What we do

Our work is generally concerned with assisting organisations to get the best returns from their information resources and systems.  Reviews we carry out are commonly forward-looking and strategic in the sense that firstly they are concerned with the perceptions held of the organisation by itself and its external stakeholders, and also that governance as well as executive arrangements are within the scope of the study.

 

Examples of the organisations we work with are JISC services and committees, service departments within institutions and international consortia operating in the higher education domain.  A number of the services that we have reviewed have responsibilities for delivery across the Internet to the whole of the UK FE and HE sector.

 

The two directors of the company each come from senior service management in UK higher education.  This means that we bring to our work both a wide understanding of IT and its applicability to education and research as well as an extensive network of contacts in the sector.  Because service design and delivery has a dependence upon technology, we draw upon our first-hand experience of IT and IT-based services in making assessments in many reviews.

 

Because of our understanding of the HE and FE sectors we can work with clients to carry out sensitive and accurate appraisals of an organisation's situation, its strategy and its planning as well as its processes, use of resources and the risks to which it is subject.  

 

We have carried out a number of studies which have examined particular landscapes.  The most notable of these was within the 2008 study we carried out for the JISC on shared services.

 

We have also carried out a major retrospective impact study on JISC’s eLib programme which ran from 1994 to 2000.  This study was carried out in 2006 and showed that a remarkable number of the many projects that ran within eLib had produced services and service elements that were still in demand.

 

An important tenet of our approach is to make it soundly evidence-based and wherever possible we aim to collect enough evidence to form reliable pictures.  We are very experienced in interviewing people in all roles of academic life.  Our normal approach is to inform interviewees beforehand of the reason for wishing to speak to them and of the issues that we wish to cover with them.  We normally agree with our clients that any interviews we carry out will be confidential between ourselves and the interviewee and in any case we all is explained these arrangements at the commencement of an interview.  We carry out a substantial proportion of our interviews by telephone.  We are experienced in using web-based survey tools and in designing questionnaires.

 

We are also experienced in planning and moderating focus groups to gather information.  We take care to decide the purpose of any focus group and what kind of information is being sought.  They are particularly useful because dialogue can take on a life of its own, participants hear each other’s' views and often ideas can be developed and undergo some testing in the group.

 

We have also undertaken projects which have required the writing of documents or advice for the sector as a whole.  This has allowed us to demonstrate a wide understanding of what is going on in the FE and HE sectors and to provide readable and accurate material.

 

In some studies communications between large numbers of stakeholders has been a significant activity and we have used Internet based approaches to meet this need.

 

If a project involves assisting in change, we welcome working with those experiencing the change in order to facilitate it. We can help organisations and their stakeholders to establish a consensus for change, based upon the conclusions from the review stages of the project.