Monday 1 November 2010

Costing services and a joint awayday

So, last week was mainly promotions, with a bit of other stuff thrown in. A meeting with colleagues from Finance for example to look at different ways of budgeting - currently they are a mixture of historical allocations, expenditure forecasting and bidding for strategic developments. One option we might be considering in the future is zero based budgeting, or working out what services we want to offer and costing them to come up with a budget. One immediate thing we're going to do is act as a pilot department for costing services in a much more detailed way than we do now. If we don't know how much our services cost, then how can we make decisions on what services we might be able to offer in the future. Of course, cost is only one thing when considering services - value and impact are also important.

Then on Friday our executive team had an awayday with the Library's. A good day, and lots of issues of joint interest discussed.  In teaching and learning our biggest area of collaboration is of course the Information Commons. We have a new manager starting later this month, which we're all looking forward to, and working with him to develop the IC to play a full role in the new teaching and learning strategy. We're also planning a bid for "IC phase 3", to increase the number of study spaces. Exciting times!  Other common areas we talked about included research data storage, identity management, the Library's e-architecture and aligning our objectives to the University's new corporate plan.

A good day, and to round things off we saw a kingfisher!

1 comment:

Pablo said...

Costing individual services, now there's a challenge. Some costs can be directly attributable of course, but a large chunk of expenditure in a department like CiCS must be in providing a network of interwoven skills which support a broad range of services with flexibility for the future. Who's for 'unbaking a cake'?

I do appreciate I am now in the running for a 'stating the bleeding obvious' prize.