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.