Funded by the: JISC Flexible Service Delivery programme.
Lead Institution: University of Bolton.
Key Words: Enterprise Architecture (EA).
Background
Aims and Objectives
We aimed to do two things with this project:
- Introduce the concepts of EA into the discussion about organisational change at Bolton, using tools and techniques, such as modelling, to build understanding about the interconnectedness of our organisational functions and processes. This involved building a high level lightweight model of the University's functions using Archimate, and showing inputs and outputs of the functions as a starting point.
- We selected an area, highly relevant to our organisational development plans, in which we could demonstrate a more focused application of modelling and EA principles, to advance the conversation around changing key processes. For this we selected pre-enrolment, the process of establishing the student record against which students can enrolled online. This process has become more complex as we have increased our partnerships, especially overseas partners, overseas campuses and online study routes. The silo like approaches are leading to duplication of effort and potentially to a poor student experience. We’re hoping to use a holistic approach to negotiate a meaningful technology intervention to simplify the process.
Context
In 2005 the University had 8500 enrolments. By 2009 the number of enrolments had increased to 11,500. The growth was facilitated by an online enrolment process which reduced the need for registry staff to enter data, capturing more directly from the student. However, to use the online enrolment for the first time, the student has to be provisioned with a login ID and a password. The process by which they receive these is triggered by the establishment of the student record and the change of status on the student record system to 'unconditional confirmed'.
In 2009, the University opened an overseas campus in the United Arab Emirates operated by a partner. The online enrolment process became an obvious way to facilitate the enrolment of students overseas. However, whereas in the UK campus students apply for courses directly to the University or through UCAS, the UAE partner was marketing and recruiting their own students so there was no student admission data on the student records system, SITS. A manual process has been improvised to collect basic data using a spreadsheet in the UAE campus, which is emailed each day to Bolton. The data is rekeyed to set up the student record against which an online enrolment can be made. In the first year of operation, 70% of the overseas campus enrolment resulted in problems for the students: problems with login credentials, incorrect names and incorrect date of birth. The problems were dealt with by both the Registry and the IT help desk.
The University intends to grow the overseas provision from 150 students to 1500 over the next four years with further campuses coming online. It is therefore essential to make a process improvement that will reduce errors, remove the need to rekey data, enable a more rapid and seamless enrolment for students and allow for an expansion in enrolment without increasing the administrative and support overhead.
The business case
The business case is made on the need to improve the performance of overseas enrolments processes, in order to facilitate further growth, without needing to increase administration. The evidence for the business case is based on the support records around the UAE enrolment in 2009. On the original 150 enrolments, the estimated number of hours of support and data entry to create the student record and correct the login access problems amounted to an extra cost of £840 (or £5.52 per student) to correct errors. Without resolving the problems, any scaling of growth to 1500 overseas students (@500 new enrolments per year) would lead to a raw cost of £2,760 per year, plus the opportunity costs and poor student experience. But because all enrolment and re-enrolment is concentrated into a few weeks, the staffing issues would be magnified requiring extra staff, who would need to be trained and competent in the enrolment and remote user support.
The uncertainties are around the sophistication and endurance of the partner administration arrangements. It is unclear at the beginning of the project how the partner recruits and carries out a local enrolment and whether this is supported by a student record system. The partner has limited technology and administrative support capability.
Key drivers
The University has established a number of partnerships including an international campus and online course delivery operated by a partner. The initial setup of such collaborative arrangements, including administration, have been rapid, but also very much effort driven. We have found that quick initiatives may try to force or circumvent established processes, people or systems, often because of a perception, or reality, that these will be an inhibitor to rapid development. The danger of this is that process variety is increased, along with additional complexity and cost, and a poor student experience.
The project is looking to creating a shared understanding of the interrelationships in functions and processes within the University as a first step to simplifying the emerging complexity.
So our drivers are:
- to be able to respond to further rapid developments in partnerships
- to reduce or contain cost growth arising from process variety
- to improve the student experience of administrative processes wherever they access these
Designing the project approach
The project brings together a number of activities:
- An attempt to model the University in a high level way using Archimate. The purpose of this is to try and contextualise changes that are proposed and their consequent impact on other areas/functions within the University.
- The second strand of activity is to establish suitable governance of the enterprise architecture.
