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Abstract: Information Systems evaluation (ISE) is an area of research that has been conducted in depth across various contexts in relation to all phases of the systems development life cycle. In practice though, ISE is an often-overlooked dimension in the management of technology. Outcomes from carefully planned ISE exercises can potentially add value to an organization especially from a knowledge management context. Data derived from ISE can provide the managers of organizations with insights into users' knowledge about systems operations and the efficiency thereof. The research reported in this paper, which is based on a qualitative case study design, examines the administrative information systems of universities. In a university context, administrative procedures are highly dependent on information systems and there needs to be surety in the effectiveness of the technology being utilized. The importance of a study focused on evaluating administrative information systems, stems from the large increase in student enrollment (massification of education) in South Africa in the post-apartheid era. Massification provokes questions of the ability of administrative information systems to handle the increase in the administrative work load. Thus, to govern the success of these systems, an evaluative tool should be developed. This is imperative to maintain a high level of quality in the education system and ensure the information systems are providing the necessary support to administrative processes. The literature suggests information systems success is centered around quality aspects such as information quality (IQ), system quality (SysQ) and Service quality (SQ). However, bearing in mind that primary users have the most experience and understanding of how the system should be functioning, the proposed evaluation tool should assess the system, from a user perspective. To be able to develop such an evaluative tool, an in-depth study of existing literature was conducted in order to identify potential system evaluation dimensions. This paper presents findings, based on a qualitative data set, which confirms and also extends commonly identified ISE dimensions which were derived from the extant literature.
Keywords: Information Systems Evaluation, University Administration, User Satisfaction, Knowledge Management, University Information Systems
1.Introduction
Higher education institutions are in many senses also businesses and therefore require robust, operative Information Systems (IS) to support the key functional and administrative areas to ensure that their objectives are met. The...