A Framework for Analytical Demands of Alumni Capital

Abstract

In 2020, in the Brazilian context, the postgraduate regulatory entity introduced new evaluation criteria on former postgraduate students’ information for its 4,598 master’s and doctoral postgraduate programs. The alumni are perceived as a permanent connection to society and reflect the social impact of their education. Thus, the postgraduate programs sought to gather information about their former students for better results in their strategic plannings as well as their evaluations. Using the Design Science Research (DSR) methodology, this research focused on bibliographic and empirical work, through an integrative literature review, to identify contributions to the construction of an artifact to explore alumni data and knowledge based on the theories of Intellectual Capital, Data Science and Knowledge Engineering. As a result, a framework was created to guide the process of analytical demands for the exploration of the intangible assets related to the postgraduate programs´ former students. The first element of this framework addresses Intellectual Capital management in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to identify and measure their intangible assets related to the alumni. The second element relies on Business Intelligence techniques for the creation of reports and dashboards with descriptive analyses. Data Science is the third element which contributes to generating predictive analytics. And, as the last element of the proposed framework, it is expected the use of Knowledge Engineering for the construction of prescriptive analyses. Although there is an extensive literature on tools for alumni management and management of Intellectual Capital in HEIs, it was observed a lack of practical research for the development of workflows for management and monitoring of Alumni Capital in postgraduate programs with descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analyses. Therefore, the proposed framework has the potential to assist these postgraduate programs in their analytical demands for better results in their evaluations. In addition, the data and knowledge about Alumni Capital enable better strategic planning of their actions.