- The third strand is an investigation into the issues around the enrolment of students overseas with the notion of making a technology intervention and process change to improve the situation. This substantive package of activity will be conducted through a process of inquiry from which we will develop the 'As Is' and 'To Be' models, which can then be used to improve understanding across stakeholders and to identify any associated issues.
- The overseas enrolment technology intervention was initially thought likely to be a web services-based solution capable of being rendered either as a portal or an application interface to the partner’s student record system.
Within the project, the technology intervention is, perhaps, the most uncertain element as the partner appears to have limited local technology and admin support available. Whilst the University is interested in service oriented approaches, the primary objective will be to resolve the problem in a cost-effective way coherent with the technology architecture of the University.
Establishing and maintaining senior management buy-in
One of our project aims is to establish new governance mechanisms for the development of Information Systems and the use of technology. We're seizing the opportunities of the new corporate strategy implementation, the need for a supporting technology strategy, together with the squeeze on resources, as part of the case for new governance approaches. A new IT governance committee is being set up which will be chaired by the Director of Resources and which will report into the University Executive and to the Vice-Chancellor's Group. The project leader has been brought on to the Vice-Chancellor’s newly established Transformation Group to look at enabling new developments.
Technologies used
The student record system is Tribal’s SITS vision. The University does not yet have, but aspires to have a service oriented approach to providing services and elements of a SOA. To this end the project is looking at the possibility of using the SITS Stutalk modules which allow for the use of web services and xml based messaging to access and push data into SITS. The project team contains some expertise in creating web services in the .NET framework. Whilst SOA is initially the preferred route, the project team is willing to look at alternatives, especially those that may not be so technology focused e.g. changes in processes which can effect the same result of a better student experience around overseas centre enrolments.
Outcomes
Achievements
Through this project the University has been able to establish a relevant governance structure to oversee the EA and IT strategy together. Although still in a fairly new state, the formal mechanism of control around business change and IT, a sub committee of the Executive Board, is far more relevant and sustainable than any previous model used by the University, partly due to constitution and partly through focus. This development has been informed by use of the strategic ICT toolkit.
A solution has been found for the overseas enrolment/pre-enrolment record creation. The suitable intervention was found to be, not the creation of new software, but in the deployment of functionality within the student record system. This allows partners to have portal access to setup student records. Further work is being carried out to simplify provisioning of user IDs and passwords, which in 2010 lead to a substantial reduction in related errors.
The project has developed a high level Archimate model of the University, demonstrating the use of Archimate to help inform areas of process change and the impact it might have on others. EA approaches are now being used in four University projects.
Benefits
Tangible
The exemplar project on overseas enrolment will enable the University to scale up its international operation without necessarily increasing its administrative overhead around Registry. The improvements also reduce the level of errors. The system solution adopted will allow students to enrol more seamlessly and in a more timely way. Students have found the communication around resolving errors both baffling and difficult and there can be several staff involved in the chain of communication.
Tangible benefits achieved
The exemplar project has enabled the partner to set up the student record after carrying out their own local recruitment, reducing the administration cost and effort around overseas campus enrolments, enabling the University to scale up partnerships without incurring significant additional costs in this activity.
The solution removes one stage of manual data entry which benefits registry staff who now simply check to see that the correct course occurrence has been allocated. Validation rules are applied to the data fields to ensure the correct form of the 'date of birth' and 'name' are entered.
As a result of the project, the turnaround time for enrolling a student overseas will be reduced from around 24 hours, due to the nature of the batch transfer by the spreadsheet, to 2 to 3 hours, allowing time for brief checking before committing the data to the student record system.
Improvements in the provisioning of the ID and password reduced the number of associated requests for assistance from the IT service desk from the UAE down to 25 in 150 enrolments in 2010, benefiting both the students and the service support team.
The beneficiaries are: overseas students, the overseas administration operation, the registry, and the IT support desk at the University.
Intangible
The University has process silos, where a change in technology and process in one area can have unintended but detrimental effects on another. For example the introduction of on-line enrolment for all students reduced the administrative effort in the registry, improved the quality of data and speed of collection, but led to a surge in support demand on the IT helpdesk as students struggled with passwords and access to the enrolment portal. The project seeks to establishes a new approach within the University to negotiating such changes through the use of change management mechanisms.
