ABSTRACT
Amidst the recent COVID-19 pandemic, the education industry was forced to completely flip its very traditional self to an online system in order to thrive and ensure continuity of operations. This moved academics and support staff to rely on system-captured data to monitor performance and plan for the future. The purpose of this research is to study the importance of big data (captured by university systems over time) and its crucial role in policy & strategy making in the higher education sector. 10 pilot interviews were conducted with education industry practitioners which indicated that awareness regarding the importance of big data analysis exists, however, there is a need of in-depth knowledge to better support this sector. The results indicate the current state/status of implementation and challenges faced by the higher education sector wherein a clear need of having a data management strategy for optimizing the use of big data is being identified. © 2022 IEEE.