The electronic college: A study of the effectiveness of electronic management systems within colleges

Electronic Management Systems (EMS) today play an important role in organizations as they simplify managerial tasks, improve resource utilization and improve efficiency. King Abdul-Aziz University is a leader in the use of technology among Saudi universities. Its focus, like several other universities, has been on building centralized EMSs which tie different departments across campus using a centralized network. The systems, however, do not aim to automate managerial tasks within the colleges themselves. As the amount of managerial work within colleges is huge and redundant, this research aimed to evaluate the effect of automating college’s internal affairs on performance. An EMS (EAASy) was built for the Academic Affairs department of the Women’s College of Computing & Information Technology and was used as a test-bed to evaluate the effectiveness of an EMS within the College. Both manual & electronic systems were used for an entire semester for comparisons. Quantitative and qualitative measurements were used. Statistically significant differences between the two systems were found. This paper includes an overview of the research methodology used in this project. It also includes results, implications, and recommendations established by the researcher.