Institutional Considerations

Further Material

A Readiness Tool for Institutions

Overview of trial projects' critical aims aligned to institutional strategy

Collecting evidence of meeting institutional strategies

There are considerations for the Higher or Further Education institution that arise from collaborative endeavour with Business and Community partners. Much BCE activity is innovative and emergent in nature, capitalising on new opportunities in Employer Engagement, Knowledge Exchange, Lifelong Learning and Public, Community and Cultural Engagement. Some institutions are beginning to take a strategic approach to such activities, but the majority is still bottom-up.

Thus BCE activities, including those with online collaborative tools, can present challenges to the established culture, habits and processes within 'the institution'. Overcoming these is at the crux of the successful embedding of BCE. Questions arise, including:

• Does engagement and collaboration with external partners affect organisational cultures, habits or processes?
• Is there a need for new roles and responsibilities?
• What is the impact on existing services?
• Who maintains control?
• What communication channels are used?
• How are senior stakeholders engaged?

Issues relating to organisational cultures

More on the integration of BCE functions is available in our Embedding BCE infoKit

A wide range of issues relating to organisational culture were experienced by the eight trial projects. From coping with demands for institutional branding to adherence to IT policy, challenges were presented to each and every trial project. Based on their experiences, a number of recommendations are offered:

• When working across institutions, consideration should be taken of any existing strategies and attitudes towards the use of online tools
• Engagement with your collaborative community should be on their territory, e.g. at their major events
• 'Champion' users are effective to widen the impact and awareness of the online tool being trialled
• Heresay is that Academia is slow to respond to external partners' needs. This need not always be the case!
• Adoption of even less disruptive online tools for collaboration take a considerable length of time, e.g. CRM
• Some unforeseen organisational processes may impact on any trial of an online collaborative tool, e.g. restructuring, redundancy

'The aims and objectives have had to be adjusted as the project has progressed to fit with the limited staffing and to adjust to the constant staff turnover.'

New College Swindon

'Perhaps the most surprising experiment from the project has been the cultural and behavioural resistance to the adoption of new online techniques within the University community. This has not so much been resistance to the re-engineering of the business processes or the externalisation of KT activity. This has largely been accepted at a strategic level. Rather, it has been intransigence at an organisational and individual level to the use of new online tools. This resistance has featured at many levels - from computing services staff to traditional marketing staff.'

University of Leeds - KT2.0

Is there a need for new roles and responsibilities?

BCE activity brings into question the division of labour within the organisation, and between the organisation and other organisations. Challenges arise in terms of where responsibility lies within the organisation (or beyond it) and a response generally takes the form of the creation of new roles and responsibilities and/or the allocation of new responsibilities.

Additionally, with new roles and responsibilities comes the need for the institution to consider the rewards or incentives available to staff who engage in new activities, possibly taking on new or additional roles and responsibilities. There is a need to work closely with varying functions across the institution including Human Resources.

The University of the Arts London trial project highlighted that the considerable success of the Open-i project was in large part down to the new role implemented to manage and coordinate the community. "This needs significant commitment in terms of budget, with at the very least a paid part-time community coordinator on 1-2 days a week."

The University of Leeds trial project recommend the integration of BCE and commercialisation so that outward facing roles are seamless.

What is the impact on existing services?

Many online tools for collaboration could be considered as 'disruptive technologies' (Clayton Christensen, 1995) providing end users with the ability to use them in a simple, intuitive and accessible manner. From the institutional perspective, where there is a common focus on expensive enterprise systems, such technologies are often seen as a threat rather than an opportunity.

The Northumbria University trial project is an example in point, impacting positively on the institutional services, widening the provision. Their trialling of online tools, including Plone, Wordpress, Joomla and Skype, has led to the provision of a dedicated server for online collaboration, available across the institution.

The University of Huddersfield trial project engaged institutional stakeholders, using existing tools (Elluminate) with which they had familiarity. The institution had already invested in the required infrastructure and technical familiarity for other purposes across the institution, including to support teaching and research. Heads of IT services were keen to exploit existing systems rather than set up new hardware/software.

