A review of the use of integrated information systems in the Higher Education sector

In Higher Education (HE) institutions, as in many other organisations Information Systems (IS) started as in house developments that tended to satisfy the immediate needs of the different departments and schools. As the universities continued to grow and become international organisations, incorporating students from all over the world, their needs changed and the need for integration across the institution processes intensified. It appears that Higher Education institutions make huge investments on integrated information systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems; however they do not seem to achieve the full potential of these systems while these new systems significantly alter the way academia is doing things nowadays. Therefore, the focus of this paper is to provide a review of this literature in order to gain insights of the implementation of integrated IS in the HE sector with a special focus on Higher Education in the UK. We start by looking into the use of IS in the HE sector. This sets the scene in order to understand how the HE environment has changed due to the extensive use of IS. From our comprehensive review we develop a number of themes that show the link between integrated IS and the HE environment