Organisational categories
Management types: it is of merit to compare findings from the geographical rankings to the management types. The presence in local government sites follows the pattern of regional sites, of lower knowledge artefact presence in the intangible operations (cultural and social), increasing towards the tangible operations (economic and conservation) (Figure 5‑28). Family/private and mixed/commercial sites had inversely higher presence in the intangible operations. Overall, universities, independent charities, and local government had above average levels of knowledge artefacts. In process-driven organisations such as the universities and local authorities, a higher presence of knowledge artefacts is unsurprising. Independent organisations tend to be smaller and hence have fewer experts, so perhaps need more knowledge artefacts to access such knowledge. This might be the same reason for the lower volumes observed in national institutions, which have experts across more of their operations, so depend less on knowledge artefacts. This is further explored later in relation to organisational size. Independent sites had a mixed level of presence across the four objectives, with Environmental preservation and Social participation hosting the highest of their knowledge artefacts’ presence. The Economic development objective had the lowest presence level across all the management types.
Alongside the highest levels of presence, local government, independent charity, and university-managed cultural heritage sites also had the highest levels of updated knowledge artefacts. National institutions had low rates, whilst family/ privately owned sites had the lowest rates of updated knowledge artefacts. The level of updating was consistent across all management types for the four objectives. The highest volume of updated knowledge artefacts was by independent charities in the Environmental preservation objective (Figure 5‑29).
Family/privately owned sites had the lowest level present, and of updating and conversion rates of knowledge artefacts, but had high overall performance. Mixed/ commercial sites had similarly low updated levels but with low performance, and national sites had low levels but high perfromance. Local government and independent charities had average levels and average performance, although local government’s conversion of present to updated knowledge artefacts appeared restricted. University-managed sites had high level of presence and the highest level of conversion to updated, but the lowest performance, hinting at other factors impeding the effectiveness of knowledge artefacts. Overall, it appears that centally managed sites (University, Local government) benefit less by knowledge artefacts than Independent or Mixed/ commercial sites, apart from National sites which compensate possibly due to their depth of expertise within the teams and have the highest performance of all management types (Figure 5‑30).
Economic development had the lowest performance out of all objectives for all management types, with family/privately owned and independent charities achieving its highest performance, and universities its lowest (Figure 5‑31).
Single or multi-site: organisations with a site to look after had more knowledge artefacts than organisations with no physical sites. Single site organisations had more present artefacts than sites in multi-site organisations (Figure 5‑32). The demands of managing a physical site appear to create greater need for recorded operational knowledge, whilst multi-site organisations can probably access a wider bank of tacit (people’s experience) and explicit (knowledge artefacts) resources.
Single site organisations had an above average rate of updated knowledge artefacts. Several factors might influence this; a processual freedom (compared to multi-site organisations) might be one, lack of access to experts or to knowledge resources from other sites, or a higher dependence on knowledge than multi-site and no heritage site organisations (Figure 5‑33).
Single site organisations had the highest rate of presence, updating, conversion, and performance. Organisations with no physical sites had a much lower conversion rate but higher performance than multi-site organisations which seem to have barriers in updating and benefiting from present knowledge artefacts (Figure 5‑34).
The performance within each of the four objectives was consistent across these three types of organisations (Figure 5‑35).
Visitor volumes: the least visited sites (up to 10,000 annually), and the most visited sites (one million or more) had the lowest levels of present knowledge artefacts. For the least visited sites, this might be due to difficulties in creating or sourcing knowledge artefacts, such as lack of capacity, whilst the largest visitor sites might have tacit expertise in their larger teams or can afford technology and outsourcing to provide solutions. For visits from 10,000 up to one million, the level of knowledge artefact presence increased as the visit numbers increased (Figure 5‑36).
The largest sites (over a million visits) had a low level of presence and the smallest level of updating. Up to that category, the pattern is the same as in presence, of increasing updating as visitor volumes increase. The larger volumes of updating are driven by the collections’ standards documentation (Figure 5‑37). Overall, the volume of updated knowledge artefacts in the intangible objectives is much lower than the Economic development and the even higher Environmental preservation.
