Improving the business (part 1)

A couple of the presentations at the CISG conference last week focussed on what could be done to deliver improvements within the institution. The first of these, from the University of Exeter, concentrated on a project to improve the quality of data within the institution. There are consequences of poor data, particularly in the higher education sector where league tables are important factors for both staff and student recruitment. The interest in league tables is highlighted by the million hits on the Times Higher’s website after they published their world league table of institutions. There is also an operational cost of poor data. Firstly institutions spend a considerable time spent correcting data, particularly getting it right for statutory returns. Secondly there is a risk that poor data may result in incorrect decisions being made or that additional systems are developed to deliver management information as the core systems data is not trusted.

The Exeter project had two strands – correction and prevention. When correcting the current data, they looked to establish why there was a problem and identify the issues that were causing erroneous data to be created. The staff responsible for the data were involved throughout the process as errors were identified and corrected. However, errors will still creep in if staff do not understand why the data they are entering is required and what the consequences are if data is incorrect. Consequently there was an extensive training programme to explain what the data is used for and to highlight the implications of incorrect data. Training on the use of systems is now augmented by training on the use of the data within them.

The project recognised some key problem areas. One of these was around the data required for the HESA return and postcode data in particular. As a result of the project Exeter now employ a temp for 3 – 4 weeks following registration to clean student data. This has resulted in a big drop in postcode errors and although it has a cost of around £2k it has resulted in a £30k saving in staff time later in the year.

The need for data quality is something the Data Efficiency Group formed by HEFCE is striving to achieve. This has highlighted that few institutions have someone on their Executive Board that has responsibility for data; the then Chief Executive of HESA noted that Vice-Chancellors were only aware of problems at their institutions when HESA alerted them. Exeter clearly have senior ownership of information – in order for this project to succeed it needed senior management buy-in from the top but also the investment in training at the operational level. It strikes me as a model others could follow.

Green IT – on the slide?

Derek Watson, in his opening presentation to the UCISA CISG Conference last week, noted that the University of St Andrews’ energy costs had risen by a staggering 53% in one year. Presumably other universities and colleges are in the same boat so the argument for green IT initiatives should be something of a no-brainer. However the conference closed with a presentation from Mark Raskino from Gartner where he observed that green IT was at the crest of the peak of inflated expectations and about to head into the trough of disillusionment.

So what are the reasons for this? One Raskino considered was that the IT department does not get the credit for savings made as a result of green IT initiatives – consequently there is a lack of kudos associated with making those savings. This is evident in a number of ways in the higher education sector. Firstly energy costs, even for distinct areas such as a data centre, are usually not charged against the IT budget. Consequently any savings the IT department delivers through, for example, virtualisation does not realise any financial benefit for the IT department. Nor do initiatives which reduce power consumption across the institution such as automated powering down of idle equipment or services that ‘wake’ systems up when they are needed. And if a more energy efficient system is procured by the IT department which is more expensive than a less efficient system, the IT department bears the cost with the savings made over the life of the system reflected in others’ budgets. So perhaps there is a need to provide incentives to the CIO to continue to deliver savings through green initiatives.

The main driver for many of these initiatives thus far has been financial – green IT initiatives were seen as a cost control measure. The current economic climate means that there are other pressures on reducing costs and so green initiatives are likely to be just some of the options being considered. Consequently it may be that options that deliver more immediate cost savings are preferred over green initiatives that deliver benefits over a longer period.

Finally, what has been achieved so far through some of the initiatives outlined above could be regarded as grasping the low hanging fruit. The challenge is to deliver a year on year reduction of an institution’s carbon footprint. This will not be easy. Further short term benefits can be delivered through changes in user behaviour – but getting individuals to change their habits is not a trivial task. Although there are tools available to help measure an organisation’s carbon footprint, there is not a good understanding by the senior institutional management that may be making carbon related decisions of how changes may impact this. IT can deliver savings through making buildings more efficient but this is likely to require a significant investment and at this time there may be other priorities for delivering short term savings. Consequently the case for such investment will have to be strong and deliver both short and long term savings.

