an information management strategy

D&

P 6

-06

Information Management Strategy

Information Management and Strategic Planning

ITS Division Monash University Clayton campus Victoria 3800 Australia

Email: [email protected]

www.monash.edu.au/staff/information-management/


Updated Public Exposure Draft Information Management Steering Committee July 2006

Information Management Governance Since the Information Management Strategy was updated in June, the governance of Information Management at Monash University has been illustrated and is presented below. Key stakeholders are represented on the IM Steering Committee to ensure that the IM vision and the implementation activities guide and deliver benefits to the Monash community. Information Management at Monash is a truly cross-organisational function.

Figure 0.1: Monash University Information Governance

The Information Management Strategy was originally developed by Dr Andrew Treloar under the auspices of the Information Management Steering Committee. The strategy is owned by the Committee and will be progressively refined and reviewed over time. For more information about Information Management contact Information Management and Strategic Planning Department, ITS Division



mailto:[email protected]

http://www.monash.edu.au/staff/information-management/

Erratum The following reference numbers will be corrected in the next version of the Information Management Strategy.

Page number

Current reference

Correct reference

23 13.6 12.6

28 10.6 9.6

42 5.7 Information ethics

5.7 Statutory requirements

60 5.1 3.1

63 7.12 6.12

80 7.2 6.2

80 7.11 6.11

80 7.14 6.14

80 9.4 8.4

81 9.4 8.4

81 9.7 8.7

84 7.12 6.12

86 12.1 11.1

86 12.2 11.2

90 10.6 9.6

90 9.4 8.4

91 7.17 6.17

91 10.6 9.6

91 12.1 11.1

94 7.18 n/a

94 7.13 6.13

99 10.6 9.6

108 7.14 6.14

MONASH UNIVERSITY INFORMATION MANAGEMENT STRATEGY

Preface for Updated Public Exposure Draft The Monash University Information Management Strategy was finalized in late 2005, based on a series of investigations that took place from 2003-2005. These included interviews, a study tour, and an analysis of the situation at Monash at the time.

The Public Exposure draft of the strategy available at http://www.monash.edu.au/staff/information-management therefore reflects the situation that was current in 2005. It has not been significantly updated since late 2005 and needs to be read with this in mind. This version of the document has been lightly edited to reflect changes since the publication of the Public Exposure draft, as well as progress on recommendations

In particular, readers should note the following:

1. A number of the recommendations have already been implemented. These are indicated in the document as DONE.

2. A number of the recommendations are being implemented in 2006 as part of funded projects or operational activities. These are indicated in the document as !DOING.

3. A number of the recommendations are no longer relevant and will not be implemented. This is because of changing strategic priorities for the university or because of changes in the external environment. These are indicated in the document as DELETED.

4. A number of the recommendations are still relevant and will be progressively reviewed and implemented as time and resources allow. These are indicated in the document as

DEFERRED. A future version of the document will be updated to reflect 1, 2, and 4, while deleting recommendations in category 3.

If you have any questions while reading the document, please direct them to: [email protected].

June 2006

UPDATED PUBLIC EXPOSURE DRAFT 12/7/06 3

http://www.monash.edu.au/staff/information-management

mailto:[email protected]

4 12/7/06 UPDATED PUBLIC EXPOSURE DRAFT


TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE FOR UPDATED PUBLIC EXPOSURE DRAFT ..........................................................................3

List of Figures ....................................................................................................................8 List of Tables......................................................................................................................8 Summary of Recommendations.......................................................................................9

INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................................16 1.1 Context....................................................................................................................16 1.2 History.....................................................................................................................19 1.3 Project governance ...............................................................................................19 1.4 Strategy development process ............................................................................19

2 DATA, INFORMATION AND KNOWLEDGE.................................................................................22 2.1 A broad enterprise knowledge context ...............................................................22 2.2 Information in the information continuum model ..............................................23 2.3 Data and information.............................................................................................24 2.4 Summary ................................................................................................................25

3 INFORMATION DIMENSIONS ...................................................................................................26 3.1 Realm ......................................................................................................................26 3.2 Information purpose..............................................................................................27 3.3 Context....................................................................................................................28 3.4 Time.........................................................................................................................28 3.5 Process...................................................................................................................29

4 ENCODING AND MANAGEMENT..............................................................................................31 4.1 Information and containers ..................................................................................31 4.2 The question of structure .....................................................................................32 4.3 Information systems..............................................................................................32

5 PRINCIPLES .........................................................................................................................35 5.1 Corporate importance ...........................................................................................35 5.2 Information sources ..............................................................................................36 5.3 User-centeredness ................................................................................................37 5.4 Availability..............................................................................................................38 5.5 Staff and student involvement .............................................................................39 5.6 Productivity and efficiency...................................................................................40 5.7 Statutory requirements .........................................................................................41 5.8 Trustworthy information and systems ................................................................42 5.9 Retention and disposal .........................................................................................43 5.10 Information Management Principles determine IT Principles...........................44

6 INFORMATION MANAGEMENT COMMON ELEMENTS ................................................................45 6.1 Information stewardship.......................................................................................45 6.2 Information storage and preservation.................................................................46


6.3 Information access ............................................................................................... 48 6.4 Role of paper ......................................................................................................... 49 6.5 Document management ....................................................................................... 50 6.6 Records management .......................................................................................... 51 6.7 Email management ............................................................................................... 53 6.8 Web organisation.................................................................................................. 56 6.9 Web content management ................................................................................... 57 6.10 File sharing............................................................................................................ 59 6.11 Collaboration support .......................................................................................... 60 6.12 Application integration......................................................................................... 61 6.13 Integrated reporting.............................................................................................. 62 6.14 Metadata................................................................................................................. 63 6.15 Classification and hierarchies............................................................................. 64 6.16 Campus aspects ................................................................................................... 65 6.17 Local databases .................................................................................................... 65 6.18 Information skills .................................................................................................. 66 6.19 Search support...................................................................................................... 67

7 INFORMATION MANAGEMENT FOR LEARNING AND TEACHING................................................. 69 7.1 Student management ........................................................................................... 69 7.2 Learning management.......................................................................................... 70 7.3 Learning content management............................................................................ 71 7.4 Timetable management ........................................................................................ 73 7.5 Lectures online ..................................................................................................... 73 7.6 Learning and teaching performance................................................................... 74 7.7 Course and unit information................................................................................ 75 7.8 Course and unit report card................................................................................. 76

8 INFORMATION MANAGEMENT FOR RESEARCH AND RESEARCH MANAGEMENT........................ 77 8.1 eResearch.............................................................................................................. 78 8.2 Grant attraction ..................................................................................................... 80 8.3 Research matchmaking........................................................................................ 81 8.4 Research publication............................................................................................ 81 8.5 Research management......................................................................................... 84 8.6 Management information ..................................................................................... 84 8.7 Research publications reporting......................................................................... 86 8.8 Ethics applications ............................................................................................... 87 8.9 Higher degree by research students .................................................................. 89 8.10 Project-based research ........................................................................................ 91

9 INFORMATION MANAGEMENT FOR ADMINISTRATION AND SUPPORT........................................ 93 9.1 Financial information............................................................................................ 93 9.2 Benchmarking information .................................................................................. 94



9.3 Committee support................................................................................................95 9.4 Policy Bank ............................................................................................................95 9.5 Business intelligence............................................................................................96 9.6 Student recruitment...............................................................................................97 9.7 Load planning ........................................................................................................98 9.8 Fund-raising and development ............................................................................99

10 INFORMATION MANAGEMENT FOR CULTURAL ACTIVITIES AND COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT ... 101 10.1 Cultural activities................................................................................................ 101 10.2 Community engagement.................................................................................... 101

11 INFORMATION MANAGEMENT FOR COMMERCIAL ACTIVITIES AND IP MANAGEMENT.............. 103 11.1 Commercialisation management ...................................................................... 103 11.2 Patents management.......................................................................................... 104 11.3 Systems integration ........................................................................................... 105

12 STRATEGY OUTCOMES...................................................................................................... 106 12.1 Consequential strategies................................................................................... 106 12.2 Information management governance ............................................................. 106 12.3 Turning strategy into action .............................................................................. 106 12.4 Managing the change......................................................................................... 110 12.5 The Monash University quality cycle................................................................ 111 12.6 Moving from information managing to knowledge enabling ......................... 111

13 CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................... 112 14 APPENDIX 1: INFORMATION NEEDS TURN STRATEGY INTO ACTION ..................................... 113


List of Figures

Figure 1: Core Knowledge Activities (Source: The Knowledge Proposition, p. 2) ............... 22 Figure 2: Knowledge becomes selectively encoded and communicated as information,

and information is used to share and build further knowledge within an overall context..................................................................................................................... 23

Figure 3: Traditional Data/Information/Knowledge Pyramid................................................ 24 Figure 4: Information Continuum Model ............................................................................... 26 Figure 5: Information Scope Dimensions (Source: Information Management Steering

Committee) ............................................................................................................. 29 Figure 6: Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records: Relationships...................... 31 Figure 7: Information System Typology ................................................................................ 33 Figure 8: E-Science Information Lifecycle ............................................................................ 79 Figure 9: ARROW High-Level Architecture ......................................................................... 83 Figure 10: Process flow for PhD candidature (Source: SSSD) ................................................ 89 Figure 11: Process flow for Masters by Research candidature (Source: SSSD) ...................... 90 Figure 12: Information Strategic Process Framework............................................................ 114

List of Tables

Table 1: Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records: terms and examples............ 32 Table 2: Backup Hierarchy ................................................................................................... 47 Table 3: Readiness Assessment (Source: Adapted from LiveLink presentation) ............... 107 Table 4: Cost/Value Assessment (Source: Linda Zeelie (EDS) presentation to Australian

Computer Society, November 2004) .................................................................... 107 Table 5: Flowchart: addressing user-driven dissatisfaction ................................................ 109 Table 6: Decision table: addressing principle-driven issues .............................................. 110



Summary of Recommendations

Common Elements

CE/AI/1 Pilot an application integration solution based on a hub-and-spoke model, then implement across the major central applications. !DOING ........................................................ 62

CE/AI/2 Develop an enterprise-wide data model for Monash University, and publish authoritative sources of information for Monash University entities. !DOING ......................... 62

CE/CA/1 Make campus coding a mandatory data element (where appropriate) for all existing and new information systems. DEFERRED ............................................................ 65

CE/CH/1 Commit sufficient resources to the LOCATE project. DONE ................................ 64

CE/CH/2 Ensure that all new staff are provided with folder hierarchies based on the LOCATE classification work. DEFERRED.......................................................................... 65

CE/CH/3 Progressively migrate existing hierarchies across to the LOCATE hierarchy. DEFERRED........................................................................................................................... 65

CE/CS/1 Undertake a review of possible collaboration/workgroup technologies .!DOING ...... 61

CE/CS/2 Source, pilot and implement a restricted set of collaboration technologies consistent with the results of the above review. !DOING........................................................... 61

CE/DM/1 Investigate possible university-wide document management systems. DEFERRED........................................................................................................................... 51

CE/DM/2 Pilot one or more such systems within defined workgroups. DEFERRED .......... 51

CE/EM/1 Develop a comprehensive E-Mail Strategy that encompasses the issues of Availability, Security, Policy and Archiving. DEFERRED .................................................. 56

CE/EM/2 Mandate encrypted authentication to central mail servers. DEFERRED.............. 56

CE/EM/3 Encourage digital signing of all email inside Monash. DEFERRED .................... 56

CE/EM/4 Implement mechanisms to support automatic disposal schedules for email. DEFERRED........................................................................................................................... 56

CE/EM/5 Implement Information Lifecycle Management techniques to deal with the growth in email storage. DEFERRED ................................................................................... 56

CE/EM/6 Provide guidelines to the Monash community about good email usage guidelines and behaviour. !DOING ............................................................................................ 56

CE/FS/1 Review provision of shared file services to university. DEFERRED..................... 59

CE/FS/2 Review the charges for Novell storage, and clearly communicate the reasons for the cost to end-users. DONE ................................................................................................... 59

CE/FS/3 Provide guidance to users on how best to make use of shared file storage (naming conventions, suggested folder structures). !DOING..................................................... 59

CE/IA/1 Investigate ways to provide improved searching across information silos, including access to information about what silos exist and what they hold. !DOING ............... 49

CE/IA/2 Clearly delineate the classes of Monash users, their entitlements, and the basis for deciding who is in which class. DEFERRED .................................................................. 49

CE/IA/3 Review access controls on web-based services. DEFERRED ................................ 49

CE/IA/4 Move to providing web-based access to core information services. !DOING ............. 49

CE/IA/5 Make this web-based access as device-neutral as possible. DEFERRED............... 49


CE/IA/6 Investigate ways to provide synchronised snapshots of core information sources for use on intermittently connected handheld devices. DEFERRED.....................................49

CE/IR/1 Develop a Reporting Strategy to ensure better management information from and across existing silos. DEFERRED ..................................................................................63

CE/IR/2 Create a reporting strategy group to ensure continued and enhanced co-operation between areas providing and using reports. !DOING .................................................................63

CE/IR/3 Develop a timeline for delivering increased reporting functionality. DONE............63

CE/IR/4 Investigate the possibility of using the proposed application integration hub as a way of facilitating better cross-application reports. !DOING .....................................................63

CE/IR/5 Continually promote and make available to the whole university reports that have been produced on request from particular groups. !DOING ..............................................63

CE/IS/1 Ensure that ownership of all information objects is visible to those using those objects. DEFERRED..............................................................................................................46

CE/IS/2 Develop policy and provide clear guidance to the creators of IP on how to protect the individuals' and university's rights. DEFERRED.............................................................46

CE/IS/3 Ensure that maintenance of information (or the underlying knowledge objects that are used to generate that information) is written into work goals and performance plans. DEFERRED ................................................................................................................46

CE/IS/4 Integrate notions of information stewardship (including information disposal) into staff induction, staff training and leadership development programs.!DOING ...................46

CE/ISK/1 For new staff, ensure a much greater emphasis on information systems and information management skills in the orientation programs. !DOING.......................................67

CE/ISK/2 For existing staff, provide structured training in existing systems (i.e. email). !DOING.......................................................................................................................................67

CE/ISK/3 For all staff, ensure that the introduction of any new information system or guideline is accompanied by a carefully structured and presented training program, coupled with user-centred online resources. !DOING ................................................................67

CE/ISK/4 Note and endorse existing information and computer literacy skills development programs being run by the Library and Information Technology Systems.

DONE ......................................................................................................................................67

CE/ISP/1 Mandate that the primary sources for critical information be stored electronically on central servers. !DOING ..................................................................................47

CE/ISP/2 Identify and remove barriers (cost, availability, training, etc.) to a move to central electronic storage for critical information. !DOING .......................................................47

CE/ISP/3 Work towards a model where print is primarily seen as a secondary output/process format for Monash University created information. DEFERRED ................47

CE/ISP/4 In collaboration with Records and Archive Services, provide guidance to members of the Monash University community on appropriate document and data retention and archiving policies and practices that meet legal and operational requirements. !DOING ................................................................................................................47

CE/ISP/5 Develop long-term preservation strategy and accompanying mechanisms for Monash University’s electronic archives, including websites. !DOING ....................................47

CE/LD/1 Provide and adequately resource a central service to support new database-based applications for local needs. DEFERRED ...................................................................66



CE/LD/2 Identify local database systems which are candidates for migration onto the new central service and then undertake this migration. DEFERRED ........................................... 66

CE/MD/1 Develop or adopt/adapt appropriate metadata schemata for appropriate activities at Monash University. !DOING .................................................................................. 63

CE/MD/2 Ensure proper management of metadata applied to information objects, including controlled editing and regular review. !DOING ......................................................... 63

CE/MD/3 Monitor trends in metadata standards and application. !DOING ............................... 64

CE/RM/1 Investigate possible Electronic Document and Record Management Systems. DONE ...................................................................................................................................... 53

CE/RM/2 Pilot one or more such systems within defined workgroups. !DOING ...................... 53

CE/RM/3 Provide clear guidance to the university community on information retention guidelines. DEFERRED ........................................................................................................ 53

CE/RP/1 In consultation with key information stakeholders (Library, Records and Archives, CeLTS) undertake a review of printeries and printing at Monash. !DOING ............. 50

CE/RP/2 Investigate the implications of this review for information flows and storage formats. DEFERRED ............................................................................................................ 50

CE/RP/3 Review available tools and systems for single-source publishing. DEFERRED........................................................................................................................... 50

CE/SS/1 Accelerate the replacement of the Ultraseek search engine with Verity K2. DONE ...................................................................................................................................... 68

CE/SS/2 Investigate additional ways to optimise search performance (retrieval and recall) that Verity makes possible. !DOING .......................................................................................... 68

CE/SS/3 Investigate the desirability of implementing server-based cross repository searching (‘Monash MetaSearch’). DEFERRED .................................................................. 68

CE/SS/4 Pilot a desktop-based search utility as a possible Monash standard operating environment addition. DEFERRED ...................................................................................... 68

CE/SS/5 Investigate converging the descriptive metadata across repositories to improve ability to search consistently across such repositories. DEFERRED .................................... 68

CE/WCM/1 Ensure that adequate resources are provided to ensure the rapid and successful standardised rollout of the Web content management system to all the centrally-hosted web content. !DOING ...................................................................................... 58

CE/WCM/2 Investigate other areas within the university that could make use of either Teamsite or Metatagger technology. !DOING............................................................................ 58

CE/WCM/3 Monitor the approach being trialled by Deakin University to use Teamsite as a generic Digital Object Management System. DONE ........................................................... 59

CE/WO/1 Develop a comprehensive over-arching web strategy as a matter of urgency. DONE ...................................................................................................................................... 57

CE/WO/2 Investigate the case for co-ordinated provision of a Monash intranet presence. !DOING ...................................................................................................................................... 57

CE/WO/3 Provide better support for university web activities. DEFERRED....................... 57


Learning and Teaching

LT/CU/1 Ensure that the functionality currently provided by the CUPID system is strongly supported and resourced by Monash University, and appropriately managed as an ongoing operational activity. !DOING ...................................................................................76

LT/CURC/1 Use the systems implemented for cross-silo reporting to develop an integrated course and unit report card. !DOING. ........................................................................76

LT/LC/1 Maintain a watching brief on WebCT’s plans, the Deakin University rollout of DOMS, and dedicated commercial software offerings. !DOING ...............................................72

LT/LC/2 Commence planning for a project to investigate, pilot and possibly source a Learning Content Management System using one of the options above. DEFERRED ........72

LT/LM/1 Ensure that all students are migrated to central Vista implementation by end of 2005. DONE ............................................................................................................................71

LT/LM/2 Continue to monitor alternative learning management systems as candidates for replacing or supplementing WebCT. !DOING ...........................................................................71

LT/LO/1 Investigate options for a portable facility allowing digital capture of audio in a lecture or tutorial and later upload to Monash Lectures Online. DEFERRED ......................74

LT/LO/2 Investigate the usefulness of providing an integrated audio/video/slide lecture capture and presentation system. !DOING..................................................................................74

LT/LTP/1 Implement a way of tracking records of staff professional development in learning and teaching. DEFERRED.......................................................................................75

LT/SM/1 Ensure that adequate resources are provided to ensure the successful rollout of new versions of the Callista SMS. DONE ...............................................................................70

LT/SM/2 Provide improved guidelines and training for Callista users, as well as improved data validation routines ...............................................................................................................70

LT/SM/3 Continue environmental scan for possible successor technologies to Callista SMS. !DOING.............................................................................................................................70

LT/TM/1 Investigate ways to use MUTTS to provide an improved staff/student experience of teaching space. DEFERRED ...........................................................................73

LT/TM/2 Provide a student calendar, integrated with Allocate+, and taking feeds from a range of other sources of scheduling information. DEFERRED ...........................................73

Research and Research Management

RRM/AE/1 Acquire and implement the RM4 Ethics Web module. DONE............................88

RRM/AE/2 Use the Projects Web Entry module of RM4 together with the RM4 Ethics Web module to guide users through the process of applying for ethics clearance. DONE .....88

RRM/ER/1 Ensure that the strategic development of eResearch takes into account not only computing and communications infrastructure but also the accompanying information management issues. !DOING ..................................................................................80

RRM/ER/2 Ensure that the ARROW project (see 9.4: Research publication) considers the issues beyond publication arising from eResearch. DELETED .............................................80

RRM/GA/1 Develop a grant information-base, accessible through the Researcher’s Desktop. DEFERRED............................................................................................................81

RRM/MI/1 Use the INTSIA methodology (see Appendix 1: Information Needs Turn Strategy Into Action) to take research goals, identify information needs to support these goals, and then take action to meet those needs. DEFERRED ..............................................86



RRM/MI/2 Investigate the use of exceptions-based reporting for management purposes. DEFERRED........................................................................................................................... 86

RRM/MI/3 Continue to enhance the TARDIS (Total Access to Research Data Information Sources) system to provide access to high quality, current information on research performance. !DOING .................................................................................................. 86

RRM/PBR/1 Identify requirements for a project-based research activity management system across the university. DEFERRED............................................................................ 92

RRM/PBR/2 Determine how best to meet these requirements. DEFERRED ....................... 92

RRM/PBR/3 Investigate synergies between requirements in this area and the needs in the commercialisation management area. DEFERRED .............................................................. 92

RRM/PM/1 Ensure that staff IDs for supervisors can be effectively matched between SAP and Callista. !DOING ......................................................................................................... 91

RRM/PM/2 Investigate ways to provide better data synchronisation between central systems and local MRGS databases. !DOING............................................................................ 91

RRM/PM/3 Provide alternatives to local databases for management of postgraduate student data that is not held in Callista. DEFERRED............................................................ 91

RRM/PM/4 Investigate better support for postgraduate student recruitment. DEFERRED........................................................................................................................... 91

RRM/PM/5 Investigate ways of better managing interactions with postgraduate students. DEFERRED........................................................................................................................... 91

RRM/RM/1 Source, and implement the recommendations in, the recent independent database review of RM4 ............................................................................................................. 84

RRM/RM/2 Continue work to improve the quality of data stored in RM4. !DOING ................ 84

RRM/RM/3 Plan for and implement data feeds into RM4 from required systems. !DOING ...................................................................................................................................... 84

RRM/RM/4 Maintain an environmental scan for possible successor research management systems. !DOING........................................................................................................................ 84

RRM/RMM/1 Capture and maintain information about researchers’ use of, and expertise in, particular methodologies and make this visible and searchable through an enhanced Research Directory. DEFERRED.......................................................................................... 81

RRM/RP/1 The university should endorse the establishment of an institutional repository and encourage engagement with it. DONE ............................................................................. 83

RRM/RP/2 Faculties should be encouraged to commit to a memorandum of understanding with the library to actively support the library’s efforts to publicise the repository and obtain material for it. !DOING............................................................................ 83

RRM/RP/3 Explore incentives for engagement with the repository. !DOING........................... 83

RRM/RP/4 The library should continue to seek the research papers of individual scholars for inclusion in the repository. !DOING ..................................................................................... 83

RRM/RP/5 Encourage Monash staff to start new journals using either the ePress or ARROW infrastructure. !DOING ............................................................................................... 83

RRM/RP/6 Investigate providing hosted access to low-cost conference management software as a service to Monash staff. DEFERRED ............................................................. 84

RRM/RPR/1 Implement a web-based submissions system for research output. DONE......... 87


RRM/RPR/2 In order to spread out the data collection burden, mandate progressive deposit over the course of the year. DEFERRED ..................................................................87

RRM/RPR/3 Negotiate with DEST to allow alternative forms of verification of research output. !DOING ..........................................................................................................................87

RRM/RPR/4 Use the facilities provided by ARROW to simplify the process of collecting research output, making it visible and reporting on it. !DOING .................................................87

RRM/RPR/5 Automatically generate (either from RM4 or ARROW) lists of research output by individual, by centre, by department, by faculty and by university as part of a new Research Directory. DONE..............................................................................................87

Administration and Support

AS/BI/1 Put online once complete the benchmarking exercise underway through the University Association for Facilities and Services. DEFERRED..........................................94

AS/BI/2 Investigate ways to provide Monash University information against which others can benchmark themselves. DEFERRED ..............................................................................94

AS/CS/1 Investigate ways to better support the work of committees. DEFERRED .............95

AS/CS/2 Provide a small set of templates and supporting tools for those managing committees. DEFERRED...........................................................................................................95

AS/FI/1 Accelerate the planned move to a fully web-based SAP client. !DOING .....................94

AS/FI/2 Investigate ways to deliver targeted subsets of SAP functionality through the my.monash portal. DEFERRED ............................................................................................94

AS/FI/3 Better align the reports produced by SAP with the needs of users. !DOING................94

AS/FRD/1 Investigate the most appropriate software to support fund-raising and alumni development. DONE..............................................................................................................100

AS/LP/1 Develop an integrated load-planning tool for use by Faculty Managers, including the ability to look at patterns from previous years. !DOING ......................................99

AS/PB/1 Migrate policy bank onto web content management system. !DOING .......................96

AS/PB/2 Use web content management system to provide delegated ownership and structured review for particular policies. !DOING......................................................................96

AS/SR/1 Produce an integrated website for prospective students. DONE ..............................98

AS/SR/2 Investigate the feasibility of extending the ask.monash system to support prospective student enquiries. DEFERRED ..........................................................................98

AS/SR/3 Investigate how best to create interactive online showcases for Monash innovation/leadership. DEFERRED ......................................................................................98

Community Activities and Cultural Engagement

CACE/CA/1 Ensure the public-facing websites for Monash provide clear information about cultural institutions on-campus. DEFERRED 101

CACE/CA/2 Investigate the feasibility of digitising the university’s visual arts collections and making them available through the ARROW repository or some other means.

