Satayeva A

Satayeva A. A.

Suleyman Demirel University/Kazakhstan

Perspectives of using Management tools in

Undergraduate Education

Managerialism is issues of managing change in higher education. Given the massive pressures for change facing higher education, especially relating to increasing marketization and global competition, it is not surprising that universities may look to new management approaches as both a response to a changing environment and as a stimulus to further institutional change. In this process, the advocates of new managerialism may be found as much inside universities as outside. One area where such change is often most obvious within institutional management relates to the adoption of new management tools. Many new techniques have been imported from the business world for use in higher education in recent years, often greeted with suspicion and cynicism by academic staff.

Management Tools

This article therefore considers the application of three particular new management techniques: the balanced scorecard, “lean” management and knowledge management. It aims to identify factors that contribute to the successful or unsuccessful implementation of these tools within the wider context of change management in higher education.

The Balanced Scorecard: Faced with growing pressures of competition and increasing requirements for accountability to both internal and external stakeholders, universities have become increasingly concerned with issues of performance at all levels within the organization. One response adopted by some universities has been the Balanced Scorecard.

Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton (1992, 1996, 2001) developed the Balanced Scorecard (BSC). The BSC aims to measure performance in four key areas:

• financial (i.e., how an organization views its stakeholders),

• customer (i.e., how customers view an organization), 

• internal business environment (i.e., what an organization must excel at), and 

• learning or organizational development (i.e., how an organization continues to improve and create value).

The BSC has been applied within higher education by many universities, initially in the US and more recently elsewhere in the world, notably in the UK and Australia. Given that higher education institutions are complex organizations with multiple and sometimes conflicting objectives, the development of tools that seek to provide an overview and to reconcile different priorities is highly attractive to many universities. In practice, the technique has been used both as a tool to support strategy development and as an approach to ensure accountability to senior management and to the institution as a whole. A clear strength of the BSC has been its adaptability to meet the specific needs of the institution.

Lean Thinking: Lean thinking has its origins in the production system developed by the Toyota Motor Corporation in Japan in the 1950s. However, the idea of lean principles became familiar following the work undertaken within the International Motor Vehicle Program based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In their seminal work, “The Machine That Changed the World” James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos (1990) described the transformation of the automobile industry into an era of mass production, offering the maximum value to the customer at minimum cost, thereby maximizing customer benefits. With the application of lean thinking, an organization creates a niche for itself by offering only those products and services that a customer needs, thereby achieving cost advantages by reducing all forms of muda (the Japanese term for “waste”). A further variation of the lean approach is a focus on the “flow” or smoothness of work, minimizing or eliminating unevenness and thereby reducing wasted resources.

Womack and Jones (2003) have also established five key principles for lean thinking as a guide for organizations seeking to move in this direction:

1. Specify value. Significantly, value can only be defined by the end consumer, not by the supplier.

2. Identify the value stream. Specifying the actions necessary to deliver a service or product, based on problem solving, information management and physical transformation.

3. Flow. Ensuring continuous flow from start to finish.

4. Pull. Designing and providing only what the customer wants, thereby reducing the inventory of products and reducing the time taken from design to production.

5. Perfection. The process of reducing effort, time, cost and resources, and of enhancing value to the consumer is never ending.

The potential applications of lean thinking to higher education have been recognized for many years. For example, Bob Emiliani (2004) and Clare L. Comm and Dennis F. X. Mathaisel (2003, 2005a, 2005b) argued that lean principles could be used to reduce waste and enhance customer value. Comm and Mathaisel (2003, 32) proposed a framework for the sustainable university using lean principles. They argued that, by the use of value stream mapping tools, universities could reduce cost, improve quality and increase student satisfaction:

Does the university optimize the scheduling and assignment of its resources (rooms and people)? Are professors and part-time instructors being adequately compensated for their productivity? Is the university over-promising what it can deliver to its customers? Are students experiencing very long wait times for services like registering for courses, eating in the cafeteria, obtaining grades?

