Benefits of using activity data
The use of activity data has the potential to bring significant benefits to organisations that make
effective use of it to enhance core business processes. In the commercial world businesses have
been exploiting their activity data for over 20 years. For some of these businesses it is critical to
their business model. Before looking at the benefits in higher education It may be worth listing a
few of the benefits that have been achieved in the commercial world to indicate the range of mature
uses of activity data that already exist.
One of the earliest to exploit activity data was Barclaycard who used it to identify unusual patterns
of behaviour by card users which could indicate that the card had been stolen and was being used
fraudulently. This lead to significant savings through the early identification and stopping of stolen
cards.
Amazon use your searches and purchases to recommend other items that you might be interested
in by showing people who bought what you are looking at also bought these items and through
their people bought these items together. Clearly, they are interested in increasing sales and have
been exploiting the data to give a more personalised service to their customers.
Google uses information from your searches to determine what adverts to display to you. for
instance, if you search for a camera you are likely to see adverts for cameras for the next few days.
In higher education there are several ways in which activity data can be used to provide real
benefits to institutions. These include:
