The University’s exercise to improve and develop the quality and availability of management information (MI) to support understanding of performance and decision making has been awarded £50,000 grant funding from the Joint Information Systems Committee.
The first phase of the project, successfully completed during 2010, included a consultation exercise with users and providers of management information, focusing on the information that staff need do their jobs effectively, identifying gaps and shortcomings and considering opportunities for short-term improvements. Phase two will focus on developing and implementing solutions to the people, data and systems issues that have been identified.
Staff across a range of disciplines are now involved to help in implementing the recommendations from this exercise.
In order to ensure that management information is clearly understood and consistently defined within the University, standardised and meaningful data definitions are being developed. In addition, improvements to data quality and formalising data ownership will be tackled as a priority.
A number of issues identified in the first phase of the project are already being addressed, including the creation of improved standard reports, and improvement in the level of awareness of reports and other sources of management information.
The success of the project will depend to a large extent on ensuring that staffing, organisational and business process issues are addressed. This will include identifying and addressing training needs, formalising roles and responsibilities in relation to management information, and undertaking business process improvement to streamline the processes by which management information is presented and made available.
Implementation of improvements is a significant undertaking, and the technical aspect of the solution will initially be trialled with a pilot in one Faculty later this year.
Upon completion, project information, examples of good practice, issues, and outputs will be shared within the higher education sector.
The project is being managed by Planning and Development in partnership with Computing Services. Comments or queries should be directed to the MI Project Manager, Barry Graham on 0151 794 8550 or barry.graham@liv.ac.uk