JISC

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This project undertook a landscape study to identify, map and classify roles, competencies and relationships of major actors in each of the high level domain areas identified as part of the JISC-funded High Level Domain Architectures project. This study supplemented the data held within this emerging domain tool and contributes to the future development of enterprise wide ICT developments.

Introduction

This landscape study was a joint project between Franklin Consulting (FC), the University of Manchester (UoM) and the Educational Competences Consortium Limited (ECC). The aims of the project were to:

• extend the High Level Domain Architecture (HILDA) (now the underpinning model for the Innovation Base) to include role information
• enhance the interface of the system in order to enable users to work with it effectively
• include a representative set of roles in the model, and
• present the ideas to the human resources community to determine what their needs are, and how they may be met using a modelling approach and a knowledgebase tool

The project built on previous work undertaken by each of the partners. In particular, the development of the High Level Domain Architectures (HILDA) project by FC and UoM and the development of the Higher Education Roles Analysis (HERA) by ECC. The report first discusses what HILDA is, with some example scenarios of how it might be used to support understanding and decision making. This is followed by a discussion of HERA, and then we report on the methods used during the report, and how the resulting information can be visualised. A discussion on role analysis is followed by one on how HILDA can support organisational development and its use in process improvement. Finally, we discuss the technical reasons that currently make it difficult and unhelpful to integrate HERA with HILDA but show how they can be used in conjunction, and a discussion of the transition from HILDA to the Innovation Base.

Conclusions

From the work we have undertaken we are in a position to draw some conclusions about the utility and effectiveness of modelling based on roles in higher education.

We have clearly demonstrated that the approach that we have taken allows modelling of roles as part of the higher education landscape, and in particular that by extending the HILDA model to take account of role information we can model roles within the HILDA model.

It is possible and practical to work with the HERA and HILDA models together as they provide different, but complementary functionality. HERA is focused on role modelling and determining the size of roles through their scoring system while HILDA offers the ability to see roles in their wider context and to model them in their wider context.

It is not currently possible to directly connect HILDA and HERA due to the lack of appropriate APIs in HERA's underlying database. However data can be exported from HERA either as CSV files that could be transformed using macros or, as done in this project, manually transferred to HILDA.

Each university that is using HERA has its own version of the HERA database, populated with the specific roles at that university. Some of the differences relate to the ways that roles are defined (for instance due to the different missions and sizes of universities), as well as they way in which individual universities score the roles. However, there is sufficient commonality in work undertaken within roles and competencies required by roles for a national model to offer a robust starting point for institutions to customise the model to their own needs.

Modelling roles is not a trivial task, and the scale remodelling roles within HILDA and HERA to understand the effects of organisational development is commensurate to the scale of the reorganisation. A major reorganisation would require significant effort in modelling. However, we believe the return in better understanding the effects of the change and the developmental requirements make this cost-effective.

We can collect data for the knowledgebase from a wide range of sources including HERA, and other frameworks such as Skills for the Information Age, e-Skills and the National Occupational Standards and even job specifications.

Human Resource and organisational development staff understand the model and its purposes and believe that it can be very useful in supporting their work, and support its construction.

It would be useful to undertake further work to align the detail level of various competency frameworks in order to make the most effective use of each of the models. This would enable universities to take better advantage of national frameworks developed outside the sector (such as e-skills).

Further work with universities on the using the HILDA (and now the Innovation Base) and HERA together for organisational development is needed to refine the system.

Report available electronically only