Abstract

Strategic decisions represent the fundamental core of the strategic planning process and strategic management in universities and they are essential in shaping the universities' policies and achieving their strategic goals. Without those strategic decisions, the universities stand unable to achieve their strategic goals and mission; therefore, specialists realized the critical importance of improving the quality of strategic decision-making in the current complex fast-changing environment that its dynamism continuously increases and which is based on the use of cutting-edge information and communications technology (ICT). Undoubtedly strategic decision-making process requires processing a huge amount of information with different robust smart methods and the extensive use of experts knowledge. There are many discussions about the uses and applications of expert systems (ESs), which are evolving rapidly in solving real problems in many fields that require experienced experts with deep sound experiences, and despite these many applications in many different fields and domains. Literature reveals that there is a scarcity of scientific research on how to employ expert systems to raise the quality of strategic decision-making processes in universities. Thus the purpose of the research is to fill this research gap by investigating how expert systems will enhance the quality of the strategic decision-making process in universities. The research design is a case study applied in Ain Shams University as a model of public universities in a developing country. This research makes a new research contribution by suggesting a futuristic proposal for improving the quality of the strategic decision-making process in universities through employing expert systems that are based on the theoretical framework of the research and the results of the field study.

Highlights

  • Strategic decisions represent the fundamental core of the strategic planning process and strategic management in universities and they are essential in shaping the universities' policies and achieving their strategic goals

  • Institutions all over the world realized the critical importance of improving the quality of strategic decision-making, and universities are no exception as examples of information-intensive organizations, especially the environment in which universities are practicing their activities is undergoing tremendous changes in all aspects: Political, cultural, technological, economic and social, and these changes have great implications for strategic decision-making in higher education institutions (Hinton, 2012; Glass, 2014; Divjak, 2016; Ejimabo, 2015)

  • Expert systems play a very important role in the strategic decision-making process since they rely on artificial intelligence tools to identify problems through their knowledge bases, provide many alternative solutions, and recommend the appropriate smart solution for the decision-makers and the reasons behind choosing it as well as answering any questions raised by the decisionmaker (Dašić et al, 2011)

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Summary

Introduction

Strategic decisions represent the fundamental core of the strategic planning process and strategic management in universities and they are essential in shaping the universities' policies and achieving their strategic goals. Without those strategic decisions, the universities stand unable to achieve their strategic goals and mission; specialists realized the critical importance of improving the quality of strategic decision-making in the current complex fast-changing environment that its dynamism continuously increases and which is based on the use of cutting-edge information and communications technology (ICT). The strategic decision-making process in universities faces many serious problems, such as: dealing with huge volumes of educational and administrative data, delay in providing the system with the required data and information, lack of. Expert systems can handle unconfirmed or incomplete information to reach conclusions (Shim et al, 2002; ArabChadegani and ArabChadegani, 2013; Akram et al, 2014; Singh and Gupta, 2016; Tan et al, 2016; Osipova et al, 2017)

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