Turning universities into data-driven organisations: seven dimensions of change
Date
2025
Authors
Komljenovic, J.
Sellar, S.
Birch, K.
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Journal article
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Higher Education, 2025; 89(5):1369-1386
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Abstract
Universities are striving to become data-driven organisations, benefitting from data collection, analysis, and various data products, such as business intelligence, learning analytics, personalised recommendations, behavioural nudging, and automation. However, datafication of universities is not an easy process. We empirically explore the struggles and challenges of UK universities in making digital and personal data useful and valuable. We structure our analysis along seven dimensions: the aspirational dimension explores university datafication aims and the challenges of achieving them; the technological dimension explores struggles with digital infrastructure supporting datafication and data quality; the legal dimension includes data privacy, security, vendor management, and new legal complexities that datafication brings; the commercial dimension tackles proprietary data products developed using university data and relations between universities and EdTech companies; the organisational dimension discusses data governance and institutional management relevant to datafication; the ideological dimension explores ideas about data value and the paradoxes that emerge between these ideas and university practices; and the existential dimension considers how datafication changes the core functioning of universities as social institutions.
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Copyright 2024 The author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)