Strategic Technology

Technology in support of Institutional Merger and Change
Dr Paul Rullmann, Vice-President, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

3TU is a federation of three Dutch universities of technology with the aim of strengthening their positions in research and education. The federation seeks to create focus and mass. The differences between the three universities are not as obvious to the outside world as we think internally. The philosophy was for no merging and this did not happen as they are quite far apart geographically and it would have focused energy too much on the administrative side.

We formed centres of competence in five areas and developed five masters programmes. In 2007 we became a federation and we are content with what has been established. This way of cooperating proves to be successful.

Goals remain focus and mass with no intention to merge. They work together on common goals and interests. The minister of education supported it with 50m euros and there is more to come. Our federation policy was criticised by the government and industry to begin with as they would have rather we had merged. But these comments have been diminished since the success of the federation. The universities that stood on the sidelines are now being asked why they do not collaborate.

[Slide demonstrating the structure of the federation and sets out the focus of each section.]

3TU Graduate School is a platform for collaboration. There are five joint Msc programmes and since 2008 three different VLEs for students and staff. The 3TU GS ambition is to create one virtual learning space with a single sign on procedure. We have an outstanding opportunity to experiment with new digital platforms as it is still at the early stages.

First steps – what do we need?

• Collaboration of IT departments (easiest to achieve)
• Adoption of SOA principles
• Orientation on business processes
• Enterprise Architecture as an enabler of change
• Federated Identity Management
• Common modelling language (Archimate)
• Standards for data exchange
• Target architecture

Architecture is about reducing pain and I hope we succeed in that.

Slide: Target Architecture – this is the most important of the slides. It is the plan for 3TU GS

Data cannot be touched but functional services can. The user should not notice a thing. The model gives portals to other services as well. It has strategic importance. Could facilitate knowledge exchange between universities. All HE institutions use SURFnet for their data exchange and they are interested in our plans and support us where they can. The plan looks simple but to put it in place is a challenge. Less technical than about culture.

Cultural challenges
The three universities differ in as many ways as possible to think of – size, cultures, IT landscapes. They are competitive and branding of individual universities is more important than ever. There is a gap between IT people and teachers.

Three success factors:
Must have a common ICT infrastructure
People must be enthusiastic
Leadership – the top has to believe in it

So the role of leadership is to communicate confidence and vision; understand technology; support painful IT decision; give clear directions to the future; organise quick wins; don’t be afraid!

 Q+A

Ewart Wooldridge, Chief Executive of the Leadership Foundation: Paul, what did you mean by the three presidents? How do you get their commitment and maintain it? And also you mentioned the culture of competition and collaboration – how do you sustain that?

Paul: it’s built on relationships. You can have initiatives but then you have to have dinner and talk about it. It’s difficult, as soon as you let go then you get the rumours in the universities so you have to keep the relationship going and see each other frequently and try to be open too. We work together in more or less the same boards for the last six years and now you see things changing and new members coming in and then you have to build it up again. When it comes it competition and collaboration among researchers, then I see that researchers go for the content and when they are interested in it they want to have the best other researchers around and then it doesn’t matter if they come from Eindhoven or Delft or wherever.

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.

Paul: you are welcome to come to the Netherlands. We have made a design and we are going to build it and at the same time there is a long term and a short term road and it is another thing on the road to collaboration when you are competitors as well. You should not do things that stand in the way of the long term perspective so you need to get the IT people together to decide things like that.

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.

Paul: for us it sure did. When you look at all your processes in that way there are a lot of things you can change when you really take the user perspective seriously. We already had shared services in Delft but now Eindhoven does too. Has spread wider than just ICT.

Roger Stockland, University of Surrey: Paul, I was really interested in your presentation about bringing these institutions together. Where have the benefits come through? Reduced public funding? Was that realised?

Paul: we did, although don’t know if enough. We get extra money from the government for research and to develop new masters programmes and there is extra money reserved for the 3TU. The other thing is that it is a platform which opens up new financial sources for research.