Abstract:

The successful advancement of a university is commonly underpinned by a strategic two-pronged approach. The first is a long-term vision which is future-focused and articulates that which the institution aspires to achieve and become. Secondly, in striving to attain the long-term vision, an established practice is for institutions to adopt successive short-term strategic plans, each of which within the South African University System (SAUS) typically covers five years. The intention is that successfully designed and executed sets of objectives over successive short-term periods will result in incremental achievements which as a collective will eventually lead to the realization of the goals articulated in the long-term vision. It has been a common practice to review achievements of 5-year short-term strategic plans at the end of the 4th year or at the beginning of the 5th year of a particular cycle. This allows an institution to assess successes and non-achievements of its targets for that cycle, as well as to interrogate reasons for any non-performance. Such a monitoring and evaluation process assists in defining the targets of the strategic plan for the next cycle, always guided by the overarching institutional vision. The weakness of such an approach is that realignment and new interventions can only be implemented at the beginning of the next 5-year cycle.

Functioning in the digital age with access to the digital cloud offers real-time data access, improves data accuracy, reduces administrative and operational burden such as manual data entry (which is vulnerable to human errors) and consequent data cleaning, as well as promotes collaboration across different sectors for relevant data correlation undertakings. Consequently, the digital cloud enables quicker institutional performance assessments.

This presentation reports on a study in progress that focuses on how the recent advances in digital technology can be used to design a more effective Framework for the evaluation, monitoring and realignment process of short-term strategic plans. The study is located within the SAUS. The presentation begins with a discussion on the significance of taking cognizance of national and global priorities and imperatives, such as the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals and the African Union’s Agenda 2063, in the development of an institutional long-term vision, and the accompanying successive short-term strategic plans (referred to as Institutional Operating Plan (IOP)). Emphasis is also placed on the significance of institutional ownership of the undertaking led by its Chief Executive Officer and the need for an audit of current performance levels to develop the next cycle of the IOP.

A model for the Framework is then presented based on the goals of the particular IOP and their respective set of objectives and is underpinned by real time data accumulation and analysis. As a pilot study, the model is being applied to the University of the Western Cape’s Vision 2040 and IOP: 2026 – 2030, which has just been finalized, and will be refined thereafter. The final part of the study will be to adapt the Framework to other global university systems.

Keywords:

Strategic planning, evaluation, monitoring, realignment.