Shared Services Study Report 1 - The current landscape of shared systems implementation and planning for administrative systems in UK FE and HE
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ConclusionsEngagement in shared services 1.Over 25% of the institutions surveyed have a shared service in at least one of the nine functional areas covered by this study.2. Engagement is mostly tactical in nature and is aimed at meeting particular goals such as regional agendas.3. The overall level of engagement in both sectors is low.4. We found that the further education sector's range and level of activity is generally higher than that of higher education. Planning1.About 10% of the sample surveyed was planning shared services in the areas covered by the study.2. In strategic planning, considering shared services as an option came up either "frequently" or "sometimes" in about equal measure (around 30%).About a quarter of institutions reported that the option was never considered.3. The surveys showed that nearly two thirds of respondents knew when they were going to review their various administrative systems against the marketplace, although over a third did not.Commitment to shared services 1.It was most common to find (about 40% of survey respondents) that institutions "might" consider a shared service in the areas covered by the study.This was in accord with the information collected in the interviews.2. The level of commitment in the further education sector ranged more widely than that found in higher education.At one extreme we spoke with a college that has a strategic commitment to services sharing and at the other we found one that declared it was strategically having nothing to do with it.3. The study carried out by ECAR for Educause found that institutions could be categorised into two attitudinal types, collaborators and non collaborators, with the former having a strategic attitude towards shared services.It is clear that the UK tertiary education sector is presently predominantly of the second type. Differences between the sectors1. FE has less to spend on its CIS systems than does HE.The less well off colleges in further education are significantly worse off than the less well off in higher education.There is a greater difference between the prosperous and the less prosperous in individual sectors than between the sectors. National variations1.There are differences between the four home countries.2. In Northern Ireland, an overt shared services agenda is not evident: in FE much has been achieved and is now bedding down.Following the large scale mergers which took place a few years ago, the ANIC consortium services all the 6 Northern Irish FE colleges.In HE, the small number of institutions places the sector in a special position.3. In Wales, the agenda is being driven by the Welsh assembly which has clearly based its strategy for the public sector on collaboration rather than on competition.This provides a clear basis for the development of shared services.4. In England, the government mandate to further education to compete clashes with the ethos of collaboration, implicit within the shared services agenda.The English higher education sector does not appear to be driven by a significant political factor.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".