An Approach for Conducting Educational Research on Two Multidisciplinary Areas of Information Systems; Enterprise Resource Planning and Big Data

There is a lot of research focus on industry that covers the implications of modern Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) in a landscape that is changing at a phenomenal speed with the advent of technological advances. Moreover, with the wide adoption of ERP systems in businesses, there is a lot of emphasis on educational research to explore curriculum design and the best teaching approaches that should be adopted to reduce ERP skill gap. Besides, companies pressingly need graduates with relevant skillsets to tackle Big Data. This paper focusses on these two multidisciplinary areas in Information Systems, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Big Data/Business Analytics (BA) in education. The main problem set for this study is to find the right approaches to inculcate the knowledge and skills related to ERP integrated with Big Data/Business Analytics in curriculum design and teaching approaches. This paper elaborates on the approach used to conduct research over two multidisciplinary areas of Information Systems (IS). This paper explains how the research focus was set at the beginning and ultimately expands on the approach used for the design, implementation, experimentation and evaluation of the framework. The expected contribution of this paper is to shed light on some approaches that could be combined and used to conduct research in multidisciplinary areas as part of educational research. While there is a deluge of studies available on research methods, it is expected that the approach used in this paper can aid future young researchers in at least setting the initial research pace.