Strategic Technology

The Strategic Role of IT in Teaching & Learning, Library Services and Research

Professor Denise Kirkpatrick, Pro-Vice Chancellor for LTQ, The Open University

Want to pick up a few key points around leadership and IT. There is a blurring and blending that is taking place between on campus and off campus learning. Masses of software and opportunities and way to connect with each other and the world.  We use them as much as we can to provide a wide range of learning experiences for our students. If we don’t teach our learners how to use these technologies effectively then we are not doing our job. If they do not use them we are disempowering them, It is our responsibility to educate our learners to make the best use of the technologies around them.

At the OU we have a wide range of supported learning and projects that use technology in various ways. We look at the influence of technology on students’ lives and in the way we provide education and run ourselves as a university. Technology does not sit in isolation from our students’ lives.

When I think about leadership I can think about it in terms of my role in the university to influence what happens in our institution but also the things we do in our own institution and the effect it has on the sector and other bodies. Leadership must cover the internal and external.

When we think about IT we think about it operating at scale – how it may transform learning and teaching – at the level of the group and the institution. A wide range of projects has been about supporting individuals or small teams and to date the impact has been fairly limited. I want to look at projects that scale up and scale across.

I think I have one of the best portfolios around. In no other university have I had such a fantastic group of people but such a cleverly put together set of units – a technology solutions unit (around 500 people). There is also a student-focused group, looking particularly at research and scholarship. I also have a technical futures unit, an R+D unit that looks at the horizons. Also a repository services and sandpit area in the library. These areas come together in a way that allows us to lead the university in the use of technology for learning and teaching.

Our students are increasingly mobile and we are trying to respond to that. The OU is involved in:

iTunes U: shows that the OU can be agile, responsive and fast. Launched in June this year, in March Apple had invited us in as some of their previously chosen flagship universities had not been able to deliver. Showed staff that we could do things quickly and in a way that involved people across the university  and that we could work to scale and deliver a high quality product. One of the ways to help people to overcome a reluctance to use technology is to make it as easy as possible, and this does that. Another way is to make it understandable - we gave all our SMT an iPod Touch preloaded with all our material. It has had an amazing effect. We think iTunes U will give us a whole range of new opportunities in the future. It is a response to a flexible and mobile world where we do need multiple channels. We are now part of a JISC-funded project – Steeple – with Oxford and Cambridge to share this knowledge.

VLE – we went with an open source management system, Moodle. Long term project and one which involved a lot of consultation. The VLE is the set of tools that staff are encouraged to use in all of their university business.

Learning designs project - the Learning Designs project is an attempt to gather empirical evidence to understand design, visualising design, guiding and sharing designs. We’ve been running learning design challenges across the university.

Leadership: creating opportunities; showing direction; supporting risk taking; blue skies thinking; now and for the future

Margaret Coutts, University Librarian, Leeds University

From collections to content: the core collections are print; e-journals; databases and datasets; e-books; content via internet – so much of it is now IT related. Commercial v open access sometimes gets overlooked.

What’s our future core likely to be? e-learning materials; e-theses; open access research outputs; mass digitisation; blogs wikis etc and many more that we do not know about already.

Has brought in new types of information management practices such as digital curation and digital preservation.

From a library point of view, we are dealing with three basic types of sources: print; print to digital; and born digital. We are working with all of these and it is a complex environment.

The future environment will see a significant increase in digital resources with a long-term reduction in the print base and a winder content creator base than ever before. There is the greatest potential ever but also the greatest fragmentation ever.

Resource discovery is crucial to effective information use – there are library shelves but also external systems/repositories and services. There are specialist navigation tools used by the research community and multiple retrieval systems from VLEs to portals and search engines.

User behaviour and needs: evidence of poor information retrieval methods; skimming reading habits; young researchers’ use patterns ‘horizontal, bouncing, checking, and viewing’

User location is also relevant: students use the library as a ‘third place’ after classroom and home – used for IT facilities as much as print. There are major library building developments going on to make libraries effective for this 21st century learning.

Research process is a cycle of content retrieval; use; creation; curation; dissemination and use. But there are also other complex processes and these need to be recognised and understood as part of the research and library landscape.

Issues for IT strategy: [full details on slide] includes digital curation and preservation; storage; open access v commercial publications; e-architecture; improved resource discovery; collaborative tools; reliable bibliometric analysis

Issues for IT/academic information management strategy inextricably linked; staff and user skills, such as content creation and curation; learning and research methods: does ’skimming’ affect the quality of our results?

Dr Phil Richards, Director of IT, Loughborough University

When joined Loughborough I was tasked to build the university’s IT strategy. I was handed the 10 year vision and a blank sheet of paper. This is what I did…

Have seen the move from central certainties of the 70s and 80s to the ubiquitous IT and distributed difficulties of today. There were issues around in the early 90s with dealing with ambiguity and complexity and tendency to withdraw into ‘this is what we support and if you don’t like it go away’. Library professionals offered a large dose of customer skills and awareness of training and need for a help desk that actually helps users.

