JISC

Background

The Further and Higher Education (FE and HE) sectors continue to witness significant investment in ICT to support education, administration, community engagement and, in the case of HE, research. These investments can range from general developments in underlying ICT infrastructure to the on-going support and maintenance of specialist software applications. Clearly it is important for institutions to be able to assess whether value for money is being achieved from these investments and to be able to base future decisions on an informed understanding of the impact of prior investments. The BIILS project based within the University of Strathclyde sought to address this issue by exploring current practice within the sector, investigating best practice across the world and examining whether there are any lessons to be learned from the approaches that are used in other sectors.

Aims and Objectives

This project has considered different types of ICT investment within the FE and HE sectors, categorised as infrastructure investments, teaching and learning technologies investments and corporate/central systems investments. The primary objectives of the project were as follows. 

• To examine the approaches used to assess the performance of ICT projects, services and activities within the FE and HE sector.
• To provide a synthesis of the range of existing approaches in the FE and HE sectors. 
• To develop a categorisation of common terms and strategies within the FE and HE sectors. 
• To document the approaches, strategies and metrics that are used for performance measurement.

Lead Institution

• University of Strathclyde