Category Archives: Information Modelling

Our Mobile Strategy at Bristol

I attended the very enjoyable UCISA Conference in Manchester this week and gave a presentation on how we are focussing on the student experience with our mobile strategy currently. Incidentally, the rumour going round was that Lady gaga was staying at the same hotel as the conference – I think I went up in the “cool” stakes accordingly as far as my kids are concerned!

In my presentation I talked through how we had started tactically with JISC funded projects to drive our pilot service for students – see http://m.bristol.ac.uk/ for example and feel free to try it out on your phone’s browser. Following lots of user feedback and some requirements-gathering workshops run by our Usability consultant, we then began to create a Mobile Strategy using an Enterprise Architecture approach. This involved defining principles to underpin our strategy, working on our information model, developing our vision of where we are now and where we want to get to and devising a roadmap to get us there. This is encapsulated in a business case for the senior decision-making body to evaluate and approve, watch this space!

Thank you to those who gave me useful feedback and discussed their own related work (for example a similar initiative at St Andrews University) and this blog post by John Townsend: http://jwt23.wordpress.com/2011/11/18/ucisa-cisg-day-two/

Conference tweetsI found other presentations on the Student Experience very useful,  for example a thought provoking presentation by Paul Taylor at the University of Warwick, who described the notion of the Student as a collaborator as opposed to a consumer or a learner, and how physical and online spaces can be created without layouts that dictate a sense of hierarchy or constraint in terms of how learning may take place. Very interesting thoughts on how the design of the physical and online environments can affect opportunities for co-creation in HE.

 

 

The pleasures of having an intern come to stay!

Last week Sara Price “shadowed” me as I went about my normal business, going to various meetings and processing information, sometimes producing diagrammatic models to help build up pictures of our systems, processes and strategies and their interrelationships… Sara blogged about her experience here: Sara’s blog post.

In fact Sara quickly got up to speed with the Archimate modelling language and by the end of the week gave me a neat appraisal of how Archimate compares with Triaster process mapping (undertaken extensively by our team of Business Analysts here at Bristol).  She said she thought that Triaster process maps are an excellent entry point to understanding complex business processes, and, as a linguist (Sara is studying for an MA in English Literature at Exeter University) they were intuitive and helpful. She said she thought that Archimate modelling on the other hand gets further in to the nuts and bolts of information modelling and that moving from Triaster models to Archimate models forces one to become very precise at a number of levels (ranging from specifying who exactly interacts with a process, down to the tool and underlying systems that are used). All very interesting stuff – thank you Sara and good luck with your dissertation!

Post card from Sara

Post card from Sara