The role of it in enhancing productivity at higher education institutions from staff and students’ Perspective-evidence from Oman

Samir Hammami, Mansour Naser Alraja, Syed Ahsan Jamil*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

7 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The main goal of this research is to assess the factors affect the overall role of information technology to increase productivity of higher education institutes from staff and students’ perspective, as there is a strong need to involve other stakeholders such as employees and students besides top management in these institutes in overall assessment and development, this will help decision makers to get the needed practices through which these institutes can overcome the challenges which are facing such as rapid changing in education requirements, increasing complexity of the technology domain, which required solid and updated information and analytical systems, and IT staff and student skills. In addition the new raising challenges, like infrastructure and applying project management concepts in order to gain a competitive advantage, which will lead these institutes to grow and attract more students while offering quality education. A model was developed in order to support the research theoretical parts about the effects of IT infrastructure, IT system analysis, IT plan, IT systems, IT staff skills, students skills and library systems on increasing productivity at higher education institutes, for this purpose a survey was done and distributed among departments and students and there were (156) respondents. Through the theoretical study, and based on the outputs of the research survey, the researchers found that the results indicated that higher institutes productivity can be enhanced, and this enhancement will be reflected in several sub factors of the tested model, like enhancing IT systems will seriously impact the higher institute productivity and this impact can be noticed in many fields like the incomplete, and limited information for decision-making, ineffective use of employee time, lack of accurate and real-time information in the right people’s hands when they need it and so on. The findings present number of recommendations which aim to develop the awareness about the productivity of higher education institutes, from the perspective of their students. This research clearly highlights the needs to build the right culture that keeps looking at technology as a main asset of the higher institute, in addition to pay attention to the employee factor, and try to develop their skills; all of these will make the needed results by building an IT strategy for wise investment in information technology.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)464-472
Number of pages9
JournalJournal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology
Volume80
Issue number3
Publication statusPublished - 31 Oct 2015
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Capabilities
  • Education
  • IT
  • Knowledge
  • Productivity
  • Systems

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