Innovation

I spent yesterday at Lancaster University with colleagues from other HEIs and Gartner talking about Innovation. Started with a tour round their data centres, normally I'm not a fan of data centre tours, but these were really interesting! Overhead cabling, water cooled, nice and modern. As our main one is in danger of being knocked down as part of the University's development plan, we may have to build a new one soon and move services, so we might get a nice shiny one as well.

I also had a chat with a lizard called Eddie (Eddie Lizzard, get it?) in a Digibooth, but that's another story...

The main part of the day was some presentations and discussions about Innovation, and how we can build it in to the way we run our deaprtments.

One of the fitrst questions we asked, was waht are the barriers to innovation - what stops people doing it? One the main ones is not asking people to innovate, and assuming they will figure it out for themselves. Others include being afraid to fail (innovation requires that you take risks), not rewarding people for innovating, only allowing the "creative types" to innovate and making the innovation process really bureaucratic and slow

Two other key processes which need a lot of attention are motivation and momentum. People have to be motivated to innovate - a clear purpose is needed, not to restrict ideas, but to give some focus that everyone can work towards.

We spent a lot of time discussing whether an "innovation team" was needed, or whether this would give the impression of elitism If we did have an innovation team, should people rotate through it?  Should we give everyone some innovation time, or run competitions for innovative ideas? What about hackathons, innovation jams?  Suggest that people do something different to promote creativity - nice quote from Chip Heath, author of Switch:

"You cannot direct people to each have a brilliant idea every Tuesday at 4 p.m. But you can direct them to do something that is likely to spark that brilliant idea — for example, taking time every Tuesday at 4 p.m. to go to a different department or talk to a potential user of your product."


The reason why we need to innovate? As has been proven many times, if we keep on doing the same things, in the same way, we will quickly become irrelevant.

Presentations, Pecha Kucha and Printing

Spent much of the last couple of days writing presentations. One to give next week at a conference which is a Pecha Kucha, or 20 slides for 20 seconds each. I must admit, I'm not entirely sure about this style. I find it quite difficult stick to 20 seconds, often wanting to digress into a story... I will just have to be more disciplined! The other is also to give next week to postgraduate research students about possible careers after they've finished their PhD, trying to open them up to things other than a career in academia. Many transferable skills are acquired doing a PhD and then writing it up including critical thinking, problem solving, writing, organisational skills and project management.

We've also had a a departmental meeting this week where I outlined our proposed new service portfolio and we had presentations on our staff creative media service and our graphic design and wide format printing service. This service has just won a national award for some design and printing work they did in of the catering outlets. Space was limited, so they designed prints to cover the cupboard doors.great work and a deserved winner.



Our external speaker was Chris Murray from epiGenesys, who gave us a fascinating overview of their history and the sorts of things they do.

Also this week I've been to a steering group meeting about how we develop the Sheffield Professional concept. Look out for some exciting announcements!

Now I'm on my way to Lancaster for a seminar on Innovation which I'm looking forward to.



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Ten great things and a murder mystery

Busy campus today as its an open day. As usual we have a stand telling students what to expect when they get here, and what they might need to know about IT facilities.

Building on our success as being number one for student experience this year, we've devised a new set of web pages and a small booklet with the Ten Great Things in IT here in Sheffield.

Also today, the Student Summer of Innovation awards were announced - I blogged last week about the selection process, and now can tell you about the 20 projects that will be funded. You can see a complete list here and read about them in detail. There's some really good ones. To give you an idea of the diversity of them they include:

• An app to encourage female students to break gender stereotypes

• A flashcard revision system for veterinary students

• The Duct Tape University - an Open Education Resource discovery and publishing tool for learning communities

• Homicidium  - a nomadic campus game which aims to introduce students to elements of their modules in a day long murder hunt. 

Will be really exciting watching them all develop over the summer.

