University analytics (Business intelligence and business analytics applications at university management)

As a result of the developments in information technologies and globalization and changes in higher education, business intelligence and business analytics applications have become important tools in effective management of universities. However, the subject of business intelligence and business analytics in higher education institutions is addressed under different concepts and approaches such as academic analytics, learning analytics, action analytics. Each of these concepts and approaches focuses in a single dimension of the subject and is inadequate in evaluating the subject from a holistic perspective. In addition, due to the common points where the concepts intersect, it may be possible to evaluate similar applications under different concepts or to use similar concepts for different applications. This situation makes it difficult to produce new scientific information intended business intelligence and business analytics applications in higher education and causes complexity on practical issues. To solve this problem, the approach of "university analytics" was developed in this thesis. With the university analytics approach, business intelligence and business analytics applications in higher education are addressed by a holistic perspective. To manage the universities effectively, the use of business intelligence and business analytics applications at the decision process of the university is proposed. After the university analytics framework was proposed and explained, case studies with 8 state and 4 private universities were carried out in order to assess current situation in Turkish universities and to identify practical issues in real-life. With these case studies, status of Turkish universities was evaluated in terms of business intelligence and business analytics applications, based on university analytics. After the case studies, it was seen that although some universities have business intelligence & business analytics projects, most of the universities are lack of knowledge the issue. It is revealed that currently, several private universities utilize the descriptive analytics effectively since they have business intelligence & data warehouse infrastructure. These universities have these infrastructures due to the SAP system they use. Thus, university analytics was not used purposefully. It was just a side product at SAP. It was observed that at one of the state universities, a business intelligence project has been implemented, and the descriptive analytics has been utilized effectively by the IBM Cognos business intelligence tool. Besides, any use of predictive and prescriptive analytics was not observed at any university. It is seen that organizational factors are the leading causes of the situations of the universities about business intelligence & business analytics.The human resource factor is the most prominent among the organizational factors. Issues such as the employment problem of human resources required for business intelligence and business analytics applications, top management support are significant reasons that make Turkish Universities lack university analytics. After the findings obtained, a roadmap was created for Turkish Universities, and it was determined how university analytics could be implemented. In this respect, it is expected that this thesis will contribute significantly both to literature and to practice.