JISC

JISC Portfolio for Senior Managers: Employing technology to support your business goals

In a challenging climate, institutional business sustainability depends on strategic oversight, agility, responsiveness and cohesiveness – in short: knowing your processes, adapting to your ‘market’, playing to your strengths.

Higher education institutions work with an increasingly diverse range of clients – from staff and on-site students to remote learners, alumni, and local authorities and businesses – and need to understand and manage an ever-wider range of interactions.
In their business and community engagement (BCE) activities, the breadth of interactions with external parties extends from private and public sector organisations to cultural bodies to community groups and members of the public. With multiple contacts, limited resources, information overheads and the need to ensure operational efficiency and consistency, it makes sense to record and manage these interactions in a coherent way.

Each institution has strategic partners that they value above others in the context of their engagement strategy, so there is also a need to ensure the partnership strategies are implemented across the organisation and that duplication and conflicting approaches do not occur, so that the partnerships deliver business value rather than become a drain or a liability.

Collaborative activities are critical for business sustainability but the multiplicity and multi-faceted nature of institutions’ external interactions, partnerships and relationships can be a significant operational challenge.

Effective customer relationship management (CRM) is one process that can help to ensure that both sides of an institution’s interactions are managed well: relationships with external clients and partners are productive and sustainable, and internal information – business intelligence – is properly managed.

The benefits are clear. Partnerships can become more productive and strategic; institutions more business-like with better-integrated information, knowledge, resource and record management, and central marketing; and there is more accurate reporting of enterprise interactions both for internal benchmarking and quality and for external reporting.

An agile university is one that can adapt quickly to change in today’s evolving and demanding marketplace. To achieve this, it is vital that it has established processes and put in place systems to allow information to be joined-up and analysed. With this kind of business intelligence flowing freely, institutions are able to make better strategic decisions.

How JISC can help

JISC’s Business and Community Engagement programme supports UK institutions in their strategic management of relationships with partners and clients external to the institution and of the associated services. A strategic priority for the programme is to equip institutions with the tools and good practice they need to make effective and sustainable investment decisions. This is particularly true of using CRM to manage knowledge effectively. The programme also facilitates fruitful collaboration, knowledge enrichment and co-development across the institutional-external partner boundary through web technologies and online engagement.

As part of its relationship management work, the programme has researched CRM usage across the sector and found it to be patchy and underdeveloped – most institutions are using CRM processes peripherally, some tactically and very few strategically. JISC equips senior managers, through a CRM Maturity Model and a Self-Analysis Framework, with the means to assess and enhance the readiness of their institution to derive value from CRM. The aim is to avoid premature purchases of CRM systems when the business processes and protocols are not in place to enable the investment to be realised.

CRM Self-Analysis Framework

The CRM Self-Analysis Framework encompasses guides, insights, research and tools designed to help higher education institutions work through their approach to CRM. It enables institutions to position themselves within JISC’s CRM Maturity Model, according to three defined levels – peripheral, tactical or strategic – and to plan their progression. The Framework is a synthesis of good practice, and includes process maps around CRM usage from a range of different institutions, sections on needs analysis, customer value, change readiness and process mapping, as well as guidance on how an institution at one level of maturity might move to the next level.

CETIS Relationship Management

JISC CETIS provides support and good practice guides to help institutions in their approach to relationship management. This builds on the CRM Self-analysis Framework.

Record Management Maturity Model

The Maturity Model aims to give an accurate, reliable and honest summary of the current level of maturity of the records management measures within your institution. It can help with: identifying and providing evidence of good practice in records management; providing evidence of compliance with the Freedom of Information Act and its Code of Practice; identifying gaps and areas of weaknesses, which may require improvement; measuring the extent to which your institution views records management as an operational and strategic priority.

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