Successful completion of My Sustainable Print

This morning I went to a celebratory event for the end of our My Sustainable Print Project. All of our print champions were invited (the people in departments who really worked with us to make this happen), as well as some of the CiCS team and Sharp, our suppliers.

It was an opportunity to thank everyone for what has been a technical and operational challenge, as well as a huge culture change across the University. Our  network of print champions, the suppliers and the different teams within CiCS have collaborated and cooperated to get to where we are today.

We started a few years ago with a complete print audit of the University by our consultants, Wyse, and from that we realised how many benefits a completely managed print solution would bring.
Sharp were awarded the contract in Dec 2013, and began planning immediately, and the roll-out programme began on 6 January 2014. Between 6 january and 31 March 521 devices were rolled out across the whole campus.

As well as rolling out the new machines we also introduced a new Pharos control solution across the fleet, a new scanning function and  follow you printing for all staff so that everyone can print to any machine across campus. In addition,  all old photocopying equipment was removed, some devices were redeployed to student library locations and a procedure for logging support calls was established. Finally,  all old printers were removed. This was not without difficulties ;-)

The old printers were sent to a community enterprise in Sheffield, Aspire, which provides support to vunerable and socially excluded people. They have arranged for the printers to be reused or recycled, thus providing significant social benefit to the local community. So far we've removed about 1800 printers, with more to go.

There were challenges which had to be met during the deployment, including the logistics of ordering, storing and delivering so many printers to different locations, the aggressive timescales, the extent of remedial works needed (for example provision of additional power and data points), changing departmental requirements, health and safety issues around location of devices, and some product specific issues including an early problem with the scanning software.

However, the deployment has been hugely successful, and we are now transiting from deployment to management and support, with a fleet manager and two engineers permanently based on site.

One of our next developments will be the roll out of Everyone Print which will facilitate printing from mobile devices and manage guest print at the beginning of September
Some of the many benefits are:
1 Cost savings of c£1m per annum. Getting rid of expensive to run printers, replaced with more cost effective and more functional devices

2 Positive contribution to green credentialsReduction of power consumption of the print fleet by 80%
CO2 emissions reduced from 24 to 5 tonnes per annum
Reduced size of printer estate.
3 A fully managed service with a reduction of internal IT time spent working on printers. which can be redirected to other projects.

4 Improvements to service delivery with a team based on site working to a tight SLA with specific targets


Going forward, we now have a sustainable print coordinator based in CiCS who will manage the contract and the service, and act as coordinator with technical teams and support teams in CiCS as well as all suppliers.
We are looking at establishing a Service Advisory Group to input into development of the service

The Helpdesk are providing first line support, logging calls on our servicedesk software which handles the escalation to second line support provided by Sharp.

A benefits realisation group had been established which will analyse and report on savings and benefits. and produce case studies to demonstrate best practice .

Finally, our highly successful Print Champions network will be maintained to help us in collecting feedback and optimising the service.

Its really nice to see the completion of such a successful project, and I'd personally like to add my thanks to everyone involved - the Project Team, the technical teams in CiCS, the Helpdesk,  the print Champions and the suppliers  -  Sharp, Wyse and Aspire. Well done everyone! But we mustn't forget our comms team who worked hard to get the message out to the University about what was happening:






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Diamonds, students and stolen tapestries

Started the week with a Senior Management Group meeting for our new building, The Diamond. We're into the design freeze now, so discussion is about progress on the building, and interior layout and details. Progress is good. Fascinating discussion about concrete. Who knew it was so interesting. Listening to the progress reports, and watching the webcam, as well as hearing about the lorries of concrete lined up at intervals and managing the tower crane capacities makes you realise what a massive logistical exercise it is.  And also now starting to appreciate what a huge, and stunning, building this is going to be.

Today I had a meeting with JISC to discus one of their latest innovation projects which I'm going to be involved with. Called from Prospect to Alumnus this is a big project which aims to provide a joined up digital student experience from pre-application to employment.  More details in this infographic. Just at the scoping stage at the moment, but I'm looking forward to being involved.

