Content

Institution D is a large and well-established higher education institution with over 250 programmes of study at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Growing from a range of specialist colleges with roots back to the early 19^th Century it became a University in 1992. It has approximately 20,000 undergraduate and 4,000 post graduate students on three campuses in the centre of a large city. 

Academic staff are grouped into 6 Faculties, each managed by a Dean. The Deans together with 6 Pro Vice Chancellors responsible for support functions form the core of the university’s Executive, the Strategic Management Group (SMG), chaired by the Vice Chancellor. 

Formal university committees are very few in number following a fundamental review of the committee structure in 2003. Prior to this, large numbers of groups met regularly but it was found that decision-making responsibilities and accountability of many were unclear, the routes followed by issues were long and complex, and many groups had outlived their usefulness. A new small-scale structure was introduced with clear terms of reference while attention was also focused on the decision-making responsibilities and personal empowerment of managers and staff. It remains the position of SMG that senior functional managers should consult as necessary to progress issues and to act wherever possible without the requirement for a formal committee separately to ratify decisions. Major policy items will still be considered by SMG however.

The University does not have an Information Strategy Steering Group. The University’s Information Strategy was developed originally by a task group convened for this purpose and agreed by the university Executive once complete. This has been viewed as an occasional rather than a continuing responsibility, to be reviewed at regular intervals to ensure that it remains aligned with the Strategic Plan. 

The most recent university IT Strategy was also prepared by a task group and agreed by SMG. Prior to the committee review in 2003, there was an ICT Committee which met regularly to monitor annual investment plans against development priorities, to agree policies and regulations, and to monitor service standards. This group was disbanded in the review. Informal groups have met since 2003 but the absence of a formal overarching IT Steering Committee was noted in a number of reports conducted since then by the university’s internal auditors who recommended that a successor body should be convened. The opportunity to validate the need for such a group and to position it clearly in an overall IT/IS governance framework was a major factor in the university’s decision to become a pilot site for this project.

A formal body has met regularly to steer Information Systems developments, however. The University has embarked on a series of inter-related information systems projects, managed as a single programme, all of which address priorities in the current Strategic Plan. In October 2002, the Vice-Chancellor confirmed that he had ‘agreed with the Board of Governors and the Strategic Management Group to adopt the well-proven European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) ‘Excellence’ Model as the framework for our organisational development and strategic planning processes’. A core element of the Excellence Model is the requirement to manage by process and fact; the portfolio of projects that makes up the Development Programme is designed to deliver both the process management framework, and the essential supporting information systems, that will enable this element of the Excellence Model to become a reality.

The great majority of IT services in the University are managed centrally. General purpose staff/student PC clients offer a consistent view of networked resources irrespective of geographical location within the University. A single University budget supports non-specialist open-access student PCs in IT suites and learning resource centres, network and server infrastructure investment and software licences for academic and administrative use. Devolved budgets support subject-specialist IT use, in areas such as Engineering, Computing and Art & Design.

Review Process

Project Approach

The University became a pilot site for the project several months after most others and it was therefore necessary at an early stage to identify an approach which would allow the preparation, self-assessment and concluding stages to be completed in a relatively compressed timescale. 

Personnel

A small project team, consisting of the Director of Corporate Information Systems, Director of Computing & Information Services and Deputy Director of the School of Business Information, supported by a Business Support Analyst, was convened for this purpose. Although small in number, the group had extensive experience of the university’s information systems both professionally and through current managerial responsibilities, together with a background in quality assurance and enhancement and QAA institutional audit/review. It was accepted that the findings of this group would need to be validated with others once the analysis was complete but that this was preferable to convening a much larger task group and potentially slowing progress in the earlier phases.

Method

After a preliminary planning meeting and individual familiarisation with project documentation and the Toolkit, the group scheduled four half-day sessions, one for each of the major sections of the self assessment. The intention was to be able to work through the various questions and to have in-depth discussion about the issues raised without time constraining debate. After each session, our discussions were summarised by the Business Support Analyst and circulated to members for comment. The group proceeded through the self-assessment in the published order (Governance, Resources, Organisation, Services) and completed each section in a single meeting.

Given the organisational structure and the university-wide nature of many the University’s activities (e.g. the University Modular Framework [UMF] the structure which underpins all undergraduate and taught postgraduate programmes) little time needed to be taken in selecting which information systems to include in this exercise. Those included were those already classified as ‘corporate’, acknowledging that manual as well as electronic elements were equally relevant. As a general rule the team assumed that, irrespective of any university’s organisational structure, policies would already be in place differentiating ‘corporate’ and ‘local’ systems and that a governance framework would incorporate all ‘corporate’ systems.

The group did not limit its consideration of issues to the approach contained in the Toolkit, however. As well as working through all of the questions posed in each section, discussions focused on the assumptions which appeared to underpin each and the degree of ‘goodness of fit’ of these to the university’s current circumstances. Other governance models were also explored alongside these issues. 

