Throughout the work of the Information Futures Commission we have learned a great deal about our traditions, our aspirations, the world which we inhabit. This section outlines a set of principles to guide the development and implementation of our strategy.
To deal with a rapidly changing environment we will:
1. Value the diversity that our discipline and individual backgrounds bring to our understanding of the future.
We will look for ways to learn continually from the different views that disciplines and individuals have of our present situation and of future needs. We will use this to inform our choice of initiatives, looking for synergies where these are possible and supporting differences where they add value and richness.
2. Harness the diverse insights and innovative ideas of each new generation of students.
We will involve our students, who are attuned to their cohorts’ learning needs, in gathering information on current and future expectations and in implementing change, acknowledging that our students are both consumers and producers of new media and scholarly information. We will be informed by the pedagogy of peer support and involve our students in the design, delivery and evaluation of student-facing services, to empower students to support students, to build more sustainable learning cohorts, to generate more powerful learning outcomes, and to nurture student leadership.
3. Work as partners across discipline and professional boundaries to achieve our aims.
We will use the expertise that exists across different parts of the organization rather than duplicate academic and professional knowledge and skills. We will create the mechanisms to make working as partners easy – ensuring that tools and communities of practice are in place, and that we develop our information and infrastructure in ways that are useful across disciplines.
4. Make choices and implement initiatives in ways that ensure we can be agile, adaptable and flexible.
Whenever possible we will provide the frameworks and infrastructure to enable experimentation, prototyping and trials to determine what works and should be further developed, rather than investing in large-scale implementations. We will leverage existing capabilities effectively – in particular relying on solutions that already exist at the University or elsewhere.
5. Encourage innovation in the use of scholarly information and technologies.
We can be sure that the pace of technological change will not abate, that disruptive change will continue to occur, that we cannot with any certainty imagine ten years forward in IT terms. Research and reflection on scholarly practices will be essential to inform the development of our policies, services, systems and infrastructure.
To deal with globalization of education and its infrastructure we will:
6. Leverage the opportunities offered by being part of a global collaborative community.
We will actively seek to be part of collaborative communities and foster partnerships to ensure that we can influence and leverage abilities beyond our means as an individual organization. We will use global standards, open source, and other open initiatives to ensure that we can collaborate, ‘trade’, and re-use the work of whole communities most effectively.
7. Focus on the quality of our staff and students as a key differentiator in a competitive world.
We will invest in developing outstanding scholarly literacy amongst our learning community through the curriculum. Professional and academic staff will work in concert, using each other’s expertise appropriately to achieve the best outcomes.
8. Seek to shape national and international agendas in line with our role as a leading institution.
In keeping with our standing as a global leader we will advocate for change to government and other relevant agendas, where possible in collaboration with other organizations. In this way others may also invest or change policy in areas of importance, enabling us to more readily advance scholarly information and communication and to achieve our vision.
To deal with the tension between emerging client needs, existing values and competing demands within finite resources we will:
9. Invest in actions which bring unique and deep value to our mission as a University.
We will invest in activities that enhance our contributions to research, learning and teaching, and knowledge transfer. We will not invest in doing things that we can readily achieve in other ways, or where they do not add unique and deep value to our mission.
10. Be firm on the strategic priorities whilst being flexible on the means.
We will be clear on what we want as the endpoint, but flexible on how we get there, aiming to do so in ways that are the most cost effective to meet our needs within the environment of the time.
11. Plan and implement what we do in ways that are financially, technologically and environmentally sustainable.
We will ensure that what we do will not impact negatively on our environment, or will seek to offset any negative effects that we cannot avoid. We will be aware of issues of data longevity in choices for new technologies. We will not implement major capital initiatives without identifying a funding stream to operate and maintain them as sustainable services.