Business Analytics for Institutional Academic Management: A Case of South African Higher Education

Data infrastructure and quality are vital organs influencing the health of any organizations and are essential for creating and delivering business insights. Due to this fact, stakeholders expect a flawless experience, real-time solutions and support. However, these expectations are normally too high for IT departments that are always immersed with various users' requests. The Big Data era and its analytics have put organizations in positions to predict and forecast users' needs to produce a great user experience. This is achieved through intuitive design, error-free coding and quality performance. There is increasing demand for better business analytics so as to enable organizations establish solid foundation by building out a data management ecosystem that delivers flexibility and performance required by cognitive solutions. The objective of this paper was to highlight how universities can leverage better analytics to process amount of continuously generated data from various sources and generate actionable insights needed to achieve academic business goals. This study followed an interpretive paradigm taking a case study of a South African university and employed semi-structured interviews. This study found that data value and the use thereof in the management of academic divisions of the university should be consistent with faculty business plans. In this way, business analytics is not haphazardly used but is strategically aligned with faculty plans and overall institutional strategic objectives and targets.