Friday 17 December 2010

Miscellaneous meetings

Rather aptly given the number of incidents we've had recently, we had a Business Continuity Steering group this week. Lots of discussion about how we handle incidents, and the imminent review of our incident plan. Also a lot of discussion about recommendations which have come out of  the incident simulations we've done. The last one was a student shooting, in an exam hall - the simulation, not a real incident! Lots of recommendations about how we communicate, and how confusing the aftermath of anything is, with no-one really knowing what's happening.

Our Admin Team meeting had a report from the internal auditors about the past year's audits, and some of the findings and recommendations. One of the most interesting from my perspective was one on procurement which discovered that a significant proportion of IT spend in departments is not going where we would expect it to. We are starting to look at IT as a Shared Service which will bring procurement more together, so that should help.

I shared with the team our proposals for moving staff to Google apps, and also our project to introduce a managed staff printing service, which both went down well.

Also this week we had a visit form colleagues at another University which is always interesting - lots of opportunities for sharing ideas and information.  Finally  we had the last of our faculty strategic liaison meetings - with Science. A good turn out and a lively discussion about future plans and how we can work more together.

Spent quite a lot of time keeping an eye on the weather forecast as well - lots of ice, but not much snow thank goodness!

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