Influencing University Staff to Improve Their Activities: A Case Study of Saga University

We describe two functions of institutional research (IR) by using a case study at Saga University, a national university in Japan. One function is to provide information, the other is to influence members of the institution. The IR office at Saga University was established under the office of the president with a directive to analyze and visualize all relevant university-wide data and to support institutional decisions taken on the basis of the obtained information. In this paper, we focus in particular on the influence-related functions of IR because few case studies focusing on these functions have been published. The purpose of IR for influence is to motivate staff members to improve their activities on their own initiative. The key performance indicator (KPI) is measured progress toward this purpose, and the president distributes special funding to each faculty member according to assessment on KPIs every fiscal year. We describe the progress of our IR up to now and the effectiveness in influencing. Some successes and several KPIs with respect to education are presented.