Mobility and governance

Had another phone conversation with a Gartner analyst yesterday about how to support a user population who own an increasing variety of mobile devices, running different operating systems and browsers, who expect to be able to access our services on them, wherever they are. This was in preparation for a talk I'm giving next week at the Eduserve Symposium on The Mobile University . As usual, I'm well prepared and have my talk and slides already prepared (that's just a fantasy...), but not panicing yet as the talk is coming together in my head, and at some point it will find its way out. Hopefully before I stand up and open my mouth. Lots of issues to address, including the level of support we can provide, the different services we can offer, and the different models of providing services, ranging from a very controlled to very hands off. Not to mention security, standards, native apps vs web services.....

I've also been having a series of meetings with senior managers in the University about changes to our governance structure. Governance usually is enough to put me to sleep, but this looks interesting! We're proposing a series of strategic advisory boards, aligned with the service areas in our service catalogue, so we're moving well away from having groups that look at systems, to a much more high level, strategic look at whole services - teaching and learning, research, communication and collaboration for example. So far its been well received, and we hope to bring it in by the summer.

Finally, I spent a very pleasant day today with a newly appointed IT Director from another institution, sharing ideas, experiences and ways of managing our respective departments. It's good to talk as they say, and good to share and network - we can all learn a lot from each other.