One of the regular meeting the Exec team have with all of our Section Heads today. Most important item on the agenda was our operational plans for this year and next, which have been drawn up by the different sections under our seven service headings. Next task is to amalgamate them into one plan for the department, and to look at priorities. Interesting how some priorities have changed - as I mentioned yesterday, wireless is top of everyone's list. Lecture capture and streaming, which we do a limited amount of, was not in demand a year ago, and now is so that we will have to expand our service. Too many other things at a high priority to list here - the difficulty will be finding the resources to deliver them!
We also talked about projects to enhance the student experience (very important in the light of higher fees), how to improve and speed up decision making in the department, and our great Vice-Chancellor's open forums, which are highly recommended.
This afternoon it was the Corporate Social Responsibility Committee, where the main topic of discussion was reducing our carbon emissions. Lots of work already done, but a lot more still to do. We're picking off the buildings on campus which have a high energy consumption and concentrating on them. Of course, the buildings which consume the most energy per square metre are our two data centres - despite all the good work we've done on virtualisation and layout etc. But, lots of good things planned to improve the air con etc. Paradoxically one of the other buildings with a high energy consumption, is the one doing all of our research on energy and climate change.
The other big agenda item was developing our sustainable procurement policy - we already have a policy on ethical sourcing, fair trade, supporting local businesses, and this will build on that. There's a lot of work to do looking at the environmental impact of our suppliers.
Finally, I managed to get a plug in for our managed printing project, which should reduce the amount we print, and make that which we do more efficient. People still seem to print everything - including the covering emails with the agenda attachments (you know the ones - please find attached, etc, etc..... And they print everything single sided. And powerpoint slides on a whole page with solid blocks of colour. Grrrr
1 comment:
I'm afraid that I'm one of the people that prints everything off when I go to meetings as I don't have either an ipad or laptop..... I feel very self conscious when going to meetings where the majority of people have either of the above...
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