Evaluating a Student MIS in the Tertiary Education Sector: Addressing Functional-Operational Misalignment through Continuous Participative Evaluation
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Abstract
The Information and Communications Technology (ICT) evaluation literature spans several decades. ICT evaluation approaches range from objective and positivistic to subjective and interpretive. While positivistic approaches have dominated the past, there is increasing recognition of the value of interpretivist methods and the need for ongoing project evaluation. Formative continuous participative evaluation (CPE) offers several benefits in terms of project control, enhanced stakeholder relationships and benefit realisation; nonetheless this is often ignored in practice. There is a paucity of ICT evaluation within the Higher Education sector. The 14 Irish Institutes of Technology (IoTs) recently underwent an extensive transformation of their ICT systems, through a nationwide implementation of a suite of integrated IS. This research study, centred on the evaluation of the Student MIS implementation was interpretive in nature; case studies were conducted in five IoTs. This paper focuses specifically on one issue uncovered through the research i.e. the misalignment between the Student MIS and the IoTs requirements. The paper proposes a set of guidelines for addressing this issue through focusing on the theoretical underpinnings of CPE and its importance for organisational learning and benefit realisation.
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