Spotlight

Before setting off to create something new it always seems to me to be sensible to first ask yourself two questions:
1) Does whatever it is that I am about to create exist already (or something very much like it)?
2) Is there likely to be a need for what it is I am about to create?

It is with these questions in mind that we today launch our FOI Guidance Wiki.

Recent discussions between Universities UK, the Department for Business Innovation and Skills and the Information Commissioner’s Office have suggested there is a need for additional sector-specific guidance on the application of the Freedom of Information Act within Higher Education and JISC infoNet have been asked to assist with this.

We are very aware, however, that many agencies and organisations have produced such guidance in the twelve years or so since the Act was passed. Some of it will undoubtedly have dated in the light of case law and experience but may still have value, whilst for some it may be that their time has well and truly passed. Equally it may be that there are some useful ‘gems’ which have been forgotten about or conversely glaring omissions which could usefully be filled.

The FOI Guidance Wiki provides multiple ways of navigating through this material, a brief summary of each resource featured and links through to them. This will be a permanent resource which we hope to keep updated.

We have also embedded a review form into each resource featured. These forms will remain live for the next few months and will hopefully enable us to gather feedback from the sector about which resources you believe to be useful, which may need updating and what gaps in coverage might exist. We will then consider the comments we receive when planning how best to add to the range of sector-specific FOI guidance material later in 2012 and beyond.

We look forward to hearing what you think!

With the number of FOI requests received by the sector continuing to increase year on year it’s little surprise that there is a growing interest in the cost associated with answering such requests. Doing so is, of course, a legal obligation and regardless of this is something that the vast majority of institutions are happy to do in the spirit of openness, transparency and accountability. Access to accurate cost data is therefore less about making value judgements regarding the ‘price to be paid for openness’ and more about ensuring that institutions can provide as efficient and cost-effective a service as possible.

Partly in response to sector interest in such data and partly in preparation for the current Post-Legislative Scrutiny of the FOIA we provided small grants to enable seven HEIs in England and Scotland to track in as much detail and with as much accuracy as possible the time and resources taken to respond to a total of 36 requests received during January 2012. Thirty-six is, of course, a very small sample indeed when one considers that in January 2011 the 69 institutions who responded to our survey alone received 939 requests and we must bear this in mind when seeking to draw any conclusions. But at least through the adoption of a common and transparent methodology and collection tool and the granularity of data captured regarding what was requested, who was involved in processing it and the time and money involved we can have considerable confidence in the veracity of this data.

And what did we discover? Amongst many interesting observations regarding links between the size of an institution and the costs likely to be incurred and the possible role which records management ‘maturity’ can play in relation to efficiency in certain stages of the request handling process we learned that the average time taken to process an FOI request is 5 hours 2 minutes at a cost of£99, rising to £121when oncosts are included. Such figures appear to be broadly in line with the data released earlier this week from the Ministry of Justice’s own study into the costs associated with FOI which established an average time to respond of 5 hours 21 minutes at a cost of £164 for non-central public authorities government departments and rising to 6 hours 10 minutes and £184 for central government departments. We are still looking in detail at the differences in methodologies and underlying assumptions between this work and our own but from our initial analysis it looks as though the two sets of findings might be even closer yet when these variables are removed from the equation.

It is not for us to comment on whether £99/£121 represents good or poor value for money. What the full data underlying this total does help us to do, however, is to identify some areas where costs seem to be concentrated and to begin to ascertain what measures might be taken to reduce them. More data on a greater number of requests would undoubtedly allow us to add further weight to some of the conclusions we have made in this report which must be treated at this stage as tentative at best and it is for this reason that we are in active discussions to repeat this process with an extended number of requests later this year. In the meantime, the full analysis and data from our initial reading will undoubtedly make interesting reading for many.

