Abstract:

In the last quartile of the twentieth century, management information systems (MIS) have emerged as a necessity of our information society. Today, management information systems are an indispensable part of organizational procedures in such fields as marketing, human resources management, and accountancy (O’Brien, 2004). The management information system is defined as a combination of human and computer-based resources that is able to perform organizational and administrative procedures such as data gathering, keeping, using, accessing, and transmitting, when they are needed (Lucey, 1987). With the help of MIS, raw data in databases turn into meaningful information explaining potential problems or opportunities for the organization (Haag, Cummings, & Dawkins, 1998). In this age of information, states have developed management information systems like e-state and e-health to build our information society. Educational organizations also have used management information systems in administrative procedures. For example, SchoolNet has been developed to integrate state schools and state libraries in Canada (KPMG Consulting LP, 2000); Web School Administration and Management System (WebSAMS) has been developed to increase the efficiency of school administration in Hong Kong (Kwan, 2006); National Education Database Program (NEDP) has been developed to build a national database of schools in Pakistan (NEDP, 2011); and lastly, National Collective Catalogue (TO-KAT) has been developed to access and research catalogues of all libraries in Turkey (TO-KAT, 2014). In the same process and as a part of the European Union conformity programs, E-school Management Information System, the focus of this study, has been developed by the Ministry of National Education in Turkey to adapt school administration procedures to the needs of our information society. E-school is a nationwide management information system that can process, save, and access all elementary and secondary schools’ data. With the help of the e-school system, the Ministry of National Education (MEB, 2009a) aims to facilitate administrative and automatization procedures for schools, to make student affairs procedures faster, to decrease software expenses of schools, to collect information in a central database, to analyze nationwide data of students and schools, and to simplify the coordination and communication of schools. Currently, the system includes all the data from over 42,000 elementary and secondary schools and over 13 million students. All elementary and secondary schools of the country are connected to the e-school system and the Ministry of National Education can communicate with all the schools through the system.

Keywords: