IT Support Community in HE

First up was a presentation by CIOs Steve Williams of Newcastle University and Martyn Harrow of Cardiff University entitled “The New Age CIO view”.   Steve compared evolution IT service delivery to evolution of bookshops moving from the traditional model, to Amazon and then to e-books.  (Adrian Ellison Captured this well in a tweet; “Steve Williams compares IT service delivery journey with bookstores: the evolution of the traditional shop thru Amazon to eBooks #ucisa11”.

Steve commented that our Universities are apparently open democracies but are actually more like a mass of arcane hierarchies, including in IT.  I felt some resonance with this being part of a very old University with a lot of inertia and committees! Both Steve and Martyn rounded up saying that there is a huge paradigm shift in our sector and that we need to embed technology in our institutions’ misson statements, manage relationships with key stakeholders will and get serious about performance management.  Trust and Empowerment will be ever-more critical to success.

Following afternoon refreshments we had the business showcases, both repeated so both could be attended.

I went first to the google presentation about google apps take-up and use in our sector.  We had a brief presentation from William Florance (Head of EDU, EMEA for Google) which touched on some of the legal and trust issues that have been barriers for some institutions.  As Ajay Burlingham-Böhr put it: “Google session majoring on why and how they are complying with DPA and a whole host of other security issues rather than technology”

Then we had two real-life case studies about the rollout of Google mail and Google Apps in two HEIs.  One was from David Speake of the University of Sheffield and the other was Martin Hamilton from the University of Loughborough.  Both HEIs had rolled out Google mail and Google Apps recently and reported excellent experiences.

The COO of Loughborough was quoted as saying “The introduction of the full Google apps for education suite has underlined that we can indeed offer and expanded and improved service for our students at a reduced cost.  The two need not be mutually exclusive”.

Sheffield had sought agreement of the University Executive Board before migrating and their success was augmented by migrating all existing mail for students and staff as well as migrating existing oracle calendar data for staff and pre-populating student google calendars with course timetables.

Following the google session was a Microsoft session about Office 365, a sort of successor to Live&EDU,  and I’m afraid to say it was very poorly done.  The speaker clearly had not been briefed properly.  I paraphrase slightly but it felt like he spent most of the talk demonstration how to make an appointment in the exchange calendar.  It looked pretty much like Outlook 2010 and technical demos are not really what people at strategic management level need.  The only slightly interesting thing was that the demo was all done using Firefox rather than internet explorer.

Personally I found the Google approach of letting case studies speak for themselves much more useful than what was not much more than a marketing pitch from Microsoft.

We started today with talks from Derek Watson, a St. Andrews Finance Director and Clive Wilson, a Bradford Estates director. Watson made the interesting comment that he thought the effect of the good times of the recent past in the HE sector means that HEIs forgot about risk. I’m not sure I entirely agree with that but I guess we are perhaps guilty of being just a little bit complacent? The challenge for our sector is to show its worth to society and we perhaps need to start considering students on some levels as investors rather than just customers. Watson said that about 60% of University spend is on staff but wonders if we are managing performance well enough to justify that. Everyone is busy but are they productive? A worrying figure from Watson was a 15% year on year increase in Power Costs. This seems to me to make investing in and installing Solar PV somewhat of a no-brainer for our sector. While the government feed-in-tariffs are so attractive it make financial sense both in terms of payback time (c. 10 years?) and avoiding the need to purchase large amounts of energy in the future.

Clive Wilson gave us a salient reminder that as managers we’re all responsible for Health & Safety. He pointed to the big 6 risks: Corporate manslaughter, Leigonella and Health & Safety (the three you go to prison for if you get them wrong) and Fire Regulations, DDA and Asbestos (those that attract large fines for non-compliance). This was all great but I couldn’t quite see how it was specifically relevant to IT managers more than other managers. Maybe it wasn’t. Clive was particularly focussing on creating a sustainable Estate and he spoke lots about how we can do that with IT systems.

After a coffee break we had the presentation of the UCISA awards. Oxford took the 2010 Excellence award for the Mobile Oxford project and the best poster award for a poster by Mike Fraser about costing IT services. The hardware stack on our table was a bit embarrassing!

Following the awards was the interactive World Café ably facilitated by John Hemingway of Nov8. We worked in small table groups and had three sections of time to consider each of: Financial Sustainability, Human Sustainability and Environmental Sustainability. The questions generated some useful discussion although as I was with colleagues from Oxford I felt I sort of missed the opportunity to get perspectives from other UK HEIs. Our group agreed that organisational flexibility and agility would be critical to sustainability and used the metaphor of a shoal of herrings to illustrate that.

Lunch followed the World Café session.

A nice slow start to the day as the conference didn’t start until lunchtime. After packing up my stuff I wandered up to the Edinburgh International Conference Centre and took time to catch up with emails (free WiFi there!) and have a wander around the conference exhibition.

Proceedings proper started with an introduction by Chris Sexton, the outgoing UCISA chair, and Graham Hill, the conference chair.

The first plenary talk was by Jeff Hayward, from the University of Edinburgh. Jeff said that IT penetrates everything that Universities do now – you might as well put “e” in front of everything. In our sector IT is expected to be as agile as amazon and as reliable as the bank. Quite a tall order! When trying to get investment in IT it is as important to make a proposal that has quick, punchy, emotional appeal as well as a logical business case. Nobody waits until the end of reading a 20 page business case before making a decision! IT is also part of the product Universities sell and its quality or lack thereof is part of what differentiates us.

Mike Boxall of PA Consulting Group was next up with a talk about reinventing the business of higher education. He made the bold assertion that Universties are moving from a funded model to a market model and that measures of success are changing. We’ll probably need to make 5-10% surpluses in the future as part of a market economy. Government funding is shifting to being “for” things rather than supporting things. Marketisation of HE will inevitably lead to more competition between Universities. I wonder if this is a bad thing? Boxall says that HEIs should be come profit-making social enterprises. There will be many new opportunities to Universities, as well as the threats. Universities that do best will be those that choose a few strengths and play those to the opportunities that arise. Those that try to do it all will probably do less well. Boxall also said that HE of tomorrow will be shaped by Google, iTunes, Facebook, and Blackboard – not Universities UK, HEFEC, Dept for BIS, or UCU.

I’m not sure I agree with all Boxall said, and I suspect the situation is a bit different for the very strong-brand Universities such as my own because we are in the fortunate position of not having to compete to fill our courses – although we must and do of course compete for the best students. One delegate (Ajay Burlingham-Böhr) commented that “future HEIs must earn a living from providing social value, building competitive competencies and providing smart access to resources.” And that we were seeing the “Tescoisation of HE” (if that’s the case I reckon we’re Fortnums!)

A tea break followed this session. All refreshments at the conference on days 1 and 2 were served in the exhibition. This served to encourage us to chat with exhibitors and also allowed networking time with other delegates. I appreciated the fact that the breaks were all fairly long (30 mins) to allow proper time for this.

After tea we moved on to the University Showcases. I was presenting (in the absence of Tim Fernando, its manager) about Mobile Oxford and how it evolved and has progressed. I was grateful to Tim for providing me with some good slides and grateful to Stuart Lee, our Director, for being on hand to answer questions. I talked about how Mobile Oxford had developed from the Erewhon project and how we had chosen to develop a web app rather than a native app. There are so many devices to keep up with so web app is much more widely available and works pretty well so long as sufficient effort is put into device detection and then delivery of content optimised for that device. As a member of Oxford City Council I was also pleased to be able to explain (and demonstrate) how Mobile Oxford is aimed at all citizens of and visitors to Oxford as well as members of the University of Oxford. I was asked after the talk about usage stats which I didn’t have to hand but I’ve now checked and find Mobile Oxford gets around 160 unique visitors per day, consistently since launch, with big peak around the transport page addition.

I had to give this talk twice – in the first two sessions of the University showcases, but was able to attend the fascinating and entertaining talk by Paul Dean of Edinburgh Napier University entitled “What they don’t teach you on management courses”. Paul gave some good personal advice including saying what you think, using management structure, and listening as well as speaking your views. Good advice about managing your boss and colleague was to try to understand them, try to make decisions outside meetings and sleep on difficult emails. All good! Good advice about handling users included getting to know the student president, avoiding feedback by committee, remembering that the top KPI is all that matters and that solutions for the masses are often better than “sexy” projects. Excellent advice about recruitment was that it is extremely important to do it right as mistakes are hard to fix. If it doesn’t feel right then it probably isn’t and on diversity, balanced teams much better than clones/yes people. A diversity of views is good and creative! The final good advice from Paul was about infrastructure – suggesting that it is critical, not the poor relation and that minimising variety is more efficient, dynamic resilience lets you sleep at night and that decommissioning your old infrastructure is as important as commissioning new.

A presentation I would like to have attended was one from Peter Tinson (UCISA executive secretary) about the cost of IT downtime. The UCISA “Cost of IT downtime” resource was launched at this session.

The poster session followed this last presentation of the day and I was pleased that Oxford University won the best poster award for a poster about how to cost IT services.

Next I went to the Sheraton to check in and had a rest and a shower before a really nice fusion-style mean at the hotel.  There were three food serving points – one Italian, one Thai and one Indian. It was possible to mix and match courses so I had a lovely Thai starter followed by Italian main course and Tiramisu for pudding -my favourite!

I travelled up a day early for the conference so as not to start the thing exhausted. I got a great cheap flight with BMI from Heathrow to Edinburgh for £30 and managed to choose a broken seat on when I checked-in online so they had to upgrade me. Bring on the G&T!

I was in my first night hotel (The Herald House) by 5pm and had a nice rest for a few hours. I then met with Steve Gough and Mark Cockshoot from Reading University and we had a great Nepalese curry in a place called the Khukuri, just around the corner. We met several other UCISA types there including Andrew Cormack from JANET. We had a useful discussion about dealing with Copyright Infringement notices sent to Universities by copyright holders complaining about p2p file sharing.

We went back to the Sheraton Hotel afterwards for a quick drink in the bar and I had another useful chat, this time with Chris Sexton, about what students want in a computing services website. Her University (Sheffield) had found that students in focus groups overwhelmingly, and repeatably, didn’t like lots of artificial groupings on service websites but preferred a simply, good search facility.

So I had already learned two useful things even the day before the conference started!

We met today at Nottingham University. We were a bit thin on the ground but did decide on some allocation of roles within the group.  We decided to start a shared blog and start to use Huddle.

Dave from Nottingham gave us an excellent run-down of how things were progressing in Nottingham University as more and more of the IT support moved to being provided centrally.  It was interesting to note that levels of service use and levels of quality perceived has increased markedly and Dave thought the challenge was to make sure that staff coming into the centre would retain identity.  Project work was pushed down through all staff levels to encourage collaboration and it was really important to clarify that moving to the centre was more of a merger thank a take-over.

Dilys Young also attended from the Service Desk Group of the Support Services Group as we have a joint Symposium at Clare College in Cambridge in 2011 and planning is well-underway now.  We agreed that we’d start a bit later on the second day to give people a chance to check-out of accommodation etc. and also agreed to host a world-café session in the afternoon of the first day where each table would have a particular user-support-type problem and delegates could move around the tables offering suggestions and/or solutions.

All in all a good meeting and useful to catch up with folks again.  We can sometimes do these meetings by video conference but it is important, I think, actually to get together sometimes, especially for the Symposium planning session.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that all I do is go to conference but that’s not the case!  I was part of the organising committee for this conference and it was held at St. Anne’s College in Oxford, about 5 minutes walk from OUCS.

The conference ran from Tuesday 20th July lunchtime to Thursday 22 July lunchtime.  There was an extremely varied programme and some excellent sessions about how we do what we do with less resource, how we do what we do differently and how we do more with less.  There were lots of useful parallel sessions also.

I think the plenary I enjoyed best was the talk by Ajay Burlingham-Böhr about leaner working.  Focussing on putting the user at the centre of everything we do rather than being hobbyists who are driven by our own interests.

I ran a pub quiz on the first night which was, on reflection, perhaps a bit too long.

USCIA folks are good tweeters so there is a great archive of  669 tweets by 47 tweeters and a nice summary of it available.