DEFERRED 101

CACE/CA/3 Retain publicly accessible information about prior exhibitions and cultural events for archival and informational purposes. DEFERRED 101



CACE/CA/4 Investigate the creation of media-rich websites to complement, showcase or document significant physical exhibitions/events. DEFERRED 101

CACE/CE/1 Investigate ways of providing standard presentations and other core information about the university. DONE 102

CACE/CE/2 Ensure that graduate and employer information is efficiently obtained and maintained, and made available to the appropriate people. DEFERRED 102

CACE/CE/3 Investigate ways of providing better information support for community organizations where Monash staff are involved. DEFERRED 102

Commercialisation and IP Management

CAIP/CM/1 Monash Commercial to proceed with acquisition of a commercialisation management system. DEFERRED 104

CAIP/CM/2 ITS, RGEB and Monash Commercial to investigate ways to integrate new system with RM4. DEFERRED 104

CAIP/PM/1 If the new commercialisation management system provides a patent database facility, migrate existing records and patent text onto this system. DEFERRED 104

CAIP/PM/2 If the new commercialisation management system does not provide a patent database facility, use the Oracle HTMLdb technology now available to Monash to create such a database on Monash infrastructure. DEFERRED 105

CAIP/SI/1 Investigate use of Application Integration Broker technology to improve speed and consistency of information transfer between systems. !DOING 105


Introduction 1.1 Context

“Information is … a resource, and needs managing as such: this puts it on a par with finance and human resources”. United Kingdom Joint Information Systems Committee, Guidelines on Developing an Information Strategy1.

Monash has the following as its overall statement of purpose:

Monash University seeks to improve the human condition by advancing knowledge and fostering creativity. It does so through research and education and a commitment to social justice, human rights and a sustainable environment. (Monash Directions 2025, p. 2)

The Information Management Steering Committee took this statement and focussed on how to support the advancement of knowledge through research, as well as the transmission of that knowledge through education. The Information Management Vision arising from that process is

Managing information to better create and share knowledge.

According to a research report from the Butler Group (Value of IT Governance, March 2004), "94% of organisations view information as important to performance". Unfortunately, almost half of those organisations "have no clearly defined information2 strategy". Even worse, half of those with an information strategy are guilty of "failing to incorporate it into a larger organisational strategy". In other words, "94% of organisations are aware of the value of information, but just over 20% are creating an environment which would lead to the extraction of that value in a controlled manner".

There are a number of challenges that faced Monash University as it began to develop an information management strategy.

Growth and complexity

The amount of information, its complexity, and the speed of its transmission within Monash University are increasing exponentially every year, with little institutional management of the rate of growth or the information itself. This applies to information stored in both electronic and paper forms.

For example, the amount of data stored on centrally managed disk storage has increased over 12 times in the last 5 years, and the amount of email stored is doubling every 18 months. As of July 2005, staff servers contain 13,500 accounts and nearly 20 million messages, occupying nearly a terabyte (1024 gigabytes) of storage. The student servers contain 77,000 accounts and over 9 million messages, occupying over 250 gigabytes of storage. More importantly, the risks associated with this uncontrolled growth (in the absence of a coherent information management strategy) are themselves increasing.

The library’s holdings are also increasing. There are over 3 million items in the library's collection, including 1.9 million books, 75,000 journals, 111 000 electronic books and journals, and 600 networked electronic databases. In 2004, the library lent out over 1.7 million items.

Worldwide, despite the promises of the ‘paperless office’, there is no decrease in the amount of paper purchased, printed on, filed, recycled and thrown away. Between 1980 and 1995, annual office paper consumption doubled3. This rate of growth has accelerated since then.

1 Available online at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=infostrategies_guidelines2 The Butler Group article uses the phrase “information strategy” but is clearly talking about an information management strategy. 3 Selden, A. J. and Harper, Richard H. R., the myth of the paperless office, MIT Press, 2002, p. 11


http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=infostrategies_guidelines


At the same time as this growth in size, we are also seeing a growth in complexity of the overall information management environment at Monash University. There are more possible sources of information (for both staff and students), more information management services from an increasing range of internal and external providers, and more complex forms (i.e. spreadsheet pivot tables) of information available. The organisation of information on many Monash websites is ad hoc and apparently determined with little reference to user needs or behaviour.

Information islands

Information is stored and managed in a wide variety of locations at Monash, including:

• paper in storage areas, filing cabinets or folders, either in a file system or uncontrolled

• local hard disks

• private areas and shared areas on file systems

• the Record Management Office (for some categories of official documents)

• email servers

• web servers

• the Library’s print collection

• Library-managed electronic collections (on our servers), and

• Library-licensed electronic collections (on external servers).

These various locations act as ‘islands of information’. It is not possible to search across them, it is difficult to browse them and it may not even be possible to discover that some of them exist. In addition, the systems for organising the information on each of these islands may well differ from one to the next, even when the same information is being managed. As just one example, most users at Monash University have one hierarchy for their email folders (quite possibly different for each user) and a separate unrelated hierarchy on their hard disks. Therefore, a document that was attached to an email will probably be stored in one location in a hierarchy on the email server, a different location on a local hard disk, and may well also be filed somewhere else as a printout.

As well as the location problem, there is no version control, so a single document probably exists in multiple versions on different information systems, and possibly in different (perhaps inconsistent) forms, including Word, PDF and HTML. In many cases it is very difficult to determine which is the latest version, or to ensure that everybody is working on the latest version. It is also difficult to regress back through versions of Monash University-created documents in a controlled way to see what a document said at a particular point in time, and who made the changes.

Information for decision-making

Information for decision-making is sometimes called management information (although the lack of management information is also an issue for those who don’t necessarily see themselves as managers). Entire areas of Monash University lack the most basic information required to do their jobs. Resolving this issue will require transparent processes for collecting the underlying data, user-driven analysis of that data, and effective means for getting access to the resulting prepared or ad hoc reports.


The challenge of convergence

There is a growing interest among academic institutions in collecting, preserving, reusing and creating value-added services from digital content produced in and for research, teaching and learning. Together with developments in information technology, the emphasis on research outputs and collaboration, and distance, flexible and online learning, has led to an increased awareness that the digital content being created by members of the academic community is an institutional asset. This content is also increasingly being recognised as an institutional challenge, requiring both strategic management.

There is a growing recognition and articulation of:

• the convergence occurring among the various university digital initiatives

• the opportunities for potential synergies

• the opportunities for more significant outcomes through collaboration.

No online learning or research environment can be successful without relatively seamless access to information resources at the point of need4. These resources should be broadly defined, and should include the library's catalogue, the electronic journals, reference databases and other electronic resources available through the library, as well as institutional repositories and resources created or collated elsewhere in Monash University, such as course material5.

Cultural issues

A common theme running through the knowledge and information management literature is that solutions to problems are often not primarily technological solutions. The real challenge (and the point at which many projects fail) is organisational cultural change. Any project that seeks to improve information management practices at Monash University faces a range of possible cultural issues, including:

• The stewardship/custodianship of information – in other words, who is responsible for keeping it up to date and making it available?

• The challenge of sharing and avoiding information silos – how do we get past a ‘Knowledge is Power’ mindset, or ignorance of the need to share?

• Feelings of loss of control if personal preferences in organising information need to change to follow more consistent corporate practices.

• Issues of trust - which individuals and which systems do we trust to manage our information?

• Working together – how do we change the ways we think about the way we work, and keep moving towards shared values of collaboration and co-operation?

• Transmission of corporate memory – how do we ensure that we do not lose accumulated tacit knowledge about how we do things now and how we did them in the past?

• Managing some of the tensions associated with information custodianship:

4 McLean, Neil, Libraries and e-learning: organisational and technical interoperability. http://www.colis.mq.edu.au/archives.htm5 Rogers, Sally A., Developing an institutional Knowledge Bank at Ohio State University: from concept to action plan. http://www.lib.ohio-state.edu/Lib_Info/srogersKBdoc.pdf


http://www.colis.mq.edu.au/archives.htm

http://www.lib.ohio-state.edu/Lib_Info/srogersKBdoc.pdf


o broad access versus the need for information security

o retention of information ‘just in case’ versus the advantages of disposal.

1.2 History

It was in the context described above concerns about these cultural issues came to the fore at the 2002 Information Technology Strategic Planning Retreat. A discussion about the proposed web content management system gradually developed into a realisation that the whole issue of information of all kinds at Monash University needed a new approach. Accordingly, some background work commenced in 2002 at a very low resourcing level. As interest grew, the activity was funded as a project from mid-2003 and into 2004 and 2005.

1.3 Project governance

The project formed a high-level steering committee at an early stage. It was felt that during the early development stages of the project it was important to secure input from a wide range of information-provision stakeholders, thought leaders and experts.

The membership of this steering committee as of June 2006 was:

• Mr Alan McMeekin, Executive Director, Information Technology Services Division (Chair)

• Professor Chris Browne, Associate Dean (Educational Development), Faculty of Medicine

• Associate Professor Sally Joy, Associate Dean (Educational Quality and Innovation), Faculty of Business and Economics and Vice-President, Academic Board.

• Ms Cathrine Harboe-Ree, University Librarian

• Mr Peter Yates, Director, Student, Community and Shared Services Division

• Mr Jeremy DuVé, Director, Applications Services, Information Technology Services Division

• Ms Kathryn Dan, Manager, Records and Archives & University Archivist

• Professor Susan McKemmish, Faculty of Information Technology

• Professor Don Schauder, Faculty of Information Technology

• Ms Bronwyn Shields, Faculty Manager, Faculty of Arts

• Mr Eric Skuja, Manager, Statistical Services, Planning and Academic Affairs

• Dr Andrew Treloar, Director, Information Management and Strategic Planning Technology Services Division.

The steering committee has been meeting regularly since the project commenced. The papers for the committee (as well as associated project documentation) have been managed using a collaborative web-based document management system.

1.4 Strategy development process

The process of developing the strategy has drawn on five main strands:

• theoretical foundations


• a study tour

• background reading

• data-collection interviews

• writing and review.

Theoretical foundations

For this element of the strategy, the project drew on the expertise of two members of the Steering Committee: Professors Don Schauder and Sue McKemmish from the Faculty of Information Technology. Both of these individuals are internationally recognised information experts in their own rights. In addition they were able to provide insights based on the research activities of the (then) School of Information Management and Systems. Being able to draw on this resource within Monash University was a significant advantage.

Study tour

The steering committee felt that it was important to learn from other universities that have grappled with similar issues. Accordingly, in 2003, a study tour was undertaken to a number of sites in the United Kingdom and the United States. This study tour was partially funded by the Council of Australasian University Directors of Information Technology (CAUDIT) 2003 Travel Scholarship and partially by project funds. Participants in the study tour were Professor Sally Joy, Dr Andrew Treloar and Ms Cathrine Harboe-Ree (for some of the visits).

The United Kingdom has the most developed (and the most widely spread) approach to information strategies for universities. Accordingly, a range of UK participants was interviewed. The United Kingdom sites chosen were those that had implemented the recommendations of the Joint Information Systems Committee on developing an Information Strategy.

The United States sites were based on the recommendations of Dr Michael Zastrocky, a research director specialising in higher education with the Gartner Research group. Prior to joining Gartner, he served as vice president of CAUSE, the international association for managing and using information resources in higher education. He was thus ideally placed to provide us with advice on which universities in the United States we should visit.

Details of the sites visited and the lessons learned are available in the final report of this study tour6.

Background readings

In addition to the study tour, and following up pointers received during this exercise, the project staff read widely in the area. A range of technical reports from research providers such as Ovum, Gartner, and the Butler Group were particularly relevant. In addition, an active program of literature scanning took place over the entire life of the project.

Data collection

In order to place the information gathered into a Monash University context, an extensive round of semi-structured interviews was undertaken in late 2004. These were initially conducted with

6 Treloar, A. (2004) Developing an Information Management Strategy for an Australian University: Learning from United Kingdom and United States Experiences. A Report prepared for the Council of Australian University Directors of Information Technology. Available online at http://www.caudit.edu.au/caudit/awards/2003/03traveltreloar.html.


http://www.caudit.edu.au/caudit/awards/2003/03traveltreloar.html


all the deputy vice-chancellors, most of their personal assistants, most of the then divisional directors, all the steering committee members, an assortment of faculty managers, a small number of academics, and a number of support staff in particular areas. This data collection will need to continue with a wider sample to ensure that the information needs of all Monash University staff and students are taken into account. In particular, the information management needs of level A, B and C academics, level 4, 5, 6, and 7 general staff, and undergraduate and postgraduate students, need to be assessed.

Writing and review

The Strategy has been gradually developed over the life of the project, ensuring that it has had plenty of time to be refined. Initial drafts of particular sections were verified with informants, and the whole document was sent to the steering committee twice: once for initial comments on both structure and detail, and a second time in near final form for a consistency check. It was made available to the university community for their input in late 2005.


2 Data, Information and Knowledge 2.1 A broad enterprise knowledge context

The vision for the Information Management Strategy is “Managing information so that we can better create and share knowledge”. This vision moves to the foreground the relationship between knowledge and information. This relationship, discussed at length in information management and knowledge management literature, was the subject of much debate within the project steering committee. High levels of confusion around the term knowledge management led the committee to undertake background research on key terms. The result was the adoption by the committee of the concepts outlined in The Knowledge Proposition Report7.

This report is a recent synthesis of views in the area of knowledge management. Arguing that “some people can find the term ‘knowledge’ unhelpful” (p. i), the report proposes as an alternative a combination of the more widely understood terms ‘expertise’, ‘information’ and ‘ideas’. These terms cover the territory traditionally encompassed by the term ‘knowledge management’ in a way that clarifies the differing concerns as well as the complementary activities within this broad and sometimes confusing field.

Figure 1: Core Knowledge Activities (Source: The Knowledge Proposition, p. 2)

Figure 1 shows the core knowledge activities for each of these terms, knowledge activities that companies have found to be invaluable in achieving their business aims (regardless of the type of industry). The information column lists activities addressed by this Information Management Strategy. The expertise and ideas columns list areas in which Monash University needs to

7 This report was developed by 20 of the world’s leading knowledge practitioners through discussion and debate at the sixth Chief Knowledge Officers Summit in 2003 and refined subsequently by email. It is available online at http://www.tfpl.com/resources/cko_summit_download.cfm


http://www.tfpl.com/resources/cko_summit_download.cfm


improve and which form the basis for work foreshadowed later in this strategy (see 13.6: Moving from information managing to knowledge enabling). This definition of the three knowledge elements (information, expertise and ideas) situates information within a broader definition of knowledge, and also relates it to the concepts of expertise and ideas, both of which are directly relevant in a university setting.

This high-level picture informs the resulting Information Management Strategy. It also suggests ways in which this Strategy can be broadened to become a true knowledge enabling strategy, primarily by developing strategic approaches to the development of expertise and ideas. The bulk of this document will concentrate on information and information management, with section 12.6 taking up the question of moving beyond information managing to knowledge enabling.

2.2 Information in the information continuum model

We have now situated information within a broader knowledge context, but what exactly is information? In seeking to answer this vexed question, the Information Management Steering Committee decided to build on expertise within Monash University and draw on the theoretical work done in this area by the School of Information Management and Systems in the Faculty of Information Technology. This work is grounded in a rich and multi-dimensional analysis of information and its context. As a consequence of this decision, the committee adopted a definition of information as ‘selectively encoded and communicated knowledge’. Knowledge in this context is defined broadly as ‘something that is known’8. This definition can operate at a range of levels or granularities. What is known can be something quite simple (a single fact or datum) or complex (the annual budget for Monash University). In other words, this approach re-defines a datum as a small item of knowledge.

Figure 2: Knowledge becomes selectively encoded and communicated as information, and

information is used to share and build further knowledge within an overall context

The implication of this definition is that knowledge should properly be viewed as something that is internal to an individual or a system. It is only when it is made available (encoded in

8 This use of the term knowledge is quite different to that used in a knowledge management context.


some form) that it becomes information. Of course, the context in which this information is made available is also part of the communicative transaction9 and needs to be taken into account. The importance of context for content is also a key requirement for effective record-keeping. This definition is shown diagrammatically in Figure 2.

This diagram shows ‘things that are known’ as residing within individuals or information technology systems. In either case, the knowledge is invisible (or tacit) until it has been encoded as information. It is only then that it can be shared or acted upon. In this respect, information technology systems should be seen as different to conventional print filing systems. Such filing systems are ways to organise knowledge encoded as information artefacts (such as documents). It is possible to directly view and act on the encoded information without the use of any additional steps or intervening technology. In the case of knowledge stored in a person’s head or an information technology system, it needs to be encoded and communicated before it can be perceived or acted upon.

2.3 Data and information

So what of the relationship between information and data? In the realm of structured information, people have traditionally talked about the relationship between data, information and knowledge as a hierarchy, as in Figure 3. This is a standard diagram, often seen in information systems texts.

Figure 3: Traditional Data/Information/Knowledge Pyramid10

The implication of the model being adopted by the Information Management Steering Committee is that this traditional view is quite misleading. In fact, the ‘data’ at the lowest level of the pyramid are just small things that are known; that is, small items of knowledge. As an example, the fact that a given student is enrolled in a given subject in semester 2, 2004 is an item of knowledge. This could either be known and remembered by a person or known and stored by a computer. In either case, this fact only becomes information when it is selectively

9 This notion of the communicative transaction is discussed at length in Kaufer, D. S. and Carley, K. M. (1993). Communication at a Distance: the influence of print on sociocultural organisation and change. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, New Jersey. 10 Source: Marco, D, “Meta Data & Knowledge Management: A Meta Data Repository is the Key to Knowledge Management”, DM Review Magazine, December, 2001



encoded and communicated. In the case of a computer system, such a selective encoding might be the course plan for the year for this student, or a class list for this subject.

From the point of view of enabling staff at Monash University to support its core activities, it is the information they work with that they primarily care about. So the information systems need to provide ways for them to select encodings that meet their information needs (these might be things like reports) and have these communicated to them in appropriate ways and in a timely fashion. And the underlying pieces of knowledge that are used to create these encodings need to carefully be managed to ensure that they are current and correct when in active use, and preserved properly if they may be needed as evidence into the future. In other words, the definition of information as selectively encoded and communicated knowledge results in a clearer focus on how to better support staff as they do their work.

2.4 Summary

The vision for information and knowledge at Monash University is managing information to better create and share knowledge.

Information, expertise and ideas are the three things that Monash University should be seeking to manage, promote and enhance.

Information is selectively encoded and communicated knowledge.

Data are simply small items of knowledge.

These small items of knowledge are important and need to be managed carefully.


3 Information Dimensions How does this theoretical work apply to Monash University? In resolving this, it is important to identify the scope for the Information Management Strategy. Over the life of the information management project, the steering committee has refined a rich and multi-dimensional definition of the information environment at Monash University, and the consequential scope for any information management activity. This work has been strongly influenced by the Information Continuum theoretical model developed by the then School of Information Management and Systems.

Information Continuum theory defines a large number of possible dimensions for information. Figure 4 shows one representation of this theoretical model.

Figure 4: Information Continuum Model11

Drawing on this model, the Information Management Steering Committee decided that the key dimensions for a Monash University Information Management Strategy were Realm, Purpose, Context, Time and Process.

3.1 Realm

Any information management initiative must support the core activities of Monash University.

11 Note: the abbreviations in each cell of this diagram refer to the combination of three of the information dimensions. Thus, AAI is Information for Accountability, with Action/Structure agency attributes in an Individual context.



Research and Research Management: the processes around the creation of new knowledge and the management of the research process.

Learning and Teaching: the transmission of that knowledge to a new generation of scholars.

In addition to these core activities Monash University also engages in:

Administration and Support: the whole array of business activities required to both enable and support these core activities.

Cultural Activities and Community Engagement, including:

public and education programmes: the provision of information and services to stimulate and broaden interest, enjoyment and understanding of Monash University in its cultural context, as well as to enrich the common wealth

community engagement: the establishment of linkages with the community to provide value, as well as to raise and maintain Monash University's broad public profile

cultural memory: the preservation and dissemination of cultural artefacts and practices, including making such culture accessible to a wider public.

Commercial Activities and IP Management, including

commercialising of research and management of Monash University intellectual property (IP) asset

developing learning applications

managing property

providing consulting and other services to industry.

As with the context dimension, members of the Monash University community will operate across a number of these different roles, often during a single day. Our information management landscape needs to allow such switching of settings in a way that is both seamless and clear about what the current setting is.

3.2 Information purpose

Monash University needs to manage information for two main purposes:

Information for Awareness: sometimes described as ‘information as knowledge’, this “perpetuates and conveys bodies/areas of thought, ideas, feelings and opinions. Such information is the focus of educational institutions, libraries (including film and sound libraries) and much publishing”12. The corporate or collective memory of the organisation is critical to its self-perception, image and reputation. The focus here should be on maximising opportunity.

Information for Accountability: sometimes described as ‘information as evidence of activity’, this “provides proof of personal, business and cultural activity, enabling people to account for what they do to each other… Information as evidence is the focus of record keeping and archiving”13. The focus here must be on minimising risk.

In addition, there will be a small amount of Information for Enjoyment (sometimes called infotainment). This might be relevant in the context of presenting Monash University activities

12 School of Information Management and Systems (2003). Lecture Notes for IMS5048, Information Continuum. 13 Ibid.


in an attractive way on a prospective students or Faculty showcase website (see also 10.6: Student recruitment).

Much of what the university does requires information in order to carry out the activity/do it better (information for awareness) and information to assess how well it was carried out (information for accountability). The latter requirement to collect information for accountability well in advance of its anticipated use needs to be built into a range of information management systems, and can be informed by the INTSIA methodology (see Appendix 1: Information Needs Turn Strategy Into Action).

3.3 Context

The key issue here is that of standards governing the management of Monash University information and compliance with those standards. There are four contexts in which these standards are relevant.

Individual: Individual information does not need to be managed in accordance with any standards (or rather, the standards can be entirely idiosyncratic). For example, the way an individual organises papers on their desk will usually be in a way that makes sense to them (and probably no-one else).

Workgroup: In a workgroup, members need to develop or comply with some standards, but they can be specific to the workgroup(s). Each workgroup can have its own information standards. An example here might be the organisation of documents for a committee.

Corporate: At the corporate level, information creation and management requires far greater compliance with standards. These may be Monash University specific standards, such as the LOCATE project to develop a standard Monash University classification scheme and business language. They may also be national (Australian Standard for Records Management – AS ISO 15489) or international (ISO Metadata Standards – ISO 19115/19139).

Societal: Information at this level needs to be created and managed in accordance with global standards. An example here might be the use of standards-based email for communication with overseas colleagues.

Each member of the Monash University community will operate at various times in all of the above contexts, and our information standards/practices/services need to reflect and support this.

In addition, people may not always correctly identify the context in which they are actually operating, or in which they should be operating. For instance, someone might think that they are doing something that is only of relevance to them and thus might not apply any of the possible information management standards. Later on, if this work ends up being used at a workgroup or corporate level the standards will have to be retro-applied. This may end up happening from time to time in any case, but it would have been easier if they had got the context right at the beginning. The information management environment for Monash University needs to provide guidance to people to help them correctly select the right context and the standards that thus apply.

