Starting Point for Enable

The project had executive engagement from the start of the project, with the Pro Vice Chancellor supporting the project and chairing the Senior Management Working Group.  There was a general recognition that the University did not have an overall vision of managing information or a central understanding of information & how it links to business processes and systems.

The project, and the University as whole, recognised that it had projects, at all levels, making changes to information without totally understanding the impact their changes would have on other systems and processes in the university. There were also projects creating new silos. The Enable Project was designed to bring focus on joined up thinking across the Enterprise.

The project identified a direct link between managing information within the institution and how change was managed (Enable: Managing Change). You will notice that the impact of issues here also impacted on how the institution manages change, and issues in managing change also impacted on how we managed information.

Issues Faced & Lessons Learned

The first major issue identified by  the project was that positive executive engagement was linked directly to providing "quick wins". It was clear from project interviews that quick wins were often created to the detriment of long term projects, but were clearly something executive were fond of. Due to the size of the project team (and the project focus) the need to show quick wins, without clear management and scope of the output, gave rise to a real possibility of derailing the project. Enable needed to ensure that there was an understanding of how the "quick win" could be used to demonstrate the advantages of keeping "the big picture" approach as central to the Enable project.

Learning curve with the modelling approaches and the terms, for the project team and the SMWG  (Enable: Modelling for more information). As with any new idea it was difficult to communicate to the SMWG/ Executive, we learnt it was easier to communicate once we had real examples and spoke purely in business terms - we had to ignore technical terms and buzz words linked to the modelling approaches chosen.

The project suffered from the loss of their Executive sponsor, and with that they lost executive engagement in second year of project meant project aims for an Executive to lead how we manage information, using Archimate and creating business/system/information models went on hold.

Message slow to pick up - Limited understanding of need for central understanding of information at the start of the project was addressed with presenting the SMWG with what will happen if nothing was done about x (identity management, course information, etc). In a number of cases we were able to show where we were behind other comparable institutions.

The bottom up approach used to create the enterprise view which meant that the project had limited influence on changing attitudes to how information is viewed, however this message has been picked up by SMWG with the help of building it into department strategies and business plans. We have also been able to use diagrams such as those below to demonstrate information issues in the university and how they can be turned into a great opportunity.

At the moment the project (and institution) lacks the CIO role (as highlighted in the Managing document), one main champion with different roles - we have highlighted this as an issue to the SMWG to ensure that if we move forward in the use of Archimate and TOGAF we need more resources.

Real examples important but take time to collect For example first discussions re TransAPEL started in Feb 2009 jiscenable.blogspot.com/2009/02/initiative-meeting.html, and work started in July 2010)

Even small models take time to get right, for example here are the models created as part of the External Examiners hub, started in July 2010 - completed Sept 2010

One to One discussions important as first step, then get groups together to discuss process differences etc and ideals using draft models.

Moving Forward

Managing Information documentation has been handed to our Executive with a number of actions that we are waiting on, this will decide our route forward. The project team has demonstrated with the External Examiners how information is managed within the institution, and how it could be managed, showing real efficiencies. This work will be built on over the next year to support a number of initiatives within the university around validation, course development and award review. Whether the methodology used by the project gets picked up institutionally is now in the hands of the executive, however they have responded very positively to the work done so far, and are keen to keep engaged with Enable.