Common Distributed Data Storage for Higher Education Management Information System in Afghanistan

In today's organizations, a management information system (MIS) plays significant roles; it supports the decision-making process and controls management which impacts the organization's functions, performance, and productivity. Therefore, one of the primary goals of the National Higher Education Strategic Plan (NHESP) of the Ministry of Higher Education of Afghanistan was the development of the Higher Education Management Information System (HEMIS). This system is active now, but its implemented partially and not used by all universities. This paper aims to analyze the HEMIS and suggest appropriate solutions to solve its main issue(s). One of the main issues is the centralized structure of the system which causes a single point of failure. To this end, we propose the distributed database solution which provides a common database backend for the HEMIS and distributes it over the network to all educational institutions as well as MoHE. In this solution, some constraints of the current situation such as budget limitations and internet connection constraints are also considered. The university users can use the system locally and synchronize their changes at the central location (MoHE) once the connection is available. Besides, the distributed database eliminates the process bottleneck by having many replicas and more than one system can process the user's request. Hence, the performance of the system will be higher, can handle many requests, and store more data