The Context

The Higher Education Environment in the 1990s

It is useful to understand some of the strategic and technological challenges and policy drivers within which Higher Education Institutions operated in the mid to late 1990s to better understand why the information strategies approach outlined in the "Guidelines for Developing an Information Strategy" may have been useful to some institutions and if some of the lessons learnt have relevance today.

The Follett Report (1993) highlighted the lack of prominence given to library, information services and teaching and learning support in general in the strategic plans submitted by institution to the funding councils. It recommended that institutions developed integrated information strategies which took account of a wide range of factors, paying particular attention to defining the needs of various groups of library users, to the performance measures and indicators which the institution believe appropriate, to quality assurance and assessment, and to the management of staff and physical resources.

The Higher Education environment had undergone a fundamental change in the move from an elite to a mass system, in a relatively short period of time. HEIs operated in a more competitive world with scarcer resources and greater levels of external scrutiny which required new and more flexible ways to use resources including staff and facilities. Learning was beginning to be regarded as a lifelong learning activity demanding more student centred approaches with increasing numbers of part-time and mature students, added to the shift to modularity and credit transfer systems. These were big changes which could not be sustained on the basis of traditional teaching and learning alone. (Ford et al 1996).

Research was undergoing similar changes with increasing specialisation requiring more sophisticated resources, and a move towards more joint working in multi-disciplinary teams and across traditional boundaries.

There was also a trend towards an increasing emphasis on accountability (e.g. Teaching Quality Assessment and Research Assessment Exercise) and use of delegated budgets with the resulting need for information about teaching and research activities and their results.

In tandem with these changes the impact of technology had never been greater or so unpredictable. The technology revolution offered many new opportunities for HE to address some of the challenges it faced, few of which had been fully understood. The JISC Information Strategies although specifically not about technology had at its heart the aim to support institutions to explore the opportunities offered for the creation and use of information for learning and teaching, research and management.

The HE technological environment was very different to the one today. The World Wide Web had just become more widely available and institutions were coming to terms with the implications. In many institutions management information was held by departments and not always shared centrally and there was a prevalence of in house systems. The MAC initiative to develop a shared corporate IT system for participating Universities had not been successful.

The Teaching and Learning Technology Programme and the JISC Technology Applications Programme (JTAP) had created a lot of interest in technology enhanced learning and teaching, but the use of Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) was still experimental and used only in a small number of 'early adopter' departmental pockets. Institutions with a single corporate VLE were rare.

The JISC Electronic Libraries and Managed Learning Environments programmes were raising questions about how information was organised, who had access to it, who owned it, and how to 'join up' previously separate systems and processes and what the organisational implications were for institutions.

The publication of the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education (Dearing) report in 1997 recognised the central role communication and information technology would have in Higher Education and made several recommendations for institutions to take advantage of the opportunities offered by technology. One recommendation was that all UK HEIs should have an Information Strategy by 1999/2000.

Many industries were re-engineering their processes, in some cases totally changing their business model (Boys and Ford 2008) to take advantage of the opportunities offered by technology. Management gurus were promoting the need for process re-engineering in recognition that change involved people and processes as well as technology. However, there was a sense that education was different and these techniques were viewed with suspicion by staff, although some Higher Education Institutions with innovative leaders were dipping their toes in these waters. This use of business process re-engineering (BPR) techniques in HE, mainly addressed administrative processes (Allen & Fifield 1999) but some argued that given the move to a mass system of higher education, the traditional structure of HE, with the emphasis on staff student contact was no longer adequate and that BPR would enable HEIs to develop organisational structures that facilitate innovative teaching and learning methods which required new approaches to course design and information management (Ford et al 1996). The JISC Information strategies work used many of the techniques of BPR, but was seen as less threatening because the focus was on information and it was not necessarily seen as the strategic organisational change management exercise it embodied.