Large (over one million) visitor sites had the highest performance, with average levels of knowledge artefacts. Medium visitor-volume sites had high levels of knowledge artefacts and significantly above average performance. The smaller sites had very small volumes of knowledge artefacts, and although they updated more than half of what they have, it was not enough to raise the performance from below average (Figure 5‑38).
For each objective, and overall, the larger the visitor numbers, the more knowledge artefacts were present and the higher the performance was (Figure 5‑39). The exception is large visitor sites (over 1,000,000) which appeared less dependent on explicit knowledge.
Staff and volunteers size: sites with fewer than 250 people are categorised as small or medium (GOV.UK, 2014). Large sites had almost a fifth more knowledge artefacts (25.60% versus 21.57%) present (Figure 5‑40). The only objective with higher presence in small-medium sites was Environmental preservation, possibly helped by the good availability of accreditation-related knowledge artefacts. Another significant finding is that presence in Economic development in all previous demographics had been lower than Environmental preservation, but the presence of Economic development knowledge artefacts in large teams was the highest of all.
The rate of updating knowledge artefacts was slightly higher in larger teams. For both team sizes there was a clear and steep increase of updated levels from intangible to tangible operations (Figure 5‑41).
Larger teams had higher levels of knowledge artefacts and although they had a lower conversion rate they achieved much higher performance. Smaller teams updated almost half of the fewer knowledge artefacts they had (Figure 5‑42).
The performance by large teams in the intangible operations was extremely high, and even in its lowest at the Economic development objective, it was higher than average (Figure 5‑43).
Separate data for staff and volunteers were collected for each team size. The overall presence of knowledge artefacts was almost identical for volunteers and staff. The spread was even across the objectives for volunteers, whilst there was higher presence in the tangible operations for staff (Figure 5‑44).
Small volunteer teams had a higher rate of updated knowledge artefacts. Perhaps volunteers depend on updated knowledge artefacts more than staff do (Figure 5‑45).
Large teams started with more present knowledge artefacts but converted fewer to updated. Their performance was much higher, clearly benefitting by the tacit knowledge of the larger teams. The effect of large teams was much more pronounced in large staff teams which had a 68% higher performance than small staff teams (Figure 5‑46).
The pattern of higher performance in larger teams was consistent in all four objectives for both volunteer and staff teams (Figure 5‑47).
Looking at either volunteer or staff teams regardless of team size, the high knowledge artefact presence in the Economic development objective was found specifically in the large sites with paid staff teams (not volunteers). Overall, the presence was relatively equally spread across the four objectives (Figure 5‑48).
Updated rates of knowledge artefacts in volunteer teams were slightly higher than in staff teams. The updated rates in the intangible operations side were considerably lower than the tangible operations’ side (Figure 5‑49).
Staff teams converted fewer present knowledge artefacts to updated than volunteer teams, but achieve higher performance (Figure 5‑50).
Volunteer teams were outperformed by staff teams in all objectives apart from Environmental preservation, with improvement potentially driven by the great availability of knowledge artefacts for it by the provider organisations (Figure 5‑51).
Trained and equipped: Looking within the teams, the participants were asked whether their staff and volunteers had the knowledge and tools they need. Relating to staff, sites answering no, had a mere 5.21% presence compared to 25.03% in sites with trained and equipped staff (380% difference). Furthermore, staff with no training or tools had 2.67% updated artefacts compared to 12.29% (360% difference) in trained teams. The performance was 81% higher in sites with staff fully trained and equipped (62.72% versus 34.57%). For volunteers, the presence levels were higher, possibly requiring them more than staff do. Not fully trained volunteer teams had more updated knowledge artefacts than staff teams, perhaps relying on those more, and in fully trained teams the volunteers had a similar rate of updated knowledge artefacts as with staff. Sites with fully trained and equipped volunteers had a 71% higher performance at 66.32%, higher than trained staff teams at 62.72% (Table 5‑4).
