Survey on CRIS in Europe – first dissemination
Knowing how institutions in Europe are using their CRISs and IRs was the main goal of a survey jointly carried out by euroCRIS and EUNIS, the European University Information Systems Organization.
At the EuroCRIS meeting in Barcelona a first overview of the results coming from the survey was presented. The poster with these results can be found here
CHEITA Complexity Index
The Coalition of Higher Education Information Technology Associations (CHEITA) comprises representatives from associations throughout the world that promote the use of information technology in higher education. CHEITA was established in 2011 to share best practice across member associations and, by extension, the individual institutions that make up those associations. EUNIS has taken an active part of this group.
As a subset of CHEITA the CHEITA Benchmarking Working Group was created to explore the viability of benchmarking IT in higher education on a global scale and identify a way to undertake such an initiative. The result of those efforts was the development of the CHEITA Global Complexity Index described in a paper that was published this summer
UNIVERSITIC: IT Survey in Spanish and Latin America Universities
The knowledge society that Europe designed in Lisbon is based on a modern higher education system with innovative methods and resources. Universities that were pioneering in introducing computation and Internet for research have been walking fast to adopt information technology (IT) in three levels: teaching, management and government.
In Spain, this evolution has sometimes lacked of assessments and of lightness. For this reason, the IT Committee of the Spanish Association of University Rectors (CRUE in Spanish set of initials), in 2004, drove the establishment of an inquest, called UNIVERSITIC, in order to achieve a global assessment of IT in universities that includes: IT description, IT Management and IT Governance.
The results of the first year’s survey showed that Spanish Universities, in general had adopted a compromised stance with the aim of incorporating and use of IT, but frequently this compromise was more reactive than proactive, more improvised than planned.
Ten years later, this survey has been improved and now also includes the Latin America area. Current results indicate that universities usually plan IT implementation and they are aware of the need to achieve best practices both in IT management and in IT governance. So the UNIVERSITIC survey and its results are very useful for the Spanish and Latin American universities and we hope it could become a good reference for European Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) too.