Avisual decisional tool (VDT) for evaluation of the strategic plan performance in higher education

Strategic planning processes are among the most demanding tasks that managers face in today's complex market place. Strategic planning is most effective when implemented as an integral part of institutional decision-making, not as a separate formal, comprehensive activity. Measuring and managing performance is a challenging enterprise and seen as one of the keys to managing change and thus gaining competitive advantage in univeristies. Educational institutions need to assess and enhance their activities, in order to provide a monitoring the strategic planning, and to measure future capability as well as past performance. The efficiency of higher education have given rise to new models and systems aimed at facilitating strategic decision making, primarily concerned with strategic planning assessment In this direction the design and adoption of a well-informed strategic management will increase the overall quality of those services. This paper suggests a decision model for managing strategic planning by examining the use of real-time, interactive visual representations in the strategy monitoring. The decision model allows efficient decision making to be made at appropriate level of management. A prototypical web-based implementation is presented and discussed.