Information Management Project
Evaluation
One of the first deliverables of the Information Management Project was to do an analysis of the information that is currently provided and how this contributes to decision making at all levels. This led to an analysis of the work systems currently owned by Student Statistics, Financial Services and Student Admissions including:
- Collection and reporting on projected/target student numbers, FTEs and serviced FTEs
- Reporting on actual student numbers against projections/targets
- Provision of statistics to Scottish Funding Council (SFC)
- Tuition fee income forecasting and resource allocation
- Course Portfolio Analysis
High level work system snapshots, data source and process flow diagrams were developed to support the analysis. Analysis then continued with an overall evaluation of the work systems using the Alter work system principals: please the customers; perform the work efficiently; serve the participants; create value from the information; minimise effort absorbed by the technology; deploy infrastructure as a genuine resource and minimise unintended conflicts and risks. This helped to collate the views of staff in the central support departments with information obtained in consultation meetings more widely around the University.
Analysis and evaluation concluded that the main weaknesses in our current work systems are:
- Significant lack of system integration which leads to major reporting issues when, for example, there is a need to report on actual enrolment data which is in SITS along with projected/target information which is in spreadsheets, this can’t be provided quickly because of the requirement to collate information from distinct systems.
- There is a need to be able to report on the information we have using different reporting structures to meet both internal and external requirements. The current data structures don’t facilitate this.
- There are issues over data quality and processing relating to the SITS student record system which we need to resolve to be able to use this system in the best way and to obtain accurate data for reporting and analysis.
- The information that we have is not being used as it could to contribute to strategic decision making.
- There is significant manual re-keying of data between distinct systems.
- There is a lack of agreed business rules and definitions.
This full Evaluation document is available on request by email to g.reid@rgu.ac.uk.
