Business continuity, planning, and what's your mobile operating system?

The week started with a Business Continuity Operations Group which I chair.  Today we looked at reviewing the University's Incident Management Plan, which has been in existence for a while, and is time to be rewritten, especially as we've now tested it in a number of incident situations. We looked at how we handled some recent incidents - including the student occupation and the snow. Templates for departments to carry out Business Impact Assessments have also been drafted and we'll be trying them out with faculties and departments soon. We want to get Business Continuity integrated with the University's risk management process, and these should help. I keep saying "we",  but a lot of our progress is due to the hard work of the University Business Continuity Manager who is based in our department.

Then we had another planning meeting, this time with the Faculty of Social Sciences. A number of professional services were represented at it, and it was interesting hearing the discussion around a number of topics - estate strategy, marketing, recruitment and  student number planning. We contributed to many of the topics, including the need to create flexible and technologically rich teaching spaces and the importance of the web in marketing.

This afternoon we had an executive meeting where we looked at a near final draft of our Annual Report - which is looking very good! We also worked our way through a survey we're going to send to our students soon about mobile devices - what they own, what they use them for etc. Edinburgh did one last year and we've been relying on those results, but thought it was time we did our own. We're looking at what sort of devices people own, and how to get students to tell us what they have - had an interesting debate about how to describe a netbook, and whether they would know what operating system their smart phone has.