It's more normal today to hear up-beat tales of the growing impact of open-source software and systems upon institutions. But over on the JISCMail VLE archive there's one emerging case study arising from the Cautionary Tale thread about an institution which has moved in the opposite direction. The story has some pretty interesting facets buried in there, particularly about the use of the independent review process as a policy tool. Anyone who has worked in HE for any length of time will know that, at times, our institutions are capable of intrigue which would put a 16th century Francis Walsingham school of change management to shame. But we now live in the 21st century, not in Elizabethan times and so HEIs can now come under the spotlight in ways that Walsingham never had to contend with.
Of course this makes it all important that reviews with major strategic implications are transparent, squeaky clean, involve all the stakeholders, contain no gotchas!, no loaded dice, and no decisions already made prior to what should be a totally objective review process. Anyway, have a read of a Cautionary Tale and reflect … we can all learn something useful from it, whether we are biased towards the author's point of view or not.
