EUNIS BI SIG and EA SIG organized a joint spring seminar about modeling for decision making in Tampere 27-28 April. The goal of the seminar was to explore how to model for strategic decision making through mapping and visualization of capabilities. It was attended by 20 participants from 8 different HEIs in Europe.
Enterprise Architect from Alto and EA SIG lead Patrick Maltusch gave us all an introduction to the higher education capability framework based on a standardized capability maturity model called HERM (Higher Education Reference Model). The HERM-model is based on the work of CAUDIT, UCISA, EDUCAUSE, EUNIS. At the seminar we learned how to identify the link between the strategy and the capabilities of the HEI. Through strategy bingo and several mapping exercises we learned how to use the HERM-model as a tool to analyze the strategy from a standardized, structured and holistic viewpoint.
At the seminar we were able to start to map our own data by using the capability model. This gave us participants a method to build or modify our road maps and to build a method for considering strategic actions in our HEI.
Day 2 of the training seminar we continued working on the use of the higher education business intelligence and analytics maturity model (HE-BIA), and road mapping. Patrick Maltusch has built a great training sheet which we used to map our projects to different capabilities and strategic goals and drivers. The training sheet gave us a great opportunity to quickly build a model to move forward with the visualization part.
Data visualization plays an important role enabling and facilitating strategic discussion in a more transparent way. Elsa Cardoso, Researcher and Assistant professor at University Institute of Lisbon, Dept of Information Sciences and Technology gave an introduction on capability model and presented some nice reflections on what are capabilities, and compared also capabilities vs processes. On the second day she gave an introduction to visualization and shared nice reflections on challenges and solutions for visualizing these mapped models of strategies, capabilities and other HEIdata structures.
All the participants had a great time and also for the organizers of the training seminar Pekka Kähkipuro (TAU) who hosted the event in Tampere University, Gry Jordet KIbsgaard, Maltusch Patrik and Elsa Cardoso this was also two great days to explore the possibilities between to interesting fields and special interest groups. By joining these forces and competences we see how we can build new methods for supporting strategic decision making through using a capability model mapped with strategies and visualized through the knowledge from BI and added more HEI structured data we can see new possibilities for both EA and BI in the future for European HEIs.
After 2 full day of intense work the two special interest groups also discussed further plans for the two special interest groups and came up with some interesting ideas.
Thank you to Elsa, Pekka and Patrik for organizing a great 2 day training seminar for us, and especially thanks to Pekka for hosting such a successful event!
If you would like to get access to the presentations from this seminar join the EA or BI SIG.