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1. Introduction
Higher education (higher ed) in the USA is an industry under stress. One-third of all higher ed institutions are financially weaker now than before the Great Recession, with an inability to raise new revenue (Selingo, 2013). Other challenges that higher ed faces are sustainability of programs, reduced viability due to reduced conventional financial support, and changes in traditional student demographics resulting in a smaller pool of potential students, and increasing debt load among graduates (CFPB Monitor, 2017). Any one of these could be significant to an industry where, historically, change is slow. Together, these and other factors threaten institutions and their missions.
Higher ed is deploying a variety of strategies to improve institutional health, among these, Six Sigma (SS), a new area of application. In this paper, we sought to understand how the SS methodology may be combined with another recent higher ed initiative, Big Data, in an effort to develop a framework that may be subsequently tested, following Meredith’s (1993) conceptual research approach. While new understanding may come within the SS domain, we understand that innovation in the field may come from interdisciplinary research as well (Labrinidis and Jagadish, 2012). With higher education starting to take advantage of data science, and Big Data in particular, the intersection of these SS adopters provides an opportunity to push the field in new directions (Labrinidis and Jagadish, 2012). In addition to the academic exercise, we kept the practitioner in mind; while theory without practice is unsuitable, practice without theory may leads to a “black box” effect, or, simulations of reality with limited understanding of the phenomena occurring (Meredith, 1993). While conceptual research may start anywhere along a spectrum from description to explanation finally to testing, we chose a descriptive starting point (Meredith, 1993). Thus, our guiding question is this: what is a conceptual framework for SS and Big Data?
The methodology of this study follows Meredith (1993) wherein we take an approach incorporating iterations of description and explanation; accordingly, theory testing was not in our scope (Meredith, 1993). Thus, while this work is largely theoretical, we seek to understand if a reinterpretation of the SS methodology holds promise through a theory building idea, where concepts are first laid out, rather than engaging in theory testing...