There’s no doubting that FOI is high profile at the moment. Debates over the proposed Protection of Freedoms Bill and the Post Legislative Scrutiny of the existing Freedom of Information Act have all succeeded in keeping Freedom of Information issues in the news, not just within HE but across the entire public sector. But whatever your views on the Act and regardless of whether you believe any changes to it represent either a long overdue adjustment or an attack on all our liberties (or somewhere in between) we all need access to reliable data about the Act and its impact on the sector. The publication of the results of our annual Information Legislation & Management survey for 2011 provides just that.

Once again we have made use of specialist statistical software to capture, analyse and present the data, whilst for the first time this year we have added an additional ‘Trends’ tab alongside the existing ‘Highlights’ and ‘Full results’ options to make it easier to view this year’s results in the light of data from previous years.

We were also delighted to receive such strong backing for our proposal to develop an Excel-based logging tool which we could make freely available to the sector, both for institutions’ own internal purposes but also to enable us to gather survey data for future years with no additional effort required from those wishing to participate. 74% of respondents indicated that they would be interested in adopting such a tool with 26 people volunteering to be involved in its development. Further information on this will follow shortly, as will the results of our recent research project aiming to accurately calculate the true costs of responding to FOI requests within 7 institutions.

Watch this space for updates on both!

JISC infoNet are pleased to announce the launch of a new infoKit – ‘Knowledge Transfer 2.0‘, or ‘KT2.0‘.

”Knowledge Transfer, and specifically the transfer of innovation and intellectual property from colleges and universities to businesses and other communities, is a changed game. In many significant ways the context has changed, the skills and tools required have changed, and innovation practice has changed…..but nobody has bothered to update the manual: to set out the new rules of the game!”

Brian McCaul, originator of the approach and author of the new infoKit

This resource integrates current innovation theory, modern social media tools and current thinking on market behaviour or motivation, to provide a more effective model of Knowledge Transfer; a model that is capable of delivering more with less.

This rich and practical resource demonstrates the benefits of a more progressive and less proprietorial approach to knowledge transfer, and makes a strong case for a new, open, technology-enabled approach which has potentially wide applicability across the sector. Woven throughout the resource are a number of sound key principles which reflect leading thinking in the area and which will resonate widely in the current climate of austerity and public accountability.

For more background and context about the resource see http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/kt/about

View the new infoKit at http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/kt

Institutions are increasingly finding it necessary to measure various aspects of their performance. This could be to determine comparative areas of strength and weakness, to help identify priorities for investment or to enable the institution to benchmark themselves against peers or against themselves prior to undertaking a change initiative.

There are a significant number of tools which have been developed over the years by JISC and others to assist institutions in this regard. All of these tools have something in common; they are all designed to help institutions to measure something they do – either in a standalone way or against a predefined set of criteria. And yet despite this commonality of purpose each is also different, either designed to help analyse within a specific subject area (for example records management or information security), or in the type of tool it is (for example a maturity model or a calculator) or in the type of data it produces and whether its of a quantitative or qualitative nature.

For the first time our Measurement Tools Wiki brings together an extensive range of such tools in one place. It provides multiple ways of finding the tool that best meets your requirements based on any of its attributes and gives a standard set of information about each tool.

Through this functionality the Measurement Tools Wiki allows you to find the tool that will be most useful to you, to know what to expect from it and how to gain access to it.

Please note that the Wiki is very much ‘work in progress’. If you know of a publicly-funded HE/FE-specific measurement tool which we have not included please let us know. Equally, if you believe any of the information relating to any of the tools featured is incorrect we would be only too pleased to correct it. Please let us know.

From 2.8 to 8.6 in 6 years.

What am I talking about? FOI requests of course. The average number of FOI requests received per institution per month from the introduction of the Act in 2005 to the results for 2010, to be more specific.

How do we know? Well, each year since 2005 we at JISC infoNet, with support from Universities UK and GuildHE have been running a survey designed to reveal exactly what impact the Freedom of Information Act, Data Protection Act and Environmental Information Regulations are having on the UK HE sector. The survey covers a multitude of question areas: from the subjects being requested and who the requestors are to how long requests take to answer and how many staff are involved in completing them. But of all the data gathered, analysed and presented each year through this process the simple ‘average number of requests per institution’ statistic is most likely to be the one looked for first; for it is this statistic which tends to act as the bellwether for all the rest.