'The OPEN-i project therefore leveraged an existing investment in teaching and learning at UAL and took that out into industry. The decisions on which software platforms to use etc. was thus effectively predetermined based on the tools developed for the online MA, which included Wimba for web conferencing, Ning as a social hub, Twitter for information sharing, and You Tube and Vimeo for hosting archives and other videos. This had the benefit of meaning that the project did not have to spend a lot of its initial energy on determining the best software platforms to deploy, instead we focused on the meta level questions of how to establish and build a community.'

University of the Arts

Who maintains control?

Control and ownership issues will always arise when undertaking a new collaboration or venture with Business and Community partners.

The creation of a new online community of practice raises an interesting consideration of 'control'. Does one institution retain ownership of the happenings within the community? Or does the community collective ultimately control its existence? The University of Arts London considered the potential institutional impact on their goal of creating an online community of photojournalists.

'We thought a lot about how to establish and nurture the OPEN-i community, as we were very concerned that the whole project didn't come across to the practice community or to the students as a cheap way of the universities getting guest lecturers from established professionals.'

'The community manifests its value in a sense of both producing something in common, and in engaging in interesting conversations, but the idea was that the interesting conversations should have some form of structure/goal, and that the community itself should produce the agenda for the conversations.'

University of the Arts

Advantage should be made of existing initiatives, enthusiasm and interest groups in partners, networks and communities to foster greater involvement and allegiance. The University of the Arts London, University of Leeds and Northumbria University trial projects demonstrated this, first building up high profile membership to brand the community before opening it up for additional members.

'G-Blog - The Listening Zone' was so named because we felt that this was about academics listening to businesses as well as entrepreneurs seeking advice from 'experts''.

University of Glamorgan - G-Blog

'Knowledge House is a collaborative service ... to help companies access the world class skills, expertise and specialist resources available within [our] five universities. The system was designed in-house to meet the very specific requirements of universities and interactions between them.'

Knowledge House - KHIS

Opening institutional communication channels

Sub-cultures or silos exist within every organisation. However, there is clear evidence that these barriers can be broken down with regard to BCE within an organisation through the opening up of communication channels, championing of new approaches, and considered use of language.

The Northumbria University trial project had a clear and open communication channel with IT Services from the outset. This opened doors within the department and helped facilitate the aim of smooth collaboration with external organisation but without compromising the University's systems.

Existing channels of communication should be utilised, including newsletters, internal conferences and lunchtime staff development meetings.

The Knowledge House trial project also took the approach of having 'champions' to publicise KHIS, their brokerage service for the North East Universities. A monthly meeting was set up, with representatives from each of their five partner institutions, with the aim of challenging habitual ways of working with the existing system by encouraging users at the vanguard to 'champion' their adoption of KHIS 2.0.

'[Resistance was overcome by] demonstrating the return on investment to users - both in terms of economic return, greater efficiency and greater scalability.'

University of Leeds - KT2.0

'The key aim ... was to collaborate with IT services to trial open source ICT tools [for BCE], which ultimately could be incorporated into the University's existing IT infrastructure for wider application.'

Northumbria University - Open ICT Tools

'[One objective is about] enhancing broader academic engagement by encouraging the use of other social media [beyond traditional mainstream press] ... A collaborative initiative with Ben Goldacre will create a series of talking head videos accompanied by explanatory text to guide academics to make best use of social media ... to promote their [research] work.'

University of Leeds - KT2.0

Engaging senior stakeholders

Senior stakeholders within the institution can be engaged through the identification of more measurable 'hard' outcomes, such as economic Return on Investment (ROI) or the development of valuable staff 'information literacy' or specific skills.

There was evidence from the trial projects that demonstrating how social Web2.0 technologies could enhance existing approaches to Business and Community Engagement was more conducive to engagement than promoting new ways of doing new things.