Strategic Technology

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?