And so in ‘2.8 to 8.6’ we can see encapsulated something of the overall experience of the sector thus far: A story of the steady but constant increase in impact. From something which could at first be dealt with as ‘business as usual’ to a significant, high-profile issue in its own right and one which seems set to keep on growing.

The results of this year’s survey may be scrutinised even more than in previous years. With the Government planning a Post-Legislative Scrutiny process of the FOIA in early 2012 various sector bodies will be working together and separately to provide as accurate a picture as possible of the experience of the HE sector and the results from our surveys over the past 6 years are likely to form an important part of that response.

We hope as many institutions as possible contribute to this year’s survey which goes live today. In response to feedback received from previous years we have made this available in December to allow people to start the submission of data in the ‘quieter’ weeks leading up to Christmas. The survey can be found from the JISC infoNet website and will remain open until Friday 27th January 2012

JISC infoNet is delighted to announce the launch today of its latest suite of resources at UCISA CISG 2011. This extensive collection is aimed at ‘Improving Organisational Efficiency’ and includes infoKits on Enterprise Architecture, Shared Services, Costing and Cloud Computing, as well as material on the technology lifecycle, advice on getting more from existing investments and a look at the technology implications of mergers and restructures.

As if that wasn’t enough, three popular infoKits have been upgraded to coincide with the new additions, with Process Improvement superseding the Process Review infoKit, Selecting Technologies providing a welcome upgrade to the former System Selection infoKit, and Working with Commercial Suppliers building on the previous Contract Negotiation infoKit.

Patrick Bellis (Director, JISC infoNet) said of the resource:

‘This is one of the most comprehensive and exciting launches we’ve had in recent times. With new and updated infoKits and a wealth of collective experience from the sector in the form of over thirty supplementary case studies and tools, this will provide a fantastic reference point for both further and higher education in helping improve organisational efficiency.’

The JISC infoNet team feel this is just the start of an exciting journey too, with further thoughts for building on this work already bubbling away behind the scenes.

This significant addition to the infoKit resources has been a huge collaborative effort. Incorporated into the material are the many outputs, experiences and lessons learned by projects within the JISC Flexible Service Delivery programme (2009-2011), and we are indebted to all of the universities and colleges involved, together with JISC CETIS, UCISA and ALT, who were all involved in the programme. Special thanks goes to Gill Ferrell, lead synthesist for the FSD programme, in pulling together many of these resources, and to the JISC programme manager, Alex Hawker who adds:

‘Organisations are under greater pressure than ever to improve performance and compete on the world stage, whilst reducing costs and increasing efficiency. The new suite of resources offers useful information, advice and guidance on the strategic management of institutional change. They include various approaches and technologies that senior managers can invest in as effective information management solutions to organisational efficiency, based on real institutional experiences backed up by a number of case studies.’

Last week David Kernohan, JISC Programme Manager, commented in a Guardian article that Open Educational Resources are a radical idea that has now become mainstream. JISC infoNet’s OER infoKit supports JISC’s OER programmes in providing a reference point:

To try and condense some of the vast amount that has been learnt about the benefits of OER releases in the past 10 years, the Higher Education Academy and JISC have developed an InfoKit. This now includes materials specifically aimed at advocacy to senior institutional staff, talking about business models for openness and making arguments around institutional ethos, alongside sound evidence-based advice about every aspect of getting to a stage where releasing materials openly online is as natural as creating them. We also have an interactive tool – how open are you – which uses your responses to make a recommendation concerning how much openness your institution is ready for.

(David Kernohan)

As David mentions, one section that was missing up until now is a section giving an overview of Open Educational Resources for Senior Managers. We’re delighted to announce that today this has been rectified with a dedicated area:

• OER infoKit >>> Senior Management Overview >>> Menu

If you’re a Senior Manager – or even if you’re not – we’d love some feedback!

