Fine Nets and Stratagems

Fine Nets and Stratagems: Information Strategies and the Political Process

Derek Law

King’s College London

Keywords: Information Strategies

Abstract: Information strategies are a relatively new concept and there is significant difficulty in defining what they are. The process of defining such a strategy at King’s College London is described and commented on.

The title of this paper comes from George Herbert’s poem ‘Sin: Lord, with what care Thou hast begirt us round!’, where he says:

Afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes,

Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in,

Bibles laid open, millions of surprises.

and that seems a fair summary of where we are in the process of developing strategies. In part because of the Follett Report everybody wants one - preferably yesterday - but no-one knows what they are. Up to about three years ago much of higher education was required to have an IT strategy and that was a well understood process defined and refined by the Computer Board. At about that time, when the Computer Board became the Information Systems Committee there was a strong push to make institutions produce an Information Systems strategy. This recognised that the days of the mainframe had largely gone, that much of the purchasing power was at departmental or grantholder level, but that the university still needed to have a view of what it was trying to achieve, rather than what it intended to buy. Before that concept had been defined, far less refined, the notion of information strategies began to take hold, perhaps precisely because it was an imaginative but ill-defined concept. The Joint Information Systems Committee has a working party looking at the whole area which aims to provide guidance to universities, but for many institutions this will come too late to meet institutionally defined deadlines - at least for the first iteration. Some delay has been experienced because the external consultants invariably view information strategies as related solely to management information and not as part of the broader educational process. As a result a brisk trade in samizdat documents has sprung up, which has done little but demonstrate the poverty of imagination from which most of us suffer.

Information in the broadest sense may consume 15% of the institutional budget and is therefore a resource well worth managing. However it is almost impossible to define an information strategy without some concept of an institution’s information topology and yet little work has been done on this area. As soon as one starts looking at information rather than systems, a whole range of political issues, many of them to do with ownership of information, begin to emerge. The classic example is examination papers which will have individual academics, external examiners, departments, registry, students and library as different owners at different times, each with different requirements and each with little concept of the needs of other participants in the information chain. In the end these territorial incompatibilities may prove manageable since the proliferation of networked home pages, which in effect publish all sorts of information under the institutional banner but without institutional regulation, will force institutions to adopt information control strategies, if only for legal reasons.

Such strategies are normally first produced under some kind of time pressure and will tend to follow the classic route first defined at Aston University where the first iteration is top down and management driven and the second bottom up and staff driven. As the trend towards decentralised financial control and decentralised computing gathers momentum, it is nevertheless important that important institutional players feel some ownership of whatever strategy is agreed. It must be a strategy for the institution and not just for the library and computer centre, even if typically driven by the librarian and/or computer centre director. Information strategies are not free standing documents but part of the larger institutional planning process. The “millions of surprises” are usually the number of pounds associated with implementing such a strategy and it is therefore important that the strategy should reflect not only local political realities and have powerful champions but that it should reflect local financial realities. Instituions will buy into a vision - but not at any price.

King’s College London has begun to develop such a strategy and this process is described. Perhaps not untypically the process started with large ambitions and a small timetable, building on existing IT and Library strategies. The ambition has been significantly scaled down and in particular the development of an implementation plan divorced from the creation of the strategy. Although the result will probably be called an information strategy - if only for political reasons - it will perhaps be closer to an information systems strategy and that is the real goal. The view has been taken that too little is understand of institutional information topologies to make the achievement of a realistic information strategy a sensible goal. That said the strategy will take account of recent high profile libel cases and pay some attention at least to the electronic publication of information by all members of the College.

Information is the key and basic resource used by universities. It is an expensive resource both to produce and consume. It is self-evidently (?) impossible to get the best value for money from that resource or to define the optimal size of the resource unless there is clarity over the objectives of the institution. Strategy documents are then the essential base tool which allow the institution to focus thinking on the problem. That alone, if well done, justifies the resulting inevitably turgid prose which encapsulate the intellectual activity.

Derek Law

Director of Information Services & Systems

King’s College London

Strand

LONDON WC2R 2LS

e-mail bay.cc.kcl.ac.uk::d.law

fax: 0171 872 0207