Gartner maturity model – aimed at infrastructure but I think it works just as well for people:
0: survival
1: awareness
2: committed
3: proactive
4: service-aligned
5: business partnership

Vision: I found it helpful to have simple, clear, high level messages. IT any time, any place, anywhere. Organised for users, not for providers. Sounds so obvious but so often we don’t do it.  Articulation via scenarios: putting user experience at the centre of conversation. Not saying that it’s original but it worked for me and it might work for you too.

Organised for users, not for providers: diagram can be found on the slide

Idea is to distill all the interfaces into one single portal for the user.

Scenarios: example of an overseas student who found it easy to use Skype in her hall of residence to call home. The highest rated service for overseas students at Loughborough wasn’t sport (that was second) but our internet service. We make a virtue out of the access to Skype – Hallnet – we offer. Student experience is very important to us and HallNet is part of that.

Scenario: a new lecturer who was attracted to the university by its high performance computing

More of these scenarios can be found on the Loughborough website.

My boss came from AstraZeneca and we started together on our first day. We went for lunch and I discovered that all of the IT at AstraZeneca had been outsourced. I racked my brains for examples in HE where outsourcing hadn’t worked. I explained the difference relating to commodity v complexity IT [see diagram on slide].

Student experience: Loughborough has a reputation for sport so wanted to do something for sport. Got sponsorship from Logicalis. Also did some work with arts, a screensaver art show.  We’re also proud of our student broadcasting, we’re leading in this area we believe. SuperJanet provides an enormous power to broadcast over the world. Last year we broadcast the Loughborough v Bath varsity  rugby match.

Summary: HE IT services maturing and have a clearer articulation of vision. Choosing where to invest, student experience as a key market discriminant and IT does have a great deal potentially to offer.

Findings from the JISC / Leadership Foundation Study
Current engagement of institutional strategies with the information technology agenda
Presented by Dr Andy Jordan of Duke & Jordan Ltd

Purpose of the study to identify the issues and development needs relating to the integration of technology into institutional strategies in UK HE. Examination of:
awareness; current practices; potential benefit

Want to incorporate feedback from today into the final report. Questions in breakout session have arisen out of the work we have done.

We approached 28 universities and asked via letter to the VC for names of roleholders and most of them said yes, some took an age to reply and a couple said no. Those that said no are those where we asked to talk to governors. Pledged confidentiality. Attempted to interview individuals from large bodies who were not HEIs but were less successful in getting agreement. Where we did, they gave a remarkably similar story of the processes in organisations outside HE sector.

We asked:
How does your institutional strategy development process work? How are any conflicts resolved?

How does technology currently contribute to delivering your institutional key strategic imperatives in teaching, learning and research, administration and other activities?
How does your institution know where and how technology can make a significant contribution to institutional strategy?
How would you improve what you do?

Got similar answers to the last question across the board.

One of the key findings was the role of technology.
It could be transformational ie radical change of the institution
A strategic enabler – strategy could not be achieved without technology
An operational enabler  technology used to deliver but not critical

Two basic models of the way in which strategy development happens within institutions: the integrated model and the disjoint model
[See model diagrams on slide]

In the disjoint model the corporate role stays the same but the technology part of it is different. We thought there would be examples of top down and bottom up processes but only came across one bottom up model. Top down appears to be the only way that people actually use.

The whole process is completely dislocated in one sense other than the fact that it takes place within a corporate strategy, although timescales may be different. Goes off in all kinds of different directions across the board with technology. An untidy model.

Five examples: 1 small HEI, 2 1992 HEIs, one pre-1992 HEI, one Russell Group

Example: institution A: has coherent long term vision and technology is at the core of the changes they are trying to implement across the institution. They have set up a set of roles within the institution to enable this to happen ad a set of three people who are technology literate – the deputy VC, an SMT member whose portfolio covers ICT and a person called a CIO but is not on the SMT. There is considerable autonomy within the schools so has to be consultation and advocacy. It is negotiate rather than compel. Have a separate IS strategy but for the last time as want a corporate strategy from the centre.

Example: Institution B: does not feel there is a need for a technology strategy/ Have adopted an enterprise architecture approach within institutional strategy and see it cascading down to technology. Have an open SMT. No specific IT skills within the SMT but involvement of several members in technology management.

Example Institution C: small, vocationally focused institution. See technology as a strategic enabler. Use the integrated model. Technology is part of what they are doing. CEO and deputy CEO technology literate. Consultation was around how rather than what. Innovation and partnership in technology is a key element in their measurement of success.

Example: Institution D: has a vision and top level strategy developed by the SMT but have a rolling approach to dealing with functional areas of strategy. Roughly one area of strategy updated annually. It is a disjoint model in terms of how it gets wrapped into the corporate strategy. One strategy component is devoted to ICT.

Example: Institution E: very long corporate strategy -  10 year cycle, very broad aims. Separate functional strategies, overlapping time cycles. Autonomy in schools. IT strategy is a governance strategy: sets framework and boundaries.

Issues – 1 – success

We asked about success and most people replied that they think it works reasonably well, were fairly happy with what they did. Wasn’t always straightforward but by and large people were happy. Trying to identify good practice but found that one model does not fit all and what suits a large institution may not suit a smaller institution.

Issues – 2

Two models of universities – federal and unitary – variants of disjoint are the most common

issues – 3 - the role of technology
The norm was to see it as an operational enabler. Very few saw it as transformational.

Issues – 4 – the role of the head of ICT

Four key areas: operation; strategy; customer support; influencing

Traditionally. the comfort zone is in operations. The hard part is the influencing. The CIO territory is influencing and CTO territory is more towards operations. Question of language and whether people were using the right or the same language came up again and again. Remains a factor even today.

Issues – 5
Where does the head of ICT sit in the hierarchy?
By and large they were only one step below the SMT but distinct difference in way that they perceived themselves. This was the major issue seen as needing improvement – the head of the tech function should function at a board level.

Issues – 6
The skills/characteristics of the head of ICT / CTO / CIO: frequently from outside the sector in the latter case

What is good practice?
Clear that most institutions have thought about where ICT fits
Not clear that all SMTs are in a position to understand what technology can/cannot deliver
But – if you’re not using the tools to hand then denying yourself opportunities

Our recent work on shared services for the JISC found that HEIs must deal with globalisation of HE and the economic downturn and so they need to be lean and agile and technology is critical to both of these.

To improve good practice:
SMTs should be technology literate
Technology should at least be a strategic enabler (cannot achieve this without integrated strategy development)
UK HEIs should develop: their own CIOs and technology staff who are business focused

Draw attention to Dearing Recommendation 42: HEIs should develop managers with a deep understanding of ICT

Q+A

Mike Roch: Andy, you talked about how most institutions are content with their processes. Did you look for any kind of performance indicator or outside verification?

Andy: yes, they would say that. But the confidentiality issue is helpful to us and do have to say that many of the institutions had changed their processes quite recently and believe that what they now have will work well. Didn’t look for alternative criteria.

Jon: we did look for the SMT possessing the ability to be able to explore potential and when we spoke to SMT people I generally felt that the levels of imagination were not what they could have been in some cases. They needed someone they could be provoked by – someone to talk about web 2.0 and describe ways it could enhance the student experience. For large corporate system planning, I got the impression that things probably were pretty adequate.

Bob: when we spoke to people and asked if they were satisfied they were not universally but we wanted to know if they had a set of processes that seemed to work and would be replicable. We did attempt to try to map what people said on to the processes they described. Difficult to avoid the big watershed developments, such as the internet or VLEs – key strategic drivers hit you and then you respond to them. A lot of questions but wasn’t just a pat on the back type conversation.

Ted: can you comment on who the intended audience for the report is and how you intend to reach them

Andy: Leadership Foundation and the JISC. First piece of work being done under those auspices. It will have recommendations about what they should be doing. That is the key audience. Hope that it will be of interest to SMTs and HEIs but they are not the target

Ted: how far did you see or not see technology as being transformational

Andy: virtually nobody is using it as that. SMT do not see it in those terms.

Delegate: reductionism in terminology – are you losing some of the richness of what is going on? Does it affect the conclusions?

Andy: a good question… we did use the word ICT…I don’t think that the word knowledge management came up at all in our interviews and that’s the sort of thing we were allowing people to range across if they wanted to. I don’t think we were losing a huge amount by the terminology we were using.

Delegate: we shouldn’t be surprised that ICT as a strategy is not integrated as there is a lot of disjoint between the learning and estate and ICT strategies and one question is which is the boss strategy and I think we’re all searching for this. ICT covers such a huge array of what an institution does. I think we’re struggling with how we cover that whole breadth of everything we’re asking the inst to do in relation to ICT and whether just one role can do that.

Andy: you’re right – different kinds of inst have different kinds of approaches. Some will have such a high level vision that the role of ICT in it is insignificant. Others are trying to keep themselves on the ladder. One model does not fit all.

1. What can the UK sector learn from these developments?

2. How do they fit with current policy developments?

Table B

• Government agendas to work together and share - pressure to do some things more efficiently, eg data centres.
• There is a need to understand business processes more so can have intelligent conversation with suppliers of commodity services, whoever they are.
• Be like a Judo player – use the weight of the heavier player (ie a funder) to work with them.
• Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are collaborative across sectors, possibly because of their size, but there’s no similar regional governance in England.
• Is three is the magic number for collaboration, or can you have a larger two–speed group (some institutions come along for the deal, but are not actively involved).
• Serious policy influence from politicians, less notice taken of practitioner requirements: serious drive to save money and become world players (eg Scottish Physics depts.) as a subject cluster.
• Where can institutions show their USP if teaching is a commodity, delivered in a standard way?

