A Framework for Vice Chancellors to Increase the International Rankings of Universities through Effective Decision Making Based on KPIs via Visual Digital Dashboard.

There are global university rankings of higher educational institutions. Public and private universities around the world endeavour to improve their rankings and to be at the top of the ranking lists. These rankings help students in finding out prominent universities for getting admitted, and after graduation in a better job placement. There are significant key performance indicators (KPIs) to determine these rankings. These KPIs are based on data, knowledge and information of a university (higher education institution [HEI]). Effective decision making through these KPIs improve the ranking and performance of the university. Business intelligence (BI) software for educational institutions is dedicated towards the provision of solutions for decision making. Therefore, the BI software might improve academic performance. However, literature reveals that the failure rate of BI projects is between 70% to 80%. In addition, they are costly solutions and require a huge amount of time for implementation. Hence, there is a need to find alternate solutions for better decision making that is economical and time efficient. An improvement in performance means improvement in the ranking of the university that is centred on better decision making, focusing on the significant KPIs, such as KPIs used by the Times Higher Education for world's university rankings and QS university rankings. This paper offers a framework of decision making through a visual digital dashboard for the vice chancellors (heads or presidents) of higher education institutions, based on a formal working structure of a university. Moreover, this framework focuses on policies and procedures linked to specific KPIs of the university and the impacts of these policies or procedures on these KPIs. Visual digital dashboard provides the statistics through comparison reports, flowcharts, graphs and trends. Effective decisions could be taken to improve the performance of an underperforming KPI; if there is a need of improvement for the KPI, a revision(s) is recommended in the policy or linked procedure(s) of that KPI, and the impact of revision(s) is measured again through the visual digital dashboard of decision making. These revisions of policies or procedures linked to any KPI is a continuous process until an expected outcome is achieved. According to the framework, some departments of the university play a vital role in the implementation and revisions of these policies or procedures. This framework is termed as VCDBDM (Vice Chancellor's Dashboard of Decision Making) framework that offers a visual digital dashboard as a decision support system to the vice chancellors (VCs)/heads/presidents of the universities. Altogether, the offered framework of VCDBDM provides an opening to the universities of Oman, GCC countries, MENA region, and worldwide universities concerning its application for successful decision making and improvements in the performances and rankings of the universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]