Best in the world - almost.

Today I was at a University Executive Awayday. Discussing planning, we focused on barriers to achieving the University Strategic plan. Very interesting, and a number of common themes. Some of the things of interest to me included complexity of processes, the need to simplify and understand data flows in the student, teaching and learning systems, research data storage and our interaction and alignment with the Faculties. Lots to talk about on all of them, and all being addressed.

We also discussed a review we'll be starting soon of our Student Information System - we implemented it some time ago and the time is right to look at the future development of it, and whether we should be looking at a package, or another solution - best of breed modules or a shared service development for example. I did try and get them to agree that any implementation of a new system would be after I retired, but they didn't seem too keen on the idea!

Finally -  a piece of really good news. The University commissions iGraduate to carry out a student and international student barometer, where the results get compared against other Universities across the world so some form of benchmarking can take place.  Yesterday the results from the Autumn 2011 survey were fed back

The headlines were;

For the student barometer CiCS scored 96.2% satisfaction, which means we were ranked as number 1 IT dept (in terms of student satisfaction) in the Russell Group and the UK.

In the international student barometer CiCS scored 96.1% satisfaction, which means we were ranked as number 2  in the world, and number 1 in the UK.

 

Not bad eh??  Well done to everyone - a fantastic result.