o How will the student experience be enriched?
o Disaggregation of teaching role (so material delivery done by associates, and high value staff facilitate high quality discussion and embed the learning)

• Institutions focus on market so “small ‘u’” universities focus on undergraduate courses, whereas “big ‘U’” Universities do masters courses and research

Table C 

• Rethinking systems: re-configure: focus on the person / student needs: ‘concierge approaches’
• Go beyond the regulatory framework: ‘rules’ or ‘guidelines’.
• Challenges of identity management: student profiles: analogy with Amazon: anticipatory needs as well as responding to them.
• ‘Predictive analytics’.
• How far will those changes ensure the organisational change?
• The real and virtual worlds should interrelate effectively: software and face-to-face
• Complicity of regulatory framework stems from a desire to be fair.
• Shared services, leverage: in particular, but not always, systems which are not differentiates between HEIs.
• ‘Hands off’ some areas.

Table D

• Collaboration issues - started with data centres
• Hydro-electric power and data centre location away from the urban area - social issues; resilience issues of fibre?
• Privacy issues for data centres, not security of personal information but systems resilience.
• Question of building-up collaboration around trust regionally already strong.
• Probably forced collaboration will come in UK. Are we capable of federalisation? Do we have to follow a merger agenda? Is it only possible where there is strength? How do we get around politics and self-interest. Is collaboration a sign of weakness?
• Collaboration succeeds where you’re not competitors but complementary, can deliver something together which separately you cannot (ie Warwick and Wolverhampton) and in particular the business and community engagement.
• Has the JISC held back inter-university collaboration and innovation? That is, does it only work on services. Should it stop funding projects.

“Open-ness”

• To what extent is e-Framework holding things back? Standards can be an inhibitor - open standards just as susceptible.
• Why doesn’t the UK work together on VLE in open source developments? Hull are just about to implement Sakai

Table E

• Maybe JISC fund a true open source federation rather than just a few more studies into it
• Reinforced the fact that when collaboration is based around a few key individuals, this progress is liable to damage or problems when individuals change – so the emphasis sits with sustaining and developing relationships and common purpose
• Maybe the motivation for collaboration higher with the Dutch example due to threat to future existence, perhaps this is less acute in the UK
• Real problems to IT function through the university enterprise agenda and outreach to wider community
• Maybe collaboration might be easier at a regional level rather that with other institutions at a mission group level
• Perhaps a role for JISC to run a UK Kuali – type project to generate more tangible outputs
• Collaboration is best when there is evidence of a very strong driver – global competitiveness ought to be one such driver to help keep UK position strong
• Need to counter the funding council-led view of collaboration which is about accountancy with institutionally relevant suggestions of where collaboration will really provide value- add
• Question? How many open access repositories will be built? Should this not be tackled?

Table G

• Open source? JISC? Agnostic on software but support open standards
• Who sets the policy direction in the UK? Funding Councils?
• What are the drivers for collaboration? Vulnerability, threat?
• Ireland – funding initiatives, alImperative for change needs to be really strong. Threat, pressure
• Hosting externally eg. Blackboard, Agresso. Out-of-hours service (NORMAN) for service desk(s)
• Open – V (?) secure issues
• Major suppliers – not really moving towards opening up products eg. SITS, Banner, Blackboard
• Still willingness in Universities to share ideas/network – we should be able to come together more with support from institutes of technology co-operating together on joint purchases eg. Banner, Agresso (??)
• Difficult for institutions to cover all the service bases individually. High availability issues – to increase, stretches resource pool unless working with other institutions.
• Shared services – requires enormous degree of change
• Distance not really the issue any more – find collaborative partners at a distance if they are not in competition?
• Spotting opportunities to share services – early enough
• JISC to ‘oppose’ other countries who may be trying to ‘poach’ our students

Table H

• Maximising leverage – using own resources both within and external to organization – could do a lot more on this

• Analogies with Government shared services agenda
• But major challenge of delivering services between partner organizations – different priorities for each organizatio
• And real cost-savings still to be prove
• Saas – cynical view
• Successes - eg JANET – and some local arrangements eg email scanning, helpdesk service
• Noted both HEFCE and JISC shared services programmes
• Drivers for sharing, leverage, etc will need to be economic, and delivering on self-interests
• Framework with common standards needed in readiness
• CIO role as catalytic here
• Some consideration of optimum scale of collaboration and sharing – but again not enough proven experience to define good practice
• Open Everything agenda - important to recognize that this is not cost-freeGreen computing – imperative to cut emissions and fuel bills
• Govt agenda – what will be forced through – important to anticipate and be pro-active

Actions to include:

• Recognition of large quantities of unused computing power capacity
• Identify scope for maximizing use across boundaries
• Get own institutional houses in order in readiness with virtualization, thin client solutions, use of cloud computing services, etc
• Possible extension to JISC green computing programme to cover maximizing use of computing power capacity.

