UCiSA, RUGIT, JISC and JANET (acronyms galore)

Back from Barcelona, and straight off to to more exotic places - Manchester and London!  Manchester was another site visit for the UCISA conference to be held there next March. This time we were looking at how we might use some of the technology we have available, including disply screens for our posters, which aren't going to be posters at all but videos, and a rather exciting exhibit looking at wht theuniveriyty of the future moght look like.

London was a RUGIT (Russell Group IT Directors) meeting. We were very fortunate to have members of JISC with us including the new Chief Executive. We had a very good discussion of what JISC is about, and how we benefit from it. JISC has three main functions - to provide a digital infrastructure, primarily through JANET, our network; to broker sector wide deals, mainly for electronic journals; and to provide expert advice and practical assistance. They're funded mainly from the funding councils and Universities, and provide a great deal of value to the sector - they calculate about £140m per annum. That's a lot of money! This mainly comes from the provision of the network, the work they do on cybersecurity and protecting us from attacks, and the deals they are able to do for us. We had a very interesting and frank discussion with them about what the furure holds, especially as their funding decrease and our current subscription ceases to become mandatory and we can choose whether we pay it or not. Personally I think it is worth it for the provision of JANET alone, despite the problems we've had over the last year. It is still the best network around!

Other things discussed at RUGIT included our response to the PREVENT guidelines, how and why, we're going about Student Attendance monitoring, and Information Security training. 

Swimming pond, fountains, steps and the darknet...

On Wednesday of this week I went to a RUGIT  (Russell Group IT Directors) meeting in London. I got there a bit early, so instead doing what I normally do and having a cup of coffee, I went for a walk. I needed to get my steps in for our Global Corporate Challenge team! I went round the back of St Pancras station,where the area is really being developed. I found a swimming pond, filtered naturally by vegetation, though there weren't many swimmers as it was a bit cold, and dancing fountains outside the University of the Arts Building. After a very early train, it was nice start to the day.

The meeting started with a discussion about our relationship with JISC, the future funding model for JISC, the services it offers, and which ones we use. We also talked about the possibilty of a shared datacentre in the north of England, similar to the one in Slough which a number of London Universities use. We'd be quite interested in being tenants in it, especially if was located in Sheffield :-)  We also had a presentation on our Security SIG (special interest group), which raised a number of questions about things like web filtering, and whether we know how much of our internet traffic is using the dark net....

I mentioned earlier that I'd been trying to get my steps up for the Global Corporate Challenge which I've mentioned before. There's a team of seven of us from CiCS taking part in it, about 43,000 teams worldwide, and about 75 from the University. I've upped my daily step minimum from 10,000 to 15,000, and am doing about 17,000 most days. Still not as much as some other members of the team though! Currently we're on day 66 and are third in the University and have virtually walked from Japan to Europe. Here's hoping we continue to do well.

RUGIT - Security, Cloud and Innovation

Today I've been to a RUGIT (Russell Group IT Directors) meeting in London at Kings College. A great location by London Bridge with the Shard towering over it.

First up was a session from JISC on security issues, starting with the implications for us of the Counter terrorism and security act 2015. It says that we should have due regard of the need to prevent people for being drawn into terrorism. It also says that as a university, we should have particular regard for promoting free speech.
Guidance on implementing the act has been published and is available here, and it advise that it should not add large new burdens to institutions who are following current best practice. Most of guidance is around updating policies and processes, including acceptable use policy which is expected to mention the new statutory duty, but no wording is currently suggested.

There's no real technology implications, other than if an institution already filters harmful content, then you should consider adding this.
JISC is currently developing on line staff awareness training.

We then looked at some other security issues, around our complex environment which covers everything from providing home broadband to complex research environments.
We have very diverse security requirements in same organisation. Because of this, we've been dealing with issues around things like BYOD and incident response for more than 20 years.
But, because our environment is changing, and the smartphone in our pockets has more power than universities had 20 years ago.
New habits are now routine. Mobile working and the blurring of the life/work means that safe IT behaviour is no longer something you need to do at work. it's a life skill.
Security can't be done by IT alone. Our users no longer need our hardware and can change security zone at the click of a mouse.