Hard hats time

Over the coming few days I’ll be picking out some of the highlights of and reflecting on the UCISA CISG Conference held at St Andrews last week. We had an interesting opening session from Derek Watson, the Quaestor and Factor of the University of St. Andrews. His focus was the current financial gloom and doom and he began by outlining some of the reasons behind the crash and current economic climate. The estimated figure for the total worldwide financial loss is $2.8trillion – a staggering figure and put into context by highlighting that the combined value of Microsoft and Oracle is a small fraction of this figure. Disturbingly the amount of loss that has been identified so far is around 30% of that figure. So with over 60% still to be identified, it goes without saying that lean times are going to be with us for some time. And with higher education way down the political parties’ priorities, government funding for the sector is likely to be impacted much more than other sectors.

The temptation is always to look for a one size fits all solution for the sector but different institutions have different missions and consequently the proportion of income from the various different sources also differs. That income is under pressure – investment funding is harder to get, income from endowment is falling and there is greater international competition, particularly now the US universities are looking more at expanding beyond their shores. Against this, costs are increasing – the pensions deficit is growing, energy costs are volatile. But the sector needs to maintain quality if it is to maintain its reputation and the income from international students.

So institutions need to find a way of cutting costs whilst also growing the business if the sector is to ride out the current economic difficulties. There will have to be a shorter payback time on investments; IT directors will have to demonstrate how new systems will pay for themselves within three or so years. There is a need to question all services and hence expenditure. What can you stop doing without any serious impact? Are there alternative, cheaper, ways of delivering the same service? Which services can you improve? This questioning role should not be restricted to those in management – Watson believed that collective action is needed to get institutions through. So all should be considering change, reviewing what they do and whether it can be done more effectively. Some hard decisions will need to be taken; but without some pain, it is unlikely that institutions will secure the investment they need to move on.

A few points based immigration questions

One of the benefits of conferences is that some issues bubble up that may not have been addressed elsewhere. Whilst that isn’t entirely true of the list of questions I was given regarding the new points based immigration system, I’ve published the answers (as I see them) to the questions raised below:

1. How to make payments. Currently the only mechanisms on offer are payment by credit or debit card or by cheque. Payment is for the batch of CAS (confirmation of acceptance for studies) numbers generated so whether it is for one number or a thousand (the maximum allowed for a batch) the process will be the same. And that process is that payments will only be accepted by credit/debit card or cheque. If the option selected is to pay by cheque then there will be a delay in issuing CAS numbers as the cheque needs to clear before the numbers are issued. The feasibility of a pre-payment mechanism has been raised with the Home Office. However, the official line is that customers should not pay for a service before it is delivered. In this case the service is the generation of the CAS number. There are discrepancies with other Home Office services, notably criminal records bureau checks where prepayment is allowed. Universities UK are continuing to press UKBA on this issue to try to ensure that pre-payment can be delivered.

2. Partner companies. The whole premise of the new system is that the sponsoring institution (ie the institution that the student/applicant is applying to) takes responsibility for students they expect to enter the country. So in the case of organisations such as INTO, the applicant is not applying to study at INTO but is applying to an institution that subscribes to INTO. Consequently it is the institution where the student has applied forthat should take responsibility (as the sponsor for that student) for the student entering the country. I am not aware that there is any change in this position but hopefully Friday’s presentation will address this.

3. Restricting the numbers of CASs issued. Institutions are asked to estimate the number of CAS numbers (ie the number of non-EU students they expect to offer places to) when they apply to be sponsors of students entering the country. I understand that this is not a hard and fast limit and may be expanded on application to the Home Office. I believe that the Home Office/UKBA recognise that this year will be something of a transitional phase and will not impede institutions that may have underestimated the number of CAS numbers they require.

4. Extra resource required. There will be extra resource required to enter data required for UKBA that is not required for normal registry operations. To some extent this is a consequence of new legislation; for example there was no additional resource generated for the introduction of the data protection act. The response below answers the point made on extra resource for monitoring.

5. UKBA have been at pains to stress that they do not require any new monitoring to be introduced to meet the reporting requirements of the new system. Rather, they need to see evidence of the processes in place to identify students that have failed/or are in danger of failing to meet the requirements of meeting ten expected contacts. What an ‘expected contact’ is is being left to the institution; it is not intended that the institution will need to introduce new procedures to meet UKBA’s requirements. Rather that they will have processes in place currently that demonstrate that students’ progress is being monitored. So put simply, normal academic monitoring which should identify when a student has missed a number of expected contacts and so is at risk of failing their course/module, should be sufficient to meet UKBA’s needs and (given that such measures should be applied to all students) should address any equal opportunities issues that may arise.

