The Institutional Research Office (IR) was established in July 2014 to provide information, assessments, and evaluations on university administration to support decision making.

The IR is run by faculty staff and officers. Currently, there are a vice president, four faculty staff, 15 management staff, and 4 URA members. A separate IR advisor provides overall advice on IR activities.

The main work of the IR is collecting, investigating, and analyzing university data. A database system named KU-RESAS that uses BI tools allows us to visualize data and make it available for analysis.

Data is obtained from Kumamoto University systems such as SOSEKI (education administration), ASO (GPA visualizations and education effectiveness), UPDS (employee and salary management), and COMET (entrance examination management). This data is categorized into education, research, social contributions, international relations, and administrative foundations. This data can also be combined for different purposes, e.g., finding relationships between education and research. Other university data, such as university ranking data, is also collected to measure and compare performance. This and other activities are how the IR contributes to university development.