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Path to success: technology the key to streamlining admin
In any organisation, whether large or small, making efficiencies to standard processes will have a direct benefit on productivity and free up staff time to focus on higher‑level activities.
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I have to say at first glance this is unsubstantiated waffle and does not reflect the experience of most academics I am aware of. Behind it all is cost savings and cost cutting belying the fact that poverty is encroaching its ugly head in Australian Universities as we move to lower cost open office environments whilst previously developing world countries doctrines move towards higher cost appropriately designed office environments. At our universities technology is being used adeptly but the problem is it coincides with support staff reductions, the argument being that with technology you don’t need them. That then leads to an increasing tend to shift the remaining administrative load onto academics who happen to not have the fortune of a strong union that contains work to working hours. The open environments mean you can’t find your students these days and a percentage of already isolated students are more so, especially the shy ones. Why is this constant piddle not balanced with admitting underlying reasons of poverty and the desire to increase income by taking on more and more student and offering less and less to them and the staff that teach them?
Although I completely agree with Mr Atherton’s assessment, there are 2 issues that regularly make implementation of these improvements difficult.
The first is the (often, but not always) lack of comprehension and support at executive level for these kinds of changes in administration. The lack of comprehension of the technical complexity of implementing University-wide automated processes often leads to the feeling that this ought to be possible within short timeframes and within limited budgets, when, effectively, we are talking about a massive culture change on top of a technological change. When automation projects don’t lead to quick results, we quite often see executives become frustrated, and withdraw support.
The second is the danger of haphazard automation due to a lack of architecture/lack of overview of business processes/capabilities. Which in turn leads to staff not knowing which information is kept where, redundancy, high storage costs and privacy risks. This is where your records manager becomes your friend 😉
In reading Karen Feinstein’s comments, I must say that I agree with those, as well. My previous comment regarding Mr Atherton’s assessment holds true if sufficient support staff is still available to support academic staff. Automation can indeed produce positive outcomes and a reduction in processing time, but not a reduction in workload, and not if it is done at the expense of a large reduction in support staff before or during (and often not even after) an automation project.
This all sounds very plausible and meaningful at first sight. However in my experience in industry and in education technology should be a tool to be used for specific purposes only and not as means of streamlining and used as a measurement and driver of kpis.
Speaking generally, I have seen an inordinate amount of time used in digitising, often for no purpose at all except to use the technology that has been purchased. Once records are digitised they provide a means for high level reporting and instead of this being used to streamline processes it often allows even more compliance requirements and measurement to take place. And here’s the rub; kpis’s are often set up based on these measurements that have little bearing on the actuality of what is happening at the coalface but require administrative time and effort to provide data to measure them.
The map is not the terrain, however managers still believe it is and use technology to implement and measure indicators that actually do not measure what is really happening.
The other issue of course is that there are a good proportion of the population who struggle with online enrolments, computer systems and the like who actually are being precluded from education.
Education is a service industry, serving students, industry and the nations skills and knowledge reserves. It is actually very difficult to measure how we service these areas. Streamlining is just a part of the equation and I have seen administration increasingly complicated by excessive use of technology. Great for the technology companies but when will we have a computer system that gives you just enough capability instead of forcing users to wait for systems to boot up, blow all it’s whistles, ring it’s bells and then collapse under the weight of it’s own infrastructure?
Most of the kpis I have seen measure things that can be measured as opposed to what should be measured. I am concerned that the ethos that has beset the banking industry; that of profit before service is now pervading the education system.