Table I

One of the things we struggle with is ‘open everything’ – just keeping up with the technology, the opportunities and options. How do you get that knowledge base into the senior team, how do you get eg Board members to take a big risk on all this? What’s really needed are good, relevant, short briefings for senior managers and leaders to help them understand. There’s a role there for JISC, for the Leadership Foundation.

HEIs will be operating less without reference to what others are doing. Shared services are being looked at. The collaboration/competition balance is tricky. But really we ought to be looking at how we can use public money more effectively. Why are we all running HPC clusters, why are we running VLEs and separate servers? Why have we all got SITS? Vendors push us into some of these silos, but open source could offer alternatives. Difficulties are around trust – who do we trust with our data? There’s Moodle, but where are the open finance systems, open student systems in the UK?

It seems easier to create partnerships outside HE, eg with FE, with schools, although competition on the 14-19 curriculum is increasing.

Technology could help break boundaries of universities. We need to focus on a change in the way we think about what our systems deliver to our end users, students and the academic community. We need to stop the proliferation of multiple datasets duplicating data. Open standards might help us. If we can get the bedrock infrastructure right, then we could get flexibility.

One of the problems is the shifting goalposts imposed by government re: reporting. Our systems are driven by those reporting requirements rather than meeting the needs of our students or staff. If systems are properly designed, we should be able to extract the reporting information anyway.

We’ve taken too long to think about a unique student ID. Again, funding goes into institutions not to individual students, so systems and thinking about services are divorced from end users. Why is it so difficult to answer the question ‘how many students do we have?’.

Green computing could have an impact in the longer term. Question whether virtualisation can deliver what universities want (even if helps energy consumption). But we should be asking serious questions about moving data centres and other potential shared facilities out of universities … ‘off-shore’ or to rural areas with close links to sustainable energy. But much of these data are critical to institutions – who do we trust with it?

University Strategy and IT: A World View from the University of British Columbia
Ted Dodds, Chief Information Officer and Associate Vice-President – IT, University of British Columbia, Canada

What Martyn described in terms of the CIO role inspires both inspiration and envy in me. The work in Cardiff is pretty outstanding. I’m honoured to be here today and I’m very much looking forward to meting as many of you as possible and exchanging our experiences. At meetings like this we get a chance to learn from each other. I’d also like to pay special thanks to David Harrison who spent most of his weekend entertaining me and showing me the sights of Cardiff.

The conference theme…I love the title and the idea of IT and people and partnership. I’ll use the term community in this presentation and it really is a euphemism for the theme of the conference around people and IT and partnership. So I feel very much at home just by virtue of the theme of the conference. The longer I spend in the IT world, the more important I find the relationship between IT and people.

I want to share observations and common strategic issues. I spend a lot of time interacting outside my institution, as well as interacting within in. I network with my colleagues and peers around the world. I want to look at the focus on people and the power of the community and leadership and the role of the CIO, though not nearly as eloquently as Martyn’s presentation.

University of British Colombia quick facts: it is a multi-campus, research-intensive university with 50,000 students and $1.5bn revenues. We have top 30 or top 40 international ranking. Our IT is highly devolved. 80% of staff are outside the centre. So the ability to make decisions and set strategy in a way that doesn’t rely on complete control of resources but rather on influence and persuasion is crucial.

Richard Katz is a thought-leader. Involved in Educause and ECAR. I went on a voyage of discovery with him by taking a year off and exploring professionally and personally and have time for reflection. I sought to gain understanding; fortify relationships; establish new connections; understand the global context; personal renewal; find the grail of IT – who is doing best practice in all these areas.

We didn’t find the grail – there is no one institution or country or region or one way of doing things best but we did find a common range of strategic themes. These are:

• leverage
• open (everything)
• aspirations
• e-research
• e-learning

Leverage: it’s about combining our resources with those of others for a common purpose. Universities do not invest in IT to increase their market share, unlike some commercial organisations. In the HE field our incomes are to a large extent rather fixed and so when we make those investments it is becoming increasingly important to leverage the resources of my dept, my institution and even my country with those of others. I think this is where the international agenda also becomes quite important. I’m happy to see the networking that takes place in a conference like this to help that kind of leverage take place.

The University of Stuttgart has the good fortune of being in the same city as Mercedes Benz and Porsche and they leverage their resources with those companies. The companies need high performance computing and they can invest in this kind of facility in a way that the university can take advantage of eg using the spare cycles, but also picking up some of their capacity when it is upgraded (which commercial companies usually do sooner than universities). Endowments are another form of leverage but in the current economic climate this is changing. We didn’t find the same role for endowments in Europe as in the US and Canada.

Open everything
I would assert that over the last number of years, HE as a community has developed a real understanding of what it means to be open. We are taking something we have always been reasonably good at – sharing knowledge – and developing services around that. The movement to open is visible everywhere.