After the four themed sessions, members met again on three further occasions to agree priorities for improvement, to consider different structures which would enable these improvements to be delivered in practice, and to consider change management issues, including the consultation process which would be necessary to secure the commitment of members of the Executive to the proposed changes. Members met on one final occasion to reflect on the process which had been followed and to evaluate strengths and weaknesses of the approach adopted.

Experience of Conducting the Self-Assessment

Members recorded the following points as they worked through the toolkit:

Alignment

The lack of an Information Strategy Steering Group does not mean that an institution is unable to implement its strategy effectively. A group with a monitoring remit, whether formal or informal, could discharge this responsibility. The precise nature of the group needed could be expected to emerge from the self assessment and planning improvements process.

Assurance

Members welcomed the introduction of a focus on how clearly the Executive but also the Governors scrutinise Information Strategy developments.

People

Although the self assessment does focus on the numbers and the skills of staff using information systems, members could not find here or in other sections the need for a critical awareness of resource deployment for systems. Members questioned whether sufficient emphasis was put on the ‘people’ and ‘manual’ side of information systems resource consumption and whether best value could be shown to be being achieved.

Structure

The University is an institution which has invested heavily in process reviews in recent years and which has operated under a number of different organisational structures. A fundamental review of student administration is being completed as this case study is being written and may well result in further structural changes. The project team felt that ‘processes’ captured the intention of the questions better than ‘systems’, and that ‘centralised’ and ‘devolved’ did not fully represent the possible models. (An alternative distinction between ‘corporate’ and ‘local’ systems was drawn above.) The main concern of the group was how processes were mapped on to existing structures and whether structures were appropriate for the direction in which the Strategic Plan was headed.

The project team wanted to make questions 3 and 4 less staff-centric bearing in mind that many systems are now incorporating substantial self-service elements for both employees and students.

Policies

Greater emphasis could perhaps be placed on the fact that this refers to information systems generally, not simply IT systems. All questions apply equally to non-IT elements and highlight more general university responsibilities which perhaps attract less attention than their IT equivalents.

Planning Improvements

The main output for the University from the self-assessment review and subsequent discussions has been consensus about a new IS governance structure for the university. We have identified the need for a transitional phase, to take the opportunity to revise the Information Strategy in the light of a newly-published Strategic Plan and meanwhile to preserve the existing System Development Projects Board. An IT Steering Group will be convened shortly to oversee investment priorities as well as decisions about architecture and policies. During this transitional phase, we propose to validate the need for an Information Management Steering Group – this has no parallel in the existing or previous structures but directly addresses a concern of SMG that the value of systems investments is clearly understood and that benefits from development projects and process reviews are realised – and to revise the membership and terms of reference of the three related groups to ensure that remits are clearly differentiated and membership is appropriate.

A related development within the University has made the introduction of these improvements much more straightforward. The Vice Chancellor remains firmly of the view that the formal committee structure must remain small and that managers should continue to implement changes without the need to refer to committees unless it is essential. A number of ‘special interest groups’ have been convened this year, however, chaired by SMG members, to progress issues which do not fit neatly into the formal committee structure. Such issues might relate to short-term developments, projects or current concerns. It is already accepted that such groups will include one to revise the Information Strategy and another to oversee IT investment priorities, and so the connection to the outcomes of this project are already made in two major areas. It is hoped that the new structures will be fully in place during the academic year 2007/08.

Reflections

Participation in this project as a pilot site has provided a most welcome opportunity to address a known development requirement within the university and to critically evaluate the Toolkit. Formal involvement in the project ensured that time was safeguarded for this task, perhaps more easily than would have been the case otherwise. Although team members were aware at the outset of certain shortcomings in the university’s management and governance structures, the real benefit of working through the issues as we did was to appreciate the many positives that were already in place and to develop a coherent overview of all issues that new structures would need to address. 

As recorded above, the project team felt on occasion that the Toolkit was perhaps too specific (or made assumptions about structures that would be in place). There may be benefit as the Toolkit is further developed in broadening the scope to incorporate aspects of other approaches – not HE specific – to allow individual institutions to assess which approach fits their particular circumstances best. There may also be benefit in introducing a preliminary assessment of corporate strategy against which subsequent judgments about systems strategy can be measured.

The project team were of the opinion that the Toolkit’s greatest strength is perhaps that it provides busy staff with the opportunity to meet and discuss the issues surrounding IT Governance in a semi-formal setting. Given the comments made earlier on possible improvements to the sequencing and content of some of the sections, it provided a clear framework which ensured that the group were able to deduce quickly the current status and then move smoothly forward to develop a range of plans and options. The speed with which the project was progressed could not have been achieved without the constant thread of the Toolkit.