ISK Academic Budgeting and Planning Support System (ISKABS)

ABSTRACT

The Academic Budgeting and Planning Support System for the Faculty of Computer Science & Information Systems (FSKSM), the University of Technology, Malaysia (ISKABS) was designed and developed to assist academic administration in building and managing its academic budget. ISKABS will aid in planning, supports organizations with funding, through the allocation of funds assists in directing operations, and can be used for control. ISKABS will support management to go through the complete budgetary cycle of identifying budget requirements, preparation, approval and use stages. ISKABS was developed using GURU expert system management shell, Lotus 1–2–3 spreadsheet and dBASE III+ database management system (DBMS). It was implemented on an IBM PS/2 microcomputer machine. The conceptual structure of ISKABS consists of the expert system component of a knowledge base, an inference engine and a user interface, a planning & budgetary model-base using a spreadsheet, and a database management system (DBMS) for the computer hardware and software database. The knowledge base of ISKABS consists of budgetary methodology, principles, rules and strategies. Through ISKABS's user interface, users can consult the system utilizing the mechanism present in the system's inference engine. ISKABS's model-base consists of a model of the Faculty's academic planning and budgeting system using a spreadsheet. The DBMS system was used to store the computer hardware and software pricing and configurations. ISKABS was developed in response to the growing needs of the Faculty's academic administration. There is more than two fold increase in its academic staffs over the last two years. There is a great increase of academic computing demand in terms of student and staff usage, research projects, consultancy works, new course offerings and change of technology. The designer of the system view ISKABS as a decision support system with three tools, that is as a mission tool, an effectiveness tool, and an economy tool.

KEY WORDS:

• academic budgeting
• planning
• directing
• control
• expert system
• spreadsheet
• DSS
• model base
• DBMS