Empowering voluntary youth organisations with a strategic and usable BL-enabled platform

Abstract

In Malta, voluntary religious youth organisations, like other NGOs, now have more opportunities to get support and funding from the State and the European Commission. These opportunities create new responsibilities and, for this reason as well as due to relatively new legislations and regulations, the NGOs are facing new challenges in the field of transparency and accountability. Similar to business organisations, the non-profit sector needs to become more efficient by measuring, monitoring and managing performance. By becoming more efficient, a voluntary organisation inspires more trust and puts itself in a better position to compete for institutional funding as well as to attract more members and private funding. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the current structure and operations of local youth organisations and assist them in managing their data and resources in a more structured and usable manner, while considering the local socio-cultural factors. This dissertation focuses on the following main areas: • The use of ICT, if any, being employed in local religious youth organisations in order to process and manage their data, including data related to resources, activities and personal data of their members; • The limitations of the current systems and procedures and possible improvements in order to enhance data usability; • How the proposed data warehouse proof of concept could eliminate some of the current limitations and achieve some of the improvements which are being sought; • How Business Intelligence could transform the 'data' into 'knowledge' inducing youth organisations to invest in such a strategic Performance Management tool. Following a review of literature on the topic of this research study, field research was performed on a number of case studies by means of semi-structured interviews, field observation and a questionnaire. This research allowed for the identification of common elements in the structures, processes and data management policies currently in place at different youth organisations. The limitations of current systems, and improvements which are being sought, were also examined. The requirements identified through the research phase were addressed by designing and implementing a proof of concept, based on a Business Intelligence Enabled Data Warehouse model. This was achieved by extracting, transforming, and loading data from existing sources into a more usable platform using the Kimball approach. Business Intelligence allows youth organisations to identify how their current data, even unstructured data, can serve as a source of meaningful information and knowledge which can be a useful tool in performance management. Hopefully, this will induce these youth organisations to start the much needed data restructuring. Finally, this research makes a number of recommendations for youth organisations which want to embark on an ICT strategy.