The caveat is that the responses outlined above are my own and may not be reflective of UKBA policy. The points raised above will be forwarded to David Ramsbotham who is speaking on the implementation of the PBS at the CISG conference on Friday to give him an opportunity to comment or correct the responses I have given here.

Cost of IT downtime

The difficulty in assessing the cost to the institution of an IT outage was raised by a number of IT directors as a problem. UCISA responded to this issue by securing funds to commission a piece of work to establish formulae to estimate the costs of outages for certain scenarios. The problem was highlighted because the IT directors were concerned that institutions were spending money either on insuring against failure at critical times or building resilience into their systems without really knowing whether the spend was justified since the impact of the outage had not been assessed.

Today I met with the lead consultant on the project. The initial project definition included a number of sample scenarios; since then a number of IT Directors in the higher education sector have highlighted further scenarios that might merit further investigation. Naturally, given the diversity in the sector, the scenarios varied greatly between institutions. There was some commonality – failure during clearing was picked out as a particular risk by a number of institutions – but in many cases the scenarios reflected the institutional missions. Over the next few days I’ll be working with the consultant to refine the list. This will involve identifying the underlying causes of the failures outlined to determine what the root cause of the failure might be. For example, the reason for a loss of access to e-journals (which are largely held off-site) may be a failure of authentication services which will have far greater impact than e-journals alone. So loss of authentication services may be a more appropriate scenario to study. We also want to identify those scenarios that will impact institutions across the sector and those that will impact the whole institution and not an individual department.

The project is due to complete in March. Before then there will be a period of information gathering from the sector as a whole before a number of more detailed studies are carried out to define and test the defined formulae. This should hopefully result in a useful resource for the whole community that will allow IT directors to identify whether or not insurance against failure or investment in resilience is merited.

Pattern based strategy – is the sector agile enough?

I attended a session on the final day of Educause09 on applying pattern based strategy in higher education. The principle is that an organisation looks to identify patterns (from some of the softer indicators such as whether alumni would recommend your institution), analyse the impact of those patterns and then make a decision to adapt current business processes. The intention is to pick up those unplanned interventions and react accordingly – for example, the growth of the use of the iPhone might be seen as a pattern that could have an impact on the way an institution operates.

In order for pattern based strategy to succeed the organisation needs to have agile decision making. This is perhaps where the difficulty will be in implementing this in higher education. I don’t believe that institutions’ decision making is always based on sound business intelligence; where there is use of key performance indicators in decision making it is often to make a reactive rather than proactive change. Interestingly Brenda Gourley, the former Vice-Chancellor of the Open University highlighted such an agile structure in the final keynote of Educause09. She instigated scenario planning and a high level of performance based management. It is possible that the planning supplemented by pattern searching would work in such an environment.

However it is often the unplanned changes that have the biggest impact on an organisation. If institutions are to be able to anticipate and react to those unplanned changes then there need to be cultural changes within institutions to allow more agile decision making. Currently I believe that a significant amount of management is reactive rather than proactive. In my view this highlights the lack of leaders within the

Technology enabling the classroom

The final presentation of the day was from Michigan State University on building, renovating & maintaining technology enabled classrooms. This has been a long term programme starting in 1995 and updating around 25 rooms a year. At this time, the University set up a group to lead the project to renovate the rooms and allocated a substantial budget to allow it to carry out the work. The group remained the same for ten years which gave continuity of planning and construction specifications but also meant that they became a significant resource for the institution to consult when considering refurbishment of rooms.

The rooms are all equipped with computers, DVD/VCR players, projectors and microphones as a minimum housed in purpose built carts or lecterns. The group are also looking at repurposing other areas either as group work areas or more social collaborative space. There are a number of factors that have to be considered when converting an existing seminar room to a group work area. The cost is significantly higher ($50,000 compared with $20,000 for a traditional set up) and the room then has a reduced capacity (typically 48 seats from 60). The capacity is the more significant issue; Michigan State has invested and continues to invest large sums on maintaining the quality of their teaching rooms. The investment is not just in terms of capital funding. Sixty per cent of the budget goes on maintenance and equipment replacement and there is a headcount of 20 FTE to support the 300 plus rooms.

Naturally some faculty want more than the standard equipment. Where this is the case the central team produce a memorandum of understanding, reviewed on an annual basis, which details where the responsibility lies for maintenance and repairs of the non-standard equipment.

