Evaluation of Analytic Projects in the Context of Higher Education

Higher Education environment is moving to a data-oriented philosophy, as it has happened in general in other contexts, transforming the society in general and popularizing the term analytics. The motivation factor is the paradigm shift that is being experimented in the higher education context, with a high increment of the competition at international level and with the irruption of new kinds of teaching, such as the massive adoption of eLearning and the Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC). Due to this conversion, higher education organizations are investing gargantuan quantities of money and resources to develop and implant analytic systems. Most of these analytic systems are unsuccessful either because they deviate from the initial planning or do not solve the proposed analytic problem. A similar situation happened before in the enterprise context, where the analytical orientation was adopted previously. In this paper we propose to adapt the experience and maturity of the enterprise environment in the specification, development and implantation of analytic systems in order to define a project management roadmap adapted to the university environment. The proposed roadmap take into account lessons learnt in order to provide guides that allow defining, conducting and closing projects to develop and implant analytic systems systematically and increase the potential success of the project. The roadmap gives support to: 1) defining the analytic project, by evaluating whether the university is ready to develop and use an analytic system and whether the analytic problem is real and relevant for the university, 2) conducting the development of the analytic system, by providing a set of critical success factors to take into account and indicators to use to monitor the development activity, and 3) implanting and validating the analytic system, by following strategies for a successful implantation of the system, a successful adoption of the system for its potential users and a validation of its impact and utility in the university.