My organisation – the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University – has recently been reviewed. I think our response to the review should be to become radically more open about what we do.
We had a meeting about the review with the Vice Chancellor and our immediate boss, Denise Kirkpatrick (Pro-Vice-Chancellor Learning and Teaching). I asked if it was Ok to blog about the review, and the VC said it was the first time anyone had asked (!) – but said fine so long as it’s circumspect.
In a circumspect nutshell, the review said that the staff in IET were “talented” but identified a serious problem in perceived value delivered to the University. The proposal of the reviewers was to split IET in two.
We’re now in to a discussion phase where we explore how we might respond to the review. To stick to the diplomatic and circumspect line, splitting precisely as proposed is proving a major challenge to operationalise. My colleagues have already kicked the ball rolling with the discussion about what we could actually do. Martin talks about how organisational structures are less important now:
There’s a lot of potential to improve things, as Will suggests:
And Patrick linked that back with the theme of new ways of working and said
So what is to be done?
I think – and this is very much the direction we as a unit have been moving for a long time – the main idea has to be increased openness about what we’re doing. Web 2.0 management!
One entirely-fun question – which I’m pleased that I’ve managed to hold off on, since it’s not what we need to focus on quite yet – is what technologies to use to support this. But suggestions welcome!
Tags: ouietreorg, policy, management, restructuring, web 2.0, open
How about you run everyone’s blog through a content analyser/tag cloud, and then cluster the results into two sets, with semi-permeable boundaries(?!);
Oh – wait, there’s only a few of you blogging… (though possibly more in IET than the rest of the OU put together?)
As far as IET’s wider mission goes – which presumably has something to do with helping knowledge about edtech flow round the OU? – getting OTHER units engaged in openness would be a major achievement, and one that could well have payoffs in terms of capturing, exploiting and promoting the inventions and innovations that OU folks come up with…
os have you thought about using http://ou.ideascale.com to put forwards IET change ideas? Or maybe set up a powerleage (as suggested in another context on Ideascale…?!;-)