Strategies for agile institutions
Institutions need strategies that enable them to adapt rapidly to change caused by external factors such as funding cuts, changing government requirements, changing student expectations, increased competition and new developments in information and communications technology (ICT).
To develop effective strategies, institutions require access to accurate, timely and meaningful information about their core businesses. Cost-effective, interoperable ICT systems provide this information. However, such systems are unlikely to be in place without effective strategies.
We’re helping institutions to resolve this conundrum by providing guidance on how to develop and implement institutional strategies that support agility and the development of efficient business processes.
- Our strategy infoKit will guide you through an approach to building an over-arching institutional strategy, drawing on online tools and techniques to help with tasks such as assessing priorities and planning for change. We’ve added a section on business intelligence to help you access the information you need to plan your strategy.
- With your strategy in place, you’ll need tools to plan your ICT deployment. We’ve supported the development of a strategic ICT toolkit to help you measure how well your current ICT is aligned with your institutional strategy and make plans for improvement.
Go to a recording of our recent webinar to find out how to use the toolkit.
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Taking a holistic approach, a new infoKit in the Improving organisational change series, can help you implement these plans using enterprise architecture, a technique that enables you to understand your current state and develop a blueprint for moving to a future desired state. Enterprise architecture provides a way of representing and understanding different functions and the interrelationships between them. For example, you can describe what your organisation does; the processes and people involved; what data are used and how they flow through the organisation; what and how information technologies are used; and the relationships and dependencies between all of these. The archi modelling tool provides a way of modelling and visualising these relationships.
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Scenario planning can also help you plan for change by helping you prepare for alternative views of the future. You explore the likelihood of a particular scenario happening and how well-placed you are to cope if it does. Get started with our scenario Planning infoKit.
- As you start implementing change to your business processes, you’ll want to measure its impact. Our impact calculator can help. Find out how 6 institutions fared when they used it to measure the impact of changes to their records management systems.
What does the future hold?
Our future work is focused on helping institutions explore the benefits of enterprise architecture with a view to establishing it as a professional approach for implementing institutional change. We're also further developing business intelligence and analytics to inform decision making.
Support from JISC Services
Our impact
As of February 2011, our impact calculator has been downloaded more than 800 times and has 245 optionally registered users. The following universities have used the tool to quantify the benefits and efficiency gains of proposed initiatives: Nottingham, Cardiff, Aberdeen, Huddersfield, Oxford and King’s College London. Examples of how they have used the tool include:
- the University of Nottingham found that the introduction of a new system to manage student case records would recoup the initial investment costs during its third year of implementation and would thereafter save the university around £4,500 per annum.
- King’s College London found that changes to the storage of electronic records within the estates department would save over £10,000 per annum
- the University of Aberdeen calculated that the provision of email training could result in a 38% reduction in the volume of emails retained by staff.
See the impact calculator pilots