Overall a simple project that is reaping benefits – almost all centrally controlled rooms now have quality equipment in situ. However this has only been achieved through a significant investment both in money and resources.

Improving retention through social networking

Day two of Educause started with a presentation on using social networking as a retention tool. A study had concluded that students that are engaged with their institution, in terms of both their learning and campus life, are more likely to complete their course. A number of universities have set up virtual communities within their portal to attempt to improve student retention.
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The portal provides single sign on and access to a range of applications including directory services, Blackboard and business applications. Each university has set up several targeted communities including freshmen, parents, alumni, sports teams and subject based communities. The student records systems hold the data which defines which community a given individual will belong to. A daily message is sent to each community in order to keep the site fresh and ever changing; some of these messages will be time critical and will be set to expire once the message becomes irrelevant.

It is still early days for the projects. The universities are using Google analytics to track which sections of the portal are being used and are tracking usage and following up with any individuals that are not making use of the portal to try to establish why. But it is too early to establish whether the project is meeting its aim of improving retention.

Managing the budget in challenging times

The second stream session I attended was a lightning round of presentations from CIOs on the actions they were taking to address budget cuts.

Two of the universities undertook reviews in order to inform their budget decisions. Louisiana State University had undertaken an internal review in 2005 to look at how they could streamline their operation but were forced to repeat the review in 2008 when the economic climate began to worsen and cuts in state funding were predicted. The target was a 5% cut and the review focused on outsourcing and redundancies as the main tools to achieve that reduction. In addition to these planned cuts, the review team also looked at scenarios for cuts of up to 25%. When considering these cuts the focus was not on sharing the pain but on identifying which were the priority services that must be kept and the remaining services that were dispensable. However, in all the planning exercises there was a continued focus on services/investments that help provide institution with competitive advantage to ensure that these were ring fenced. The challenge is for the CIO to make the case for those services/investments to make sure they aren’t cut.

Miami University also carried out a review but used a panel of three higher education CIOs to establish guiding principles for making budget decisions. Having established these principles, they looked at which services could be cut then evaluated the initial plan looking in particular for any unintended consequences. The output from this review was the final plan. There was some concern that some of the investments to deliver competitive advantage may be lost and so Miami sought to make greater operational cuts to protect that investment.

Reed College was one institution that has been only marginally impacted by the recession. They suffered fiscal difficulties in the early 90s but some of the measures taken then was giving them protection now. They had taken the decision at that point to establish a technology innovation fund. This fund is controlled by the CIO who may use if for development and capital costs with no strings attached to how the money was spent. Although it is not intended that this fund will be used to meet operational costs, it may be used for this purpose at times of crisis. They also built equipment replacement costs as a budget line so it was not necessary to request capital funding to replace equipment. Finally they got agreement from some of their staff that they would consider part-time working at times of crisis. It was estimated that this could realise up to an 18% saving on staff costs.

One of the points that the CIO at Reed College made was that it is possible to overcut during difficult times which makes the road to recovery harder than when staff resources and services had been protected. Both Miami and Louisiana State talked about protecting the investments and services that delivered competitive advantage. Their future success may depend on how successfully they manage to do that and how they manage to maintain the expertise they need within their service to help them move forward in better times.

IT in a global university

The first stream session I attended at Educause was given by New York University on the work they are carrying out to attempt to implement a global network university. NYU is the largest study abroad institution in the US with a presence in Asia, Africa, Europe and South America. What they were striving to do was create a vertically integrated corporation – language which was rather at odds with the opening presentation from Collins which suggested that institutions should shy away from implementing business practices when most business are ‘average’. However, the focus was very much on the academic aims of the institution with seamless mobility of students, faculty and research at the top of the agenda.

The key to their programme was standardisation – the service in Abu Dhabi should be identical to that in New York. This is easy where the campus abroad is managed by NYU. However there are greater challenges where the NYU presence is hosted within another institution. In this case there is a need for greater partnership with the host institution (with the aim to deliver benefits to both) and strong identity management to ensure that only those that have the right to access NYU facilities can do so. Overall there is still much work to be done. The presentation highlighted the work that has been carried out between the New York and Abu Dhabi campuses. But these are only two campuses – there are at least eight others that also need to be brought into the fold before this can be deemed a successful project.