Hi Hilary
There are several aspects to your question, including technical issues
and human/organisational ones.
To address just the technical side of things, there are problems with
use of graphical tools, such as PowerPoint - the information is locked
into this application, and it will be difficult to repurpose the
information.
Architecturally a better approach would be to store the data in XML
format, and then to transform the XML data into a graphical
representations - probably using XSLT to transform the data into SVG.
An example of this approach can be seen in Tim berners-Lee's diagram
showing the relationships and dependenices of the Web architecture (XML
foundations need XML Schemes; SVG is dependent on XML; etc.)
You can see the slide at
http://www.w3.org/2001/Talks/0501-tbl/slide19-0.html
although you will need an SVG plugin to see the data - see
http://www.w3.org/2001/Talks/0501-tbl/slide1-0.html
I appreciate that it will be more difficulto produce your diagrams
using this than in PowerPoint!
Brian
On Fri, 21 Jun 2002, Hilary Nunn wrote:
> Do other HEIs have a unified structure chart/collection of structure charts
> for their institution that they share over their intranet?
>
> Is this supported by an internally developed system or externally supported
> software? If the latter what product do you use? How effective is it? How do
> you maintain the data? At an institutional level, by department or by
> individuals themselves?
>
> The reason I need some help is that we are in the position where:
> senior management want to be able to identify individual members of staff
> and their roles (and vice versa) and see where they fit in the overall
> structure.
>
> We have a collection of structure charts dispersed on internal websites: the
> collection is incomplete, those that are there are often out of date. They
> have been built using a variety of tools (word, powerpoint, excel etc) and
> to varying degrees of completeness (some omit certain categories of staff).
> Even if they were consistent they don't piece together at all to give an
> idea of the overall structure.
>
> Our staff directory doesn't contain enough of the right sort of information
> to support this.
>
> If anyone has any experience of this issue or can proffer advice I'd be
> grateful if they could reply to me directly. I'll be happy to summarise for
> the list.
>
> Hilary
>
> > Hilary NUNN < <mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
> > Intranet Development Manager <01908 6 59337>
> > Web Development Group <t: 01908 654990 f: 01908 638434>
> > The OPEN University <<http://www.open.ac.uk/wdg>>
> >
>
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