Executive Team

Several meetings today, and I wasn’t impressed that the last one was at 5pm! I’ll start with the one of most relevance to the department - the Executive Team meeting. Items discussed included:

• How CiCS might have to realign its services to take account of a major restructuring of the University which will happen next year. I’ll post more on that later when the report is circulated to the Senate.

• ITIL - this provides a structured framework for best practices for IT Service management and related processes. ITIL has been widely implemented within the IT industry but has only recently been adopted by the HE sector. A number of Universities have started implementing ITIL in specific areas with a view to applying the principles to other areas over time. The areas covered are:
• Service Strategy
• Service Design
• Service Transition
• Service Operation
• Continual Service Improvement

Potential benefits of implementing ITIL include improved service quality, better resource allocation and pro-active IT management.
We’ve agreed that in principle we want to implement ITIL but in order to find out more, and decide which bits and how, we’re arranging a half-day overview for key people.

• Lessons learnt from the power outage incident last week – we’ll be having a number of discussions about how we might improve a number of things.

• How we might provide training and support for staff in CiCS who manage staff, by setting up a management development programme, tailored to the needs of individual staff

Other meetings included the Admin Team – the Heads and Directors of the Professional Services - where the main item of discussion was the implications of the restructuring, and a meeting to discuss transparency and information flows.