Running events is one of the best ways for us to be involved with our community, and we do our best to make sure our events are both engaging, great to attend and relevant.

The hardest part of running any event is getting people to take part and participate fully.

To help us with this, we asked Catherine and Ross from Peanut at Northumbria University to run their ‘Participatory Approaches’ (PA) course, demonstrating that getting people involved really doesn’t have to be such a challenge.

To give some quick background, Catherine and Ross had already helped us facilitate events we ran for the Collaborative Tools project. Wanting to learn more, we got them over for two fun-packed days which were full of activities and tools to get people to fully participate in events.

We were completely blown away with what we learnt and did during the two days. It was centred on including and enthusing people to make better decisions and above all, to make events more enjoyable.

Take for instance, the icebreaker.

These can vary depending on the type of event you’re running, but generally you might not get very much information from it.

At the start of the PA course our icebreaker was drawing a timeline in answer to the question ‘how did you get here today?’

This deliberately was a really open ended question that could be interpreted in very different ways – and we did! We were asked to include drawings of our highs and lows and then explain what we had drawn. From that we got more qualitative information and were able to ask questions – all the time learning more about people than you would normally from a traditional icebreaker.

And that was all in the first half an hour!

Using tons of post-it notes, flip charts, marker pens, and play-doh, we learnt about tools and activities for ranking choices, for grouping people and for understanding the positive and negative aspects of a subject. We did activities on open and closed questioning, on getting people to participate and on making decisions. It was all part of a process of getting the best information by involving people and so leading them to better decisions.

Our group work even took us onto the streets of Newcastle asking questions to people in and around the university – really scary at first!

It was a brilliant two days and we’re really grateful to Catherine and Ross for running the event and showing us how to include people using participatory approaches and activities.

We’ve started to put some of these techniques into some of our recent events and workshops and internal meetings – using H-Forms, graffiti walls, grouping, spider diagrams and impact ranking.

Peanut has given us tons of ideas that we want to explore.

This week marks three important milestones in the life of our Impact Calculator.

Earlier this week it celebrated its 2nd birthday and with perfect sense of occasion also marked the event with its 2,000th download! This works out an average of around 20 downloads per week which we think is pretty good going.

Of those 2,000 downloads 300 provided us with some information about themselves by registering their details and from this data its certainly clear that the appeal of the Impact Calculator is not limited to the UK nor to the HE/FE sector. We’ve had registered downloads from 64 countries around the world, ranging from Australia to Algeria and Venezuela to Vietnam. And whilst unsurprisingly nearly 50% of downloads have come from the education sector, so we have also received significant numbers of downloads from across central and local government agencies and the private sector amongst others.
We’ve also created a dashboard based on the available data giving full details of who, where and why the Calculator has been downloaded over the past two years.

And so to mark these twin milestones of age and downloads we are delighted to be able to also announce the launch of a new version of the Impact Calculator. This takes into consideration the feedback received late last year from our registered users and our own ‘wish list’ of improvements. Its definitely a case of evolution rather than revolution and we have deliberately badged this update as Version 1.1 rather than Version 2. The improvements we have made are chiefly aimed at increasing its flexibility as a tool (it’s now possible to define your own time periods for the projects you wish to measure, rather than assuming they will be measured over a 5 year period and thereby making it useful to much smaller projects, for example) and improving its usability. This has been achieved via a less cluttered looking interface and the addition of easy to use notes fields for you to record information on decisions taken or assumptions made when completing the Calculator. A host of minor bug fixes and other improvements have also been made ‘under the hood’.

Inevitably we still have some items on our ‘wish list’ that it didn’t prove possible to address this time around, but which may well feature in future versions – no doubt alongside other great ideas and suggestions which we hope will emerge from our users in the months and years to come.

So Happy Birthday Impact Calculator and here’s to the next 2,000 downloads!

Version 1.1 is now available from the JISC infoNet website