Open standards: little bit of a dichotomy but standards leads to flexibility and to creativity. 100 years ago there were as many ways to screw in an electric lightbulb as there were lightbulbs. It inhibited development. Or look at railroad gauges. Different gauges inhibited the free flow of railcars. The free flow of knowledge is made easier with a well set-out set of standards. It has been a real driver of innovation and creativity.

The open forum: fascinating conference coming up in December in the US . Full details on the slide. I think it is the road that we’re on and it will require a range of changed management structures we need to start to think about.

Another good resource is a new book called Opening Up Education, published by MIT Press. It’s covered by the Creative Commons licence. Just begun to look at it and it is fascinating reading.

Open source is one example of open that has come of age as a viable alternative to market offerings. It has already become a de facto driver of innovation as it offers an alternative in the market place which is typically dominated by a few large players. It increases competition and keeps the commercial world on its toes in important ways.

Aspirations
I read a lot of university mission statements while on study leave. How many can a person read and remain sane? We all aspire to similar things and I think there is something to be said for being a little bit more selective. Can a university be all things to all people? The universities I think of as excelling are relatively young as institutions:

In the private realm, Carnegie Mellon, which made a decision to be the best in the world in narrow research disciplines where they could be the best in the world, defined their strategy as narrow but deep and through that they have been enormously successful.

In the public realm, the University of San Diego, took the decision not to be all things to all people and so they moved their veterinary college to UCLA and shrunk the capacity of the university and so increased its capability in what was left. Gutsy decisions.

We found that institutions that were well established were perhaps less focused on the value of Bologna than younger, less well-funded and ambitious institutions. Saw it not as a threat but how can we bring the brightest and best to our institutions.

Rankings: why do we care about them so much? We can’t see how we’re doing on the stock market so we look at rankings instead.

e-Research
Research is no longer the preserve of the lonely scholar in a garret. We’ve been eliminating the boundaries of time and distance. The grid, the cloud, the idea that I can sign into the cloud and just get on with it. These are tools for collaboration, to have that immersion experience. ‘Industrial’ approach to e-research – positive trend of CIOs being recruited in from the private sector. Most people to survive and thrive through that culture shock. All these investments result in a lot of stuff which takes up a lot of space and draws on a lot of hydro, which requires heat, which requires cooling, which requires more energy. The green implications of these high performance computer clusters is starting to have an impact on the environment. Green ICT is coming of age. Cloud will be an interesting change management exercise.

[Slide e-Research – ICT and CO2 emissions contains various facts about the environmental impact of computing]

We’re going to start by researching and publishing research and best practise around green IT. Carbon trade system in ICT? Educause has identified green IT as one of its potential foci in the future.

Data centre projects require space and resources and people. Huge investment going into them [see slide e-Research – Data Centres]. Would it be possible to have “zero carbon” data centres? Then we can scale up as zero times zero is still zero. We have the capacity to do this today but we haven’t previously conceptualised the problem in this way before.

e-Learning
Current state of play: Market consolidation; litigation and patent rulings; disruptive behaviour; difficult to tailor or personalise products. I think the time has come for a new generation of systems. The current generation have not simplified tasks for most people and the systems are not user-centric and are increasingly complexity despite substantial investments being made over many years. We have a service deficit. They are monolithic and so inflexible and so time-consuming and expensive to adapt to changing practice. Upgrade cycles are frequently not driven by the needs of the customer and in-house development has become unsustainable.

Time for a new generation of systems: need modular, flexible, loosely coupled and systems-based (Service Oriented Architecture). Collaborative, shared development with commercial business models for implementation and support. This is made possible by maturing technologies.

Information systems for the net generation. Kuali – community source software. This is the idea that institutions band together to create products of interest to us. Also have commercial affiliates, both big and small.

UBC is leading a project called Kuali Student. Our vision is to support students by anticipating their needs and helping them to make choices and set goals and reduced the time it takes them to complete administrative tasks. Also to support a wide range of learners and activities, and support a wide range of academic processes which are not silo-based.

List of founders and investors available on the slide.

Ted runs through the role of the CIO and identifies the issues for CEOs and CIOs – the full list is on the slide. Major complaint with dealing with CEOs is that technology is only visible when it is a problem. For CIOs, think about demand not supply and think about restructuring around Operations and Strategy.

Q+A

Mike Groves, University of Reading: Ted – your last slide was about the authority of the CIO – could you say more about it?

Ted: in the environment in which I work which is highly devolved, the importance of IT governance and the ability to have authority that doesn’t manifest itself in command and control and centralisation - those are very bad things in our environment and I wouldn’t last long if I pushed that. The CIO needs to be involved in those decisions and set policy – how do we decide who has decision rights and who has input rights and it needs to be clarified that the CIO is in the decision-making role within a collegial environment. To Martin’s point about the importance of building trust, the more you can show a track record n this type of governance structure, what are the benchmarks we can show people to illustrate progress?

David Harrison, Cardiff University: I think that 3TU have got a lot to teach us about SOA. We have been trying to do some stuff on it but seeing it turned into practice would be very interesting.

