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Unis must modernise admin systems to excel: Davis
Universities must bring management systems into the current century to achieve future growth and long-term success, one of Australia’s most prominent vice-chancellors has said.
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It is indeed difficult to overcome the ‘Kremlinisation’ of universities when these management systems are rolled out. At the University of Melbourne, management systems are increasingly centralised and remote; administrative units have been depopulated; many staff have been laid off and, where some of them have been replaced, newer appointments have no institutional memory to draw on; administrative contacts are now ‘hidden’ behind generic emails that take ages to process; and overall, service delivery has not improved. The resulting system is now wound so tightly that no one can move; an administrator’s appointment is now set in stone and cannot change unless the equivalent negative change happens elsewhere in the system: a fractional increase in someone’s appointment, for example, means someone else’s appointment elsewhere in the system has to decrease by the same fraction. We’ve probably produced the most neurotically inflexible administrative system I have ever seen. This is not ‘modernisation’, I need hardly add: which is why the VC is right to worry that the perception of ‘Kremlinisation’ is rapidly gaining ground.