JISC

Maximising investment

The impact of JISC’s funding is seen throughout the post-compulsory education sector. Its services and collections are used by all UK colleges and universities. The JANET network is an award-winning shared service that provides a reliable, high quality, high-speed connection to over eight million UK users covering research, higher and further education, and schools. Other services facilitated by the network, for example, video conferencing, save considerable time and money and reduce environmental impact for the sector. The negotiating and purchasing power of JISC Collections produces significant economies of scale. A recent analysis (2007–2008 figures, from Demonstrating JISC’s Impact on the Sector, Charles Hutchings, 2009) concluded that for every £1 of funding to the Collections team, the sector received services with a commercial value of over £34 (an increase from £26 in 2006). The JISC Advance advisory services are another successful example of a highly regarded shared service within the sector. The same analysis concluded that for every £1 invested in JISC Advance, the sector saved £12 (up from a saving of £9 in 2006).

Most institutions have drawn upon additional JISC funding in order to help them to innovate. Its innovation programmes have invested funding in over 170 institutions in the last five years. All universities and colleges can benefit from innovation activity, project outputs and advice, regardless of funding source.

Scaling-up from small pilots to achieving institutional or national take-up is a significant challenge. Change takes time – even proven technical innovations can take considerable time to be adopted by large institutions as the strategic and cultural change is much slower. Key stakeholders need to take ownership – both within institutions and national bodies. JISC supports capacity building in the sector through large-scale change programmes, through dissemination, communication, benefits realisation and partnership activities.

JISC will look to ensure the value of its investments are maximised

Help the sector to use JISC’s outputs

JISC maximises its return on investment through a structured communications strategy that identifies how its outputs can address key strategic issues facing institutions, targeted at all management levels and for different types of practitioner. The outcomes from JISC programmes are frequently synthesised into briefings and papers aimed at a wide range of stakeholders, eg the recent technology-enhanced learning and teaching publication entitled Effective Practice in a Digital Age, Recent investments have produced high quality case studies, software, toolkits and recommendations for change that offer positive benefits to the sector. Many programmes produce valuable products and recommendations that do not reach the wider community. JISC will prioritise efforts to ensure that it increases the impact of its investment through improved access to outputs, communications and benefits realisation (supported take-up of new approaches). This will involve working through JISC Advance and the Regional Support Centres, and in partnership with other organisations, such as the Leadership Foundation, the Higher Education Academy and Becta

Build capability for innovation in institutions

Adapting technology to support institutional systems and processes requires good planning and implementation practices to support programmes of change. JISC recognises the importance of good practice in these areas and through its service JISC Advance it supports the sector in good project and portfolio management. JISC uses the government-approved methodology Managing Successful Programmes to design its large-scale change programmes and also trains project leaders in project management. There is a need to develop further the take up of project, programme and change management techniques within the sector.

Understand user needs and changing technology

Users of systems are changing and systems and processes need to evolve in order to respond to their needs. JISC will build on the high quality research that it has commissioned into the needs of learners, researchers and future generations of researcher and extend this work to include the changing needs of teachers. JISC recognises that the technology context changes continually. It will focus increased effort on exploring how institutions and other organisations can make more effective use of new technologies to support their user communities. This will include exploration of informal content and user-owned environments.

Sustainability and new business models

In a world of increasing user requirement and embedding of ICT into practice, JISC recognises that issues of sustaining investment are an essential and growing challenge, both for institutions and for JISC itself. Institutions have reduced resources available to innovate and sustainability is a large part of this problem. JISC has developed a Sustainability Handbook in order to guide its projects and services through a set of sustainability processes. It will continue to work with expert organisations to investigate new and creative business models, to implement these models in its activities and to encourage their take-up by institutions.

Improved market intelligence

As the use of information technology becomes more pervasive across institutions and the diversity of those organisations also grows, it is a challenge for JISC to ensure it has an accurate and comprehensive understanding of the needs of those it serves. JISC will develop market intelligence capacity to enable it to gather, synthesise and understand requirements and priorities of education to better target and maximise the value of its future investments.

Measuring success

JISC recognises the importance of measuring and clearly demonstrating progress against its overall strategic aims. A key component of this will be to identify how it is impacting on the sector. As such, JISC is putting in place a series of measures and processes to achieve this.

Measuring success falls broadly into two main areas:

1. What JISC should use as indicators of success
2. What mechanisms it will use to gather the information needed (such as through programme evaluation, impact studies, longitudinal surveys and baselining)

JISC has the potential to impact the community through a number of different activities which all need to be considered, namely through its:

• Project and programme activities (innovative/developmental work)
• Services
• Communication and marketing
• Initiatives and partnerships

JISC will measure success using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methodologies (through statistics, metrics, qualitative information, case studies and illustrative examples). Some impacts will be immediate while others, such as changes in practice or behaviour, may take longer to realise. Some will be more tangible and directly measurable than others (eg those caused by JISC alone), while others involve partnership with other organisations, and hence are more complicated to measure. Some impacts will operate at the individual level while others will operate more strategically with the magnitude of impact differing across audience types.

While JISC will continue to develop reports that analyse value and economic impact, it recognises that a broader approach to measuring its overall impact and success is required given the complex nature of many of its activities.

Consequently, JISC will adopt an approach to describing its impact and progress through narrative – comprising case studies, examples, counter-factual arguments etc, with supporting statistics where available – rather than by trying to quantify the collective impact of its activities. None the less, where certain activities have substantial impact, this will be reported for these activities. Such an approach has been adopted successfully by a number of similar organisations, such as the Research Councils UK and Universities UK JISC will agree how impact will be realistically measured and implement a strategy through which evidence is obtained systematically across JISC to demonstrate this.