Finally, a piece of news tonight which made me smile. We used to have a meetings room called The Tapestry Room, with two Eighteenth Century tapestries. About 20 years ago one was stolen, rather brazenly by a couple of guys who walked in wearing brown coats, rolled it up, carried it out and calmly nodded to the porters as they went. It was some days before someone realised it hadn't been taken down for cleaning....

So, one of the tapestries remained until recently when the room was refurbished and decorated, and it was taken down.  We were going to sell it, but it's origin was traced to a French chateau where it had been looted by the Nazis in WW2. So, we've returned it! How cool.

Don't like ladders.....

One of the reasons I was at the Enterprise Mobility Summit yesterday was to take part in a panel session. It was chaired by the chief reporter from Computing magazine, and although there were several questions lined up in advance, most of the questions came from the floor. I was with the guy from the swiss bank who I posted about yesterday, someone from a local authority, and another private sector company. A real mixture of different approaches, and the guy from the swiss bank and I were sitting next to each other, and decided we were opposite ends of the spectrum when it came to our approach to mobile access to our services. They are very heavily regulated, locked down and risk averse, obviously. I think I was the only person there from the education sector, and everyone was really interested in our approach to BYOD - as I pointed out, it's difficult to avoid with a 25,000 student population. There was some definite wincing in the room when I pointed out that we allow any device to be connected to our network, including gaming ones.  I was surprised at the attitude to Android devices - even the most risk averse companies allow iOS and Blackberry, but will not allow Android devices to be used because of the risk of malware. The other area we were way ahead on, was using the web as the main platform for services, and having a good single sign-on portal - makes mobile access so much easier.

So, an interesting couple of days, met some people from outside the sector which is always good, caught up with someone who used to work with us 10 years ago, and scared myself stupid visiting HMS Belfast on the way back. Yes, I know I should have realised that a nine deck warship was unlikely to have staircases, that most of it would be below the water line, and a dress and sandals would not be appropriate attire for climbing up and down vertical ladders. Throw in a fear of heights and water, and it was a perfect hour!!

Enterprise Mobility Summit, mobility trends

Today I'm at The Enterprise Mobility Summit in London, taking part in a panel discussion later about opportunities and challenges of the move to mobile.

The summit kicked off with a review from Computing magazine of the main mobility trends following some research they'd done using focus groups, questionnaires and interviews.

Most people in IT are control freaks. Interesting dilemma when it comes to mobile. Control of devices is moving away from IT and becoming more decentralised. But, security is moving from hardware, to software and services which is under control of IT. Huge rise in mobile working which has to be facilitated.

Main reason for implementing mobile solutions is increasing efficiency and productivity, with increased flexibility second.

Use of PCs and Blackberries decreasing, tablets and smartphones increasing. Is it time to write off the laptop? Not yet.

BYOD increasing. But slowly in corporate organisations. Looking to secure the data, not the device.

Main platform for app development are iOS and android, blackberry and Microsoft way behind.

Next session was from a Swiss banking organisation about how they are using mobile. Interesting, so different from us. Most people using PCs and blackberries. Main mobile device is laptop.
Have to be secure, and seen to be secure.
Mobiles devices are a mechanism for leaking data, for introducing malware, instruments for government snooping.
Use "good for enterprise" on blackberries and iOS but won't allow it on android because of risk of malware and data leakage.
Use a mobile device management system on company owned iPads.
No single sign on to applications. VPN only available to senior managers. Prioritised platform security overly system security.
Their aim to be device agnostic, with BYOD available, whilst staying secure. To do this they will have to manage the apps and data and not the device. Single user identity, single authentication. Mobile first approach to apps.
They admit they are a long way from this, and it will take a lot of time to get there.




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Up, up in the sky...

