Strategic Management Information
Strands
1. Requirements
Key questions to be addressed during this strand include:
- What information do senior managers want/need access to in order to fulfil their role?
- Where might this information currently reside within the institution (if at all) and what changes might be required to facilitate its use in this way?
- What support may senior managers require in order to make most effective use of business information?
- What external sources of information might be usefully leveraged and how might this best be achieved?
Answers to these and related questions will be obtained by the following means:
- online survey
- Interviews and visits to selected institutions
- Detailed profiling and mapping activity within selected institutions
- Consultation with IT, information management and planning practitioners
- Research and synthesis of relevant sources of external date
2. Technology
Key questions to be addressed during this strand include:
- Is there an accepted and appropriate definition of 'Business Intelligence' within the sector?
- What are the characteristics which should usefully define 'Business Intelligence'?
- What approaches and technologies are institutions currently using to successfully progress this agenda?
- What lessons can be learnt from outside the sector?
- What current and planned offerings from system vendors may help institutions to successfully progress this agenda?
- What is the business case for investing in Business Intelligence and how can 'success' be measured?
Answers to these and related questions will be obtained by the following means:
- Online survey
- interviews and visits to selected institutions
- liaison with vendors
As with all the strands of this programme, JISC infoNet will be seeking to work closely with those agencies and bodies who have an existing interest in this area, including UCISA, HESA, SCONUL, The National Planners' Group and The FE/HE Special Interest Group of the Records Management Society and to build on any work they have already undertaken.
3. Infrastructure
Key questions to be addressed during this strand include:
- What are the issues which may currently be acting as a barrier to successfully realising the information requirements of senior managers as identified during Strand 1?
- How could collaboration between information, IT and planning practitioners best be coordinated to help advance Business Intelligence within institutions?
- How can information, IT and planning practitioners work most effectively with senior management to over come these issues?
- How can JISC, other sector agencies and the vendor community most usefully support institutions seeking to progress evidence based decision making within their institution?
Answers to these and related questions will be obtained by the following means:
- Facilitating discussion between the information, IT and planning officer communities
- A one-day event to be held in the autumn/winter 2010/11
- Brokering discussion between the senior management and practitioner communities in relation to this agenda
- Supporting pilot projects funded to address the core underlying issues identified in this Strand and to meet the requirements of senior managers as identified in Strand 1 (this is subject to the approval of further funding)
Context and objectives
The Strategic Management Information Programme is a new programme funded by the JISC Organisational Support Committee.
Operating within an increasingly volatile and competitive market and against a backdrop of a severe economic downturn it is essential that senior managers have access to timely, accurate and relevant information about their institution, its stakeholders, its competitors and the wider context in which it operates in order to facilitate effective evidence-based strategic decision making. Routine access to such data is also a prerequisite for being able to assess and report on progress against agreed objectives via the measurement of 'key performance indicators'.
As a result an increasing number of institutions are expressing an interest in enhancing their access to and use of 'business intelligence', both through the more efficient creation, integration and manipulation of the information they already hold within corporate systems and elsewhere and the collection of additional data from relevant external sources. Concepts such as senior management 'dashboards' and other tools to enable data manipulation and visualisation are becoming more commonplace: tools which enable the end user to aggregate, analyse and interpret information which may have originated in several disparate systems how they see fit to answer the specific questions which they need the answers to.
But whilst new technology may offer the potential for significant advances in this regard, the reality can often prove frustratingly difficult to realise. Dashboards and visualisation tools are only as good as the data they rely upon and attempts to progress such initiatives may fail to deliver their true potential if the various sources of data concerned are not accessible, accurate, up to date, authoritative and capable of automated integration.
JISC infoNet is taking forward a major new JISC-funded programme which runs February 2010 - December 2011, seeking to identify:
- what the information requirements of senior managers are;
- how technology may be able to help;
- where exemplars of good practice currently exist;
- why barriers to making progress in this area may exist, and
- what can be done to overcome them.
