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InfomaX – A Case
Study…………
HIGHLAND
COUNCIL, Education Department, Dingwall, Scotland
Education
Services in the Highlands of Scotland continues to go from strength
to strength, according to the findings of a team of inspectors whose
report was published recently. The education service in Highland was
the first in Scotland to be subject to the inspection in 2000 and
although Highland’s report card was good, there were recommendations
made and followed up.
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Her Majesty’s Inspector of Education has
just completed the follow up visit and they have complimented the
authority for the progress made. One area the inspectors highlighted for
praise was in the approaches to quality assurance and data management.
Bruce Robertson, Director of Education, Culture and Sport said “We are
very proud of this excellent report. Across the service, staff have been
working hard to address the original recommendations of what was a first
class report in 2000. We have made great strides in the form of
productivity in the Quality Assurance area. This can mainly be attributed
to our acquisition of some new Knowledge Management software, a product
called InfomaX. This was developed by a local company called Pinnacle
Business Solutions and has been a tremendous aid in our quest to manage
all the information that is handled by the department”.
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InfomaX
was originally installed in Highland in January 2002 to catalogue
and manage school development plans. Each school has it's own annual
development plan. The Quality Development Team (QDT) provide support
in the preparation of the plan, ensuring that Scottish Executive
Education Department (SEED) objectives are targeted. Subsequently
the QDT monitors the progress of the plan, providing further support
as appropriate. In order to perform its role QDT needs to bring
together pieces of information from various sources: |
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Management information software (MIS) is used by the schools to
record base data including details of pupils, names, addresses,
ages, attendance, test results and also some social indicators such
as numbers entitled to free school meals etc. Each school maintains
its' own MIS application, the data from which is also kept on a
central system held by the LEA. MIS predominantly holds numeric
data. |
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HMI
reports, following school audits are published and made available as
.pdf documents on the HMI web site. These reports are textual but
contain some standard category descriptions, for example very good,
good, fair and unsatisfactory. They are only available on the web
site for a limited period of time. |
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Department of Education advice and guidance papers are published and
distributed as either pdf. files or printed copy. SQA information
notes and results are published as .pdf or HTML files on the web
site. QA reports on schools are prepared as text files and printed
copy. School development plans are prepared as text files or printed
copy. All of the archive i.e. prior years data is stored as printed
copy. |
The Quality Development Team consists of
7 officers who have oversight of 217 schools. All of the activity involved
in its work will generate approximately 800 documents, each year. Most of
the value generated by QA is derived from the evaluation of the
information available, but before InfomaX was installed up to 80% of the
time available was spent "finding" the information.
The use of InfomaX has subsequently been expanded to accommodate any type
of document or electronic format file which is catalogued and made
available as a resource for all users of the system.
InfomaX contains functionality to satisfy a wide range of complex
requirements. For example, a filing structure with multiple levels of
category and index (e.g. Document type, school, classification,
organisation, location etc.), free text searches for particulars words or
phrases, different file types (e.g. .doc, .xls, .pdf, .jpg, html),
configurable reporting formats, data import facilities, version and
revision control, configurable security and access via a web browser.
Alan Cowie, Quality Development Officer commented, “Given a Knowledge
Management system with this functionality, our QA personnel are able to
significantly reduce the amount of time spent on searching for and
collating information from the various sources. InfomaX assists in this
area, making more time available for analysis and for providing support to
the schools most in need”.
The application of this technology in a solution to meet the needs of QA
can help in the different business aspects of the operational processes.
For example, management of incoming documents, (doc or pdf, including
cataloguing and indexing), download and categorisation of new publications
from schools, HMI, SQA, DE, synchronisation with information held within
the Phoenix central application, scanning of paper archives to create .pdf
files (for import and catalogue), access to the system via web browser (to
allow the QDT to access the information on the Intranet), multi
dimension/level searches, free text searches (words, abbreviations and
phrases), report "templates" which can automate the retrieval of
information into predetermined report formats.
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