3.4 Time

Information exists in both space and time. Its temporal nature means that any examination of information management must deal with:

future information

envisaging future needs and uses



current information

managing current information objects

past information

storing/versioning/disposal and the need to continually manage the transition from future to present to past.

3.5 Process

This is reminiscent of, but not the same as, the Information Lifecycle. The four main ways in which people at Monash University work with information are:

• Create

o generating the original piece of knowledge

• Capture

o capturing that knowledge as information in a container

• Organise

o organising the information in some sort of retrieval system (desk, filing cabinet, website, database)

• Repurpose

o reworking the information for a different purpose, taking part of it for use elsewhere, or referring to/providing the information as an record of what happened in the past.

Figure 5: Information Scope Dimensions (Source: Information Management Steering

Committee)


Figure 5 shows how all these dimensions fit together. The breakout box in the lower right hand corner shows how the Process dimensions apply to Information for Awareness in the Cultural Activities & Community Engagement realm and a Societal Context. The Process dimensions also apply to all of the other boxes in the diagram, but this has not been shown for the sake of clarity.



4 Encoding and Management The previous section discussed the scope of information as defined for the Information Management Strategy. What of the ways in which this information is selectively encoded and managed? The key issues here are the container and its structure.

4.1 Information and containers

The Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) report14 argues that a work (the original idea in an information context) is realised through expression (as an information artefact), which is embodied in a manifestation (various formats of that artefact), which is exemplified by one or more items (copies of these formats). In data modelling terms, this can be represented as shown in Figure 6 below.

Figure 6: Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records: Relationships15

Note that the relationships between Work and Expression, and between Manifestation and Item are both one-many. The relationship between Expression and Manifestation is many-many because a given manifestation (such as a CD) might contain many expressions (different pieces of music). Similarly, a given piece of music might appear on many different compilation CDs.

14 IFLA, Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records – Final Report, K.G Saur. Available online at http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr.htm15 Source: Presentation by Dr Barbara Tillett, Library of Congress. Available online at http://gondolin.rutgers.edu/MIC/teext/how/FRBR_tillett.pdf


http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr.htm

http://gondolin.rutgers.edu/MIC/teext/how/FRBR_tillett.pdf

The work and expression are the intellectual content (the information itself). The manifestation and items are the physical encoding of that content, its container. Table 1 below shows these relationships with examples.

FRBR Term Example Level Work Idea for an Information Management

Strategy Information object

Expression Text of Strategy Manifestation Word version, PDF version, HTML

version Information container

Item Copy of PDF on Monash University Web server, Copy of PDF on laptop, copy of PDF emailed to colleague

Table 1: Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records: terms and examples

An information management system for Monash University will need to deal with simple items of knowledge (such as the data for a single student enrolment discussed earlier) and more complex selective encodings of this knowledge as pieces of information (such as the reports derived from student enrolment data). These different levels of granularity require different treatments, and different management systems.

4.2 The question of structure

One way to think about these systems is in terms of their structure. Consider a Word document. There is structure in the expression (the way the document is organised internally), in the manifestation (the file format, any associated metadata) and in the item (the location of a copy in a directory tree on a file server).

For the purposes of an information management strategy, it is the structure relating to the container (structure at manifestation and item level) that is most critical. It is the manifestations and items – the information containers – that will need to be managed. In a record-keeping context, the structure is what is used to preserve the content in context. However, in the long term, it is the content that is the most important and the most enduring16. The content is the end, and the container is the means to that end.

Structure for containers should be considered as a continuum. Some containers are very lightly structured: text in emails or Word documents. An email will have some header information in the email envelope, but the actual text will have no necessary structure. A Word file will have some embedded metadata17 but again the text will have no necessary structure. At the other end of the continuum, some containers are highly structured. Relational database tables are probably the best example of these. Such tables underpin a number of our core information systems such as SAP and Callista. In these systems, because the information objects are derived from the underlying stored data, these data also need to carefully be managed.

4.3 Information systems

In order to work in the rich information environment we have described, we need information systems. Such systems are a combination of people, processes and tools. These tools need not necessarily involve information technology, but increasingly most information management in a university environment has a strong information technology component.

16 For more on this see OCLC, Information Format Trends: Content, Not Containers, October 2004. Available online at http://www.oclc.org/info/2004trends/. 17 Word calls these document properties. They are usually blank or set to default values because most users dislike getting asked to supply them every time they save a new document.


http://www.oclc.org/info/2004trends/


These information technologies can be analysed in a number of different ways. One simple way that is helpful is in terms of the ‘structuredness’ of the content and the types of interactions that the systems support.

Information technology-based information management systems can be assigned along a continuum of the degree of structure for the storage of the information:

• more structured

databases, human resources, finance, records, library collections, institutional repositories

• less structured

email, files, instant messages, voicemail.

The types of interactions that these systems permit can also be placed on a continuum from:

• people to people

In other words, communication and collaboration

• people to information

In other words, content.

Figure 7: Information System Typology18

18 Based on an idea derived from an Opentext presentation on Enterprise Content Management


Figure 7 shows how some of the main Monash University information systems fit onto this two-by-two grid.

The location of some of these systems in the diagram might need some explanation:

• Email is currently used by many people as a default filing system for documents (see 6.5: Document management) and hence is not shown as just a People-People system.

• The Monash University Website is used to locate contact information about people and thus is not a pure People-Information system.

• WebCT supports access to information and discussions between people and is shown midway along this continuum.



5 Principles In order to decide which actions to take, it is necessary to agree on what principles to follow. The IMSC has identified a set of overriding Information Management Principles to govern any proposed changes to/improvements in Information Management at Monash University. The following pages list each principle, together with its implications and some examples.

5.1 Corporate importance

Principle

Information is a strategic resource, and will be managed appropriately. In general, university-wide information will be centrally managed. Information needs and how information is managed should be identified as an integral part of strategic and project planning. An appropriate governance framework and adequate resourcing should be established to ensure this occurs.

Implications

1. The university needs an Information Management Strategy to guide this activity.

This document is intended to be a major step along this path.

2. This Strategy should inform both tactical and strategic decisions.

The strategy identifies the desired end point, and will need to integrate with the other strategic planning cycles of Monash University. The tactical decisions are the ways to get to the end point.

3. Information Management requirements should be embedded into all new activities of Monash University.

The success of this approach was one of the key lessons from the study tour undertaken in 2003. For more details see Appendix 1: Information Needs Turn Strategy into Action.

4. The Information Management Strategy needs to be viewed and funded by Monash University as an ongoing activity.


5.2 Information sources

Principles

University-created information may be made available from a core source or a derived source. The core source for any item of university-created information must be identifiable and accessible. Any derived sources of information must be identified as such. In general, changes should only be made to the core source. Each core source should have an identified custodian, an identified access community and an identified set of maintenance responsibilities.

Where possible different manifestations of information expressions (see section 5.1: Information and containers) should be derived from a single source. As with core and derived sources, changes should ideally be made to this single source and the derived manifestations should be automatically re-generated.

Implications

1. Changes must only be possible to the core source.

This is to ensure that changes are controlled through the business rules and security in the system housing the core source. For example, the Monash University Directory Service provides information about staff members to a range of other systems. Some of this is derived from SAP-HR. Any changes to the information must be made in SAP-HR.

2. Derived sources must be identified as such.

Information derived from a core source should be identified as derived information, and a link (where possible) provided to the core source (preferably with details about how to change it).

3. The primary sources for university documents that need to appear in multiple forms should support single-source publishing.

The primary sources for university documents that will appear in multiple forms should be some well-structured form such as XML or a database. Paper, HTML and PDF versions of these documents can then be automatically derived from this form as required. Any changes to the primary source should automatically be propagated and obsolete versions either archived or deleted. Examples of this are the use of CUPID to store information about unit offerings that appears as the print and online handbooks, the new MedWays database-driven system for managing the new undergraduate Medicine course and learning materials, and the INCORE in-house project within the Student and Staff Services Division.

Even where the core record is in paper form, the notion of a single source can be applied to ensure that the archival version of something like a committee document is retained centrally, while allowing the committee members’ copies to be destroyed as the disposal guidelines determine.



5.3 User-centeredness

Principle

Information systems and services should be designed (or re-designed) to operate in a way that is user- and task-centred. This should inform all aspects of system or service design.

Implications

1. The use of User-Centred Design methodologies should be a mandatory requirement for the development of new systems, including web-based information systems.

This has implications for Monash University in terms of retaining core skills in this area within ITS, and in providing an internal consulting service to those outside Information Technology Services doing systems development.

2. Evaluation from a user perspective (both for usability and accessibility) must be a mandatory requirement for any systems acquired by Monash University. Systems that test poorly from a user perspective should only be selected if there are significant off-setting factors.

This implies that new systems should be evaluated by representative groups of stakeholders, and by accessibility and usability professionals, well prior to the contract being signed.


5.4 Availability

Principle

Information should ideally be accessible (subject to security and acceptable use guidelines) to: • anybody who needs it • at anytime • anywhere • and anyhow

in order to ensure that it delivers the greatest value to the university19.

Implications

1. Anybody

The default for Monash University information should be that it is available to anyone who wants to (particularly in an online environment). Any retreat from this default position would need to be justified on security, privacy, commercial or other grounds.

2. Anytime

Within the constraints of existing resources, information systems should normally be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

3. Anywhere

Consistent with legitimate security concerns, information should be accessible from any network-enabled location. This principle implies ubiquitous wireless access at all campuses, although this will take time and resources to achieve. Access should only be restricted to specific locations (i.e. on-campus) where there are particular security concerns.

4. Anyhow

The range of possible access devices continues to expand beyond personal computers to include personal digital assistants (PDAs), smartphones and web-browsers in insecure locations. Particular information systems should be prioritised for enhancement with the ability to deliver to these different devices.

19 This view of information is derived in part from the World Wide Web Consortium who refer to ‘one web for anyone, everywhere, on anything’. See interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee online at www.technologyreview.com/view/article.asp?p=12155.


http://www.technologyreview.com/view/article.asp?p=12155


5.5 Staff and student involvement

Principle

The process of developing and implementing the information management strategy and its accompanying policies should be as open, transparent and inclusive as possible. The university needs to provide an adequate, relevant and ongoing development programme to enable staff and students to create, access, manage and disseminate information resources effectively.

Implications

1. New staff

Require completion of core information management training for new staff as part of the standard Monash University induction program. This should ideally be woven into existing material where possible, rather than treated separately. This is consistent with the holistic approach to information management espoused in this strategy.

2. Existing staff

Provide similar training opportunities for existing staff. Initially, existing staff will need staff development that is somewhat different from new staff (because they are already familiar with the information systems being used). Once this new regime is better established, it will be necessary to provide refresher material, delivered in a variety of modes.

3. Students

Follow the lead of the Library and seek to encourage the embedding of information management material in existing courses for students.

4. Graduates

Graduate attributes should recognise the importance of information management skills.


5.6 Productivity and efficiency

Principle

Information, and the way it is managed, should contribute to the productivity of members of the Monash University community.

Implications

1. Information management processes should continually be reviewed to ensure that they are as efficient and effective as possible.

This should be undertaken as part of the normal service-management lifecycle.

2. In general, new information systems and services should create no net additional workload for staff or students.

This implication could be varied in two specific areas:

i. Where the long-term benefit from the systems outweighs the short-term costs. In this case it needs to be properly resourced in the short-term. Example: assigning metadata to all business records to allow for categorisation and better retrieval into the future.

ii. Where the new systems are required to ensure that Monash University function as it should. Example: ensuring documents are appropriately retained in accordance with statutory requirements.



5.7 Statutory requirements

Principles

Information must be managed in accordance with external statutory and regulatory requirements.

Information must be stored in such a way as to allow a timely response to freedom of information and local requests, as well as legally-mandated controlled discovery.

Information arising from research involving human subjects must be dealt with in accordance with the Human Ethics Committee requirements.

Implications

1. Software compliance

The ability to comply with the relevant, and overlapping, legislative regimes needs to be a mandatory part of any assessment of software to be acquired from an outside vendor and a mandatory design requirement in the case of software written in-house. This assessment is particularly important in the case of software acquired from overseas as this will normally have been written to local (usually United States) legislative requirements, and will need to be checked for Australian and state compliance.

2. Access consistency

Where possible, all parts of Monash University should treat access to personal information in the same way to make it easier to assess compliance. This does not occur at present in some cases. For instance, in the case of granting access to student information (such as Special Consideration applications) for students enrolled in a given course, some faculties allow this according to whether their faculty owns the course and others according to whether their faculty teaches the course. These are not equivalent access regimes, but they should be.

3. FOI readiness

Ability to comply with reasonable freedom of information requests should be a requirement for any new information system. 4. Systems, networks, policies and communication to staff and students should be designed to ensure that information is used within appropriate legal and regulatory frameworks and that guidelines to those frameworks are made available.


5.8 Trustworthy information and systems

Principles

Information provided by Monash University should be, and be perceived to be, trustworthy (that is, relevant, accurate and timely) to the maximum extent possible. Where the information is sourced from outside Monash University (as with, for example, library holdings), all reasonable care should be taken to ensure its trustworthiness.

Any activity that creates, modifies or transmits critical university information should be trustworthy. This means that it should be:

• logged (to ensure an audit trail)

• non-repudiable (to ensure that the creator/changer can not later deny their action, and that there is proof that the action took place).

Implications

1. The trustworthiness of university-provided information should be made obvious to its users.

There are a number of ways that this can be done without it being too intrusive. One is to have web pages describing our ‘information hygiene’ practices, without (of course) giving anything away that might affect our information security. Another is to have clear statements about information ownership (see also section 6.1: Information stewardship), and date of last revision.

2. The trustworthiness of university-provided information should be a prime requirement in systems design.

This involves all the things we are doing now with respect to access controls, systems security and audit trails (see also principle 5.7: Information ethics). It requires good contextual metadata about the information (e.g. who created it, when and for what purpose). Ensuring that information appearing in multiple locations and multiple forms (such as handbook or fees information) is sourced from a single master (see also principle 5.2: Information sources) is a key strategy in achieving this aim.

3. Logging

The logs of any activity that creates, modifies or transmits critical university information are as least as important as the information itself. Such logs should be managed and retained in the same way as the information they relate to. Where possible, the logs should also be made available for centralised monitoring and analysis.

4. Non-repudiation

Any action that creates, modifies or transmits information should be non-repudiable. This means that the agent of the action cannot later deny their action. In the case of a database transaction, they will be able to undo their action (such as changing a piece of data) but both the original change and its reversal will be logged. Non-repudiation is particularly important in the case of email. At the moment, most emails are used as business records but can easily have their text manipulated or their sender misrepresented. A non-repudiable email cannot be changed without this being detectable and can also be guaranteed to have come from a particular sender.



5.9 Retention and disposal

Principle

Essential information must be retained while required and then appropriately disposed of in accordance with Monash University standards and external obligations. A proportion of all information will be retained in the Monash University Archives, constituting the organisation’s captured corporate memory. While it is retained, it must be managed in such a way as to be recoverable in the event of loss on a timescale consistent with university requirements.

Implications

1. Disposal regimes

The disposal regimes for different classes of information should be known and applied across Monash University. This means that staff should be made aware of what the regimes are (as part of induction or refresher training). It also means that, where possible, the disposal regimes should be built into information management software with reasonable default settings.

2. Information storage

Critical university information stored on local desktops, where it may never be backed up, should be relocated to central storage (see also 6.2: Information storage and preservation). Critical university information stored on central storage should be backed up to an alternative location on a schedule and in a way that is agreed with its business owners.


5.10 Information Management Principles determine IT Principles

Principle

The information management principles in this strategy should be used to derive a set of IT principles. These IT principles will support and enable the implementation of the information management principles, as well as determine the deployment of IT systems.

Implications

1. A set of IT principles needs to be developed

This set of IT principles needs to be developed in collaboration with IT stakeholders at the university.

2. The IT principles need to guide the revision of the IT architecture

This set of IT principles needs to be developed in collaboration with IT stakeholders at the university.

3. The IT principles and the IT architecture will determine the deployment of IT systems in response to information management needs



6 Information Management Common Elements Scope

This section deals with information management issues (and their associated systems) that apply across one or more realms of Monash University. These common elements will also be referenced in sections dealing with specific realms of activity.

Basis

The section is based on common elements arising from all the data-collection interviews and on an analysis of the Information Technology Strategic Base Plan and the Update for 2005.

Organisation

Each of the sections in chapters 6 through 11 of this document follows the same format. The Background section provides an overview of the area or its systems. The Analysis section discusses the issues in this area. The Recommendations section lays out recommended actions, arising from the analysis. Each recommendation is assigned a code consisting of the Realm being discussed, the specific area and a sequence number. Thus CE/IS/1 is the first recommendation (1) in the Information Stewardship (IS) discussion in the Common Elements (CE) chapter.

6.1 Information stewardship

Background

Information once created needs to be maintained. It needs to be checked to see if it is still current, it needs to be updated as the circumstances for which it was generated change, and it may need to be disposed of (either as a result of particular decision or according to some agreed disposal schedule). This active maintenance of information is sometimes called information stewardship.

Analysis

For information stewardship to be successful, at least four things are necessary:

• clear information ownership

• information protection

• formal recognition

• an information-aware corporate culture.

These should not be seen as mutually exclusive; rather, they are interdependent and mutually reinforcing.

Information ownership

With some exceptions, the ownership of particular information objects is not clear, either to those accessing those objects or those who are currently maintaining them. As a result, information often suffers from the ‘tragedy of the commons’ – lack of responsibility results in lack of action. Note that information may actually be owned by teams or roles within groups rather than by individuals. Those who own the information should also be those responsible for


disposal of it, in accordance with clear guidelines20 and with full understanding of their responsibility.

Information protection

The university through its research and creation of learning materials is a significant producer of intellectual property. This IP is one of the core assets of Monash University and the creators, and should be protected. One way to do this would be to develop policy and provide clear guidance to the creators of IP on how to protect the individuals' and university's investment. An area of particular concern is the assignment of copyright to journal publishers by authors.

As well as the issues of policy and guidance, systems, networks, and communications to staff and students should be designed to ensure that information is protected and used within appropriate legal and regulatory frameworks.

Formal recognition

Staff across Monash University produce information in a range of forms: for example, web pages, policy documents, and entries in a knowledgebase like ask.monash. Despite the fact that the creation of this information is embedded in jobs, there is often little formal recognition of the need for information stewardship. Information stewardship rarely appears in performance goals and as a result it is left to the professionalism of staff.

Information culture

Monash University needs to become aware that creating and maintaining information is not something that happens in addition to the job. In many cases, it is the job, or a large part of it.

Recommendations

CE/IS/1 Ensure that ownership of all information objects is visible to those using those objects. DEFERRED . This can be as simple as a ‘Maintained by X’ line at the foot of a web page or document.

CE/IS/2 Develop policy and provide clear guidance to the creators of IP on how to protect the rights of individuals and the university. DEFERRED

CE/IS/3 Ensure that maintenance of information (or the underlying knowledge objects that are used to generate that information) is written into work goals and performance plans. DEFERRED. In some cases, ensure that responsibility is clearly articulated in position descriptions. In many situations proactive activity that goes beyond simple maintenance is preferable.

CE/IS/4 Integrate notions of information stewardship (including information disposal) into position descriptions, staff induction, staff training and leadership development programs.!DOING.

6.2 Information storage and preservation

Background

Critical university information and the underlying data from which this information is derived is stored in a variety of locations. These locations can be listed in a hierarchy according to their backup regimes (which depend in part on their storage technology). See Table 2 for details.

20 Monash currently has guidelines at http://www.adm.monash.edu.au/records-archives/archives/disposal/index.html but these are largely unknown or ignored. Compliance with these guidelines is also a legal obligation under the Public Records Act.


http://www.adm.monash.edu.au/records-archives/archives/disposal/index.html


Analysis

Each of these storage categories is theoretically vulnerable, but the risk of loss increases as one moves down the hierarchy (note that this is a generalisation – library holdings and the Records Management Office are protected in ways that local filing cabinets rarely are). The university should therefore be moving to:

• store critical information and data in the most secure locations (usually centrally)

• back it up appropriately

• manage it so as to be able to provide access as quickly as possible in the event of disaster (in practice this means duplicated storage at geographically separated sites).

Other categories of storage should only be used for in-process storage of information or where the impact of loss (relative to the cost of protection) is deemed to be sufficiently low.

Category Examples Backup

Central servers Web, Mail, Novell, eReserve, SAP, Callista, Voyager catalogue, ARROW

Nightly. Increasingly to off-site storage at alternate production sites.

Departmental servers Web, file Varies. Rarely to same standards as central servers.

Local desktops C: drive Rarely. Dependent on individuals. Location of backup rarely offsite.

Print Local print files, library holdings Not realistically possible. Print is not stored offsite except for rarely accessed materials. Physical storage facilities suitable for preservation include fire suppression and/or smoke detecting systems.

Table 2: Backup Hierarchy

As well as storage, there is the issue of preservation. It is not enough to just store bits and back them up – we need to be able to preserve them (over time periods that will be different for different types of information and the purposes to which it is put) and get them back at some time in the future (which can be quite a challenge).

Recommendations

CE/ISP/1 Mandate that the primary sources for critical information be stored electronically on central servers. !DOING

CE/ISP/2 Identify and remove barriers (cost, availability, training, etc.) to moving to central electronic storage for critical information. !DOING

CE/ISP/3 Work towards a model where print is primarily seen as a secondary output/process format for Monash University created information.

DEFERRED

CE/ISP/4 In collaboration with Records and Archive Services, provide guidance to members of the Monash University community on appropriate document and data retention and archiving policies and practices that meet legal and operational requirements. !DOING

CE/ISP/5 Develop long-term preservation strategy and accompanying mechanisms for Monash University’s electronic archives, including websites. !DOING


6.3 Information access

Background

Monash University staff and students are increasingly working in a range of locations: at their home campus, at other campuses, from home, on the road. Information Principle 5.4: Availability says that information should be accessible (subject to security and acceptable use guidelines) anytime, anywhere, anyhow. What are the barriers to this?

Analysis

Finding

Before one can access information one needs to be able to find it. This is either a problem of organisation (see 6.8: Web organisation, 6.14: Metadata) or a problem of searchability. If the organisation of the information is deficient, most users will end up resorting to search anyway. This suggests that Monash University should investigate ways to improve searching across the web, shared drives and email.

Monash University also has little information about its information stores. It is very difficult to find answers to the following questions (either at a local level or across Monash University):

• Do you hold information about X?

• What container do you hold it in?

• What definitions do you use in holding it?

• What are your access and retention policies?

Entitlement

Different categories of Monash University users are entitled to different levels of access to information resources, systems and services. The question of exactly who is entitled to what, and what sources of information are used to determine this, is a vexed one. It is both a systems and a governance issue. Two examples illustrate the problem:

• Are higher degree by research students more like undergraduate students or staff? They have characteristics of both.

• Should research fellows who also work commercially be entitled to access Monash University site-licensed information resources such as online journals?

Anytime

Information Technology Services is currently only resourced to provide support for its information systems between the hours of 8 am and 10 pm. While information systems are designed to run continually (except for scheduled maintenance windows) any faults outside the designated support window will not be remedied until staff are next at work. True 24 by 7 supported systems will not be possible without an increase in resources.

Anywhere

A number of information systems/services can only be accessed while on-campus. Novell shared drives are one example (see also 6.10: File Sharing), although this is being addressed through iFolders and Netstorage. Any information stored on a local desktop computer is also normally unavailable off-campus21, which is one of the reasons for Recommendation CE/IS/1

21 There are ways around this, but they are insecure unless very carefully managed.



recommending central storage for critical information. A number of web-based systems use inappropriate access controls, such as requiring access from a local Monash University computer rather than requiring password-controlled access.

Anyhow

A significant number of core information systems require use of a dedicated Windows client. This means that these systems are not easily accessible by any of the following categories of users:

those with a Linux desktop

those with a Macintosh desktop

those using a non-Monash University computer over which they have no control (such as in an Internet café or other remote location)

those without access to a networked computer, such as users of handheld devices.

Recommendations

CE/IA/1 Investigate ways to provide improved searching across information silos, including access to information about what silos exist and what they hold. !DOING .

CE/IA/2 Clearly delineate the classes of Monash University users, their entitlements, and the basis for deciding who is in which class. . DEFERRED .

