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Research work carried out in any institution could be meaningfully administered, and the outputs generated rendered more rewarding for its key stakeholders, if a set of critical success factors (CSFs) are outlined ex-ante. When CSFs are neither clearly identified nor practised in a vital sector such as commercial agriculture, difficulties arise with timely monitoring and evaluation, and tallying the achievements with intended Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – particularly the goal of ‘zero hunger’. This article proposes a Key Performance Index (KPI index) that takes into account CSFs that would aid in evaluating the success of research linked with commercial agriculture development. How such an index is used to facilitate monitoring of scarce resource utilisation and internal processes of research institutes, and thereby support evidence-based decision-making to sustain a conducive research culture is explored with a special focus on underutilised performance drivers (e.g., societal development and environmental sustainability) in line with agriculture research.

Purpose Key performance indicators (KPIs) are in use to determine how and the extent to which the business objectives of an organization are achieved. This paper aims to evaluate the contribution of a research institute in terms of KPIs to support its process of decision-making towards, etc., innovation, sustainability and improvement. Design/methodology/approach In light of this, a systemic review was conducted on a set of relevant scholarly studies to identify the trends which shed light on the possible critical success factors to be effectively used in research institutes in association with the development of commercial agriculture. It examines whether, and if so how KPIs that are highly associated with those critical success factors are disruptive in research culture in an institute with certain organization design to promote research on innovative commercial agriculture. Findings The study highlighted some important aspects of commercial agriculture that showed strong links with possible critical success factors that could be used to develop a possible KPI set for a research institute. The salient features in a model performance management system with such KPIs of a research institute having strategical contribution for commercial agriculture are further elaborated. Originality/value This manuscript is a conceptual piece that advocates research institutes geared towards commercial agriculture development to begin using KPIs as part of research culture to evaluate their success. The paper suggests that commercial agriculture – perhaps, especially in developing countries – faces many challenges and using KPIs could help diagnose when and why essential processes break down. This study shows possible avenues of KPI use in research institutes that have not been very well discussed or discussed meagerly that have high potential to be integrated into successful KPIs towards innovative commercial agriculture.

Research in commercial agriculture is instrumental to achieve the targets set under the second Sustainable Development Goal (SDG), i.e., 'Zero Hunger by 2030.' Execution of research for the success of commercial agriculture becomes a tedious task and research organizations have been long struggling to assess their performance unequivocally in the face of COVID-19. Any evacuation plan in place to improve the performance, monitoring, and evaluation of a research institute must guarantee that the institute is on the right momentum and let it evades metrics-obsessed research drives during this pandemic. A survey was conducted through the participation of the topmost administrators attached to key research institutes working on agriculture in Sri Lanka to explore the current performance management practices deeply. The conclusions derived from a thematic analysis of the survey data were used to propose a set of solutions that facilitate a well-thought research agenda in a digitally transformed performance management system. The solutions imply that intelligently driven key performance measurements worked by artificial intelligence and big data could be used with policy innovations to support research integrity and assessment security within the coexistence of humans and machines for the well-being of research development in the commercial agriculture sector.The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s43545-022-00484-8.

Web intelligence can be considered as a subset of Artificial Intelligence. It uses existing data in web to produce new data, knowledge and wisdom to support decision making and new predictions for web users. Artificial Intelligence is ever changing and evolving field of computer science and it is extensively used in wide array of web based business applications. Although it is used substantially in web based systems in developed countries, it is not examined whether it is being substantially used in Sri Lanka. Every Sri Lankan citizen depends on Public Service more or less throughout his/ her life time and at least more than 3 times: at birth, marriage and death. So providing most of these services to its citizen, Sri Lankan Government uses more or less of its country web portal. This paper presents a model to evaluate web intelligence capability based on weight to key functionalities with respect to web intelligence. The government websites were checked by the proposed criteria to show the potential of using web intelligent technology to provide website based services. The result indicates that the use of web intelligence techniques openly and publicly to provide web based services through government web portal to its citizens is not satisfactory. It also indicates that lack of using the technologies pertaining to web intelligence in the public service web hinders the most of the advantages that citizen and government can gain from such technological involvement.