INFORMATION FLOW MANAGEMENT: A Study applied to the physical accountability of academic projects developed in a higher education institution.
Physical accountability. Academic projects. Informational flows. Information management process. Transparency.
Physical or technical accountability is a legal provision aimed at ensuring the production, collection, processing and presentation of information concerning the products and services generated by academic projects, which are performed at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN) using public resources. For 2019, the budget for the development of the portfolio that includes 63 projects is R$ 448,367,705.40. This amount justifies the implementation of actions aimed at monitoring and control, as well as evidencing that the management of the flow of information relevant to the process must be performed regularly, methodically and systemically, in order to ensure transparency, efficiency, effectiveness and, above all effectiveness of public spending. From this conjuncture, a qualitative, descriptive and applied research will be developed, which, through a case study, will investigate how the information flow management of the physical accounts of the academic projects developed at UFRN occurs, based on the phases of the representative model of information flow in organizations developed by Beal (2004). To this end, the objective is to describe and analyze how coordinators and supervisors of academic projects manage the informational flow of physical accountability within the scope of their legal attributions. Specifically it is intended: a) To identify occurrences related to the informational flow that can interfere in the time and the quality of the rendering of physical accounts, through documentary research (1st); b) Know how coordinators and inspectors perform the stages of informational flow of physical accountability, through 12 semi-structured interviews; c) Develop informational products aimed at the standardization and quality of supporting documents presented in each physical accountability; and d) Encourage with the research subjects strategies to establish an institutional information flow that leads coordinators and supervisors in the execution of their legal attributions and contributes to the active transparency of the University, through documental (2nd) and bibliographic research, the mentioned interviews and a focus group. For data analysis will be used the qualitative analysis in five phases of Yin (2016), composed by the stages of compilation, decomposition, recomposition, interpretation and conclusion, as well as the triangulation of data and theories.