CE/IA/3 Review access controls on web-based services. DEFERRED

CE/IA/4 Move to providing web-based access to core information services. !DOING .

CE/IA/5 Make this web-based access as device-neutral as possible. DEFERRED

CE/IA/6 Investigate ways to provide synchronised snapshots of core information sources for use on intermittently connected handheld devices.

DEFERRED .

6.4 Role of paper

Background

The university stores information in a variety of media. The bulk is stored on hard discs or paper, although some is also kept on tape (particularly for backup, but also for video), slide, overhead transparency and the like.

Analysis

Most of the information in Monash University begins life in electronic form (what is sometimes called ‘born-digital’ information)22. Paper is then one of a number of possible output formats (the others including things like PDF or HTML). Of course, for some information encodings paper may not be possible as an output format. Data collection informants reported a variety of attitudes to paper and its management. A number suggested that paper should be seen as a document delivery and process mechanism rather than a document storage mechanism. Paper is currently the most stable medium for long term preservation (and hence the best option for archival retention), but Monash University needs a clearer articulation of the role of paper in an information management context. Monash University also needs to evaluate options for preservation of electronic information.

22 This also suggests that we should be making better use of our ability to search across all of this.


Recommendations

CE/RP/1 In consultation with key information stakeholders (Library, Records and Archives, CeLTS) implement the recommendations in the review of printeries and printing at Monash University. !DOING .

CE/RP/2 Investigate the implications of this review for information flows and storage formats. DEFERRED:

• information flows into Monash University (document imaging, faxes, scholarly communications, etc)

• information flows within Monash University (distribution of documents, role of photocopiers/scanners, etc)

• information flows out of Monash University (publicity material, scholarly communications, etc.)

• appropriate storage formats for information that needs to be preserved long term.

CE/RP/3 Review available tools and systems for single-source publishing (refer 6.2: Information Sources) and make recommendations as appropriate.

DEFERRED

6.5 Document management23

Background

A significant amount of the information generated by Monash University is in the form of documents. These are usually Word files, although they may also be created by other Microsoft Office Applications (such as Excel or Powerpoint) or by specialist packages such as Framemaker, Visio or Omnigraffle. Documents may be transitory or ephemeral in value and will not necessarily be organised as part of a system.

Analysis

The management of these documents is often ad hoc. Where they are stored in electronic form, this might be on a desktop hard disk, a Netware shared drive or a webserver. If stored in paper form, this might be in filing cabinets, piles on desks/floors, Lever-Arch files or on shelves. The organisation schemes for these documents will usually be either idiosyncratic or organised according to workgroup norms. Finding such documents will be difficult for anyone but the owner and sharing the documents with others usually occurs via email.

During recent years, faculties and other business units of Monash University have been tackling this problem by independently identifying and considering purchasing document management software products. While particular applications may suit current local business needs, there is significant risk that this software will not be compatible with other university systems or will be difficult to maintain in the long term. At present there are a number of different document/records management systems being used in different parts of Monash University, with others under consideration.

23 There is a degree of overlap between Document management, Records management and Email management. Not all documents (or all emails) will be records, and some emails will be documents in their own right. Because the issues and recommendations are different for each of document, records and email management, each will be treated separately in this strategy.



As well as these special-purpose document management systems, many people at Monash University use the email system as a default document management system, leaving messages and their associated attachments on the email server. This has a number of advantages24:

• the documents are stored together with their accompanying email, which often amplifies or provides context for the information in the documents25;

• the documents can be stored using the same filing categories and folders as the accompanying emails;

• the documents are automatically time and date-stamped on receipt;

• the system used to manage the documents is one that end-users are already familiar with and which they use for another purpose26;

• the emails (and their attached documents) can easily be accessed from anywhere in the world by using either the my.monash or mail.monash webmail clients.

Consequences of the un-coordinated approach to document management across most of Monash University are:

the creation of hard-to-access islands of information

not taking advantage of efficiencies in doing business electronically within or across units

risks to Monash University associated with inability to locate documents as needed.

Recommendations

CE/DM/1 Investigate possible university-wide document management systems. DEFERRED based on required functionality, integration capabilities, and

anticipated whole-of-implementation operational cost.

CE/DM/2 Pilot one or more such systems within defined workgroups and (if pilot is successful) provide as part of standard Monash University operating environment. DEFERRED

CE/DM/3 Provide clear guidance to members of the Monash University community on when to use the various available content and document management technologies. .

6.6 Records management

Background

A record can be defined as “information created, received and maintained as evidence by an organization [sic] or person, in pursuance of legal obligations or in the transaction of business”27. Records are the by-product of the actions of an organisation or person. They tell the story of who did what, when and why, through documents. A record is usually a collection of documents that relate to a particular activity or topic. The most common example of a record in paper is the file: usually a folder containing letters, printed e-mails, reports or other documents

24 Note that these advantages also potentially apply to a electronic document and records management system which allowed the filing of both emails and documents as corporate records. 25 This is significant because the theoretical model of information adopted in this Strategy and outlined in Figure 2 describes the importance of the context for any communicative transaction. 26 Thereby benefiting from the ‘one-less-system’ effect. 27 International Standard AS ISO 15489, Records Management, 2002.


to do with a particular matter. The same kind of thing can be created in electronic systems. Electronic document and records management systems are designed to integrate with other applications (e-mail, word, etc) so that the equivalent of electronic files can be created and organized. Of course, record-keeping should be a key requirement of a whole range of information management systems, not just those concerned with electronic documents.

What makes something a record is the use to which it will be put, not its format or storage medium. In contrast with documents, one of the distinguishing characteristics of records is that they are deliberately captured into a system. That is, they are explicitly organized in a way that links them to an action. For example a university administrator might put all the documents relating to a particular committee in a labelled folder rather than having scattered documents. In contrast, documents don't need to have any organizing structure.

Monash University records will be made up of documents in various formats: Word and Excel documents, e-mails with or without attachments, faxes, plans, photographs, etc. Not all documents in the University will necessarily be records.

Monash University needs to keep records of its activities to provide accountable evidence of its actions (information for accountability). These records are vital knowledge assets and key components of Monash University’s corporate memory. Monash University is obliged to keep ‘full and accurate’ records of its activities and to legally dispose of them in accordance with the Victorian Public Records Act 1973. The disposal regimes would be different for different types of records.

At present, much of the record-keeping across Monash University is done in an ad hoc way using a wide range of methods. There is no consistency in classification systems (see also 6.15: Classification and hierarchies), storage is often woefully inadequate, and disposal regimes are either ignored or applied spasmodically. The services provided by the Records Management Office (part of the Records and Archives Branch) are the exception to all of this, but the availability of their services under the current arrangements is constrained to central administration staff and some additional units.

Analysis

Consequences of the current approach to records management across most of Monash University are:

the creation of hard-to-access islands of information

inability to take advantage of efficiencies in doing business electronically within or across units

inability to find evidence of, or account for, decisions made in one area of the University

difficulties in responding to FOI requests

difficulties in retaining electronic archives from multiple systems.

The current software being used by the Records Management Office to manage paper records (uCollect) is unsupported, has a poor user interface and does not meet the most basic of requirements for integration with other Monash University systems.

Maintaining records in a new electronic record management system would:

• ensure their integrity and security

• provide on-line access as required to users in any location

• ensure documents can be preserved over time within context.



Such a system could also include aspects of document management (see previous section). In this case it is possible that one system might meet both sets of recommendations. Such a system could also be used to replace hard-copy filing for student files (see also 6.4: Role of paper).

Recommendations

CE/RM/1 Investigate possible electronic document and record management systems. DONE

CE/RM/2 Pilot one or more such systems within defined workgroups. !DOING

CE/RM/3 Provide clear guidance to the Monash University community on information retention guidelines. DEFERRED (see also Principle 5.9: Retention and disposal).

6.7 Email management

Background

Monash University relies on email as a means of communication. As in most large organisations today, email has largely replaced paper as the default way to communicate short messages. According to a recent Butler Group report28,

“E-mail has become a business critical application without which the organisation cannot function thanks to its integration with many enterprise applications, and its use as a form of communication.” (p. 11)

Monash University has a large and sophisticated email infrastructure. ITS runs a number of servers providing access to stored emails via IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol), ability to send emails via SMTP (Simple Message Transfer Protocol), email routing, and virus and spam scanning. In addition to this central infrastructure, a number of Faculties and Departments run their own email systems.

The central student servers have over 75,000 users with over 9 million messages stored, taking up around 250 gigabytes (GB) of space. The central staff server has over 13,500 users with nearly 20 million messages stored, taking up nearly 1 terabyte (TB) of space.

Analysis

An enterprise e-mail management system should have the following features:

• high availability

• security management

• policy management

• e-mail archiving.

In addition to these system features, it should support users in storing and retrieving; organising, and searching their emails.

High availability

This consists of features such as clustering, mirroring, disaster recovery and back-up. This is an area where Monash University has made significant progress. All the critical servers are duplicated and the stored email lives on disks where a single failure will not affect access.

28 Butler Group, E-Mail Management: Reducing Risk and Unlocking Value Through E-Mail Lifecycle Management, September 2004.


Email storage is being moved to the new Storage Area Network to provide even greater redundancy. Email hardware is largely spread across more than one site to improve disaster recovery. Backups are taken nightly. As a result of these measures and the actual infrastructure being used email has been highly reliable over the past couple of years.

Security management

This consists of features such as anti-virus checking, anti-spam measures, authorisation control, signed email, encryption, and content control. Monash University has had good anti-virus checking for a number of years now. Virus signatures are automatically updated twice-daily, as well as on-demand as required. Email filtering on the server (including spam filtering) has just been introduced and the rules are continually being enhanced. Authorisation to be able to read email is via the central Monash University Directory Service, but it would be desirable to further require that the authentication step be encrypted (to remove the possibility of the username/password being intercepted and read in transit). The encryption mechanisms used should be strong, and these will need to be updated from time to time as technological advancements age the encryption mechanisms reducing the level of protection offered.

Digital signing of email has been possible for a number of years now, but is not mandatory. Encryption of emails is possible using our digital signature technology but has not been rolled out yet because of issues associated with recovery of emails. Monash University should seek guidance from National Archives Australia on this matter.

Content control (putting in place rules on what is allowed to be sent to whom) would be difficult to get agreement on within a university environment. However, the Staff IT Use Policy29 and Student Acceptable Use Policy30 are both quite clear about what types of content are acceptable.

Policy management

This includes features like blocking e-mails based on policy rules, as well as implementing automatic retention/disposal schedules (see also Principle 5.9: Retention and Disposal). This is an area where Monash University has not done any work beyond the protocols set by Records and Archives (which are unfortunately largely ignored). The Monash University Electronic Mail Recordkeeping Protocol31 indicates that

“2.1 Electronic mail communications concerning official business whether created or received by staff are university records and as such are amenable to exactly the same appraisal and retention/disposal techniques as for hardcopy records [see sect. 4].”

In the absence of systems to support retaining e-mails electronically in an organised way with other electronic documents, the protocol requires e-mails of official business to be printed and placed on file. While this is far from ideal, it at least keeps related e-mails with the other paper documents that are still being received, filed and dealt with. The situation is further complicated by the fact that much of Monash University business takes place outside the official records/files system.

E-Mail archiving

Monash University has also done very little work in this area. Not only is there little practical policy guidance, the email system itself provides nothing beyond the ability to get a copy of emails in a folder by date range32 from the server, or to copy emails from the server to local

29 Available online at http://www.adm.monash.edu.au/unisec/pol/itec16.html30 Available online at http://www.adm.monash.edu.au/unisec/pol/itec12.html31 Available online at http://www.adm.monash.edu.au/records-archives/rmo/monash-only/email.html32 Tool available at http://www.its.monash.edu.au/messaging/email/archive/


http://www.adm.monash.edu.au/unisec/pol/itec16.html

http://www.adm.monash.edu.au/unisec/pol/itec12.html

http://www.adm.monash.edu.au/records-archives/rmo/monash-only/email.html

http://www.its.monash.edu.au/messaging/email/archive/


folders using an email client. These facilities are primarily intended to assist users create local backups of older emails before deleting them from the server. They do not provide the facilities of a true corporate archive, automatically retaining emails of continuing value on secure storage as part of the record of the organisation. Most users just purchase more mail space as they run out of quota or delete messages in unplanned ways to stay under quota. Instead, any retention and destruction of e-mails should only be carried out in accordance with University records disposal guidelines.

Storing and retrieving

All emails delivered to a user are automatically stored. Until late 2004, this initial delivery and storage was always into the user’s Inbox. The introduction of server-side filtering rules mean that some emails will never appear in the Inbox, but will instead be filtered elsewhere (such as to one of the designated spam destinations if the user has set up server-side spam filtering). Retrieval of emails occurs via the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP). This is designed for users who move between locations and machines. IMAP by default leaves messages on the server. It can also be configured to only deliver headers for emails, allowing users on slower links to selectively access their mail. It also ensures that a user can access their email from multiple machines in a day and still see all of their email in each location.

Organising

The main mechanism for organising emails is the creation of hierarchical folders. Users can create folder hierarchies of arbitrary complexity. Once the folders are set up, users can manually file emails as they wish. Users can also set up filtering rules on their email clients or on the server to automatically file emails into their folder hierarchy. The LOCATE project (see 6.15: Classification and hierarchies) provides a set of hierarchical terms describing Monash University activities that could easily be repurposed as the basis of a ‘standard’ Monash University email folder hierarchy.

The main limitation on organising by folders is when emails might plausibly be assigned to multiple locations. At present, one has to either choose one location consistently, or deliberately place a copy in the different locations. Some next generation email systems are now starting to provide a facility called ‘virtual folders’. These appear to the user to organise email into folders, but the assignment of the emails into these folders is based on rules or characteristics of the emails themselves. A given email could thus possibly appear in multiple virtual folders, while only being physically stored once.

Alternatively, electronic records management systems now on the market can integrate with e-mail systems so that e-mails can be organised and retained with documents to do with the same activity or topic.

Another facility that is not yet used at Monash University is shared folders. These are email folders shared between multiple users. This could be used by a manager and her PA to share access to particular folders, or by work teams who need to access a common set of emails. Such a system would need to be introduced carefully if there is a possibility of records management software being implemented. Once one system of organisation of e-mail is in place it is hard to move people to keeping e-mail and other relevant documents together. Shared folders has value but should be implemented in a way that is strongly linked to development of organisational tools and software for records management as many e-mails actually should be captured as records.

Searching

Searching by email header or contents is a feature of the mail server. It can be accessed either using a standalone email client or the web client.


Recommendations

Monash University needs to significantly improve its management of email. There are good guidelines available on what to do and how to do it. The challenge will be to generate a sense of the importance of this issue, to come up with policies that have a chance of being followed, and to put in place systems to make this as painless as possible. Pending this work on an E-Mail Strategy (within the larger Information Management Strategy Framework), some initial recommendations are:

CE/EM/1 Develop a comprehensive E-Mail Strategy that encompasses the issues of Availability, Security, Policy and Archiving and is integrated with the Record Keeping Policy. DEFERRED

CE/EM/2 Mandate encrypted authentication to central mail servers. DEFERRED.

CE/EM/3 Encourage digital signing of all email inside Monash University. DEFERRED

CE/EM/4 Implement mechanisms to support automatic disposal schedules for email. DEFERRED

CE/EM/5 Implement Information Lifecycle Management techniques to deal with the growth in email storage. DEFERRED.

CE/EM/6 Provide guidelines to the Monash University community about good email usage guidelines and behaviour. !DOING , including being careful with language used, and writing information subject lines to aid in filtering and retrieval.

CE/EM/7 Pilot shared email folders. with a view to providing this as a university-wide service.

6.8 Web organisation

Background

Monash University has a large and complex web presence. While much of the web content is contained on the central servers run by ITS, Monash University currently has web content spread across nearly 400 web-servers. Some of the faculties and departments run their own servers with significant amounts of content. Many of the Monash University web servers contain publicly-visible content, while some only provide content visible inside Monash University (or that is password protected). The web is already the main public face of Monash University.

Analysis

For our target student market, if it isn’t on the web (or if they can’t find it, which can be seen as the same thing) it doesn’t exist. Unfortunately, the Monash University web presence suffers from a number of difficulties. A short initial list might include the following:

• there is no over-arching web strategy to guide the management of this important area

• there is no clear demarcation between intranet content (intended for members of the various Monash University communities) and extranet content (intended for those outside Monash University)

• much of the intranet content is organised in ways that make it difficult to locate or use

• the branding of publicly-visible web-content is sporadically and inconsistently applied



• the usability of much of the Monash University web-presence ranges from adequate to sub-standard

• there is no clear demarcation between what should appear on faculty-branded servers and what on university-branded servers

• the governance around what is published and when it is updated is inconsistent or non-existent

• there is little centrally-resourced support for organisational units who need assistance with their web presence

• the current Monash University web search engine is outdated and lacking in critical functionality

• there is little use of metadata to tag and search content.

Recommendations

CE/WO/1 Develop a comprehensive over-arching web strategy as a matter of urgency. DONE.

CE/WO/2 Investigate the case for co-ordinated provision of a Monash University intranet presence. !DOING, integrating and linking content housed on central and Faculty/Division servers, and utilising standard tools and navigation.

CE/WO/3 Provide better support for university web activities. DEFERRED.

6.9 Web content management

Background

At present there are approximately 500,000 – 750,000 Monash University web pages. Prior to the introduction of the Web content management system all these pages were edited on local machines (using software like Dreamweaver) and then uploaded to the production server. Once the pages were uploaded, they were immediately visible to the world.

In 2003, Monash University licensed a number of products from Interwoven to improve this process: Teamsite provides a suite of integrated services for collaborative document management and rich media asset management. Metatagger provides metadata management and automatic metadata generation. OpenDeploy provides scripted and metadata-driven deployment of content to a range of different delivery targets. These products are being progressively rolled out at Monash University for managing Web content but are capable of being used more widely for other uses, including potentially generating multiple outputs from a single source (see 5.2 Information sources)33.

Analysis

The introduction of the Web content management system has enabled:

• web authorship without complex technical knowledge

• support for the new brand

33 The project website for the implementation of these products is at http://www.its.monash.edu.au/projects/webcms/index.html


http://www.its.monash.edu.au/projects/webcms/index.html

• workflow processes including authorisation processes

• enforced periodic review of web pages for currency

• template driven publishing to ensure consistency of look and feel

• management of web content over time

• multi location output to ensure consistency of information across the web site.

However, a significant proportion of the total Monash University Web offering is still managed in a manual way. There are a number of issues with this approach:

• pages are not tracked or authorised in any standard or consistent fashion

• web site management/maintenance is ad hoc

• web content is not managed so that it can be retained as evidence (thus exposing Monash University to potential litigation)

• there is a significant risk that out of date or incorrect material is displayed on the web

• there is no way to proof web content prior to it being public.

The Web content management system has not yet been extended to all of these manually managed pages. The rollout has been delayed for a number of reasons:

• the new Monash University rebranding (which was finalised during the Web CMS implementation) required the creation of a new set of standard templates to match the new look and feel

• there was insufficient recognition of the amount of work involved for staff in business units and in ITS

• an over-emphasis was placed on replicating the functionality in the existing environment versus rolling out a relatively generic out-of-the-box offering

• a number of bugs were discovered in the software

• there was (with the benefit of hindsight, and given the demand for the technology) inadequate initial resourcing.

Despite this, the Web content management system has significant potential. Monash University needs to do a better job of managing the complexity and size of its web content. Using a content management system is clearly the right general approach to tackling this challenge. Teamsite is a mature product with a great deal of functionality that can be used in a variety of ways around Monash University, including its application to single-source publishing. This is an initiative that must be supported and followed through.

Recommendations

CE/WCM/1 Ensure that adequate resources are provided to ensure the rapid and successful standardised rollout of the Web content management system to all the centrally-hosted web content. !DOING.

CE/WCM/2 Investigate other areas within Monash University that could make use of either Teamsite or Metatagger technology. !DOING.



CE/WCM/3 Monitor the approach being trialled by Deakin University to use Teamsite as a generic Digital Object Management System. DONE34.

6.10 File sharing

Background

As part of the routine work of Monash University, people need to share files with each other. Often this is done by placing files in a shared location where others within a workgroup can access them (for other ways of sharing files see Collaboration Support below). The main system used for this purpose at Monash University is the Novell shared drive system. More correctly known as Netware File Services, this provides both private data storage and shared data storage for groups at a number of organisational unit levels within Monash University. The Netware environment (of which this is a part) also provides the main login authentication for staff and students, printing services and application installation and distribution

Analysis

The Netware File Services are less used than they might be for a variety of reasons:

• until recently they have not been easily accessible from off-campus locations

• they are regarded as unreliable

• the cost for storage space acts as a disincentive to use.

Some of these reasons are no longer valid, and others are being addressed by the current rollout of Netware 6. There are also a number of possible alternative technologies to the Netware File Services that could be considered. Note that not all of these would provide the same functionality, nor would they necessarily address all the above issues.

• Linux-based file services would provide much of the same functionality, but at a potentially lower license cost.

• Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) based file services would also provide much of the same functionality. These file services are accessible to Windows users as ‘web folders’ and to Macintosh users directly in the Finder. In addition, files stored in this way would be useable from any location, and could be linked to Monash University Directory Services Teams for access rights.

Recommendations

CE/FS/1 Review provision of shared file services to university, possibly as part of the proposed review of /collaboration/workgroup software (see 6.11: Collaboration support). DEFERRED.

CE/FS/2 Review the charges for Novell storage, and clearly communicate the reasons for the cost to end-users. DONE.

CE/FS/3 Provide guidance to users on how best to make use of shared file storage (naming conventions, suggested folder structures, use of iFolder). !DOING.

34 Some information about this initiative is available online at http://www.deakin.edu.au/doms/.


http://www.deakin.edu.au/doms/

6.11 Collaboration support

Background

The need to collaborate exists across Monash University in each of the realms of activity identified in section 5.1:

• educators need to collaborate on the creation or updating of teaching materials

• researchers need to collaborate while researching, writing conference papers or journal articles, and submitting grant proposals

• administrators need to collaborate when writing reports, creating strategy or undertaking new initiatives

• commercial intellectual property managers need to collaborate with the generators of this intellectual property in the Faculties.

All of the above examples clearly demonstrate the nexus between content-creation and collaborative activity, a nexus that also appears prominently in the research literature.

Increasingly this collaboration needs to occur across organisational boundaries (including outside Monash University), across geographical boundaries, and across time zones. This brings with it a range of technical and governance challenges.

The need for better collaboration support was identified in the Information Technology Strategic Plan 2004 Update, the Support Services Plan 2005 Update and during the Research Information Seminar held in May 2004. It will become a major issue as Monash University moves into e-Research and the activities that will coalesce around the Synchrotron.

Analysis

The current collaboration technology of choice for most users is the use of email to send out Microsoft Word documents. This has a number of problems:

• it is difficult to be sure what is the current version of a document in progress

• it is onerous and error-prone to collate edits/comments from many co-authors

• there is no location where associated materials can easily be stored and accessed

• discussions are not archived in an accessible location.

These issues are not, of course, peculiar to Monash University. A range of technology options are available to support distributed collaboration. These range from commercial software such as Interwoven’s Teamsite MP and the Oracle Collaboration Suite through open-source solutions such as TWiki-spaces and PHPCollab through to integration of existing services in a portal environment.

These systems provide some of the following functionality:

• shared discussions that are stored and can be searched

• instant messaging

• collaborative online document editing

• shared publishing spaces

• shared online whiteboards



• desktop videoconferencing

• peer-to-peer file management environments

• searchable and expandable knowledge spaces.

It is quite likely that what will be necessary will be a number of special-purpose collaboration environments, structured around specific problems. This is the model being pursued by the University of California (Los Angeles) with their Scholars’ Portals initiative, and was supported by a number of eResearch/eScience presentations delivered at the inaugural Australian Campus Architectural Middleware Planning (CAMP) Workshop35, held at Griffith University in December 2004.

Recommendations

CE/CS/1 Undertake a review of possible collaboration/workgroup technologies , including the following aspects:

• user requirements across the differing realms of Monash University

• implications for existing messaging, scheduling and document sharing infrastructure

• international developments and standardisation activities. !DOING

CE/CS/2 Source, pilot and implement a restricted set of collaboration technologies consistent with the results of the above review. !DOING.

