Business Intelligence in Uppsala Univeristy - Do academic institutions practice what they preach?

Abstract: Business Intelligence (BI) is not a new concept. However, it is still complicated to work with it due to the different views and ways of implementation. This study has adopted an organisational oriented approach of BI: getting the right information, to the right people, at the right time. It was found in this study that poorly implemented BI features and inadequate information infrastructure may lead to workarounds in order to compensate for missing or lacking features and systems. This case study has been conducted at the faculty of Social Sciences of Uppsala University (UU) where a set of interviews were conducted to individuals on one of the key positions at the university; the Director of Studies (DoS). The aim was to map out the key processes and head activities of the DoS’s and evaluate them through the BI view of this thesis. Being the conclusion a concrete mapping of the DoS head activities as well as BI assessment of the current situation of the studied departments. Some improvements have been proposed in order to remedy the lacking of valuable and critical features and systems. However, it was found that the current system infrastructure and problem area is too immature in order to implement any form of integration. Several studies on key positions and influential systems need to be conducted in order to exhaustively map out and discover the problem area.