Higher education institutions are facing growing pressure to improve retention and graduation rates. Academic analytics has emerged as a strategy to address the completion issue. Because academic advisors are integral in providing successful student success initiatives and they often maintain relationships with students throughout their entire academic careers, academic advising is the essential component to increasing completion rates. Therefore, the technologies included in the academic analytics strategy most often impact academic advising work. The purpose of this study was to investigate how academic advisors perceive the practice of academic advising at Amey State University (ASU) in the context of changing technology tools, specifically the implementation of the Student Success System (SSS). The study used an exploratory qualitative methodology since there is little other research that seeks to understand the practice of academic advising from the advisors’ perspective. Using the NACADA (2017a) Academic Advising Core Competencies as the conceptual framework this study explored how the use of an academic analytics tool changed the work academic advisors do through the Conceptual (understanding), Informational (knowledge), and Relational (skills) components. The participants were all academic advisors from Amey State University, a large, four-year, public, research one institution with a high population of undergraduate students (Carnegie Classification, 2018). The findings of this study reveal that the academic advisors have a strong focus on student success yet do not identify or connect with the broader student success goals of the institution. There is a lack of trust from the advisors in upper administration in regards to decision-making and a need for clear, transparent, and frequent communication between leaders and academic advisors regarding student success mission and goals. Integration of the Student Success System (SSS) into the academic advisors’ daily practice only caused minor disruptions and little improvement to their practice of advising because of the inability to use most of the functions. This study concludes that academic advising practice is constantly changing and evolving due to internal and external forces. The increased attention to retention, completion, and persistence along with the rapid advancements in technology tools to assist these efforts will mark the next era of academic advising practice. Academic advising will need to find ways to deal with the rapid changes in technology tools and seek best practices in transitioning from one tool to another in order to keep pace with the changes.
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