6.12 Application integration

Background

Monash University is reliant on a number of centrally-provided information systems. While these systems are designed to deal with particular silos of university activity, there are an increasing number of situations in which it is either desirable or essential to integrate data or functionality across two or more systems.

At present there is no systematic approach to this application integration, and successive approaches to integrate applications have been handled separately in a point-to-point fashion. As more services move online, it is becoming increasingly difficult to support the needs of Monash University and rollout new integrated solutions efficiently and effectively.

In some cases different interfaces to applications are generating basically the same information, with some variation in formatting or minor attributes being the only difference. In other cases, the interface mechanism involves shipping across a full extract of all the information existing in the source applications, whereas the target application really only requires information about what has changed.

Of greater concern is the lack of any documentation of the authoritative source of information (see section 5.2: Information sources). Because of this and the absence of an enterprise data model, data is sometimes obtained from the most convenient, rather than the authoritative, source.

35 Presentations from this event are online at http://www.aarnet.edu.au/events/middle/2004/presentations/.


http://www.aarnet.edu.au/events/middle/2004/presentations/

Analysis

A number of informants identified issues with having to synchronise/reconcile information between SAP and either Voyager (the Integrated Library Management System) or ACCPAC (the accounting package used by Monash Commercial, Monash International, Monash South Africa and Monash Malaysia). These are specific instances of a more general problem.

Information Technology Services has already commissioned an analysis of this application integration issue. The consultants, Oracle Corporation, have shown that the complexities of point-to-point custom interfacing could be eliminated by adoption of a ‘hub-and-spoke’ model for integration. All communications between applications occur through a single hub which provides a central point of control and management.

Implementing this solution would:

• improve the efficiency and accuracy of data feeds between applications

• significantly reduce the effort required to integrate new systems

• provide a single point where integrated reporting may be possible.

Recommendations

CE/AI/1 Pilot an application integration solution based on a hub-and-spoke model, then implement across the major central applications. !DOING by providing resources within ITS to design, develop and implement interfaces.

CE/AI/2 Develop an enterprise-wide data model for Monash University, and publish authoritative sources of information for Monash University entities. !DOING

6.13 Integrated reporting

Background

As indicated above, Monash University is increasingly reliant on centrally-provided systems. As this reliance increases, there is a corresponding increasing demand from divisions and faculties to access reports across the range of administrative, teaching and research applications. At present there is no mechanism by which data from the student, financial, human resource and physical resource collections may be drawn together for strategic or even tactical analysis. A number of the existing silo applications provide inadequate support for end-user ad hoc queries and there can be delays in meeting requests for custom reports. This means that decisions are being made on the basis of incomplete, out-of-date, inaccurately-joined or inconsistently interpreted information sources.

Analysis

Monash University needs to meet the reporting needs of users of centrally-provided systems. Comments on deficiencies with existing reports and the reporting process were the most common theme in the data-collection interviews. Meeting these needs will require a co-ordinated approach to provide:

• ad hoc reporting that can be driven by end-users (with appropriate access rights)

• reports and data-matching across application silos

• better targeted creation and modification for reports that need to be managed centrally.



This approach will need to be governed by a good understanding of what users require, an awareness of what the current technology makes possible and a commitment to meet the needs of the users.

Recommendations

CE/IR/1 Develop a reporting strategy to ensure better management information from and across existing silos. DEFERRED.

CE/IR/2 Create a reporting strategy group to ensure continued and enhanced co-operation between areas providing and using reports. !DOING.

CE/IR/3 Develop a timeline for delivering increased reporting functionality. DONE.

CE/IR/4 Investigate the possibility of using the proposed application integration hub (see 7.12: Application integration) as a way of facilitating better cross-application reports. !DOING.

CE/IR/5 Continually promote and make available to the whole university reports that have been produced on request from particular groups. !DOING.

6.14 Metadata

Background

Metadata is usually defined as data about data. ISO 15489 defines it as “data describing context, content and structure of records and their management through time.”36. Metadata can take many forms: descriptive, administrative, structural, technical or archiving. Metadata is increasingly being used in a range of information systems, not just those associated with the library world. Digital repositories will require metadata, however there are few standards, schema and guidelines ready for immediate application.

Analysis

Led by the library, Monash University has been active in using metadata for some time. The library utilises metadata for collection purposes and has also been providing expert advice to other metadata-related initiatives across the university. One of these initiatives, the Web Content Management Systems Metadata Working Party, has been developing metadata element standards and guidelines for the creation of quality, consistent, metadata in order to find, reuse, manage and maintain web content in the Teamsite web content management system. This metadata will enable content authors and end users to improve searching and retrieval of relevant content. It will also make sites easier to find by the Monash University search engine and shareable and accessible through global services. A great deal of work has occurred recently in resolving metadata and persistent identifier usage in a research publications context in the ARROW project, and Monash University must determine how metadata will be applied to learning objects and research datasets.

Recommendations

CE/MD/1 Develop or adopt/adapt appropriate metadata schemata for appropriate activities at Monash University. !DOING

CE/MD/2 Ensure proper management of metadata applied to information objects, including controlled editing and regular review. !DOING

36 International Standard AS ISO 15489, Records Management, 2002


CE/MD/3 Monitor trends in metadata standards and application. !DOING

6.15 Classification and hierarchies

Background

While noting other classification schemes used in the university, for example those used by the library for organising scholarly information, this section focuses on classification schemes for organisation of corporate information.

The Structured Keyword Classification Scheme37, developed by Records and Archives some years ago, is a set of rules for titling records. It describes university business functions, activities and transactions using a three-level hierarchy. The three levels are:

• Primary term: BUILDINGS, GROUNDS AND PROPERTIES

• Secondary term: WORKS

• Free text to specifically describe the subject: REFURBISHMENT OF BUILDING 1, CLAYTON CAMPUS

This scheme is primarily subject based. This keyword classification scheme was originally introduced to the University in 1987, but was completely revised in 1995-96. It is largely used by Records and Archives staff.

Analysis

At present, corporate information at Monash University is arranged in a number of different ways. A user might have one hierarchical organisation for their local hard disk, a different hierarchy on their Netware U drive, a different one again on the shared Netware drive to which they have access, and a different one again for their email folders. As well as these locations, information will probably be organised differently again on their staff intranet pages as well as on the public web.

This situation arises from a number of causes. One of these is that there is no agreed way of describing what Monash University does. Another is that these various systems either provide no guidance to users or are structured according to idiosyncratic schemes. The LOCATE38 Language Classification Tool, currently nearing completion by Records and Archives, aims to replace the Structured Keyword Classification Scheme with a new Language Classification Tool for the consistent classification of business information. This new Monash University thesaurus will consist of a controlled vocabulary based on classifying/naming information according to its purpose rather than just its content. Over time, LOCATE could serve as the basis for a classification scheme to be implemented across a number of university systems, including the web content management system, electronic and hard copy directories, and other existing and future electronic document management systems used across Monash University. Because it is being developed by Monash University staff, it will describe what Monash University does in terms that university staff can understand.

Recommendations

CE/CH/1 Commit sufficient resources to the LOCATE project. DONE to ensure that it delivers a comprehensive classification scheme in a timely fashion.

37 SKCS – more details at http://www.adm.monash.edu.au/records-archives/rmo/monash-only/skcs.html38 More information about the LOCATE project is available at http://www.adm.monash.edu.au/records-archives/projects/locate/ - access to Monash IP addresses only.


http://www.adm.monash.edu.au/records-archives/rmo/monash-only/skcs.html

http://www.adm.monash.edu.au/records-archives/projects/locate/

http://www.adm.monash.edu.au/records-archives/projects/locate/


CE/CH/2 Ensure that all new staff are provided with folder hierarchies based on the LOCATE classification work. DEFERRED for their email, local hard disk, and network drives.

CE/CH/3 Progressively migrate existing hierarchies across to the LOCATE hierarchy on an as-required basis, and where this makes most sense in operational or strategic terms. DEFERRED.

6.16 Campus aspects

Background

Monash University has grown since its inception from a single-campus institution to one that now covers six major campuses in Victoria, 2 campuses overseas (Monash South Africa and Monash Malaysia), a range of study centres/joint ventures (Prato, Potsdam, Ulm, King’s College) and a host of associated hospitals, rural health centres and the like. This growth has occurred through a mix of amalgamation, joint ventures and greenfields creation.

Analysis

In common with many of the Dawkins amalgamation universities, this expansion has not yet been fully reflected in some of the organisational culture and the information systems which reflect that culture. One of the pieces of metadata (see 6.14: Metadata) missing from some information systems is a ‘campus’ flag. Where this flag is present (as it is in Callista) it may need the creation of custom reports to make it visible. A number of respondents reported that this made it difficult to obtain a campus view of Learning & Teaching, Research, or Cultural Activities & Community Engagement. Example queries that are reportedly difficult to answer are things like:

• How many research grants (and to what value) have Peninsula staff attracted this year?

• Are there any staff who are full-time at Berwick only?

• How many units are not taught at Gippsland?

As a result, staff at campuses other than Clayton often need to run shadow systems to track this sort of information.

Recommendations

CE/CA/1 Make campus coding a mandatory data element (where appropriate) for all existing and new information systems. DEFERRED.

6.17 Local databases

Background

Many areas of Monash University currently maintain their own local databases and database-driven applications. There are at least two reasons for this:

• to meet needs that are not met by university-wide services (yet)

• to meet needs that are sufficiently idiosyncratic that they probably won’t ever be met by central services.

These databases are usually created using Microsoft Access, although some are also built using Filemaker. In some cases, Excel spreadsheets are used instead of databases as a tracking mechanism.


Analysis

These local databases have the following issues:

• Expertise in their creation and maintenance is often located in a small number of people (often just one or two).

• The systems are often not documented, resulting in significant support difficulties if the creator leaves.

• Storage of the data is often on desktop computers without enterprise-class storage, hardware redundancy, or environmental support. In some cases these computers are old hardware running unsupported operating systems just to keep unsupported databases working.

• Access to these databases is either difficult or impossible over the web.

• There is no way to ensure preservation of the data (or access to the data) as part of the archival record.

It is clear that there is an ongoing need for Faculties/Divisions to manage their own local databases to complement university-wide systems. The requirement therefore is to provide guidelines and support for such creation in a way that both meets local functional requirements and university information security/information architecture requirements.

A preferable alternative to local databases running on single workstations with (usually) local storage would be the use of the HTMLdb technology to which Monash University now has access via its Oracle site license. This has the following advantages with respect to the current Access/Filemaker solutions:

• Centralised enterprise level data storage and management

• Web based access to application design and provision

• Thin client cross-platform web pages using HTML and Javascript only, without the need for any Active-X controls

• Centralised business logic with separation from presentation and data storage layers

• Easier read access to data held in existing central information systems such as Callista.

Recommendations

CE/LD/1 Provide and adequately resource a central service to support new database applications for local needs. DEFERRED.

CE/LD/2 Identify local database systems which are candidates for migration onto the new central service and then undertake this migration. DEFERRED.

6.18 Information skills

Background

Monash University staff are operating in an information environment that is increasingly sophisticated and complex. A number of respondents reported feeling overwhelmed by the volume of information that they needed to deal with, a perceived lack of skills, and the range of information systems with which they needed to interact.



Analysis

There are a number of issues that need to be tackled here. The information systems issues are dealt with in other sections. The skills issues need to be tackled both for new and existing staff, as well as for students. Existing information and computer literacy skills development programs being run by the Library and Information Technology Systems are noted and endorsed, although they are otherwise out of the scope of this document.

A number of informants talked about general issues to do with information technology training opportunities. These included:

• the need for more tailored training and more use of ‘train-the-trainer’

• the problem of staff being blocked from access to systems until they had completed the required training (even though the required courses ran infrequently)39

• the claim that training took too long and disrupted the work that needed to get done

• no acknowledgement of internal training processes within units.

Recommendations

CE/ISK/1 For new staff, ensure a much greater emphasis on information systems and information management skills in the orientation programs. !DOING.

CE/ISK/2 For existing staff, provide structured training in existing systems (i.e. email). !DOING.

CE/ISK/3 For all staff, ensure that the introduction of any new information system or guideline is accompanied by a carefully structured and presented training program, coupled with user-centred online resources. !DOING.

CE/ISK/4 Note and endorse existing information and computer literacy skills development programs being run by the Library and Information Technology Systems. DONE.

6.19 Search support

Background

The ability to search for information is complementary to the ability to browse/navigate. Research into information use across email, web, and file system environments has shown the importance of providing both modalities. Some users preferentially use one over the other, while other users switch between search and browse based on task.

Monash University currently has a number of information environments that support search in one way or another:

• Email

Searching by email header or contents is a feature of the mail server. It can be accessed either using a standalone email client or the web client. In addition, many email clients support searching the body of email messages.

39 This led to a range of creative but undesirable workarounds…


• Web

An old version of the Ultraseek search engine indexes much of the content on the centrally-hosted web servers. Monash University has now licensed Verity K2 as a replacement. Other web servers may have a different or no search engine.

• Netware file services

No native search support. Relies on whatever search is supported by the end-user’s desktop operating system (either native or as a separate utility)

Analysis

Each of the above search environments works in a different way. The look and feel of the user interface is different, the syntax for the search commands is different and the ranking of returned results is different. This places an extra cognitive load on users and means that they may search less than they might or take longer to locate information. A number of integrated search systems are now becoming available. Some of these are hosted on a server, and thus available remotely via a web client. Others, such as Google Desktop Search or Copernic are add-on utilities for a user’s desktop. Lastly, both Windows (in the Longhorn operating system due in 2006) and Mac OS X (in 10.4, codenamed Tiger, due in the first half of 2005) will have integrated search systems.

Recommendations

CE/SS/1 Accelerate the replacement of the Ultraseek search engine with Verity K2. DONE

CE/SS/2 Investigate additional ways to optimise search performance (retrieval and recall) that Verity makes possible. !DOING

CE/SS/3 Investigate the desirability of implementing server-based cross repository searching (‘Monash MetaSearch’). DEFERRED

CE/SS/4 Investigate a desktop-based search utility as a possible Monash standard operating environment addition. DEFERRED

CE/SS/5 Investigate converging the descriptive metadata across repositories to improve ability to search consistently across such repositories.

DEFERRED



7 Information Management for Learning and Teaching Scope

This section deals with information management issues (and their associated systems) that apply to the realm of learning and teaching.

Basis

This section is based on data-collection interviews conducted with40:

• Professor Alan Lindsay, DVC (Academic)


• Professor Denise Kirkpatrick, Professor Learning & Teaching and Director, Centre for Learning and Teaching Support

• Professor Graham Webb, Director Centre for Higher Education Quality

• Professor Sally Joy, Associate Dean (Graduate Teaching), Faculty of Business and Economics

and on an analysis of the Learning and Teaching Plan, the relevant sections of the IT Strategic Plan Update 2005, and the Learning and Teaching IT projects for 2005.

7.1 Student management

Background

The student management system used at Monash University is Callista SMS, from Callista Software Services41. In 2003, the Commonwealth Government introduced its Higher Education Reform Package Our Universities: Backing Australia’s Future, implemented in legislation as the Higher Education Support Act. It aims to establish a new web-based information management system (The Higher Education Information Management System – HEIMS42) to assist in the management of the new reform arrangements for students and higher education providers.

Analysis

In order to meet the requirements of the HEIMS (which are non-negotiable), our student administration system (Callista) will need to undergo a significant program of functional enhancement, which Callista Software Services are undertaking to provide. Implementing the new software at Monash University will require a program of six-weekly upgrades (plus associated testing and quality assurance), running well into 2005..

The distributed nature of Callista, and the significant number of end-users (over two hundred) mean that quality control over data entered is a significant issue. The university needs to ensure adequate training for users, and provide clear guidelines on information quality and security.

40 Note: for sections 7 through 11, the incumbents and the titles for those interviewed are those as of the time of interview. 41 Their website is at http://www.callista.com.au/. 42 The HEIMS website is at http://www.dest.gov.au/highered/heims/default.htm.


http://www.callista.com.au/

http://www.dest.gov.au/highered/heims/default.htm

Recommendations

LT/SM/1 Ensure that adequate resources are provided to ensure the successful rollout of new versions of the Callista SMS. DONE.

LT/SM/2 Provide improved guidelines and training for Callista users, as well as improved data validation routines. .

LT/SM/3 Continue the environmental scan for possible successor technologies to Callista SMS. !DOING.

7.2 Learning management

Background

The main Monash University Learning Management System is currently WebCT43. The Faculty of Business and Economics began using WebCT in 1999, and Monash University decided to adopt it university-wide in late 2001. The Faculty of Business and Economics and ITS are currently both running separate installations of WebCT Campus Edition. The WebCT project team is currently piloting WebCT Enterprise Edition (also known as Vista). This has the potential to deliver substantial benefits over the existing campus edition, including a vastly improved staff and student interface, devolved and more automated administration at faculty level and further options for integration with related systems such as the Portal and the CMS. It is also implemented in a way that is more consistent with the ITS preferred deployment environment for enterprise-class applications. The plans are to move all students across from both Campus Edition implementations to the central Vista implementation by the end of 2005. Our license requires us to have migrated by 2006.

In addition to WebCT, Monash University also runs a group of systems called the Flexible Learning Support System (FLSS). These are technically for teaching support rather than learning management, but their functionality overlaps in places with that provided by WebCT. FLSS consists of four university-wide systems operated by the Centre for Learning and Teaching Support. These support approximately 12,000 students undertaking Monash University courses/units by off-campus distributed learning and other forms of flexible learning.

The systems included under the FLSS umbrella are:

• Materials Administration System (MAS)

• Despatch and Inventory System (DIS) which includes the video tracking system

• Assignment Tracking System (ATS)

• Course Inquiries System (CIS).

Analysis

Our current WebCT implementation is insufficiently integrated with other applications. There are links to WebCT from the portal, but WebCT does not itself link out to other applications (such as the timetabling system or the library catalogue). It is possible for staff to manually create links from units in the LMS to library resources but this does not occur consistently, nor is it as easy as it should be.

Unlike most other institutions that have adopted WebCT, Monash University has a perpetual license. This means that we are protected from significant increases in license costs experienced by many universities in Australia and overseas. It also reduces the pressure on Monash

43 Company website at http://www.webct.com/.


http://www.webct.com/


University to consider other options for learning management on cost grounds. However, some of the available options may be attractive on other grounds. Some of these alternative software packages are from commercial vendors, such as Blackboard44 and Desire2Learn45. Others are coming out of the open-source community such as Moodle46 and SAKAI47. Some, such as the Learning Activity Management system (LAMS48) – move beyond just learning management to provide additional capabilities.

Recommendations

LT/LM/1 Ensure that all students are migrated to central Vista implementation by end of 2005. DONE.

LT/LM/2 Continue to monitor alternative learning management systems as candidates for replacing or supplementing WebCT. !DOING.

7.3 Learning content management

Background

Our Learning Management System (WebCT) provides good support for a range of online delivery elements, including student tracking, online assessment, file management, and presentation of content. It does not provide adequate support for management of that content.

Analysis

Just as Monash University is moving towards better management of Web content, we also need to do a better job of managing learning objects. Learning objects are variously defined in the literature, but the simplest definition of a learning object is that it is a piece of content that's smaller than a unit or lesson. This might be a simple as an image or as complex as an interactive piece of Flash code. Typically a learning object will carry with it associated metadata that describes the object and its possible application.

Learning Content Management Systems (or Learning Object Management Systems) provide facilities such as:

• rendering from a single master into alternative formats for delivery of content via WebCT, to CD-ROM, or on paper

• version control for learning objects

• structured workflow around content creation, maintenance and disposal

• management of metadata associated with learning objects

• copyright management and enforcement of copyright access restrictions

• resource discovery of resources of interest based on a variety of criteria

• assembly of learning objects into standards-compliant content packages.

44 Company website at http://www.blackboard.com. 45 Company website at http://www.desire2learn.com/. 46 Project website at http://moodle.org. 47 Project website at http://sakaiproject.org/. 48 Website at http://www.lamsinternational.com/.


http://www.blackboard.com

http://www.desire2learn.com/

http://moodle.org

http://sakaiproject.org/

http://www.lamsinternational.com/

Growth in online delivery of learning material has meant a greater awareness of the importance of managing learning objects. Both WebCT and Blackboard are looking to either strengthen their native content management options or to partner with specialist providers of such systems.

Monash University has at least five options with respect to Learning Content Management:

1. Adapt our current Web Content Management System (Interwoven’s Teamsite) to learning content.

o this is the approach being trialled by Deakin University in their Digital Object Management System project49

2. Wait for WebCT to provide adequate native functionality in Vista.

o there is no way of knowing how long or whether this will happen

3. Extend the ARROW repository technology to learning objects.

o the ARROW project is making technology decisions now with a view to this being a possibility later

4. Investigate whether it would be possible to extend and adapt the repository software written to support the WebWorkforce project50. The project has recently been renamed InforMER).

o Monash University was the lead agent on this project but the IP in the software is unclear

5. Investigate whether it would be possible to extend and adapt the PIAVEE51 software being written by the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering.

6. Source a dedicated Learning Content Management System that integrates with WebCT.

o There are a range of these, including at least two Australian contenders: HarvestRoad’s Hive52 and the Learning Edge53.

Making the decision on which option to pursue is not one that should be rushed. It should be seen as being at least as significant as the decision to adopt WebCT and should be resourced and planned appropriately.

Recommendations

LT/LC/1 Maintain a watching brief on WebCT’s plans, the Deakin University rollout of DOMS, and dedicated commercial software offerings. !DOING.

LT/LC/2 Commence planning for a project to investigate, pilot and possibly source a Learning Content Management System using one of the options above.

DEFERRED.

49 Public details available online at http://www.deakin.edu.au/doms/. 50 See http://www.webworkforce.org/ for the project and http://www.sims.monash.edu.au/research/itnr/current/web_workforce.html for its evaluation. 51 More details at http://cerg.csse.monash.edu.au/piavee/. 52 Product website at http://www.harvestroad.com/products/hive.cfm. 53 Company website at http://www.thelearningedge.com.au/.


http://www.deakin.edu.au/doms/

http://www.webworkforce.org/

http://www.sims.monash.edu.au/research/itnr/current/web_workforce.html

http://cerg.csse.monash.edu.au/piavee/

http://www.harvestroad.com/products/hive.cfm

http://www.thelearningedge.com.au/


7.4 Timetable management

Background

Monash University provides two systems for dealing with timetable information: MUTTS and Allocate+.

Monash University Timetabling System (MUTTS)

This provides management of the scheduling of rooms and teachers and students. It uses Syllabus+ software and provides a web-based interface54 for registered users.

Allocate+

Allocate+ is an online allocation system55 that can be accessed from any computer in the world with Internet access. Students are able to browse available timeslots for all enrolled activities and specify their personal preferences for timeslots they would like to attend. Their preferences are collected, ranked, randomised and sorted. After completion of the sort, they are provided with a clash free timetable.

Analysis

MUTTS is currently designed to optimise the timetable by room usage. In practice, it could be used to optimise the student experience or the staff experience. Providing a more user-friendly student-learning timetable experience would help Monash University attract and retain better students. Providing a more user-friendly staff-teaching timetable experience would help Monash University attract and retain better staff. Arguably, either (or both!) of these might be more important to Monash University than optimised room usage.

Allocate+ does a good job of providing an initial timetable for students, but could go much further. In particular, it could be integrated into a student calendar system which would allow students to add their own bookings, or to overlay bookings associated with Faculty/Department/Club events.

Recommendations

LT/TM/1 Investigate ways to use MUTTS to provide an improved staff/student experience of teaching space. DEFERRED.

LT/TM/2 Provide a student calendar, integrated with Allocate+, and taking feeds from a range of other sources of scheduling information. DEFERRED.

7.5 Lectures online

Background

Monash University currently provides access to audio of up to 200 different classes through the Monash Lectures Online service56. This system is highly automated, requires minimal intervention from the lecturer and is rated by students as very successful. Monash University also has a streaming audio/video server based on the QuickTime Streaming Server code but this is currently little used for teaching purposes.