Ted: very important point that David has raised. I’d love to exchange what we have been doing. SOA is at the heart of what we are doing with Kuali and it would be great to exchange expertise.

Craig Wentworth, JISC: JISC’s funding some work into SOA so I’m interested in whether you have found that the modelling you are doing has facilitated any other benefits, even if not intended.

Ted: defining what that service is, is definitely the direction we are going and we should see some results from that soon. We have an active project with Ian Dolphin from JISC to learn from each other around SOA and the e-framework as one way we can have a common vocabulary in order to span nations and I think that’s where we will see some real benefits.

Martyn Harrow, Director of Information Services, Cardiff University

David Grant, Vice-Chancellor of Cardiff University, is sorry not to be here. But if a CIO is worth his salt he should be able to do the CEO’s presentation, so I will do my best to cover his ground too.  I sit on the managing board of Cardiff and so have a corporate responsibility to lead and guide the university but also have four functional areas of responsibility:

• the library service
• media centre
• high performance computing
• university IT

David and I did have two presentations and I will not entirely attempt to present his but will step through it with the overheads. Then I will do my own. David and I have had a partnership over five years. It is very central to the university’s development and it also has to be nurtured and invested in. We do a lot of that nurturing in discussions over a bottle of wine. A lot of good ideas come out of that. But that key relationship does have to be worked on.

We first gave this lecture in 2003 and most observations are still valid today. First, a bit about Cardiff: 26,000 full time students, more than 6,000 members of staff, member of the Russell Group, seeking to be one of the top 50 universities in the world.

The CEO and the Vice-Chancellor – a  similar role? David contrasts the two roles in terms of industry and university. [See ‘CEO Roles’ slides.] More touch points than one might think. Even the conventional idea of short-termism in business and long-termism in universities is not strictly true. Both must manage short term outputs and deliver today but both also have to have an eye for the long term game plan and that is central to the relationship with IT right now.  There has been a huge change in the capability of ICT and global ICT impact is tremendous.

Vice-chancellor’s view of the  CIO role: makes the point that information absolutely central to the excellent management of the university but, again, university IT has perhaps been rather under-invested in the past and this is a legacy many of us face in this sector. Past under-investment is not just in kit and systems but in whole professionalisation and culture of the university and understanding of how to grasp the potential of IT and grasp it with competence. The CIO is business-critical and business-enabling.

Martyn now moves on to his own presentation.

CIO is one of the most exciting jobs that anyone can have but also one of the toughest jobs that anyone can do in any enterprise. Also one of the most exciting because the fast-changing nature of IT presents the opportunity to make a difference to your organisation. I’ve held CIO roles in government and public service, private sector and also provided coaching in CIO roles so I have a spread of experience. One of the most important features is the relationship between the CIO and CEO.

Why CIO? Because it is about how to make large complex enterprises work well. How to make them the best in their field. IT is the tool, the enabler you can use to achieve those outcomes. That’s my passion – the fusion of people and IT.

The new IT agenda
[further details on the slide]
In the 60s and 70s IT started to become central. We have moved from Doing IT to Managing IT to Leading IT. It is a single working lifetime change. We started our jobs on the left hand side of the chart (60s/70s – Doing IT) and we’re now on the right hand side and that rate of change within one lifetime has no equal in any other profession. Both in terms of pace of change and also the capabilities of IT. There is a generational change. It is a completely different paradigm. The shift from functional IT to IT which is much more about social connection - the human dimension of IT – and the fusion of those things is opening up a new paradigm. We’re really only on the cusp of a huge shift in power because of the shift from functional to human dimension of IT. It is a much more prevailing and compelling form of IT that sticks.

The skill agenda is also important – what does it take to be successful as a CIO in the 21st century? The same kind of skills needed for success in any profession or organisation. Very different skills to the technical skills that have been traditional in our discipline and that’s something we have struggled with – we suffer from the legacy of that. We may present in ways that are not so business-smart and often look a bit geeky. We need to learn about the people dynamic that is essential for success. If you need to get IT invested in, it can be hard to take management on a journey to feel confident about IT.

IT environment – Target for change
Checklist on slide: if you recognise too many of those points as a CIO then you are in a bad place. The last few points are among the most important: sceptical stakeholders. Treat the key people in your organisation as your investors rather than your customers. You want to take them seriously and deliver confidence. Your senior team are your key investors. They need to get the kind of service to convince them that the IT people can manage their own business well. IT has in the past been treated as a cost not an investment.

21st century CIO – agent of change
You need to be the organisation leader responsible for IT but also have a wider remit – have a positive impact wider than IT. Skills that would apply to anybody in any discipline.

How do you get there? Firstly, you have to BE the CIO. Take ownership and provide the catalytic change. Exhibit the kind of characteristics I talked about in the previous slide. Get the basics right first. Put the IT house in order so that the service delivers – show what you can do with the service you already have. Show that you can actually fix stuff and deliver excellence within the parameters you have. Recognise that the people factor is everything. Manage the people dynamics is key and you must invest in your own and your team’s development. One of the challenges when you have a technical profession. Think out a game plan for yourself.