The role of IT department is to look help our organisations adopt and choose a package of  behaviour, policy, and technology.

Think "work safe", not "stop unsafeness"

We also had a session from a layer, an expert in cloud  - he has a blog which I've a had a quick look at and it contains some interesting stuff - on cloud risks and how to manage them

The first was SLA oversell, where the sales pitch says the service will be 100% available, secure, unhackable, the best, fastest, cheapest etc. however, the SLA will contain phrases like "make  Reasonable efforts etc".
100% availability except, scheduled maintenance, planned maintenance, unscheduled maintenance, emergency, etc.

Another clause found in lots of cloud terms and conditions is the "As is" service.
Or, the service is as we provide it. It might work, it might not.
There's often other clauses excluding any warranties, with no guarantee over what they provide. No guarantee that data won't be lost. They're not liable to you for any losses, even data. All of the above are contained in a the Ts and Cs of a very big web services company who made their name selling books...

How do you manage it? Negotiate terms? But often can't with big corporates. 
Pay more, get better cloud? Pay for failover, redundancy etc?
Split between public, private and hybrid?

Issues around data compliance tax a lot of people, and we concluded that wherever your data is someone will be able to get to it
 Every country has a surveillance organisation, and some legal jurisdiction to get at data.

How do you manage this? Keep you data in your local data centre? Use a hybrid cloud? Encryption, tokenisation? Or just do a robust assessment of the risks

The other risk with cloud services is Disaster recovery and insolvency. First have gone bust, and administrators have demanded large sums of money from customers to get their data back.  You need to plan for the worst and have a DR strategy

finally we had a session on innovation management from Oxford and Birmingham. Both have implemented solutions similar to a Ideascale for generating, capturing and scoring ideas. Done in slightly different ways in the two organisations, but with similar results. Innovative ideas are sought in a campaign from staff and students, and are voted on, and the assessed by a panel. The most successful are funded. in some cases, the staff or student originator works on the project, in some they are developed by the It at department.

Very good day. Always good to meet the others and share ideas and issues

RUGIT awayday continued, JISC, HEFCE and N8

We started this morning with an update from JISC. Tim Kidd outlined some of the things JISC Technologies have been doing, including:
Agreeing terms of contracts with Microsoft and Google for the sector
Putting in place a dynamic framework for file synch and share.
Establishing an archive to tape framework
Amazon web services framework launched in October
Consolidating the Financial XRay which looks at the total cost of IT
About to look at what the sector wants them to do with cloud frameworks
The shared tier 3 joint data centre in Slough with an 800 rack and requirement gathering started for second data centre in North of

They are also just starting Eduroam service monitoring which shows compliance with Eduroam technical specification and provides real time feedback to sys admins. Prof of concept is complete and the "box" will soon ship to 300+ sites.

Also touched on Security, and they are enhancing the security monitoring of the network so that they can identify, analyse and classify events in near real time. They are also looking to protect customers from a wider range of DDOS attacks.

We also got an update about what the R and D section is doing, including some of the student projects from the summer of student innovation which I've written about before.

Something I'm interested in is their Learning Analytics project which aims to develop a dashboard and app so that staff can track students learning progress and get warnings when students are at risk of dropping out so that interventions can be planned. Some interesting ethical issues need to be addressed, for example when university data is combined with postcode data.

After that we got an update on the N8 HPC project which we are involved in, and you can read about that here.

