Predictive Analytics to improve Outcome-based Funding for the Public Universities in South Africa through Big Data

The development of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) brought many opportunities for organisations to improve their competitive advantage. Their way of running operational activities has changed, processes have moved towards digitization. The innovative stand makes organizations to generate voluminous data silently which add more potential to improve business value and decision making, universities being one of the areas that can gain valuable insights from this data. However, advanced analytics are required since this data is generated in high speed, high velocity, heterogeneous formats from different sources, which is where the emergence of the big data concept was coined. The paper aims to discover university big data sources, both structured and unstructured data with its substantial relevance to support decision making towards outcome-based funding through predictive analytics, factors that influence universities Outcome-based Funding and categories this factors into technology, organization, environment.