BAM tool adoption in school environment

Abstract

In our daily life business environment should have the ability to sense changes in business conditions in order to allow decision makers to provide the necessary changes to the business so it remains competitive in the market. Business Intelligence provides the ability to analyze data and deliver important information to managers. As it works only with historical data, BAM tools appeared so more current data can also be used to support the decision making process. With the wide variety of companies/institutions that could take advantage of these tools ‘benefits, we chose, for our case study, the Academic Services of IPVC, which is an administrative department that handles students enrolments, grades launch, diploma issuing, etc. As such, several Key Performance Indicators are important for this department, such as the grades launch status per subject or per course. This is the one we used as it was enough to show the importance of the introduction of this tool, focusing on two main aspects: dashboards and alerts. The first provide a graphical view of presenting information and the second allow a preventive action in a given situation. In order to conclude about the viability of the adoption of a BAM tool to a school environment, we made a research on proprietary (Oracle BAM, IBM WepSphere Business Monitor) and also open source tools (WSO2 BAM and Chroniker). Throughout this thesis, we present the most relevant conclusions regarding advantages and disadvantages of the adoption of each one of these tools. In the implementation part, we only used one tool of each type, showed how to create dashboards and alerts, and pointed out the main difficulties felt along the implementation process. The adoption of BAM tools in school environment was shown with the created dashboards in order to provide information about launched grades’ status and alerts, which were defined in order to inform the management of academic services about launched grades status and also to send notification e-mail to teachers/professors who have not launched grades on time. Whit this work, we developed a solution that could help to improve the efficiency in the grades launch process at IPVC, informing teachers and managers about the process evolution with preventing measures, and also by providing dashboards with a graphical view of grades status per subject/course.