54 Available online at http://mutts.monash.edu.au/MUTTS/. 55 Available online http://allocate.cc.monash.edu.au/. 56 Available online at http://audio.monash.edu.au/mlo/.


http://mutts.monash.edu.au/MUTTS/

http://allocate.cc.monash.edu.au/

http://audio.monash.edu.au/mlo/

Analysis

Increased use of computer presentations to supplement lecture content, as well as greater use of interactive and engaging teaching methods is exposing the limitations of an audio-only approach. Even if the slides used during a lecture are available, the student needs to manually coordinate the audio with the slides, an approach that is cumbersome. In addition, there is no potential for capturing any interaction that took place during the lecture. This disadvantages students who are unable (for whatever reason) to attend the scheduled lecture sessions. Having said that, the current Monash Lectures Online initiative provides a very low-impact solution for the academic staff who use it, and the service is rated very highly by students. The major limitation of the current system is that it is only available from particular lecture theatres. It would also be useful if there were some way to extend the benefits of Monash Lectures Online out to arbitrary teaching spaces.

It would be possible to extend the functionality currently provided by Monash Lectures Online by developing or sourcing a system that would:

• take video and audio recordings of lectures based on a pre-programmed timetable

• make a digital recording of the slides presented during a lecture

• automate the combining of the gathered information to produce a multimedia presentation that would automatically change slide presentations at the correct time to coincide with the lecture presentation

• use state-of-the-art camera technology to capture engagements between teachers and students in seminars, forums and debates.

Such a system would initially complement, and possibly later replace, the existing Monash Lectures Online system. There would need to be careful investigation if the cost of acquiring and running such a system delivered sufficient pedagogical benefits to make it worth doing. It might only be an option in certain settings or for certain classes.

Recommendations

LT/LO/1 Investigate options for a portable facility allowing digital capture of audio in a lecture or tutorial and later upload to Monash Lectures Online.

DEFERRED

LT/LO/2 Investigate the usefulness of providing an integrated audio/video/slide lecture capture and presentation system. !DOING.

.

7.6 Learning and teaching performance

Background

The Federal Government is making available $250 million over 3 years in its Learning and Teaching Performance Fund57 as an incentive to improve the quality of university teaching. Eligibility for funding under this programme will occur in two stages. Stage 1 will determine an institution’s eligibility to apply for funds. Institutions will be required to

Demonstrate a strong strategic commitment to learning and teaching through: a current institutional learning and teaching plan or strategy; evidence of systematic support for professional development in learning and teaching for sessional and full-time academic

57 More details at http://www.dest.gov.au/highered/learning_teaching/p_fund_default.htm.


http://www.dest.gov.au/highered/learning_teaching/p_fund_default.htm


staff; evidence of probation and promotion practices and policies which include effectiveness as a teacher; and systematic student evaluation of teaching and subjects that inform probation and promotion decisions for academic positions. Strategies, practices, policies and student evaluation results would be made publicly available on an institution’s website. (DEST Learning and Teaching Performance Fund website)

Many of these demonstrations of Monash University’s commitment to learning and teaching have significant information management implications, particularly in assessing performance and making the performance readily visible and assessable. In particular, the cost of meeting the necessary regulatory hurdles to receive this funding will be significant to the University with its current unit evaluation processes. These are a mix of manual processes and custom software, and are not sufficiently devolved to the level of users.

Stage 2 will assess institutional performance in learning and teaching. The assessment method is currently being developed in consultation with the sector via an initial issues paper and a process of consultation meetings. The Information Management Strategy will need to respond to whatever assessment method is selected.

Analysis

The exposure of Monash policies, guidelines and procedures can probably be dealt with using the existing web content management mechanisms (see 6.9: Web content management), although the processes for making public information that is currently restricted will need careful thought.

The need for students to systematically evaluate teaching, and to make the results of this evaluation publicly available will require a new approach. The online unit evaluation system implemented this year will not only help to ensure compliance with this new initiative, but will also assist in ensuring sufficient quality measures for AUQA and the University’s internal quality processes. Better information is expected to significantly improve the ability of departments and faculties to focus quality efforts where they are most needed. All these efforts contribute towards the University’s commitment to the process of continuous improvement in learning and teaching.

In addition to student evaluations, Monash University will need to manage records of staff professional development (perhaps using SAP-HR) to provide the required “evidence of systematic support for professional development in learning and teaching”. There will no doubt be other implications from Stage 2, but these cannot be determined until the assessment method is defined.

Recommendations

LT/LTP/1 Implement a way of tracking records of staff professional development in learning and teaching. DEFERRED

7.7 Course and unit information

Background

The Course and Unit Publication and Information Database (CUPID) is a repository of course, unit and other data, enabling online enquiry, reporting and publication online and in print of a range of Monash University publications including the Undergraduate and Postgraduate Handbooks, CourseFinder, International Course Guides and Off-Campus Distributed Learning handbook. CUPID is a web-based system58. Its print-production facilities are an excellent example of how to put the principle of single-source publishing (see Principle 6.2: Information

58 Available online at http://my.monash.edu.au/interactive/cupid/start.


http://my.monash.edu.au/interactive/cupid/start

Sources) into practice. CUPID allows authorised users in Faculties to update and maintain course and unit information, compare changes, and identify key publications where information is to appear. Because of the close alignment between the information that CUPID holds and that held by Callista, Callista database tables are used as the CUPID storage mechanism.

Analysis

The CUPID system was delivered in mid 2001, largely according to specifications. Subsequent plans to enhance CUPID functionality have lost their way due to uncertainty of ownership and funding. Despite this, CUPID has developed into a key system for university. It is also becoming seen as a valuable complement to the information contained in Callista.

Recommendations

LT/CU/1 Ensure that the functionality currently provided by the CUPID system is strongly supported and resourced by Monash University, and appropriately managed as an ongoing operational activity. !DOING.

7.8 Course and unit report card

Background

Monash University routinely collects and stores a wide range of information concerning units and courses. The information is standard across Universities and is recognised as being valuable for the purpose of course and unit management.

Analysis

Making use of this standard information is more difficult that it should be because it is stored in multiple locations. What is needed is a consolidated single-page report produced on a regular basis that can easily be scanned and interpreted by course managers, Heads of Departments and Deans. Such a report could draw together an agreed set of quality indicators/attributes (such as student ratings, attrition and progression rates, GPA, fee income, numbers), and also allow analysis by time series. The initial focus should be on maximising the benefit from existing data sources, rather than creating new ones. Once the model is developed it could be extended to include course attributes such as CEQ and GDS results. In effect, this is a specific instance of cross-silo reporting. It would also be very useful in providing reports for the AUQA process.

Recommendations

LT/CURC/1 Use the systems implemented for cross-silo reporting (see 6.13: Integrated Reporting) to develop an integrated course and unit report card. !DOING.



8 Information Management for Research and Research Management Scope

This section (as the title suggests) deals with the inter-related areas of information management support for the process of doing research, and for the management of that process within the research realm of Monash University.

Basis

This section is based on data-collection interviews with59:

• Professor Edwina Cornish, DVC (Research)


• Mr Alan McMeekin, Executive Director, Information Technology Services

• Professor Don Schauder, Associate Dean (Research), Faculty of Information Technology

• Professor Max King, Deputy Dean, Faculty of Business and Economics and Director, Monash Research Graduate School

• Professor Sue McKemmish, Head, School of Information Management and System, Faculty of Information Technology

• Ms Pam Herman, Manager, Monash Research Graduate School

• Ms Diane Davidson, Senior Research Administrator (Postgraduate Research Programs), Monash Research Graduate School

• Ms Michelle Lopez, Finance and Resources Manager, Monash Research Graduate School

• Ms Fiona Neilson, Senior Administrative Officer (Examinations and Special Projects), Monash Research Graduate School

• Ms Janet Gaffey, Manager Research Grants and Ethics Branch

• Dr Ian Johnston, Director, Accident Research Centre

and on an analysis of the Research Management Plan, the relevant sections of the Information Technology Strategic Plan Update 2005, presentations by a range of individuals60 to the Research Information Management Seminar held on May 14 2004, and the Research information technology projects for 2005.

59 The incumbents and the titles for those interviewed are those as of the time of interview. 60 Including in particular the presentations by David Saint and the solid analytical work that underpins them.


8.1 eResearch

Background61

eResearch is a new model for research that has become possible and evolved through the rapid evolution of information and communications technology. The term eResearch refers to the kinds of large-scale research that will increasingly be carried out through distributed global collaborations enabled by the high speed Internet. A feature of such collaborative activities is that they will typically require access to very large data collections, very large scale computing resources and high performance visualisation back to the individual researcher. The IT infrastructure that will make these collaborations possible is sometimes referred to as the Grid. This system, under active development, will make possible the “sharing of computing resources, data resources and experimental facilities in a much more routine and secure fashion than is possible at present”62.

eResearch has application across a wide range of disciplines. Some examples include63:

• Structural biology and bioinformatics: the search for new drug docking methods; modelling cardiac function; new detector design for the synchrotron, optimal X-Ray dosing for cancer treatment.

• Atmospheric sciences: modelling the effects of savannah burn-off on climate; pollution modelling.

• Engineering design: optimal antenna design; product design for durability; optimal aerofoil design.

• Complex systems and earth systems: modelling the hydrological flows within the Murray Darling Basin.

• Archaeology: integrating three different digital archives into a geo-referenced GIS support so as to allow virtual visits (through a web-based system) to a simulation of early Pompeii.

• Digital Palaeography: digital representation of the images of 12th century manuscripts, possible through software called System for Palaeographical Inspection developed by Italian researchers.

A number of these examples have a science focus. The subset of eResearch dealing with science is often called eScience. Some of the most demanding applications, in terms of computational power required and the amounts of data generated are in the eScience sector. The National Virtual Observatory in the USA will require the storage of 500 Terabytes64 per year from 2004. The BaBar experimental work in particle physics has created the world’s largest database – 350 Terabytes of scientific data. A digital mammogram requires around 100 Megabytes of data, and the United Kingdom generates around 3 million such mammograms per year. The examples could be repeated across a range of disciplines. Increasingly, these datasets are not just large, they are also complex and distributed, aspects which bring their own challenges.

This information generated by eScience applications is in turn the input to other applications that consume it in novel ways made possible by the new technologies. It also results in

61 See About the United Kingdom e-Science Programme: Background at http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/escience/. 62 Hey, A. J. G. and Trefethen, A. E. (2003) The Data Deluge: An e-Science Perspective, in Berman, F., Fox, G. C. and Hey, A. J. G., Eds. Grid Computing - Making the Global Infrastructure a Reality, chapter 36, pages pp. 809-824. Wiley and Sons.. Available online at http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/7648/. 63 Taken from a strategic initiatives bid for e-research at Monash developed by the office of the DVC (Research). 64 One Terabyte is 1000 Gigabytes. It corresponds roughly to the amount of storage required for the annual production of refereed journal articles across all disciplines.


http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/escience/

http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/7648/


publications that are used by other researchers and educators. Some of those who consume research publications as students, themselves become researchers, thus continuing the cycle. This information lifecycle in a generalised eScience context is shown in figure 8.

Figure 8: E-Science Information Lifecycle65

Analysis

The goals of eResearch according to one of its proponents66 can be summarised as:

• To generate, curate and analyse research data

• From experiments, observations and simulations Providing quality management, preservation and reliable evidence

• To develop and explore models and simulations

• Enabling computation and data at extreme scales Providing trustworthy, economic, timely and relevant results

• To enable dynamic distributed virtual organisations

• Facilitating collaboration within the research sector and with industry, with information and resource sharing Providing security, reliability, accountability, manageability and flexibility

65 Source: Presentation entitled eBank United Kingdom – linking research data, scholarly communication and learning, given by Simon Coles & Liz Lyon to the United Kingdom All Hands Meeting 2004. The full presentation is online at http://www.nesc.ac.uk/events/ahm2004/presentations/237.ppt. 66 Sir John Taylor, former Director-General, United Kingdom Research Councils. See The Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, Report of a Mission to the United Kingdom to examine the United Kingdom eScience Programme in the context of Australian eResearch Initiatives. Available online at http://www.atse.org.au/uploads/escience.pdf.


http://www.nesc.ac.uk/events/ahm2004/presentations/237.ppt

http://www.atse.org.au/uploads/escience.pdf

All of these goals pick up themes already discussed in this information management strategy: managing data, encoding data into useful and trustworthy results, facilitating collaboration in secure and reliable ways.

It should be clear from the preceding discussion that if Monash University is to start to operate effectively in an eResearch context, it needs a significant commitment across all of the following areas:

• computing and communication infrastructure of the kind foreshadowed in the eResearch bid prepared by the office of the DVC(Research)

• information management services and tools needed to curate the data (and metadata) produced by the research programmes (see also 7.2: Information storage and preservation, 7.14: Metadata)

• collaboration support for distributed and virtual research teams (see also 7.11: Collaboration support)

• new publishing opportunities, particularly for disciplines whose published output does not translate well into print (see also 9.4: Research publication).

The establishment of the new e-Research@Monash Centre is a positive step towards this goal.

Recommendations

RRM/ER/1 Ensure that the strategic development of eResearch takes into account not only computing and communications infrastructure but also the accompanying information management issues. !DOING.

RRM/ER/2 Ensure that the ARROW project (see 9.4: Research publication) considers the issues beyond publication arising from eResearch.. DELETED.

8.2 Grant attraction

Background

The advancement of research is inextricably linked with the necessity to make use of research funding. Monash University is seeking scarce research funds in a competitive environment. Success in attracting research grants is increasingly being used as one of the measures of university success by a range of bodies, including the Commonwealth Government and private organizations.

Analysis

There are a number of things that could aid the process of grant attraction. In particular, lessons painfully learned across Monash University on what works and what doesn’t are not being sufficiently shared. In many cases, these lessons are not documented and are transmitted via oral tradition within research teams or informal networks. It is important to emphasise that while grant attraction can be viewed as a zero-sum game across the higher education sector, it is not a zero-sum game within Monash University. Therefore, there should not be any barriers to sharing information about how to be more successful.

What is needed is some system that provides integrated access to the following:

• lists of successful grants by discipline area

• access to referees comments for both successful and unsuccessful grants

• guides from successful practitioners about what they have found useful in the past.



Such a system could well become a core component of the proposed Researcher’s Desktop initiative. It would go well beyond the sort of alerting service offered by the Community of Science, SMARTS or Genius, although it might seek to integrate with these services where this is useful and possible.

Recommendations

RRM/GA/1 Develop a grant information-base, accessible through the Researcher’s Desktop. DEFERRED.

8.3 Research matchmaking

Background

Research is increasingly becoming an activity that takes place mostly in teams. The challenge for both new researchers and for existing researchers is to identify appropriate partners. This has two dimensions: finding those active in a particular discipline area, and finding those active in a particular methodological area.

Analysis

Other strategies in this document (see in particular 9.4: Research publication and 9.7: Research publications reporting below) can help with finding people by discipline. Finding those who are using particular data collection or analysis methodologies is more difficult. This is because the use of such methodologies is not immediately obvious from reading publication titles or even abstracts, and because such methodologies are applicable across discipline areas (which is where researchers tend to look).

What is needed is a system which lists research activity and research expertise by methodological approach (or even use of a particular piece of equipment). This would make easier and probably more likely the serendipitous realisation that someone unknown might have something to offer to one’s research.

Recommendations

RRM/RMM/1 Capture and maintain information about researchers’ use of, and expertise in, particular methodologies and make this visible and searchable through an enhanced Research Directory. DEFERRED

8.4 Research publication

Background

Once a piece of research has been undertaken, the researcher wants to make it public (the original meaning of ‘published’), and there is frequently an expectation or requirement that this will occur. They want their peers and others interested in their field of research to be able to read about (and increasingly view in image or video form) their work and their results. For the last two centuries this has been facilitated through publication in print: journals (whether produced by scholarly societies or commercial publishers), working and conference papers and monographs.

The journal-based system of research publication militates against research visibility by locking up published materials in fee-based forms. If a researcher does not have access to an institutional subscription to a given journal, and is unable or unwilling to subscribe herself then she is reliant on gaining access via the inter-library loan system (assuming she knows what to ask for and has such access).


Space does not permit even a cursory examination of the changes in the scholarly publishing space over the last decade67 but it is safe to say that the existing publishing models are breaking down, evolving, and reforming in unanticipated ways. In particular, the Open Access Scholarly Publishing movement appears to be gathering significant momentum68. There is a growing recognition that improving the speed of publication and the visibility of the published research would significantly benefit the scholarly community. The most promising development on this front is the deposit of research at the post refereed but pre print-production phase into institutional open-access repositories. This means that the research is available as early as possible, and as widely as possible. An increasing number of publishers (including even Elsevier) now permit such deposit.

Analysis

Monash University is already responding to this changing environment on two fronts: an institutional research repository, and electronic publishing. It has the potential to respond further on conference support.

Institutional repository

The Australian Research Repositories Online to the World (ARROW) project69 is a DEST-funded 3 year national demonstrator project (2004 – 2006) under the Research Information Infrastructure framework. Monash University is the lead institution in a consortium that also contains UNSW, Swinburne and the National Library of Australia. ARROW is developing and integrating software to manage eprints, electronic theses, open-access journal publishing, and the data needed to substantiate DEST research returns. The software will deal with a wide variety of input formats, it will store the information securely, and it will make it available through a range of technologies, including indexing by search engines such as Google. The ARROW high-level architecture is shown in figure 9. As one way of encouraging deposit into ARROW, Monash University could ask academics to lodge their papers in the repository when they are seeking promotion. This would be counted as evidence of professional service, one of the four areas of activity assessed during the promotions process.

Electronic publishing

The Monash University ePress70 was established in late 2003 and will formally launch its first suite of titles in early 2005. The ePress will publish new electronic journals or print equivalents for existing journals, as well as monographs, on a fee-for-service basis. It provides a leading-edge XML-based production system, state-of-the-art online publishing and e-commerce facilities, and support for journal types (such as those requiring complex high-resolution colour graphical images) that would not be possible in print.

Those journals that do not need the sophisticated features of the Monash University ePress (either the production support or the ecommerce capabilities) will be able to use the Open Access Publishing component of ARROW. This will allow for devolved administration of open-access journals by editors using an ARROW-branded (and later integrated) version of the Open Journal Software from the Public Knowledge Project71 in Canada. The text of the articles

67 For a much more detailed treatment, see Treloar, A., Hypermedia Scholarly Publishing: the Transformation of the Scholarly Journal, PhD Thesis, Monash University, 1999. Available online at http://andrew.treloar.net/research/publications/theses/phd/. 68 For an excellent discussion of this area, see the preface to the United Kingdom House of Commons Science and Technology Committee Report released on July 20, 2004 and entitled Scientific Publications: Free for all?. Available online at http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39909.htm. 69 Website at http://arrow.edu.au/70 Website at http://epress.monash.edu.au/. 71 Website at http://www.pkp.ubc.ca/ojs/.


http://andrew.treloar.net/research/publications/theses/phd/

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39909.htm

http://arrow.edu.au/

http://epress.monash.edu.au/

http://www.pkp.ubc.ca/ojs/


will be made available online as HTML and/or PDF. It will be globally searchable through Open Archives Initiative – Protocol for Metadata Harvesting service providers such as OAISTER72.

Figure 9: ARROW High-Level Architecture

Conference support

A third area where Monash University could build on its access to sophisticated information technology skills and infrastructure is in the area of conferences. Monyx already provide some services for managing conferences. Monash University could also provide devolved low-cost conference management software to make it easier and more attractive for Monash University academics to run conferences. The Public Knowledge Project produces its Open Conference Software which may be appropriate. The ePress is also available to produce high-quality conference proceedings.

Recommendations

RRM/RP/1 Seek endorsement by the university, through the Vice Chancellor’s Group, the Committee of Associate Deans Research (CADRES), faculties, Academic Board and other forums of the establishment of an institutional repository and encourage engagement with it. DONE.

RRM/RP/2 Encourage faculties to follow the example of the Faculty of Business and Economics and commit to a memorandum of understanding with the library to actively support the library’s efforts to publicise the repository and obtain material for it. !DOING.

RRM/RP/3 Explore incentives for engagement with the repository. !DOING; for example, that academics seeking promotion be encouraged to lodge their papers in the repository (subject to permission by the publisher).

RRM/RP/4 Continue to seek the research papers of individual scholars for inclusion in the repository. !DOING.

RRM/RP/5 Support Monash University related new journals using either the ePress or ARROW infrastructure. !DOING.

72 Website at http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/.


http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/

RRM/RP/6 Investigate providing hosted access to low-cost conference management software as a service to Monash University staff. DEFERRED (and the communities in which they operate).

8.5 Research management

Background

The main application used for research management is ResearchMaster4. This is a client-server application that comes with a number of modules. Monash University has licensed and uses the Ethics, Publications, Publications Web Entry, Personnel, Funding, Projects, Finance and Dates/Actions modules. We have licensed the Postgraduate and Applications modules but do not use them. Modules that we have not yet licensed include the Scholarships Recipients and Contracts modules.

Analysis

RM4 is a traditional client-server data entry system. The developers are adding web-entry and reporting tools but the standard interface is still difficult to use and there are performance issues. Some of these relate to the basic design, and others to implementation decisions by the developers.

On the plus side, the implementation of RM4 has enabled consolidation of a number of databases and resulted in the resolution of vast amounts of data integrity issues (there are still some issues remaining). It also does not appear as though there are many viable alternative systems available.

Recommendations

RRM/RM/1 Source, and implement the recommendations in, the recent independent database review of RM4 conducted by Mark Gurry and Associates on behalf of QUT.

RRM/RM/2 Continue work to improve the quality of data stored in RM4. !DOING. This includes resolving inconsistencies between data matching fields in other systems which feed RM4 (see also the comments on authoritative sources in 6.12: Application integration and Principle 5.2: Information sources), as well as better validation and cross-checking of manually entered data.

RRM/RM/3 Plan for and implement data feeds into RM4 from required systems. !DOING (see also 7.12: Application integration as one possible way to do this).

RRM/RM/4 Maintain an environmental scan for possible successor research management systems. !DOING (such as Callista Research, InfoEd or possible deliverables from the SAKAI project).

8.6 Management information

Background

In order to manage research, it is necessary to have high-quality, current and relevant management information. A number of respondents talked about their inability to get the information they required to make the decisions they needed to make. Clearly, providing good support for managing research must be a high priority. The current systems, for whatever reason, are not delivering what is needed.



Analysis

The issues with management information in the research space relate to its reliability, currency and relevance.

Reliability

The underlying data used to generate management information reports needs to be as accurate as possible. Where it is derived from multiple sources these need to be merged with an awareness of data-matching and data-quality issues. The ongoing work on research data quality is addressing much of these issues.

A number of informants talked about the need for Faculties to be able to manage using staff or research-unit research profiles. These profiles should be based on reliable data about composite research performance across publication, grant and external income, and possibly impact.

Currency

The information needs to be as current as possible. Working with historical data makes decision making more difficult. The longer the gap between the available data and the present time (which can sometimes be over a year in the case of publications data), the harder it is to make good decisions. In the Research Review conducted in 2004, a number of Faculties expressed concerns about delays of over six months in getting access to accurate information about research income in the preceding year.

Relevance

A number of informants talked about the need to provide data on research performance that was relevant to the decisions that needed to be made. This might include things like:

• publications information at an individual level, ideally with linkages to publication impact factors (to identify high performers)

• the ability to view research performance by individual, research group, centre, department or faculty (including aggregating it upwards)

• the ability to view research performance longitudinally or compare year to year

• the ability to link research performance as measured by publications with performance as measured by numbers of higher-degree completions

DEST-driven or needs-driven?

One informant made the point that much of the data collection is being driven by what DEST requires (which changes from year to year). They argued that it would be preferable for Monash University to:

1. identify the things it wanted to achieve in a research context,

2. work out what information needed to be collected in order to meet these goals,

3. collect that information, and

4. let the DEST data fall out of this (which would mean ensuring that certain things got collected).

In other words, the management of research would become more outcomes-driven, rather than narrowly DEST-driven.


Working smarter, not harder

One informant commented that it would be good to spend less time checking things (just in case) and have the systems generate exceptions reports. That way, scarce time resources could be focussed on the things that matter. Similarly, Monash University should try to re-use data already collected where possible for other purposes. This issue of duplication and overlap was also raised in the context of information kept on discovery disclosures, patent information and financial outcomes of research contracts by both Monash Commercial (see also 12.1: Commercialisation management and 12.2: Patents management) and the Research Grants and Ethics Branch.

TARDIS

One response to some of the above needs has been the development of TARDIS (Total Access Research Data Information System). This is a web based reporting tool that amalgamates data from Callista, ResearchMaster and SAP. TARDIS has been developed as an executive reporting tool that will enable high-level users to see all research from all staff, with the ability to compare departments (and faculties if required). The intention is to ensure management staff can make informed, strategic decisions by providing accurate and reliable data on the research activity of staff and departments.

