The Academic model in effect is the main product catalogue of any HE institution, courses, modules (or units of study), scholarships, research opportunities, assessments, etc. All play a fundamental part of the fully working enterprise.

This fundamental information is necessary for the working enterprise that is the institution and it is used in many dimensions, instances and purposes. It is necessary to understand the interdependencies between this information and marketing, admissions, offers, enrolment, module taking, funding, third party reporting, timetabling, virtual learning, finance, third party agents, research and business ventures. All of these business functions are in effect business critical to the institution’s academic and administrative infrastructure and every function will be using and reusing this information to achieve its goals.

But the challenge in terms of the enterprise architecture is to demonstrate the importance of the management, propagation, governance and interdependencies that this information holds, operational changes such as coding structure changes, organisational changes or marketing strategies can potentially affect all layers where this information is held and that is something that requires careful planning and testing before any changes are executed.

It is likely that some organisational unit may be using this information independently. This could cause a scenario of points of stress in one or more parts of the enterprise ad its integration being logical or physical will in effect breakdown.

An example I have seen was obvious at marketing level where there had been offerings and publications created without the academic governance and this caused enquiries and applications that did not lead to an actual offering. Similar problems I have seen in terms of changes to academic regulations that were not presented to the students, causing a high number of queries and complaints. These occurrences have affected various other organisational units all at the same time.

This typical example demonstrates that strong understanding, governance and careful implementation of the academic model are keys for the effective operations of very much all mission critical areas of an institution. Higher education establishment s must spend good time understanding and governing all dependencies of the academic model.