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Background

Sector agencies see the need for co-ordination and sharing of information, to ensure successful implementation of Government policy relating to tertiary education arising from the Tertiary Education Strategy. The Tertiary Information Strategy makes it easier for sector participants to deal with central agencies and for agencies to deal with each other. It supports the whole-of-government approach set out in the vision and strategy for E-government.

Sector agencies will use the strategy to help frame their own information strategies and budget bids in a way that is consistent with the wider sector picture. The strategy does not define priorities for specific agency projects or investment decisions.

Purpose

Create an environment in which consumers need not know where information comes from and producers can more readily reconfigure their organisation structures.

1. Give ready access to information that enables the tertiary sector to measure how well it is achieving Government’s stated outcomes.
2. Maximise availability of information and minimise costs to producers and consumers.
3. Make organisational boundaries less visible and more permeable.
4. Enhance information flows within the sector and information exchanges with the secondary education and labour market sectors.
5. Eliminate duplication of effort and rework associated with collecting the same information multiple times for multiple purposes.
6. Tell information consumers where the authoritative source is held and how to access it.

Outcomes

The Government’s renewed focus on outcomes demands that all parties in the sector ask themselves hard questions about what they do and how they relate to others. This means better policy-making, better alignment of complementary agencies and better service delivery. The tertiary sector is an information-based community and relies on good information to meet its business objectives. The sector seeks these outcomes:

• higher quality decisions based on better quality information
• lower compliance costs through operational efficiency in data management
• improved evidence that interventions are raising educational achievement
• co-ordination among central agencies to promote information sharing
• data held centrally is readily available to providers, with value-added
• central agencies appear to the rest of the sector as one virtual agency

To achieve these outcomes, all the central agencies must be actively committed to and champions of the strategy. By working together, the agencies will become more responsive to sector needs.

Challenges

The efficiency gains the strategy makes possible translate into raising the quality standard and doing more for the same dollars; it’s not about cutting costs. Rather, it allows the central agencies to keep pace with rising sector demands for added-value and gives them more options for how they collect and manage data. The sector faces a number of information-related challenges, including:

• more electronic information exchanges are happening
• information is flowing much more quickly between parties
• each agency is engaged in a number of major system redevelopment projects
• interdependencies between agencies have increased dramatically
• growth of ICT infrastructure enables and drives demand for instant information access
• risk management becomes more complex as decisions and actions have wider impacts

The tertiary agencies see increased collaboration as the best strategy for responding to these challenges. By bringing a range of perspectives to bear on the issues, the group as a whole gains insights they don’t get as individual agencies.

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