JISC

As the sector braces itself for the impending changes to funding and student fees, robust data collection, linking and the ability to interrogate across data sources to determine accurate and appropriate costing and price strategies will be crucial. The University of Bolton believes that the ability to achieve sound costing and pricing principals of often very complex provision is essential to deliver its mission in a, potentially, very price sensitive part of the sector.

The University has robust systems for the management of core data, if somewhat siloed, but also areas of weakness in some areas of data collection, reuse and deficiencies in combining and interrogating data in timely ways to support operational, tactical and strategic decision making at institutional, school, unit or course levels.

Using the requirements of HEFCE TRAC as the base model, the JISC Business Intelligence Infokit and an Enterprise Architecture approach, this project will consider the means by which effective data capture, accumulation, release and reuse can both meet the needs of decision support within the organisation and that of external agencies.

The “Assessing Information Needs” Survey (JISC BI programme) indicated that “what institutions most want to know” is costing and pricing. This project will model processes and data, developing reporting tool sets that are straightforward to use and widely accessible for use in scenario planning, benchmarking and costing and pricing activities using lower cost technologies.