Clive Holtham, Nigel Courtney, Cass Business School; Mark Barratt, Text Matters

The QuBE project is used as a case study to illustrate how inclusion of a multiple choice menu of applications has created a generalisable model that is amenable as the basis for an ‘electronic Base Room’ or a virtual leaning environment.

The aim in this project has been to develop understanding of the type of internal information architecture for quality management in business schools that can:

• Be flexible in the face of constantly changing definitions and national processes
• Be flexible to meet the information needs of different accreditation bodies who have overlapping and sometimes conflicting requirements
• Reflect the performance measures important to multiple stakeholders, again with potentially conflicting information requirements
• Cope with the problems of strong national and international competition for students globally, leading to potential volatility in student numbers and calibre
• Cope with the tensions inevitably present when the business school is part of a larger university that may have a huge diversity of tempo of daily academic life, of professional engagement and of stakeholders
• Cope with the rising career and intellectual aspirations of already well-educated and ambitious students
• Support a delicate balancing act between priorities for research, learning, administration, business relevance and external profile.

The ICT-enabled Accreditation Base Room

The operation of an accreditation Base Room has historically been a largely paper-based exercise. Over time this has evolved to include a much higher percentage of electronic documents. Those involved in quality are or should be much more like a community of practice than a formal hierarchical organisation. The information architecture should reflect that, and needs to go beyond flat e-document stores and beyond classic relational databases.

Implementation of the new approach would require candidates for accreditation to:

• Agree a school information architecture that balances ‘institutional’ and ‘individual’ ethos
• Define formats and classifications for all documentation and databases needed for accreditation

1. In the short term, store information on local PCs in consistent formats and classifications.
2. In the medium term, share all documentation (e.g. via a shared server) so that there can be top down interrogation of
   • the system
   • the automated production of integrated and school-wide Management or Executive Information Systems
   • exception reporting.
3. If necessary, creation of a Management Committee to ensure that assessors can use the system easily.

Our information architecture envisages three levels:

• Institutional Systems. ’Bedrock’ enterprise IT infrastructure covering a single identity/authentication system, finance, registration and personnel/student records. Simple, open standards for interfaces and data exchange.
• Departmentally driven systems. Standardised formats, possibly individual look and feel. The information contained is collected and displayed via the institutional system.
• Local ad hoc systems. Access via the institutional system will still be necessary but less stringent design and classification rules are necessary.

It also envisages the following information policies and vision for Teaching Quality Assurance (TQA):

• Information should be collected once and kept accurate, with clear accountabilities for initial input/accuracy.
• Once stored, information should be retrievable via generic front-end (e.g. browser based) systems with minimal or no training. There should be provision for ad hoc queries and export of data without recourse to experts so that new forms of data and information can be added without major upheaval or investment. ‘Hard’ information systems need to be cross-relatable to ‘soft’ systems, e.g. discussion and opinion.
• In principle, staff and students should be presumed to have access to information about themselves, their courses and progress from anywhere in the world. In a ‘flat’ organisation engaged in learning partnerships, transparency of this type is essential.
• Information needed for Quality Assurance should be an automatic by-product of high quality ongoing processes, procedures and systems. They should not require special or one off information gathering procedures.
• Information relating to students, courses etc must been seen as an institutional, not a personal or departmental resource, even if it is a departmental or personal responsibility to create and update it.

IA for QM: the QuBE project example

QuBE is an FDTL5-funded multi partner investigation into Quality in Business Education and aimed to create a practical toolset to help quality management in the FE and HE sectors. QuBE researchers are widely dispersed across the UK and the time and budget for the project is limited. Therefore harvesting the project’s potential for widespread dissemination demands efficient and effective support for collaborative working.

There are 4 steps in our IA for QM:

1. Community/project facilitation: the design process
2. The information design features
3. System structure and development
   • Presentation and interaction
   • Applications
   • System infrastructure
4. Dynamics over time
   • Reveal and add features
   • Feedback and monitoring.

Outcomes: the QuBE Toolbox

QuBE outputs are presented in a structured form that business-people and senior managers of business schools are used to and prefer - the ‘QuBE Toolbox’ - that the potential user can inspect at various levels of detail. The dissemination manager places Partners’ draft outputs in one of four categories, namely; research reports, quality briefings, diagnostics or supporting data.

The purpose of these information and knowledge management processes is to enable people in a position to make a difference to scan quickly what is available in the QuBE collection – both in the Toolbox and the online library. They can then use hypertext links to drill down for more detail on items that would appear to be of use at a particular time. An alternative access route is provided by the dynamic Site Map which offers a linked list of every QuBE published output. An RSS feed is provided on the homepage for technology enthusiasts.

Conclusions

Our information architecture for quality management has evolved in the course of supporting a series of national and international projects. This experience has highlighted the advantages of an explicit design approach and the use of versatile, professional information designers. The approach can be used to create an electronic Base Room that the uses the same data to offer a manager’s view and an auditor’s view. This enables audits to become largely automatic by-products of ongoing operational processes. Other types of project can gain an extended information life after project funding ends. In addition, we feel that activation of the embedded learning tools has the potential to create ‘the next VLE’.

There is an urgent need for business schools to review their information architectures in the light of the needs of quality management. This is not simply a question of hardware and software, but requires examination of the policies, mission and values of the school.

The full research report is available as a PDF file.