Mohamed A. Baessa

A Lean Six Sigma program in higher education

Purpose: The objective of this paper is to contribute to the body of Lean Six Sigma knowledge within the field of higher education institutions. The paper will review the initial phase of an implementation and highlight future challenges of applying the Lean Six Sigma method in a complex transactional environment. Design/methodology/approach: The observations presented in this paper originate from rolling out a large Lean Six Sigma implementation at a recently established university. The paper is further supported with secondary data from literature. Findings: The implementation of Lean Six Sigma methodology at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) has resulted in improvements in business processes and efficiency. This has been achieved through project execution and training programs. Approximately 350 staff members have completed awareness training, 200 yellow belts and 230 green belts have been trained, and the first round of seven black belts have completed training, of which three have completed independent certification. Research limitations: This paper is based on an empirical study of a single instance and the authors’ experiences as practitioners. Originality: This paper is the first description of what is believed to be one of the largest implementations of Lean Six Sigma in higher education.

Connecting the pieces: Using ORCIDs to improve research impact and repositories.

Quantitative data are crucial in the assessment of research impact in the academic world. However, as a young university created in 2009, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) needs to aggregate bibliometrics from researchers coming from diverse origins, not necessarily with the proper affiliations. In this context, the University has launched an institutional repository in September 2012 with the objectives of creating a home for the intellectual outputs of KAUST researchers. Later, the university adopted the first mandated institutional open access policy in the Arab region, effective June 31, 2014. Several projects were then initiated in order to accurately identify the research being done by KAUST authors and bring it into the repository in accordance with the open access policy. Integration with ORCID has been a key element in this process and the best way to ensure data quality for researcher’s scientific contributions. It included the systematic inclusion and creation, if necessary, of ORCID identifiers in the existing repository system, an institutional membership in ORCID, and the creation of dedicated integration tools. In addition and in cooperation with the Office of Research Evaluation, the Library worked at implementing a Current Research Information System (CRIS) as a standardized common resource to monitor KAUST research outputs. We will present our findings about the CRIS implementation, the ORCID API, the repository statistics as well as our approach in conducting the assessment of research impact in terms of usage by the global research community.

A CRIS in the Desert

The integration of research information systems with existing university processes has tended towards information exchange models in which the CRIS ingests information from existing systems and takes on functions that were previously distributed across several independent solutions. This paper draws upon the experience of the implementation of a CRIS at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) to posit a model in which functions remain distributed so as to take advantage of the strengths of each system. The functions discussed include institutional reporting, publications tracking, preservation of research outputs, provision of public access, researcher identity and profiling, and metrics analysis. The systems reviewed include a CRIS (Pure), a locally developed publications tracking system, a hosted DSpace repository, a locally developed ORCID integration, and a metrics dashboard (PlumX). The interactions between these systems forms a network of services to our research community, with each node connected to several others, and we discuss how we arrived at the current arrangement, as well as its drawbacks and advantages. The still limited use of standard data exchange formats like CERIF XML is discussed as a constraint that increases the costs of adding to and maintaining the network of services. At the same time we look at how increased standardization should make this distributed approach sustainable, allowing institutions like ours to mix and match complementary systems to achieve an optimal set of research information services for our needs.