August 16, 2007
Information: It’s at the center now
What is information management, and why should you care about it?
Information management is the term used to describe the storage and maintenance of data, especially large and complex sets of data. It also encompasses those applications that are used to enter information into these data sets and to retrieve information.
At the UW, this information includes how many students are enrolled in which degree programs, how many faculty there are in each school and college, how many employees the University has and what their salaries are, and the budget status of particular departments or programs.
And you should care because, increasingly, information is the lifeblood of the University, both as a business and as a research enterprise. Changes are afoot that hold the promise of making information more accessible, more consistent and more able to meet the needs of schools, colleges and other units.
In November, Sara Gomez was appointed interim vice provost for information management and chief information officer. Her appointment, and the elevation of information management to a higher priority, signaled the beginning of a process that Gomez calls “alignment” — an examination of the information infrastructure to better serve the needs, not just of the central administration, but also of schools, colleges and other units that rely on accurate and trustworthy information to make key decisions. Gomez is responsible for overseeing both information management and administrative systems universitywide.
“The creation of the Office of Information Management was a milestone,” says Provost Phyllis Wise, “and recognizes the role that the central administration must assume in helping administrators and faculty do their work. We live in an information-intensive environment and our people need the best tools that we can provide. We are using a highly collaborative process to improve our information infrastructure. This has my complete and enthusiastic support.”
Last year, a task force co-chaired by Mike Eisenberg, professor and dean emeritus of the Information School, identified a series of issues facing the University, which had heretofore chosen a highly decentralized and incremental approach to information management and to its administrative systems that support the UW’s core operations (including student, human resources/payroll, finance and research). Among its other recommendations, the report called for better tools to enable sharing of information across the University, as well as a strategic planning process to assure that the institution’s needs are being met.
Since assuming her position, Gomez has embarked on an extensive series of what she calls “discovery/assessment meetings” to find out what people would like to see from central information management and administrative systems.
One result has been to structure the new Office of Information Management around four divisions: business applications, community and partnership development, enterprise information services, and strategic projects and portfolio management. The new organizational structure reflects the major issues elicited in the discovery/assessment process — in particular, aligning information management and administrative systems to build and sustain an active and collaborative information management community across the institution, Gomez says.
Three broad themes emerged during the discovery/assessment process.
The first theme concerns expanded strategic partnerships, both within higher education and with corporate entities. Gomez has launched a Universitywide effort to plan for the future of information systems, dubbed the Strategic Roadmap for Information Management and Administrative Systems. Discussions are under way with peer institutions, some of which are participating in a national consortium that is developing applications and standards for information management systems with broad use in higher education. The University also has been discussing its needs with Microsoft, which has a strong interest in providing tools for addressing the University’s business needs.
Another theme was the need for better information management tools. The Provost has appointed a Data Management Committee, chaired by Eisenberg and reporting to the Office of Information Management, with the task of developing consistent definitions of data elements across the institution. One strategy for helping to decide which data elements need to be examined first has been to ask, “What are the top five questions deans want answered about activities within each school and college?” This is leading to discussions among deans and their staff and ultimately will lead to the creation of rules and standards for data definition.
“Depending on whom you ask, you will get different answers to such seemingly straightforward questions as what is a student or what is an academic year,” Eisenberg says. “Having common definitions of what these words mean is not just a matter of making us more efficient. It enables us to do our job properly.
“We have excellent people in place, both in Computing & Communications and now in Information Management,” he says. “The creation of a data warehouse has already been a great step forward in addressing our information needs. In the next five to 10 years we’re likely to see sweeping changes in our information management.”
The Data Management Committee also is going to look at so-called “shadow databases,” which have been developed by larger schools and colleges to capture necessary administrative information. While these systems may make life easier for individual units, sharing the information can pose problems, since definitions are likely to be inconsistent.
“We pay costs for reinventing the wheel at the college level,” Gomez says. “We want to build a systems inventory across the University, to find out where the systems are redundant and where they meet a real need. Our opening assumption is that about 80 percent of the needs for information are common among the various units, with only about 20 percent meeting specialized needs. It’s clear from our assessment that a fragmented approach does not serve the institution’s needs.”
In addition to the systems inventory, Gomez has received the support of Provost Wise and vice president/vice provost Ron Johnson in making structural changes which will help to overcome fragmentation of effort. School and college administrators of information systems will now have a dual reporting relationship, one within the college and the other to Gomez.
“We want to make it clear that information systems and information management is an institutional priority,” she says. “The dual reporting relationship will help bring about communication and collaboration across the institution. I want to emphasize that this is not a top-down strategy. Our goal is to create a more collegial relationship among those key information people in the schools and colleges. Already, we’ve been able to have conversations among them that have never occurred before. We believe we can create a real partnership in sharing and innovation.”
The third theme within information management is improvement in business process and information systems that support the UW’s business needs. Already, there have been important revisions in the Financial Desktop and the development of improved tools for keeping track of Faculty Effort Certification, as well as upgrades in the procurement process and the release of an online timesheet for hourly staff. The SAGE project, a partnership between Information Systems and the Office of Research, has streamlined the grants management process through electronic processing of information.
But the strategy of modernizing existing systems can only go on for so long, Gomez says. “There is a clear need to replace some systems which no longer provide adequate support for our business needs,” she says. She adds that other institutions have announced plans that commit vast resources to overhauling major information systems, and the needs for modern systems throughout the higher education community are great. “We need to build systems that are sustainable over the longer term, that aid our efforts as a premier University,” she says.
The Strategic Roadmap effort will involve representatives from across the University. It will be coordinated by a working team composed of representatives from the central administration, as well as from many schools and colleges. The working team will seek opinion and comment from the University community. The Information Management Advisory Committee, which is serving as the steering committee for this effort, will oversee the process.
“We want to ensure that the Roadmap provides a clear action plan that can be used a framework for making decisions and determining funding,” Gomez says.
“This is all about making our work easier,” she says. “We want to support the entrepreneurial attitude in our schools and colleges by aligning our information systems in a way that they support better decision making.”
