Development of Information and decisions management Software for educational council minutes of Medical Sciences Universities

Abstract

Minutes of educational councils in universities always contain valuable organizational knowledge and play an important role in micro and macro educational decision makings. Lack of storage system, organization and retrieval of these documents can be a major obstacle in the way of utilizing these precious documents. Designing and implementing of an appropriate software to manage minutes of educational councils can facilitate classifying these important documents and ease the access and visibility of their content as well. Therefore based on the structure and the content of educational council minutes of one school of medical sciences universities as a sample and the views of key stakeholders, researchers tried to design and implement a software for information and decisions management of minutes. This research is of developmental- applied type. In order to design the software, object-oriented analysis is used. In the analysis step, at first requirements are identified, extracted and defined based on the descriptive cataloging and subject analyzing of educational councils minutes and after final analysis, the required diagrams were drawn. Software architecture is determined based on the list of requirements and finally the drawn diagrams are converted to programming codes using C# programming language. In the end, the produced software has been tested to ensure its adaptation to the objectives of project and the defined requirements. In this study, it was tried that the designed software leads to the development of electronic database for minutes in order that the universities could have access to content and decisions of these meetings in due time and in appropriate manner. Despite the numerous capabilities of this software, it seems necessary that it be used more widely in order that we could review its improvement and optimization during its implementation in the actual operating environment. Subsequently, it is recommended that Universities of Medical Sciences use the software for information management and their educational meetings to facilitate the process of organizing, storing and retrieving of the documents. They can also contribute to the process of software upgrade for educational meetings in other universities.