Recommendations

RRM/MI/1 Use the INTSIA methodology (see Appendix 1: Information Needs Turn Strategy Into Action) to take research goals, identify information needs to support these goals, and then take action to meet those needs.

DEFERRED .

RRM/MI/2 Investigate the use of exceptions-based reporting for management purposes. DEFERRED.

RRM/MI/3 Continue to enhance the TARDIS (Total Access to Research Data Information Sources) system to provide access to high quality, current information on research performance. !DOING.

8.7 Research publications reporting

Background

As part of its annual reporting to the Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST), Monash University needs to report on research output for the year that meets the DEST criteria. These criteria change each year73. This report needs to be submitted by June 30 in the following year. Publications in different categories receive differing numbers of points. Publications with multiple authors have the point values divided among the authors. What is reported to DEST is an aggregate number across Monash University. This aggregate is derived from the publication details entered into the Publications module for RM4 by local research publication officers, together with assignment of weightings for multiple authors (or part assignment where some authors do not work at Monash University).

In addition to reporting, Monash University has to keep author declarations and proof of publication for later possible sample auditing. For a journal article this would typically be a photocopy of the table of contents and the full article text.

73 The criteria for collection in 2004 of data about 2003 publications are online at http://www.dest.gov.au/highered/research/documents/specs2004.pdf


http://www.dest.gov.au/highered/research/documents/specs2004.pdf


Analysis

This process has a number of problems:

• The rules for what is eligible typically come out from DEST late in the year, and so the data collection occurs in a burst early in the following year.

• The rules about what information should be entered into RM4 are inconsistently applied across Monash University. For instance, some areas enter all publications into RM4 (not just those that are eligible) to ensure that they have a complete record of publications. Other areas allow academics not to have their publications (even where eligible) entered into RM4 because of their philosophical objections to the entire process of assessing research output by counting publications.

• The process of collecting and storing the photocopied evidence is time-consuming and wasteful of space.

• There is no good way of viewing the total research output of Monash University.

This process will change once DEST decides how to implement the Research Quality Framework, although this will probably take up to two years to phase in. Until then, the recommendations below are still valid.

Recommendations

RRM/RPR/1 Implement a web-based submissions system for research output. DONE. This might be the RM4 publications module or it might be something else provided as part of the Researcher’s Desktop.

RRM/RPR/2 In order to spread out the data collection burden, mandate progressive deposit over the course of the year. DEFERRED (see also RRM/RV/2).

RRM/RPR/3 Negotiate with DEST to allow alternative forms of verification of research output. !DOING74, such as linking to online journals or deposit in an institutional research repository.

RRM/RPR/4 Use the facilities provided by ARROW to simplify the process of collecting research output, making it visible and reporting on it. !DOING.

RRM/RPR/5 Automatically generate (either from RM4 or ARROW) lists of research output by individual, by centre, by department, by faculty and by university as part of a new Research Directory. DONE. Use these automatically-generated lists to replace the current lists which are manually managed to various levels of consistency and accuracy in multiple locations around Monash University.

8.8 Ethics applications

Background

Monash University needs to track ethics applications in three areas: Human, Animal and Bio-Safety. At present application forms for each of these areas are downloadable from web in Word format. Separate Access databases or Excel spreadsheets are maintained in each Ethics area that contain data specific to their area of expertise.

74 The Arrow project is in discussion with DEST about this, and is providing a testbed for DEST's thinking.


Analysis

Some of these separate systems need updating to reflect current practices. For example, the Animal Ethics database needs to be restructured so that multiple species and annual totals can be more easily entered and reported. In addition, the system of downloading forms, completing them manually and submitting them for data-entry into separate systems could be significantly improved by moving to a web-based online form. This would need to be coupled with a back-end database to receive the entered data.

Such a system would have the following benefits:

Improved and consistent system for the entry, maintenance and retrieval of ethics data

Reduction in data loss risk associated with PC based database and spreadsheet facilities

Reduced need to provide IT support at PC level

Improved data relationships between grants information and ethics information

Reporting of ethics matters for a project where it involves more than one type of ethics clearance will be available from one source

Animal Ethics will have better data entry and retrieval for Animal lists and annual totalling

Laboratories will be tracked and certifications recorded on same database as the Ethics clearances – leading to less chances of certificates expiring without anyone knowing

Improved inquiry facilities for research staff through a consolidated database

Automatic Email facilities for reporting and certification milestones

While these benefits are mentioned here in an ethics context, one informant made the point that it would be good to move away from filling in manual forms and use the capabilities of the tools to help us work more effectively, rather than just replicating the features of paper-based systems.

Recommendations

RRM/AE/1 Acquire and implement the RM4 Ethics Web module. DONE.

RRM/AE/2 Use the Projects Web Entry module of RM4 together with the RM4 Ethics Web module to guide users through the process of applying for ethics clearance. DONE.



8.9 Higher degree by research students

Stud

ent

Dep

artm

ent/

Facu

ltyG

radu

ate

Affa

irs

Com

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eeM

onas

h R

esea

rch

Gra

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esea

rch

Serv

ices

Stud

ent A

dmis

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s an

d R

ecor

ds B

ranc

hStart

Complete application for

scholarship

Prepare recommendation for scholarship &

candidature

Assess Recommendation

for candidature

Enter application on MRGS/RS Scholarship database

Continue with application for

course

Application ranked &

recommend for a

scholarship?

Determine overall ranking

Applicant offered a

scholarship?

Enter application in Callista

*1

No

Yes

Define Session details including

admission category & period

Enter Personal details-

Name & DOB

Research Degree Application

Process

End

Enter/check address details

Enter in Course application with course offering

details

Enter Candidature Details

Check/Update commencement

date, Att%, Submission dates

Enter Research Topic (mandatory)

Enter Supervisor details (mandatory)

Enter Thesis details & Research

codes (optional)

Enter Probation details in Milestone

(optional)

Update Prior Candidature in Milestone (if appliable)

Enter Stipend Scholarship details

Enter othe admission details

such as employment,

history/prev. qual. (optional)

Update qualification&

documentation status

Set Outcome status to Offer

Pre-enrol Student Course Attempt &

Research unit

Applicant accepts offer?

Higher Degree Enrolment Process

File all documentation

End

*1 Forms are available in faculties/MRGS,RS/Web*2 Details include-Degree, Dept/School/Faculty *3 ID check done here against surname & DOB for matching students*4 One Correspondence address must be entered*5 Submission Dates will be adjusted in recognition of candidature if applicants has prior candidature with other institutions*6 Some students from other institutions may bring with them a transferable scholarship (APA)*7 Handbook is sent with the letter of offer to student..

No

*3

*4

Yes

No

*5

*6

*2Send

Correspondence to students for offer

Yes

No

*7

Figure 10: Process flow for PhD candidature (Source: SSSD)

Background

A significant part of the research activity of Monash University revolves around the supervision of higher degree by research students, and the work that they contribute towards Monash University’s research output. Higher degree by research completion statistics form part of the annual university returns to DEST, and so collecting this information accurately is important. It is also important to attract good students as they form the basis for the next generation of teachers and researchers.

Analysis

Management information

Good management information relies on good data collection. In considering the data collection activity for these students, it is important to note that the location where the work takes place depends on the type of qualification. Figure 10 shows the flow for a PhD student, where most of the work occurs within the Monash Research Graduate School.

In contrast, for a Masters by Research student (figure 11), most of the work occurs within their owning Department or Faculty.


Stud

ent

Department

Gra

duat

e A

ffairs

C

omm

ittee

Res

earc

h Tr

aini

ng &

Sup

port

Stud

ent R

ecor

dsStart

Higher Degree Enrolment Process

Enter other admission details

such as employment

history, previous qualifications

Enter application in Callista

Define session details incl ADM

category & period

Enter personal details - Names,

DOB

Enter/Check address details

Enter course application with course offering

details

Enter candidature details

Enter Probation details in milestone

(optional)

Enter Thesis details and

research code (optional)

Enter supervisor details (mandatory)

Enter research topic (mandatory)

Check/Update commencement

date, att%, submission dates

Complete Application for

Doctoral Degree

Update qual & documentation

status to "Faculty Satisfactory" if

appropriate

Prepare Recommendation

of Candidature

Assess Recommendation for Candidature

Applicant to be offered

Update outcome status to "Rejected

by GAC"

No

Update Outcome to "Faculty Approval"

Assess recommendation for Candidature

Applicant to be offered?

Update Outcome status to "Rejected

by PHD & Scholarship"

No

Set outcome status to "Offer"

Yes

Applicant accepts the

offer?

Offer letter generated from

template

Pre-enrol student course attempt &

research unit

Yes

Update offer response status =

"Rejected"

No

File all documentation

End

*1 *2

*3

Note:

*1 ID check done here against Surname & DOB for matching students*2 One Correspondence address must be entered*3 Submission dates will be adjusted in recognition of prior candidature if the student has prior candidature with another institutions before.

Enter Prior Candidature as

Milestone (if applicable)

End

End

Figure 11: Process flow for Masters by Research candidature (Source: SSSD)

What this means in practice is that in addition to information stored in Callista, there are a range of local databases maintained by the Monash Research Graduate School and by Faculties. Integration between these systems is hindered by inconsistent data and mismatches between system event types.

One informant talked about the utility of moving beyond simple reports on things like completion times, and instead looking at historical trends and data patterns to make predictions about likely completion rates. One of the responses to the 2004 Research Review reported that many higher degree by research students are required to repeatedly provide the same personal information to Monash International, MRGS and their owning Faculties.

Attracting students

While in some senses this is a special instance of student recruiting (see also 10.6: Student recruitment), there are additional requirements in the research student area. As well as being able to monitor and ‘flow’ potential students from initial enquiry to enrolment, there is the added dimension of matching students with supervisors. There is no system that links students’ interests to researchers or research teams. What is needed are good ways to expose the research activities of Monash University in a compelling way to attract the best possible students. The research visibility activities (see 9.4: Research publication) will help with this, but more could be done to present research activities in more interesting ways.



Recommendations

RRM/PM/1 Ensure that staff IDs for supervisors can be effectively matched between SAP and Callista. !DOING.

RRM/PM/2 Investigate ways to provide better data synchronisation between central systems and local MRGS databases. !DOING.

RRM/PM/3 Provide alternatives to local databases for management of postgraduate student data that is not held in Callista. DEFERRED (see also 7.17: Local databases and recommendation RRM/PS/5 below).

RRM/PM/4 Investigate better support for higher degree by research student recruitment. DEFERRED (see also 10.6: Student recruitment).

RRM/PM/5 Investigate ways of better managing interactions with higher degree by research students. DEFERRED, such as the PORTIA module from Research Master P/L.

8.10 Project-based research

Background

A number of areas in Monash University are heavily involved in project-based research. The Accident Research Centre75 is an example where the entire activity of the centre is based on project work. At any one time the Centre might have 100 projects simultaneously underway. For other areas within Monash University, project work may not be the only thing they undertake, but will be a significant component of their overall activity. An example might be departments who undertake a significant amount of NHMRC or ARC funded projects.

Analysis

The challenge for these areas is that the standard information systems for Monash University are designed for ongoing activity rather than finite project work. Some users find SAP inadequate as a project finance tool, and the RM4 Project Module does not manage all the information that makes up a project, nor is it easy to report from (see also comments in 12.1: Commercialisation management). As a result, there are a number of shadow systems around Monash University that periodically need to be reconciled with SAP.

What is needed is a system to manage contract-based projects from start to finish. Such a system would need to capture, manage and retain as records:

• the original request that was bid against

• the original bid document

• the signed contract

• the contract variations

• the interim report

• the final report.

In addition to this document management, it would need to manage project financing, project organisation, and integration with Faculty-based centres. Such an integrated system should

75 Website at http://www.general.monash.edu.au/MUARC/.


http://www.general.monash.edu.au/MUARC/

allow queries across sets of projects for past activities matching a range of criteria that could be used as the basis for a new bid.

Recommendations

RRM/PBR/1 Identify requirements for a project-based research activity management system across Monash University. DEFERRED.

RRM/PBR/2 Determine how best to meet these requirements (consistent with the Monash University preferred architecture and systems already in place).

DEFERRED

RRM/PBR/3 Investigate synergies between requirements in this area and the needs in the commercialisation management area. DEFERRED.



9 Information Management for Administration and Support This section is based on data-collection interviews conducted with76:

• Ms Alison Crook, DVC (Resources)


• Mr Alan McMeekin, Executive Director, Information Technology Services

• Mr Peter Yates, Director Services and Systems, Staff and Student Services Division

• Mr Greg Connell, Director Audit and Risk Management

• Mr Reynold Dias, Deputy Director, Financial Resources Management

• Professor Don Schauder, Associate Dean (Research), Faculty of Information Technology

• Ms Bronwyn Shields, Faculty Manager, Arts

• Ms Jan Houge, Faculty Manager, Art and Design

• Ms Janet Kemp, Faculty Manager, Medicine

• Ms Glenda Key, Faculty Manager, Science

• Professor Sue McKemmish, Head, School of Information Management and Systems, Faculty of Information Technology.

and on an analysis of the Support Services Strategic Plan 2005, the relevant sections of the IT Strategic Plan Update 2005, and the Administration IT projects for 2005

9.1 Financial information

Background

The current finance system, SAP, was introduced into Monash University as part of the response to the Year 2000 (Y2K) compliance issues with the system at the time. The full SAP R3 offering consists of a large number of optional modules. At the current time, Monash University has chosen to implement modules for Finance and Human Resources.

Analysis

The user interface for SAP has undergone a major change since it was first introduced at Monash University. The initial 4.0 GUI was widely regarded as difficult to navigate. SAP worked with a user-interface consulting firm to produce the 4.6 GUI (the one Monash University currently has deployed). This is a significant improvement, but still suffers from a number of deficiencies.

SAP provides a lot of power for those who use it on a daily basis, but makes that power hard to use for those who only access it infrequently. In addition, many users of SAP only need a very small fraction of that power to perform their daily jobs. It would be much more efficient if they could access these discrete functions in some way other than via a full-featured Windows client.

76 The incumbents and the titles for those interviewed are those as of the time of interview.


A number of informants talked about their difficulties in working in the SAP reporting environment. The process of generating the reports (via the SAP interface) was described as difficult, and the reports themselves were often viewed as being difficult to interpret.

A number of informants reported that they were experiencing problems because SAP expects things to be done ‘its way’ (it was unclear whether this was because of software constraints or implementation decisions). For instance, it is currently not possible to have a number of expenditures listed as commitments: sessional (as opposed to contract) academic staff, anticipated expenditure on electricity/voice/data. This means that the respondents needed to manage these outside SAP, exposing Monash University to reconciliation and risk issues.

A number of parts of Monash University either use an alternative finance system (Monash International, Monash South Africa, Monash Commercial – all ACCPAC) or have a major application with its own embedded finance capabilities (Library – Voyager). Reconciling these systems with SAP is both tedious and open to error.

Lastly, Monash University needs to work more closely with its decision-makers to help them understand their information needs and how the available systems can better meet them (in both the short-term and longer-term).

Recommendations

AS/FI/1 Accelerate the planned move to a fully web-based SAP client. !DOING.

AS/FI/2 Investigate ways to deliver targeted subsets of SAP functionality through the my.monash portal. DEFERRED (see also 7.18: Information portal) or the Managers’ Desktop.

AS/FI/3 Better align the reports produced by SAP with the needs of users (see also 7.13: Integrated reporting). !DOING

9.2 Benchmarking information

Background

There is an increasing emphasis within the Australian university sector on benchmarking. This can be at the scale of the individual institution (i.e. comparing one area with another), across the country (comparing one university with another) or even internationally. These benchmarking exercises are usually for particular subsets of university activity, such as spending on Information and Communications Technologies (ICT).

Analysis

Leaving aside the practical difficulties of carrying out these sorts of exercises (specifically problems of definitions, accuracy and comparative validity), it is often difficult to get access to (in a readily usable form) comparative data across universities. Monash University should take the lead by making available a slice of our financial reports.

Recommendations

AS/BI/1 Put online once complete the benchmarking exercise underway through the University Association for Facilities and Services. DEFERRED.

AS/BI/2 Investigate ways to provide Monash University information against which others can benchmark themselves. DEFERRED.



9.3 Committee support

Background

Monash University, like all large organisations, has a rich and varied infrastructure of committees, working parties, boards and councils (referred to generically as committees in this section). These committees are both generators of information (minutes, produced reports, requests) and consumers (minutes of other committees, requested reports, university information sources).

Analysis

There is significant diversity across Monash University in the management of committees. This diversity includes things like communication with members, operation of the meetings themselves, support for publishing the minutes/reports, information flows between committees, and management of the actions arising. At present, much of this practice is either re-invented anew for each new committee or passed around within Monash University through informal networks of staff. An under-acknowledged part of this story is the significant practice-sharing role played by secretaries, personal assistants and other administrators on secondment from one area to another.

While there is no doubt some reason for local variation, there is probably a small set of ‘best-practice’ ways to manage the work of committees. Monash University should provide templates to reduce the amount of wheel-invention in this area, which is highly inefficient.

Recommendations

AS/CS/1 Investigate ways to better support the work of committees. DEFERRED, including monitoring the trial underway within the Faculty of Business and Economics of a web-based document storage and collaboration system.

AS/CS/2 Provide a small set of standard templates and supporting tools for those managing committees. DEFERRED.

9.4 Policy Bank

Background

The Monash University Policy Bank provides a single Web location for academic, research, administrative and information technology policies. Once approved, policies are converted by the Secretariat into HTML and made available online77. The academic policies are accessible alphabetically or via a navigation system that includes major topics of broad institutional level significance and topics reflecting the student experience. The research section links to the relevant areas within Research Services for policies regarding postgraduate research training and research grant applications. The administrative section contains policies such as compliance. Information technology consists of all policies relating to IT as approved by the University Information Technology Policy Committee (UNITPOL). There is also an alphabetical list of all the policies listed in the indexes. The policy bank also points to a range of other Monash University policy sites.

Analysis

The introduction of the policy bank has significantly improved access to university policies. Nevertheless, there are some areas of the policy bank that could be improved:

77 See http://www.adm.monash.edu.au/unisec/pol/.


http://www.adm.monash.edu.au/unisec/pol/

• Unclear policy owner – there is not always a clearly identified owner for each policy, although this can sometimes be inferred from the policy area or the name of the policy authoriser.

• Lack of structured review process – policies are not automatically flagged for review after a certain interval.

• Version numbering – there is no version number listed on some policies, which makes it hard to identify whether a version being referred to is the most current.

• Policy updating – policy changes have to be pushed to the Secretariat in order to ensure that they are aware of them.

• Inconsistent presentation – not all policies have the same format or descriptive information associated with them.

Recommendations

AS/PB/1 Migrate policy bank onto web content management system. !DOING

AS/PB/2 Use web content management system to provide delegated ownership and structured review for particular policies. !DOING

9.5 Business intelligence

Background

Business intelligence (BI) can be defined as:

[A] broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analysing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions. BI applications include the activities of decision support systems, query and reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining.78

Analysis

Monash University has some components of this definition already, but lacks others. In particular, a number of informants talked about the need to have better BI systems in the area of market analysis. The university currently has no specialist support for collection, storage and reporting of information about target markets. This is particularly the case for Monash International and Monash Commercial, but is also true for Faculties with a large international student profile (such as Business & Economics and Information Technology). Example queries that such a system should be able to support include:

• Where have we recruited from in the past?

• What are the trends in target market X?

• What are the top 50 schools that feed program Y?

Some of this information is not kept at all. Some is kept, but in a variety of systems and needs to be pulled together manually. Very little is kept in a way that supports access to historical data and an ability to analyse that data.

78 Source: SearchCRM.com. Definition available online at http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid11_gci213571,00.html.


http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid11_gci213571,00.html


There is also no facility at present for data-mining, data-warehousing or online analytical processing (OLAP). The integrated reporting initiative (see 6.13: Integrated reporting) may provide some of this.

Recommendations

AS/BI/1 Investigate ways to provide a general business/market intelligence offering across Monash University, including ways for devolved management of information subsets.

9.6 Student recruitment

Background

The two core activities of Monash University are Learning & Teaching, and Research. In order to do both of these we need to attract prospective students (either to coursework-based or research-based programs). The quality of the students we attract should be directly reflected in the quality of the student experience, employment outcomes for graduates and performance of research teams (particularly at PhD level). In addition, overseas students are a significant revenue stream for Monash University. Monash University is increasingly competing against other Australian universities and overseas institutions to attract the best and brightest students. This increased competition needs to be reflected in the efforts we put into presenting Monash University effectively and attracting students.

Analysis

The main delivery vehicle for information supporting student recruitment should be the Web. For this target market, print materials play a decidedly secondary role. There are a number of different things we should be concentrating on to ensure that Monash University appears as attractive as possible.

Branding

The public-facing website needs to be clearly and consistently branded. Marketing and Public Affairs have done great work on this, and ongoing rollout of the new brand in conjunction with the Web CMS implementation will address much of this. See also 6.9: Web Content Management and 12.1: Consequential Strategies.

Information provision

The information provided to students needs to be relevant, targeted and comprehensive. A minimum list of items would be the following:

• Course information delivered via Course Finder

• Accommodation information

• Scholarships information

• Admissions and enrolments policy

• Tuition fees policies and other costs

• Orientation and transition information

• Open Day information

• Possible employment options (both during and after study)


• Research strengths.

In order to maximise our return on investment, we should try (wherever possible) to deploy things that we do for current students to prospective students as well, and focus on providing information at the point of delivery.

Integration

Prospective students will not be expected to know the structure of Monash University to the extent needed to locate all of the above on the various websites. Monash University needs an integrated website to draw together all of this information. Such a system should go beyond just providing information to allowing students to register themselves as potential students. It would also be very helpful if they could interact with an integrated system which would draw together fees, financial aid, scholarships and student employment into a comprehensive system for students which would provide a overall picture of likely liabilities and offsets.

Information tracking and responding

We also need to provide clear and consistent responses back to requests for information. Ideally, this should be via a Customer Relationship Management system which tracks users and their interactions with different parts of Monash University, including education agents. This user tracking should include a way to track their use (either individually or in aggregate) or our web resources. A complementary system (which would meet much of the need) would be to take the technology powering the very successful ask.monash system and extend it for prospective student enquiries. This would ensure greater consistency in responses, and free up individuals to move beyond providing routine information over and over again.

Showcasing

One way to differentiate Monash University would be to move beyond simple static information provision to more interactive online showcases. These could highlight particularly innovative teaching practices/resources, or compelling world-leading research.

Recommendations

AS/SR/1 Produce an integrated website for prospective students. DONE.

AS/SR/2 Investigate the feasibility of extending the ask.monash system to support prospective student enquiries. DEFERRED.

AS/SR/3 Investigate how best to create interactive online showcases for Monash University innovation/leadership. DEFERRED.

9.7 Load planning79

Background

Beginning in 2005, Commonwealth funding will come to the University through meeting a combination of both load and financial targets. In addition to this, other aspects of the higher education reforms introduced by the Commonwealth will create a dynamic environment where the patterns of competition between institutions will be in flux. Monash University has been very successful in the past in meeting Commonwealth load targets, maximising the allowable level of funding per DEST student and avoiding the penalties imposed by DEST for under or over-enrolment. In the future, the Commonwealth imposed targets will be more stringent with a tolerance of only one per cent in meeting the financial target and plus 5 per cent in meeting the

79 This section draws heavily on a submission by University Planning and Research for 2005 IT Project funding.



enrolment target. Financial penalties for over-enrolment and both financial and loss of load penalties for under-enrolment will apply.

Across the University, the dual tasks of load planning and monitoring will become increasingly complicated, not only in relation to DEST funded students, but also for domestic fee-paying and international students. The higher education reforms (Higher Education Support Act [HESA] and guidelines) will add a layer of complexity for load monitoring with additional reporting requirements and parameters.

Analysis

As the University moves into a more competitive environment for domestic and international students, it is critical to the good management of the University that admission and enrolment numbers are planned for and monitored very carefully. To do otherwise carries serious financial risks to Monash University overall and to faculties on an individual basis.

