Despite a late-ish start (to allow people to arrive and check-in), it was a packed afternoon and lots of useful information. Session one focused on the financial context, and session two on Information Management. Session three talked about the experiences at the University of Exeter in terms of data quality.
Financial Context and Challenge
The opening speaker was Derek Watson, Quaestor and Factor of St Andrews. (Basically, the Finance and Estates Director). His session was really about setting the context of University funding within the global economic situation. Whilst the headlines are nothing new, his explanations made sense of some complex financial issues and there were some notes from the session that I thought were particularly striking, and sobering:
The estimate of the amount of money lost to date in the global economy varies, with one suggesting it is $1.2 trillion, and the IMF $2.8 trillion. Trillion – eleven zeros. Derek likened that to taking the combined value of both Microsoft and Oracle, multiplying it by 8 and still not quite getting to the figure. Pause for a moment – 8 times the combined value of two of the most influential and important IT companies in the world, lost almost overnight.
He then went on to talk about what Universities do, how they are funded, and how the costs break down.
Using UUK information, he said that in the UK, Universities earn 51% of income from teaching, 39% from Research, and 10% from other activities. Of those global figures, the range was as varied as 1.7% to 96.1% of income from teaching, and 1-70% from research. At St Andrews is is 40:40:20 and Derek said teaching is contracting.
In terms of where we get our money from, Derek again used UUK figures.
36% from the main funding bodies (ranging from 0-73%), 27% from fee income from students (ranging from 1-42%) – and nearly a third of this derives from non-EU students – and 16% from Research Grants
A major cost was staff pay, at around 57%, with a range of 2-72%.
Derek also talked about the fragile nature of HE finances, noting that Capital receipts from asset sales give the impression of health but of course you can only sell an asset once (and you can earn no income from it once sold), and the income from International students, if lost, would account for more than double that income from sales.
The remainer of his session looked at what we can do to survive/overcome what he explained as the pain to come – that the public funded economy hasn’t yet nose-dived in the same way as other parts of the economy but surely will as the level of public sector debt increases.
The obvious ways forward are growth and cost cutting. However, you can obviously only grow so far and there are costs associated with unfettered growth. Similarly, you can only trim and trim so far before you trim something that then breaks and costs more to put right.
Derek’s view was that the responsibility lies with us all; to look at what we do, do things differently, stop doing things that aren’t going to really be missed. Don’t look to ‘them’ to solve it – because we’re all part of ‘them’.
Asked about practicalities, Derek talked about harnessing the whole institution IT spend, aligned to strategy, worrying less about cost/benefit and more about alignment with the strategic direction and a short payback period. He also underlined the importance of engagement, of talking to people across the organisation and understanding what it is they are trying to do.
A very interesting session.
Information Management – the Story
Alison Allden, Chief Executive of HESA, spoke next on a subject of interest to me at the moment, as I try to finish drafting our new Information Management Strategy.
Alison stressed the importance of provenance – knowing where the data is from – the need to emulate Google-like search capabilities, and semantics – common definitions and meanings – as well as the two-sided issues of standards being both important and an overhead.
Alison also talked briefly about the importance of such roles as ‘Type 42 (Dearing) leaders in IT who understand both IT and the ‘business’ of the University, and the critical input Business Analysts and Project Managers can bring to an organisation even though their value might not be fully appreciated at first.
There were some very useful and relevant resources identified including sources from JISC, the Information Standards Board for education, skills and childrens services, and HESA’s ‘heidi’
There was a lot to consider in Alison’s session and I am particularly interested to look at the various sources mentioned to check the Information Management Strategy is picking up good practice from there.
Data Quality
This reminded me of an early role I had in the Registrations and Exams office of a large FE College I used to work for. In September my job, every day, was to go through the enrolment error reports and identify missing or inaccurate information, trace it back to enrolment forms and mark the reports so that data input staff could update the records on an evening shift. It was thankless and boring work but of course incredibly necessary to ensure we reported student numbers accurately and were able to claim fees, funding, etc, correctly.
In the session, staff from Exeter talked about work they had done to improve data quality particularly around student information. They stressed the importance of getting the data in correctly first time, avoiding the costs of putting it right later. They showed a quick but extreme example of what can happen when data is wrong, and gets corrected!
The speakers stressed the need for top level buy-in – and training and education for all in terms of changing the culture and process.
Again, another thought-provoking session, particularly the extreme example of the far-reaching consequences of errors in data and the impact of correcting them out of context.
Tags: cisg09, data quality, economy, finance, information management, standards