JISC

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This briefing is for senior management team, CIOs, IT directors.

The Context

Further and Higher Education is facing a range of pressures including the changing political landscape (especially in relation to funding), increased competition for students, and rapid ICT developments. This creates a need for agility and the ability to work with a wider range of stakeholders (business, the wider community, and international), doing more for less, and recruiting, training and keeping staff with the right skills and experience.

The speed of technological change can be a barrier to development. It may encourage short-termism in strategic planning in higher and further education, and is often used to justify a risk-averse and conservative ICT strategy, with institutions not wanting to try out ‘untested’ technology, or concerned that investments will quickly become out of date.

The Rewards

IT works for you. The rewards are business agility and increased efficiency. In academic terms, this can be reflected in being able to offer a wider range of students something new, different, or more efficient compared to competitors. In business terms, administrative processes become more streamlined, flexible and data more accessible to staff, and the institution improves its ability to realise its visions and goals.

What We Know Already ICT is a vital part of overall strategy ICT is fundamental to all parts of your organisation: infrastructure (eg networks), academic (learning and teaching systems such as virtual learning environments), and corporate (eg administrative and finance applications), so it must be part of wider strategy.

Planning and change

Investment in ICT causes major change; new ICT has the potential to fundamentally alter the way in which learning, research and business processes are carried out. It is important to have a sound basis for your strategy and to manage the changes it may require.

Develop and manage strategy effectively

The JISC ‘Strategy’ infoKit offers general guidance on organisational strategy and explains the most important tasks and processes required to successfully articulate, coordinate and manage strategic activity within your institution. In summary, the four main steps for effective strategy management are:

• Agreeing mission, vision and values
• Accurate assessment of both internal and external business environments
• Ensuring the whole organisation buys in to the strategy in day-to-day activity
• Monitoring the effects of strategic change and adjusting as needed

If you are investing in ICT then its role, effects and potential at each of these strategic steps needs to be examined.

ICT and people

Strategic investment in ICT can be challenging, as there usually gaps in understanding and knowledge both for non-IT senior managers who are leading strategy, and IT specialist staff. Non-IT senior managers need to know and understand a certain amount about ICT trends and developments in order to lead and manage change, and IT specialist managers and staff may need more business knowledge in order to be more effective as ICT strategy champions.

The Strategic ICT toolkit

Read through the JISC Strategic ICT toolkit.

Commissioned by JISC and the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education, and developed by the University of Nottingham, the ‘Strategic ICT’ toolkit was conceived as a way to bring ICT into mainstream business, and help align business strategy and IT strategy.

Currently there is a considerable disconnect between business and ICT in many institutions; the toolkit aims to bring about a culture change so ICT is an embedded, integral part of the strategy for meeting business goals.

How does it work?

The toolkit opens up IT to people who are not necessarily part of an IT department, and help dispel the myth that IT is somehow a ‘dark art’. It helps universities and colleges to analyse, assess and develop their strategic use of information technologies, thereby becoming more efficient and agile.

It is not intended to be read end-to-end, nor does it assess the ‘value’ or ‘quality’ of a specific solution or service.

The toolkit is divided into three key areas:

• A ‘knowledge base’ which describes the key factors that influence and enable successful strategic use of ICT
• A set of case studies drawn from institutions within the HE sector with models of operational, strategic and transformational maturity. They illustrate the different context set by institutions for ICT to provide operational, strategic or transformational support
• Two self-analysis tools, which form the main resource of the kit. The first is for the organisation, and is run in a workshop context. It assesses the organisation’s maturity, and the best ways forward for improving strategic ICT. The second is for the individual, and assesses how ‘ICT savvy’ they are: how much they can contribute to, engage in and undertake activities, within their institutional role, to support strategic ICT maturity. It identifies changes that the person can make and aims to help bridge the gap between ‘business leader’ and ‘IT leader’.

Toolkit successes

The toolkit has proved to be a very useful resource when put into in practice, so much so that twelve of the original field test organisations are now using version 2 as a diagnostic to see how far they have progressed in twelve months.  

Getting Started

A number of colleges and universities have been field testing JISC’s new Strategic ICT toolkit, which focuses more specifically on developing and managing ICT strategy. The field test finished at the end of August 2011, the results informed version 2 of the toolkit, which will soon be available from JISC infoNet.

It provides more focused advice on how to ensure ICT, in all of its applications, is embedded in and supports your overall strategy. It will introduce you to the subject, and help you:

• Understand what ICT strategy is
• Work out where you are now – is the way that you govern and manage your ICT peripheral to your wider strategy, more tactical, or an integral part of it?
• Assess your readiness for change
• Work out how you will manage the change. IT integration is not just technical and systems integration, but involves people and processes

Make a case for ICT investment

Any change, even if it is aligned with a wider strategy, will need a sound business case. This will include identifying the costs and benefits of your investment, and choosing an evaluation method that will allow you to weigh them up against each other and that fits with your type of investment. Benchmarking, financial, or customer-focused are some typical evaluation methodologies.

Read ‘Benefits of ICT Investment – Landscape Study: evaluation framework and toolkit' for more details.

Get yourself heard

Organisational culture and the complexity of decision-making processes can make it difficult to present a case and get buy-in. Success can depend on things like:

• Formal committees absorbing your key messages
• Your use of informal connections and lobbying among key people
• Encouraging dialogue between administrative and academic interests
• A ‘champion’ to initiate and/or to coordinate, especially if the status and/or position of this person is high and acknowledged within the institutional hierarchy

Finally…

Reviewing and developing your strategy can appear a daunting task, but the JISC tools do not require you to reject the way you currently do things, they are frameworks to help you. And even small improvements to the status quo can often yield big returns.