A Business Intelligence Based Framework to Align Higher Education Output with Labor Market in Sudan

Abstract

The global expansion of Higher Education (HE), socioeconomic changes and technology advancements exert tremendous pressures on HE including its alignment with labor market. In Sudan, HE has seen unprecedented growth over the last two decades, both in terms of numbers of HE Institutions (HEIs), and the vast admission increase in the existing ones. Education-to-employment is a long, complex and interrelated process that encompasses every step of the transformation of students into contributing members of the workforce. It includes many activities and decisions taken by the many stakeholders; such as, students, graduates, employers -public and privateas well as HE policymakers, among many others. Many of the decisions taken throughout the process are uninformed and are based on alternative information source due to the lack of, or inaccessibility of reliable objective decision-support information. This remarkable expansion in HE provides a number of challenges and opportunities, including adapting HE to the labor market demands while maintaining quality by availing decision-support information and analysis capabilities to all stakeholders, and this is the focus of this research. The objective of this thesis is to investigate the value and advantage of utilizing Business Intelligence (BI) technologies to enhance decision-making throughout the education-to-employment process. The research hypothesizes that adopting these technologies leads to reliable and knowledge-based decisions and would yield a better-quality process. A mixed-model research approach was utilized to develop a BI implementation model while exploring the main factors affecting its adoption. Then an empirical investigation of stakeholders’ perception and expectation was carried out. Content analysis methodologies and exploratory interviews were used in identifying the crucial factors affecting adoption and their associated variables. The survey target group includes senior students, recent graduates and employers. This study produced a useful and usable implementation of the BI model that consolidates scattered HE data in a Data Warehouse (DW) and answers HE admission queries. Furthermore, the survey results significantly support the research hypothesis, as it has concluded that there is substantial stakeholders’ support for the use of technology and the adoption of BI throughout the education-to-employment process. This support is consistent among all respondents, and yet is contrasted with their dissatisfaction with the current process in all the examined activities, ranging from HE admission and career planning to recruitment and talent retention. One of the most important findings is that major prerequisites for BI adoption in Sudan are already available and fitfor- purpose. This thesis has laid out the foundation for improving the education-toemployment process while providing insight to HE planners, businesses and HEIs to better realize the value of BI, the possible obstacles, and the existing leverage in its adoption. It has also provided a base for further BI research and extending empirical studies to other countries with the aim of amending the statistical analysis, and refining the BI components.