IT game-plan for success
Look at the reality now, desired reality, action agenda and actions now. You have to figure out how to make it happen in your own organisation. Have to get your profession engaged with your colleagues elsewhere in the university.

An illustration from Cardiff
When I arrived in Cardiff I had that game plan and David and I put together a strategy for the next 5-7 years. Cardiff has set itself an ambitious agenda. We have modest funds so have to be very smart in our investments in order to get an edge. The international world of university research is incredibly competitive and we want to be one of the world’s top 50 universities. I looked at how IT could make our university distinctive. It could be an affordable investment. We identified three differentiating platforms of the future:

• Library strategy: what would a 21st century library of the future look like and how would we get there
• Modern IT working environment: CIO role to see some of the ways modern IT could help this institution. But it has to be something that the whole university sees. So we went through sessions with key players to show some of these ideas and ask if they could see ways that those ideas could help the university.
• Advanced research computing: we were a bit behind on this so we used some outside consultancy to work with colleagues with more knowledge and expertise to hold a mirror up to us

An illustration from Cardiff [more detail on the complex slide]
The university strategy is world-leading Cardiff; research; learning teaching and assessment; staff and student experience. There are specific areas of focus in these three areas: Excellence today; Creating new futures (the three major investment platforms: 21st century library, modern IT working environment, advanced research computing, pathfinding); Developing INSRV (Information Services).

The MWE concept illustrated [more detail on the slide]
We have a concept for the modern IT working environment: it will deliver to you what you need wherever you are, whatever device, 24/7, 365 days and be available to colleagues you are collaborating with too. This is being implemented now and is catalysing change in a diverse university. It helps achieve a sense of identity across campuses and departments. It is making a fundamental difference.

Take aways:

• The CIO has to be the person who takes the lead. Absolutely. And you absolutely have to guide your organisation through this fast-changing world. And you have to be skilled with all the usual skills
• The CEO/CIO role is crucial. And it also includes all the senior key players and they may not all be on the board and you have to figure out who they are.
• You need to have your own game plan for success. HOW you are going to make it happen.

Questions

Malcolm Read: your success in Cardiff is underpinned by a strong relationship with your CEO. What advice would you give to any CIO who cannot make that relationship work so well?

Martyn: You have to recognise where you are in a situation like that. You may not be able to achieve the transformational change your organisation needs without that. I would counsel anyone not to let your career be blighted by that and to think about moving and finding a CEO who does get it. But there can be work to be done – it’s not something to give up on lightly – the penny may drop over time. But ultimately you have to make that choice.

How do you know if you’re getting somewhere? People talk about hard measures of progress, such as network uptake, but these are hard to do as so many changes at any one time. The soft measures are the most compelling. What’s the buzz on the wire? Do other universities ask to come and see what you’re doing? They are coming to us at Cardiff. Are the academics starting to talk up the infrastructure? Is the university attracting academics because of the infrastructure and support? Are they asking you to co-author something eg in the area of high performance computing? The final soft measure of progress is your CEO becomes a hero for the use of IT.

Delegate: can you just talk about the role of the deans in the faculty in terms of influence and how it works?

Martyn:  It’s always a challenge to get the right kind of relationships with everyone and it’s a journey. You have to pick a few to start with and then work over time. They have to see that you are on their side and working to support their agenda and whenever they need anything you must move heaven and earth to try to achieve it. If you do that then the relationship moves on to a different place and they become sponsors of the cause. I think that’s happened in Cardiff. If you get the relationships right then you can have an influence beyond the IT agenda.

Delegate: One of the things that David did when he became VC is to disband a lot of the committee structure and the concept of personal responsibility was put in its place – making it easier to get things done. So the issues would get at least surfaced within a two week period and not get lost in the committee structure.

Martyn: I go to almost everything I am invited to and so they see me as part of the organisation and not the IT geek over in the corner. It helps to break down the need for formal structures.  We take an interest and use our initiative to help them out.

Delegate: We would welcome the way you emphasise the people dimension. In this sector there is quite a culture of adversity to change and people who have been there for some time and think they know the way to do it. How did you address those issues?

Martyn: In private industry leaders can do a lot of incentivisation which may – but not necessarily - make it easier to align people to the purpose. A CEO may have some levers a VC does not have but I don’t think it’s really that different. People are driven by attainments and the key trick is to get people on side with change is to help them to understand that what you are seeking will help them to achieve what they want to achieve. How you get to that point of understanding has to be dealt with as the opportunities arise. In Cardiff people are generally on board with the idea of getting the university to the top 50 positions, and that all the efforts we are making on the ground are very clear.

Delegate: One of the things that has been amazingly successful is the investment in people. My experience in the past is that this is not traditional. We tried to understand how the people in INSERV work together and support the university’s mission.