Executive Information Systems (EIS) Implementation for Education Management - a Conceptual Framework

Education management is a social process to identify, maintain, stimulate and unite human resources and physical assets in a comprehensive way in order to meet educational aspirations. Education management of a country in general involves several layers of management that requires different types of information from various operational units. As the units are mainly scattered all around the country and managed individually, most education information are isolated and disintegrated. On the other hand, the strategic planning and direction for education has to be centralised where it originates from the authority body, namely the Ministry of Education (MOE). MOE is responsible for planning, managing and monitoring the administration of those units so that they align with the national educational goals. These tasks are not straightforward to accomplish for a huge business like education, especially when the information are not easily and readily accessed. Fortunately, information age offers computer technology and applications as a powerful means to assist people in managing their businesses. The issues of education management above can be resolved, for instance, by having an Executive Information System (EIS). EIS is capable of not only retrieving and storing information in a repository, it can also consolidate isolated information and perform comparative analyses through its mapping and merging feature. This paper aims to discuss how EIS can be applied in education domain. A conceptual framework that consists of critical success factors and characteristics of EIS implementation, particularly for education management is included in the paper. The framework was proposed based on literature reviews as well as field study that uses Malaysia context as a case. The results indicate that EIS can become a potential and feasible solution for addressing education management issues. The framework can act as a guideline to education's stakeholders for introducing and implementing EIS in managing their respective education businesses.