Knowledge Management: It is widely asserted today that knowledge lies at the heart of the modern economy, where knowledge assets are the principal factors of production and where nations and organizations have to organize their knowledge assets to their best advantage. Ideas of knowledge management (KM) began to emerge in business in the 1990s, and were heavily influenced by the massive expansion of access to information and analytical power created by new computing methods, increasing expectations regarding quality and quality assurance, and new emerging ideas about human factors and human capital. There is no clear, accepted definition of KM, but Andreea M. Serban (2002, 6) offers two ideas that help in understanding the concept:

1. Knowledge management is about connecting people to people and people to information to create competitive ad- vantage.

2. Knowledge management is the systematic process of identifying, capturing and transferring information and knowledge people can use to create, compete and improve.

Skryme also identifies many of the potential benefits of KM. In particular, he identifies four key organizational benefits: better and faster innovation, improved customer service, reduced knowledge loss, and improved productivity and performance.

Using knowledge management techniques and technologies in higher education is as vital as it is in the corporate sector. If done effectively, it can lead to better decision-making capabilities, reduced “product” development cycle time (for example, curriculum development and research), improved academic and administrative services, and reduced costs.

New management tools inevitably vary in their relevance and longevity. Based on the interviews undertaken as part of this project, it would be false to see the Balanced Scorecard or Lean Principles as “fads or fancies,” adopted as a fashion and likely to wither away over time. While it is certainly true that such techniques often spread by imitation and therefore appear to form a trend moving through higher education, the motivation is almost always positive, based on a sincere desire to enhance operational efficiency. In the case studies reviewed, staff, many of whom had been cynical from the outset, were often passionate converts to the strengths of new management tools and now regard their use as a permanent part of university management.

As a result, new management tools need both careful explanation and justification and adaptation to specific, local requirements. Finally, the case studies show the importance of careful management to ensure successful implementation. In particular, the potential risks in implementing new management tools arising from highly devolved structures are identified.

The case studies prompt many interesting conclusions about the implementation of new management tools. However, the study points also to wider, highly significant trends. All three tools studied emphasize the role of the university as a service organization, where the needs of stakeholders are paramount. In particular, certainly in these three case studies, the student was most certainly seen as a customer who might be attracted elsewhere, who wanted value for money and whose opinions would be important in sustaining institutional brand and reputation. The application of new management tools, some with immediate success and some still unproven, was a key element within these far-reaching changes.

References

Anderson, Karen, and Rodney McAdam. 2004. “A Critique of Benchmarking and Performance Management: Lead or Lag?” Benchmarking: An International Journal 11 (5): 465-483.  

Corral, Sheila. 1998. “Knowledge Management.” Ariadne 18. Available online at www.ariadne.ac.uk.

University Press. Kaplan, Robert S., and David P. Norton. 2001. The Strategy Focused Organization: How Balanced Scorecard Companies Thrive in the New Business Environment. Boston: Harvard University Press.

Skyrme, David. 1997. “Knowledge Management: Making Sense of an Oxymoron.” Insights 22. Available online at: www.skyrme.com.

Slater, Anne, and Robert Moreton. 2007. “Knowledge Management in Higher Education: A Case Study in a Large Modern UK University.” In Advances in Information Systems Development: New Methods and Practice for the Networked Society (vol. 2), ed. Wita Wojtkowski, W. Gregory Wojtkowski, Jože Zupančič, Gabor Magyar, and Gabor Knapp (pp. 371-382). New York: Springer.

Stankosky, Michael. 2005. “Advances in Knowledge Management: University Research Toward an Academic Discipline.”In Creating the Discipline of Knowledge Management: The Latest in University Research, ed. Michael Stankosky (pp. 1- 14). Burlington, MA: Elsevier Butterworth Heinemann.

Taylor, John, and Claire Baines. 2012. “Performance Management in UK Universities.” Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 34 (2): 111-124.

Womack, James P. 2006. “Lean Thinking for Education.” Keynote address at EdNet Annual Meeting, Worcester, MA, 17 October 2006.