Monash University needs a load-planning tool that will enable faculty managers to plan and monitor load online, at course and taught load levels, and will enable them to undertake initial projections. As a planning tool, the facility should allow faculty managers to modify key computational parameters (retention and taught load conversion rates), set targets for various market segments and student types, test intake scenarios, project load up to five years ahead, store plans and access a variety of detailed and summary reports. As a management tool, the facility should continue to enable the faculties to monitor actual load against target, but also extend its functionality to the admissions process with access to VTAC, direct entry and international student admissions data from the point of application through to offers, acceptances, enrolments and load. Such a tool would both support existing Faculty Managers/Selection Officers and also make explicit valuable corporate knowledge. This project has been funded for 2005 and will continue into 2006.

It should be noted that such a tool would not resolve all the issues associated with Load Planning (although it will make them easier to deal). Other issues related to the inter-connectedness of different parts of the process and the tight timelines. A particular concern is the mismatch between the availability of information and the timeframes for submission. Better and more timely information flows are one possible remedy.

Finally, there should be tighter integration (see 6.12: Application integration) between load-planning and other university functions. In particular, load planning decisions should inform staff and timetabling decisions, and any changes in student load should automatically flow through into budgets.

Recommendations

AS/LP/1 Develop an integrated load-planning tool for use by Faculty Managers, including the ability to look at patterns from previous years. !DOING.

9.8 Fund-raising and development

Background

The amount of funding that Monash University receives from the Commonwealth Government has (in common with all Australian universities) been steadily in decline. In 2004, this funding source contributed around one third of total revenue. As a result Monash University has been relying more on international and local full-fee paying students (see 10.6: Student recruitment). It has also started to think more seriously about ways to increase income from alumni and corporate donations. In 2004, the Vice-Chancellor identified a focus on fund-raising and development as a core part of Monash University’s strategy for greater self-reliance. It should be noted that alumni development, including strengthening the relationship between alumni and


their alma mater, should be seen as an end in itself, not just a means to the end of soliciting donations.

Analysis

The area of fund-raising and development is one which universities in the United States have relied on for a number of years now. As a result, a number of sophisticated software programs are available to support this activity. These programs have either been developed in-house by universities and commercialised or have been written by independent software vendors (ISVs). They are primarily written for a United States context, and may make certain assumptions about taxation and university organisation, but will be an excellent place to start in sourcing software to support the information management needs of an increased fund-raising and development effort

Recommendations

AS/FRD/1 Investigate the most appropriate software (including an analysis of the Advance C/S software already licensed by Monash University) to support fund-raising and alumni development. DONE. Dependant on the results of this investigation, pilot and acquire software package(s). !DOING



10 Information Management for Cultural Activities and Community Engagement

10.1 Cultural activities

Background

Monash University’s galleries, collections, performance venues, exhibitions and performing arts programs are essential components of Monash University. These cultural resources and activities have institutional, regional, state and national significance. They provide an outlet for Monash University’s creative and performing arts courses, play an important promotional and marketing role, provide a platform for Monash University’s engagement with the wider community and form the basis of creative partnerships with other cultural institutions.

Analysis

Monash University’s multi campus nature disperses staff involved in cultural programs, as well as cultural facilities and promotional activities relating to this area. Information management should optimise the value to Monash University of its cultural programs, facilities and resources by supporting their management, operation and promotion. This could include ensuring that the web provides effective information about current events, programs and exhibitions, and utilising standard booking software across all venues. As with management of research output, information management tools should be considered for showcasing Monash University’s collections, especially its visual arts collections. Some of this is happening already in a small way, with the National Library’s PictureAustralia80 harvesting the Monash University archival images available through the MonPix81 system.

Recommendations

CACE/CA/1 Ensure the public-facing websites for Monash University provide clear information about cultural institutions on-campus. DEFERRED.

CACE/CA/2 Investigate the feasibility of digitising Monash University’s visual arts collections and making them available through the ARROW repository or some other means. DEFERRED.

CACE/CA/3 Retain publicly accessible information about prior exhibitions and cultural events for archival and informational purposes. DEFERRED.

CACE/CA/4 Investigate the creation of media-rich websites to complement, showcase or document significant physical exhibitions/events (these websites could then be retained as in CACE/CA/4 above). DEFERRED

10.2 Community engagement

Background

One of Monash University’s defining themes is engagement (refer Leading the way: Monash 2020). This theme is defined as having three key elements: i) leading the development of knowledge and professional practice in order to improve the

human condition;

80 Available online at http://www.pictureaustralia.org/. 81 Available online at http://www.adm.monash.edu.au/records-archives/archives/monpix/.


http://www.pictureaustralia.org/

http://www.adm.monash.edu.au/records-archives/archives/monpix/

ii) seeking to engage with the communities it serves and the employees of its graduates and users of its research; and

iii) building closer links with other organisations to strengthen Monash University’s role in lifelong education and career enhancement of its graduates.

These multiple elements require information management support in a range of ways, including ensuring that good information about graduates is obtained, retained and kept current, and supporting staff and students as they engage in community activities.

Analysis

Community engagement is by its nature ad hoc. Monash University can improve support for this activity by ensuring that accurate basic and specialised information suitable for presentations and handouts is available, and that staff and students know where to find it and how to use it appropriately.

In addition, Monash University is seeking to better engage with the communities located around its various campuses. Once Monash University’s strategic directions in these areas have been clarified, supporting information management initiatives can be developed.

Many Monash University staff serve on a range of external organisations. This might be in their areas of expertise (such as conference committees, boards of professional organisations). It might also be more general (charities, management committees, community groups). At present, this involvement of Monash University staff in community engagement tends to be ad hoc and uncoordinated. The affiliation of the staff with Monash University is generally not emphasised, and Monash University therefore receives less cachet than it should. More importantly, beyond a limited amount of informal time release, Monash University provides little or no support for these activities. It would be possible for Monash University to do much more in the way of hosting websites, providing technology support for meetings and using the range of expertise available to Monash University as a strategic resource to benefit the wider community.

Recommendations

CACE/CE/1 Investigate ways of providing standard presentations and other core information about Monash University. DONE.

CACE/CE/2 Ensure that graduate and employer information is efficiently obtained and maintained, and made available to the appropriate people. DEFERRED.

CACE/CE/3 Investigate ways of providing better information support for community organisations where Monash University staff are involved. DEFERRED.

See also recommendation RRM/RP/2 dealing with conference management software.



11 Information Management for Commercial Activities and IP Management This section is based on data-collection interviews conducted with82:

• Professor Edwina Cornish, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research)

• Jonathan Sanders, Chief Operating Officer, Monash Commercial

• Rolland Scollay, Director, Commercialisation, Monash Commercial

• Susan Wong, Patents Manager, Monash Commercial

• Peter Batchelor, Director, Commercial, Monash Commercial

and on an analysis of the Monash Commercial website.

11.1 Commercialisation management

Background

Monash Commercial needs to manage a large number of pieces of inter-related information to support its commercialisation efforts (both for Monash University research, and in its consulting role). The information covers the areas of:

• contracts

• licensing

• royalty payments (both in and out)

• intellectual property

• partnerships

• corporate governance

• accounting

• statutory compliance.

Analysis

At present, management of this information is ad hoc and inefficient. Some of it is managed using the existing Record Management Office (RMO) system (paper-based management of information, computer-based management of metadata). This is proving to be slow and unwieldy. Much of it is managed outside the RMO either manually or in Excel spreadsheets. This does not provide an adequate system of passive management of the audit trail. It does not provide an adequate active alerting system for compliance and IP infringement risks. And there is no way to search a database of contracts for places where particular clauses (that may now be challengeable) have been used in the past.

Working in this way exposes the organisation to a range of risks due to decisions being made on the basis of inadequate or missing information. These risks include strategic risks (key outputs not identified, performance targets not aligned with outputs, knowledge gaps within the

82 The incumbents and the titles for those interviewed are those as of the time of interview.


organisation) and operational risks (environment and safety targets, failure to meet commercialisation project targets for time, cost or quality).

Finally, such a system does not provide adequate continuity and corporate memory for the organisation. If a business manager leaves, getting adequate access to all the records they were dealing with can be problematic without access to a centralised information management system. Such a system would need to provide automated version management, automated approval and sign off, and fine-grained security and access control.

This need to manage information in support of commercialisation is one that is shared by a number of universities. Accordingly, a group of business development offices in Victoria are partnering to evaluate, source and implement an off-the-shelf system to support research commercialisation. There are a number of such systems available around the world, most of them variants (or add-ons) to standard university research management systems. Interaction between such a commercialisation management system and the existing research management system at Monash University (RM4) is desirable but not essential. RM4 does not have an adequate stand-alone or add-on offering and Monash Commercial cannot afford to wait for them to develop one. Lack of such a system is currently impeding the productivity of Monash Commercial activities and exposing Monash University to IP-related and contractual risks. However, any new system could run the risk of duplicating information already held elsewhere. One informant suggested that what was needed was an approach where individual areas could manage their own data elements while allowing others to access those data for their own purposes. In other words, this would be a federated/distributed system rather a number of isolated/duplicated systems.

Recommendations

CAIP/CM/1 Monash Commercial to proceed with acquisition of a commercialisation management system that supports the key record keeping requirements of retention and integrity in consultation with Records and Archives.

DEFERRED

CAIP/CM/2 Information Technology Services, Research Grants and Ethics Branch and Monash Commercial to investigate ways to integrate the commercialisation management system with ResearchMaster 4. DEFERRED .

11.2 Patents management

Background

Monash Commercial (as well as other parts of Monash University) needs to manage a growing portfolio of patents.

Analysis

At present, management of this information is often done using the uCollect software provided by the Records Management Office (part of Records and Archives). This is proving difficult to use, and data entry is running well behind requirements. In addition, because the patents themselves are stored in paper files, there is no easy way to report across them or search for particular information. Finally, there is no way to effectively capture data on intellectual property assets that are either sold or licensed to generate income for Monash University.

Recommendations

CAIP/PM/1 If the new commercialisation management system provides a patent database facility, migrate Monash Commercial existing records and patent text onto this system. DEFERRED . Ensure that the text of the patents is searchable



(either by OCR of existing page images or by loading the electronic text from the original documents).

CIP/PM/2 If the new commercialisation management system does not provide a patent database facility, use the Oracle HTMLdb83 technology now available to Monash University to create such a database on Monash University infrastructure. DEFERRED.

11.3 Systems integration

Background

Like Monash International, Monash Commercial does not use the standard Monash University offerings for Finance and HR (SAP). Instead, it uses ACCPAC for Finance, PAYPAC for payroll, CBA for Project Finance and manual systems for HR.

Analysis

Because Monash Commercial is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Monash University, it does need to integrate with SAP for reconciliation and reporting purposes. At present this reconciliation is done by Financial Resources Management. This reconciliation does not occur in real-time due to the technology used.

Recommendations

CAIP/SI/1 Investigate use of Application Integration Broker technology to improve speed and consistency of information transfer between systems. !DOING.

83 Product details at http://htmldb.oracle.com/. See also 7.17: Local databases


12 Strategy Outcomes 12.1 Consequential strategies

This document has made a series of recommendations about the need to develop consequential strategies (including integration with the Monash University Record Keeping policy) in the following areas:

• Web Strategy (Recommendation CE/WO/1)

• Email Strategy (Recommendation CE/EM/1)

• Reporting Strategy (Recommendation CE/IR/1)

The foreshadowed Information Management Governance activity (see below) will need to prioritise this work and ensure it takes place.

12.2 Information management governance

The development of this strategy has been undertaken as part of an ITS funded project. A number of the respondents commented on the need to turn this into an operational activity. This would require:

an organisational home within Monash University

a funding source for any required positions

a revised governance structure

It is inappropriate for this strategy to comment on 1 or 2, but it is possible to make some comments about 3.

The current steering committee has been an appropriate way of providing focussed input during the development of the strategy. It is probably too large to be effective once the strategy has been finalised and accepted. A way of dealing with this that has been found to be effective in other areas is to create a new much smaller steering committee and a much larger reference group. The reference group provides a chance for wide consultation and input. The steering committee takes this into consideration when making decisions. A possible membership for the steering committee might be the heads (or nominees) of those areas in Monash University directly concerned with information management: Library, CeLTS, Records and Archives, ITS. An open question that needs to be resolved is to whom should this steering committee report.

SO/IMG/1 Establish an efficient and effective governance mechanism for information management at Monash University. DONE

12.3 Turning strategy into action

One of the challenges for any strategy activity is how to take the strategy and turn it into action. Making this transition is particularly difficult in an area like Information Management for the following reasons:

• The area itself is new and evolving

• consequently there are few models of good practice to draw upon

• The changes we wish to make will potentially touch every aspect of the work lives of the Monash University community



consequently we need to maximise the impact on efficiency and effectiveness while minimising the impact on the stress levels of Monash University staff and students, and the funding required

• The areas potentially affected are all inter-related

o consequently we have to find a way to avoid trying to tackle everything at once.

Despite all this, we want to have the strategy make a difference. There is little point in spending time working on a strategy if it is ultimately not going to make a difference. One of the most exciting things about the INTSIA methodology that the study tour learned about in the United Kingdom (see Appendix 1: Information Needs Turn Strategy Into Action) was that informants reported that it really did make a difference

In seeking to make a difference, this strategy proposes to use a number of different tools (not just the INTSIA approach), under the headings of Deciding What to Do, Intervention Dimensions, and Areas of Change. These tools build sequentially, with decisions made at one stage flowing through to the next.

Deciding what to do

There are a number of factors that need to be considered in deciding what to do (first). These include:

• Monash University’s strategic goals

• the recommendations of this strategy

• prioritisation recommendations of the Information Management Steering Committee

• possible priorities arising from the 2005 Senior Management Planning Forum.

One way to focus the decision-making is to consider the process in terms of the urgency of particular actions and Monash University’s readiness to act. Table 3 proposes some possible types of action for each of the 4 combinations of high and low urgency and readiness.

High Urgency Leadership, Early Adopters, Quick Wins

Quick response, Wide deployment

Low Urgency Training, Workshops, Participation

Timing – don’t wait until it becomes urgent

Low Readiness High Readiness

Table 3: Readiness Assessment (Source: Adapted from LiveLink presentation)

Another way to think about the most effective actions to undertake is to think of them in terms of the cost of any action and the value that will result. Table 4 shows how these two measures combine.

Low Cost Highly Desirable

High Cost Highly Undesirable

Low Value High Value

Table 4: Cost/Value Assessment (Source: Linda Zeelie (EDS) presentation to Australian Computer Society, November 2004)


Intervention dimensions

Once a decision has been made about what to do, it needs to be recognised that any intervention must take place on four dimensions simultaneously

Strategy

For an intervention to be sustainable, it needs to be reflected in university strategy. This might well include both the Information Management strategy as well as relevant strategy in one of Monash University’s key areas (such as the Learning and Teaching Plan, or the Research Management Plan).

People

Any intervention also needs to operate at the level of people. This will probably involve:

• explaining the rationale for it (so that they are brought along)

• involving them deeply in its implementation (so that it meets their needs and they feel a sense of ownership)

• providing training and follow-up (so that it becomes part of their work practices and embedded in the life of Monash University).

Processes

Intervening in how people work with information is an opportunity to ask a series of questions. Why do we need to collect this? Why do we do it this way? Are there other things we can use this information for? We should always take the opportunity to rethink what we are doing, why we are doing it and how we can do it better. Otherwise, we may end up with new information systems that echo the worst aspects of what they replaced without taking advantage of what the new might make possible.

Tools

Lastly, we need to intervene on the tools dimension. This does not just include information technology. It can also include policies, guidelines and instruments like the outputs of the LOCATE project (see 7.14: Metadata). Note that Tools is deliberately placed last. If the other dimensions are not adequately dealt with, any intervention on the Tools dimension alone (as sometimes happens) is almost certainly doomed to failure.

All of these changes (Strategy, People, Processes and Tools) will themselves require careful Change Management.

Areas of change – different approaches for different areas

Finally, we need to identify the areas where we want change, and recognise that one approach won’t work in all.

The areas where we want to drive Information Management changes can be divided into at least four categories:

• new services

• existing services

• new operational activities

• existing operational activities



The distinction between services and operational activities can best be illustrated by thinking about the example domain of handbook co-ordination within a Faculty. An information management service used by someone in this role is CUPID. Operational activities performed by someone in this role include creating documents, processing email, searching websites, etc.

Each of these categories will need a different approach.

New services

Definition: Any new service that Monash University might seek to offer, not just those with an explicit information focus. Naturally, we would be more interested in those with such a focus.

Issue: Ensure that information needs are considered as part of any such service planning.

Approach: Use the INTSIA approach.

Testbed: Research Information (to validate this approach).

Existing services

Definition: Any existing service offered by Monash University, not just those with an explicit information focus.

Issue: Ensure that the service is improved to better meet client needs.

Approach: Start with existing pain-points identified in focus group work or via other approaches. Use a combination of Information Management Principles and INTSIA gap analysis

Testbed: Enterprise-Wide Reporting.

Existing operational activities

Definition: Any existing operational activity performed by a member of Monash University community.

Issue: There are at least two ways in which changes in operational activities might come about:

User-driven

Principle-driven

Approach: The approaches we might take to address these changes are depicted as Tables 4 and 5 respectively.

Testbed: Approach 1 – High –profile area identified through focus group interviews Approach 2 – Management of corporate information as a resource

1. Start with user-identified pain-points

2. Perform a requirements analysis to clarify and consolidate groups of concerns

3. Analyse and identify the underlying causes (which may not be the same as the presenting concerns)

4. Analyse and identify potential solutions

5a: If operational, implement 5b: If new service, process using standard new project prioritisation process

Table 5: Flowchart: addressing user-driven dissatisfaction

The approach depicted in Table 4 is appropriate when the driver is user-dissatisfaction. In some cases the driver will instead be a high-level principle that is not being appropriately followed in some area of Monash University.


IM Principles Areas of desired compliance

Barriers to implementation

Strategies to Overcome

Actions

1.1 Final versions of corporate documents should be stored on servers

1.1.1 Cost of Novell storage

1.1.1.1 Ensure lowest TCO for Novell storage consistent with business objectives

1.1.1.1.1 Identify new storage architectures

1.2 1.1.2 Need for Training

1.1.1.2 Publicise reasons for cost

1.1.1.1.2 Implement new storage architectures

1.3 … 1.1.3 Issue of ‘Ownership’ over documents

1.1.1.3 Provide menu of possible storage options to ensure better fit between cost and business requirements

1.1.1.1.3 …

1. Corporate Information should be managed as a Resource

1.4 … 1.1.4 … 1.1.1.4 …

Table 6: Decision table: addressing principle-driven issues

12.4 Managing the change

It needs to be recognised that some of the actions that may result from the process just described will involve potentially significant change. While parts of Monash University have well-defined processes for change in particular areas84, there is no standard Monash University holistic change management methodology. It will be necessary to carefully investigate and apply best practice in this area.

One possible example is the Office of Change Management at Northwestern University. They have as their mission:

… to facilitate organisational change at Northwestern University. We will help identify potential change initiatives and work in collaboration with academic and administrative leaders to enhance and develop mechanisms for increasing the effectiveness of essential administrative and operational support activities that support Northwestern's core research and teaching mission.85

Some of their current initiatives include:

• Student Financial Services Initiative

o Achieve significant enhancement of service delivery to students in all aspects of student financial services through an integrated service model.

• Research Assistant Scholarships (RAS) Initiative

o Facilitate the ongoing process of developing a revised mechanism for supporting graduate research assistants on sponsored research grants at the University.

• Maximizing the Effective Use of Administrative Data at Northwestern University:

84 See for example the ITS policy for IT Change Management. Available online at http://www.its.monash.edu.au/its_only/policies/ChangeManagementPolicy.pdf. 85 See http://www.northwestern.edu/change-management/.



o Facilitate and coordinate the process of enhancing the use of administrative data in support of decision-making and policy development at Northwestern through the Administrative Data Council.

• Department Chairs/Academic Leadership Professional Development

o Assess the professional development needs of department chairs and other academic leadership at Northwestern

• The Graduate School: Offices of Admissions, Financial Aid, Graduate Student Advising, and Minority Affairs

o Conduct a comprehensive examination of the structure, services, operations/functions, and staffing in TGS

Monash should examine the advantages of having a standard change management methodology and an office to co-ordinate organisational change across the university.

12.5 The Monash University quality cycle

No matter what approach is followed, any actions will need to take place under the umbrella of the Monash University Quality Cycle, with its steps of Plan-Act-Monitor-Review. The Information Management strategy primarily deals with the Plan phase of the cycle. This chapter has looked at some ways of turning that planning into action. It will be critical that the remaining steps of Monitor and Review are mandatory elements in any outcomes from the strategy. The role of ongoing Information Management Governance will be critical in ensuring that other activities are similarly monitored and reviewed.

12.6 Moving from information managing to knowledge enabling

As described in section 3.1, this strategy is focussed on the challenge of managing information, but in a broader context. Once some of the major challenges outlined in this document have been addressed, Monash University should consider broadening its activity and develop strategic approaches to address issues of Expertise and Ideas. This would enable Monash University to truly claim that is a Knowledge Enabling institution. In undertaking this activity we would be able to draw on the considerable expertise in the Knowledge Management group within the Faculty of Information Technology.


13 Conclusion Monash University is an institution whose lifeblood is information and whose wellbeing depends on healthy information flows. All areas in the university rely on quality information (that is both accurate and reliable, and has integrity) to make good decisions and to ensure they do not need to ‘reinvent the wheel’. Information management provides a framework that supports the creation or acquisition of such information and a methodology that manages this information to improve the effectiveness of the organisation. The recommendations in this document detail a programme of activities that will significantly improve how Monash Universities manages this critical information resource. The Information Management Steering Committee commends the strategy to the university community for its consideration and feedback.



14 Appendix 1: Information Needs Turn Strategy Into Action Background

During 2003, Information Technology Services and CAUDIT jointly sponsored work towards the development of an Information Management Strategy for Monash University. Part of this work involved looking at a range of universities in the United Kingdom and the United States to investigate how they approached the issue of university-wide Information Management strategic planning. The diverse range of universities exposed different approaches and organisational models that had been adopted to address different information needs.

Many of the approaches encountered were variations on fairly traditional strategic planning models. One university, however, took an innovative approach and used information needs to drive the translation of high-level strategy into specific action points and milestones. This approach (outlined below) was developed and implemented by the Strategic Planning Office at the University of Glamorgan in South Wales, after first trying and failing to develop a conventional Information Management Strategy.

Information strategy process framework

This university recognized the danger of concentrating on current information issues (a tactical focus) instead of focusing on the long-term information needs of their user community (a strategic focus). They also determined that for most users their information needs are primary, and that the activity of the university should therefore focus on determining how to meet those needs. Implementation of information systems and resolution of technology issues would then flow out of this process. An analysis of their Information Management Strategy activity over a period of two years indicated that it was during the translation of the strategy into concrete actions during the implementation phase that the strategy tended to run into difficulties.

After significant development work, they therefore developed a simple six-step framework designed to translate university-wide strategic aims into concrete actions through:

• “Defining information requirements that are needed to meet key strategic goals and objectives

• Defining the information and performance indicators needed to assess the progress of the strategic goals

• Collating information on current performance and national comparators

• Translating this information into specific action points and milestones both for the University as a whole and individual departments.”86

The framework addresses specific corporate and faculty/departmental objectives in terms of:

Information requirements: what is needed to achieve and monitor progress towards the strategic goal.

Current information provision: what is currently available, including both internal and external provision.

Perceived gaps between information requirements and provision: gap analysis between key requirements and current provision.

Identification of potential solutions: What information/information processes or systems are needed to meet and monitor key university goals and objectives.

86 Case Study on the development of an Information Strategy based on the JISC Guidelines into a practical tool for the support of the University of Glamorgan Strategic Planning Process, December 2000, p. 5. Available online at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/tbcsglam_fin.pdf


Specific action points/targets: development of series of specific action points or information targets.

The process for Monash University, slightly extended by adding a post-implementation review and renamed Information Needs Turn Strategy Into Action (INTSIA), can be diagrammed as shown in Figure 12.

Figure 12: Information Strategic Process Framework

Discussion

This framework derives from, and underpins the key strategic objectives of Monash University. It also provides a clear and simple mechanism for bridging the gaps between high level strategic planning and operational activity.

As more and more of Monash University’s activity becomes dependent on information provision and management, an information-driven approach to translating strategic goals into action should be adopted. The Information Management Strategy activity is well placed to guide this activity.


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