Analysis and effective use of data in a university environment

Foreign universities already commonly utilize data for their decision-making activities. The majority of such data is still primarily produced by students – their success in the admission process, satisfaction within their studies both with the taught subjects and with the teaching staff, successful completion of studies within the regular study period, etc. This trend is also gradually spreading to Czech and Slovak universities. However, the use of data produced by the school itself, faculty, or directly by the department is much less common. This work, therefore, focuses on the use of data analytics and business intelligence tools in the university environment, with an emphasis on data produced by academic staff, which is freely available to the public, and on internal data produced and managed by responsible officers of the Prague University of Economics and Business. The work is divided into six interconnected parts - the first two deal with the current state of data use at universities in the Czech Republic and abroad, defining the goal of the work and describing the environment of the Department of Information Technologies of Faculty of Informatics and Statistics of Prague University of Economics and Business, including requirements for a pilot solution. The main part of the work describes the approach to source data, their download, transformation, and processing using various analytical tools and applications, including the final visualization in the PowerBI environment. The conclusion then addresses the validation of the proposed solution and summarizes all the findings and challenges that arose during the creation of this work.