Secondly, the project aimed to build some understanding and capacity to use EA approaches and to use this in other projects in which key staff are involved.
Intangible benefits achieved
The project has been an exploration of the use of EA within the University as the means of overcoming problems around process silos. The process of enquiry and modelling has helped to improve the knowledge and understanding across business areas involved in applications, admissions and enrolment. These models are also reusable as the University looks at new projects in these areas.
The governance group is engaged in a process of learning and has developed a view on how business change will be negotiated in future with the use of more formalised mechanisms such as project proposal, monitoring and benefits realisation documentation. Whilst these have existed in the past, their use has by no means been universal, and decision-making has been focused on individuals, particularly Pro Vice-Chancellors. Changes in the University structure means that the time is right for a more collaborative approach involving a wider group of stakeholders.
New skills
The project team has been using the Archimate language and elements of the TOGAF framework to assist with the project. The team adopted the Archi tool for modelling.
Three members of the project team, Patrick O'Reilly, Dumebi Oderinde and Bill Olivier have been active in the FSD and Architectural Practice group workshops and events, sharing issues, models and experiences with colleagues. The formal and informal discussions that take place in these events have proved to be very valuable sources of learning and for testing out ideas.
Members also attended the modelling bash in Coventry and the SOA training put on by Rob Moores at Leeds Metropolitan University. The former has helped to establish a common presentation format for the Archimate modelling; the latter is assisting with the understanding of the issues of moving from pure web services, to the implementation of SOA lite.
Two associated members also attended the EA foundation workshops and have been able to incorporate learning from these and from the EA lite project into their other projects.
Drawbacks
Formalising the mechanisms for governance and involving a much wider stakeholder group, has increased the overheads on maintaining and providing relevant information to assist with oversight. In joining a more collegiate approach, key process owners want to know more about how resources are allocated, prioritised and used for change. Whilst this is good thing overall, we have still to mature and develop beyond the politics and games-playing that was part of the silo developments of the past.
It is not entirely unreasonable to say that we could have reached the same outcome using past practices. But the examination and learning is contributing in someway to a cultural change and richer conversations with senior managers about the relationship between IT and business change.
We failed to use the project as a lever to point towards a more flexible information systems architecture. However, given the changing concerns within the University around sustainability and costs, there is still some way to go in making the case for building and maintaining a SOA, particularly around acquiring and retaining the skills and discipline needed.
Key Lessons
Whilst we had some notion of using the project to help the University start to establish a technology change towards more service components, we settled instead for using functionality which was easy to release within one of the course systems, the student record system. On one level this could be seen as a technology compromise, but as we have learned as we've gone through the EA programme, the essence of delivering business benefit can be in reusing functionality that already exists.
One area that we explored was in taking the overseas centre application process through the systems used for home applications if this moves online. This could potentially increase the quality control around overseas centre applications, with there being greater consistency in qualification checking. By taking the students through the normal application route and application form, the student record is established anyway. However, after reviewing the option the problems of time and capacity were clear. The online application form is not yet implemented for UK and EU students: using the application form for overseas centre students could be two years off. The lesson here is that compromises have to be made between expediency and deferred benefits. The on-line application process may prove to be the best solution in the future, however there will be issues around the autonomy of the overseas centres to recruit their own students.
Looking Ahead
The work on creating a high level model of the University, the modelling of admissions and enrolment functions is being used to inform new projects in these areas. These projects relate to the new 3 level fee structure for 2012 assisting students to identify the fee for a course, whether studied part time, full time or with a partner. A second strand deals with online payment of fees at enrolment where necessary. The models are being enriched to capture the additional course price and payment processes. The process of negotiating the change will follow a similar route and be informed by the overseas centre enrolment project.
The project leaves a legacy in the governance arrangements, the use of modelling, and the capacity and understanding that has been built up in those people involved in the project. Archimate modelling is being used in four other projects, and an embryonic modelling group has met a few times. We are still working through TOGAF and looking to adopt more of the framework.
Sustainability
The use of enterprise architecture approaches is being incorporated into the new information systems strategy which is being overseen by the governance group established through this project. On the governance group there are now three members who have been working on the EA light project. The architectural principles are encapsulated into the overarching ICT strategy.
The high level model will need revisiting in line with restructures to the University.
