3.2.4. Lessons Learned: Understanding the nature of the organisations and processes
The development of an understanding of the nature of your organisation and monitoring the process of change is complex and multi-faceted. In particular many of the projects reported that moving towards effective implementation of e-learning, even when it is built into the strategic aims of the institution and has high level stakeholder engagement, is problematic in part because of the nature of change but also because of the difficulty of understanding and encapsulating how universities and colleges operate.
There is a conflict between maintaining existing modes of working and adapting or moving to new systems and processes and models.
There has been a significant shift in terms of the nature and potential composition of the environmental context within which universities work in the past few years. Previously the environment was relatively stable, with standard and established administrative processes and stable methods and technologies for learning and teaching. In some ways the converse is true for FE colleges which have suffered a constant wave of change initiatives and major structural reorganisations.
The increased range and potential of new technologies over the past decade has begun to have a major impact, on organisational structures, roles and identities and new forms of learning and teaching innovation. Much of this is now crystallising through MLE developments which foreground these changes more visibly and by their nature demand cross-institutional engagement and impact.
Stakeholders need to see the relevance to them, preferably being able to see that the benefits will be in the not too distant future.
There can be a lack of appreciation and understanding of data ownership across different stakeholders, which is particularly highlighted when attempting to share across areas.
It is important to change an understanding of how the organisation functions and the interaction between the physical flows of departmental information.
Integrating existing legacy systems is difficult, complicated by the fact that many have been badly designed, with missing or inaccurate information.
Typically the projects have highlighted that institutions know very little about existing data flows or organisational relationships and processes.
Institutions lack effective cost-benefit models or performance analyses for evaluating the effectiveness of either traditional educational processes or elearning ones.
Data systems tend to have been built up piecemeal to address the needs of separate functional areas within the organisation, there is therefore a need to build up accurate and complex data and organisational maps to record what is already happening within the institution prior to the MLE development.
Mechanisms are needed for reviewing, redesigning and evaluating systems during the project and to assess user requirements.
Projects used a variety of mechanisms for gaining an understanding of the nature of the organisation and associated processes, such as data flow diagrams and process maps, user surveys and user scenarios.
The lessons above have been drawn from researching project documents, and in particular from Jos Boys' report 'Learning Lessons from MLE Development projects - A review of the 7/99 JISC-funded projects', a commissioned JISC report.