One of the JISC projects I've been really pleased to be involved in has been the Summer of Student Innovation - I've posted about it a number of times, and the scheme is now closed. The ideas have been submitted, and the votes cast. They are all on the JISC Elevator site here - you can have a look, but can't now vote. I've spent a lot of time over the last few days scoring them in preparation for choosing which will be funded. It's been really good fun - I'm amazed at the inventiveness of the students, and also the professionalism with which they produced the videos pitching their ideas.  Watch this space for an announcement in the next couple of weeks about the successful ones. And then for the students chosen, the work really starts as they have to develop their idea ready for a showcase at the end of the summer.

In other news, there was a fantastically bright pass of the International Space Station tonight. Still fills me with awe when I see it. There's a really good app I use to track it and forecast passes (ISS Spotter), and then if its not very bright you can use SkyView Free to see it pass pver. As well as impressing all of your friends by knowing the names of ll of the stars and planets you can see. Saturn was particularly impressive tonight. Must get a telescope. Although I think I got a pretty good picture with my iPhone!

User Group and Digital Trust

This morning was our User Group - representatives from across the University who we use to gather feedback about existing services, and act as a sounding board for new ones. We covered a number of things - our objectives for next year, the services we're planning to run in The Diamond, and the very imminent demise of Windows XP. Like a number of places, we've still got some machines running it, but as of 1 September we will be disconnecting them from our wired and wireless networks, so that should flush them out!

We had a presentation about our Staff Creative Media Suite, which we set up following the success of our student facilities, and is available for all staff to creative multimedia projects.  Very popular for creating audio and video for MOOCs, iTunesU, and other digital teaching material.

We also talked to them about security - a very hot topic at the moment. There's a lot of media coverage about various security issues, which is leading to an increased awareness. Other things covered was  the project to review our student system, and the work of our comms team, presented as an entertaining Pecha Kucha.

Later in the day I was at PSE (Professional Service Executive), where I was presenting. We had received a briefing note aimed at Audit Committes called "Building Digital Trust". This had been circulated to senior managers, and I'd been asked to comment on the issues and risks raised, and what measures we were taking. The note is easy to read, and outlines the changing environment for IT including the usual suspects - consumerisation, mobile, social media, analytics, connectivity, cloud and the pace of change. It then lists ten topics which have associated risks, and suggests how Universities should be managing those risks. I picked a number out, and outlined our response. These included:
Student expectations, Cybersecurity, Consumerisation, Cloud, New Educational Delivery Models,  and I added two of my own, Digital Literacy and Digital Identities. One of the points I was trying to get over, was that many of these risks nee to be seen not as IT risks, managed by technology, but as University level risks and concerned as much with people and processes as technology.  We will be starting up some University level governance around Information Security and Identity Management soon, so I hope it worked.

Old web site, new masterplan

Well the sun is shining, its Friday, going out tonight and a free weekend ahead - what could be better?  Thought I'd better post something about what's been happening - the reason for a lack of posts is that a lot of the week has been taken up with SRDS interviews, HR matters and budgets. most of which I can't for obvious reasons tell you about. I've also been writing a couple of presentations for next week, as well as preparing myself for a panel sessions I'm taking part in at The Enterprise Mobility Summit on Thursday.

 I have been to some interesting meetings though - the University has just about finished it new Estates Masterplan, and I've been to a session on that. Great to see so much in it about the public realm, creating more green corridors and public spaces and squares. Also a lot about traffic management - promoting our green transport policy and trying to get as may cars as possible out of the centre of the campus and onto the periphery.The multistorey car park we're building will help with that.

I've also been talking to some of our Executive Board about our review of our existing student system, and the importance of this being seen as a transformational project. This is not about putting a new system in, it's about having a completely new look at how we do things and about reviewing  all of our processes. This project will be as much about people as it is about systems.

Finally this week we're saying good bye to someone who was instrumental in designing the first major revamp of the University's web site, from a Campus Wide Information System, to a proper web site back in around 1997 I think. Here's a screengrab of it:

Look at those lovely clean lines, the well designed icons....   Good luck in your retirement Ken, you'll be missed!