Final session was from David Sweeney, Director (Research, Education and Knowledge Exchange) at HEFCE. As ever, an entertaining and informative talk, looking at the funding landscape particularly in relation to research. His main point was that UK Higher Education is world leading and will continue to be so. We should consider our cups to be half full rather than half empty, there's been so much change in last 20 years that we will surmount anything. It will be tough but we will win.
Higher education is vital for economic growth, and research is central to this. He touched on the REF, and particularly the impact measurements. I hadn't realised that all of the case studies are on line on the REF web site, and they make very interesting reading. The conclusion was that we should make strategic decisions about research investments, partner with big players and stop doing things that aren't productive.


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Google apps, an enthusiastic academic.

The final session this afternoon was from Professor Matthew Collins from York University about using Google apps for research. York, like us is a Google site, using the apps for education suite.

It was a passionate talk. I love listening to academics :-). It was based on the premise that Academics tend to write papers together, and do it quickly. So, they need good collaboration tools. They also process and store lots of data. Cloud services are great for this.

He moved from a Mac laptop to chromebook as an experiment, so he was forced to use cloud services. He has obviously never looked back!

He made the interesting point that all academics use gmail, no matter what you think they're using. He collaborates with academics using docs from many universities, and if they don't have a gmail account from their university, they log in with their personal one. He has rolled out lots of cloud services to academics who loved them.

He pointed out the difficulties of collaborating in other ways, such as track changes in word. His example was 30 authors collaborating on a paper which had to be completed in two weeks, which was successfully done using google docs. Would have ben impossible in word.

I was reminded of something which happened here recently when someone wrote a document in Google docs, asked for comments on it from a group of us, and someone converted it to word, used track changes, and emailed it to the group!!

He also uses Google Plus a lot with closed communities around separate research communities. When this is indexed it becomes a massive collaboration tool.
Some of the tools integrated with Google apps are very powerful. A free GIS tools allows mapping, and a cloud based based bibliography tool, Paperpile, looked particularly good and we'll certainly be investigating it.

He has 1.5m docs on Google drive!! This led to Google stopping his access because they thought he was doing something dodgy.

He has tried other cloud services eg iCloud, One drive, but in his opinion they were not as good as Google.

He's now using it for teaching preferring Google classroom to Blackboard, and
Google slides instead of Keynote or PowerPoint. I hadn't realised how integrated Google slides was with Google scholar, allowing you to select images which you can drag to a slide and it will provide the citation of the origin of the image.

He's also using Google plus for teaching. Students will post stuff there because it's a closed community and not part of their Facebook and Twitter worlds. They engage with it in a way that they won't with Blackboard.

Excellent talk, and some discussion afterwards. Especially liked the question, will Microsoft ever catch up, and his emphatic "no" as a response.



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HEDIIP

Next up at RUGIT was Andy Youell talking to us about HEDIIP, redesigning the information landscape. We all submit data to various bodies, including HESA. There's been a massive lack of coordination amongst data collectors with duplication and no standardisation. This has therefore driven uncoordinated responses from HEIs.

There's also data capability issues with data management and governance issues starting to come up. Of course, there's a desire to drive value from data, and therefore you need good data which requires data governance.

HEDIIP is a programme to drive change across the UK. The intention is to redesign the information landscape, not tweak it.
So far they have done an inventory of data collections from us. They found 523 separate HE data collections and 93 organisations collect student data every year. Many have them use different data definitions. Lots of scope for standardisation and rationalisation.

Lots of good work done so far on things like the adoption of the Unique Learner Number, Subject Coding, and data management. Lots of examples of Universities with hundreds of pockets of student data, often in spreadsheets (fun fact, you can get 1.7bn pieces of data in an excel spreadsheet). Also, different parts of the university will be sending data off to different bodies. Often with no-one else knowing about it.

If we are to redesign the landscape, there needs to be a standard data set with a standard set of definitions. For example, what is a course, what is a student? There will need to be a governance body to implement this. Will probably be built on current HESA return.

Really interesting topic, and I was seriously surprised how many bodies are collecting student data, and how many pockets of student data there are in an institution. One of the discussion topics was, how much is this costing us as a sector. The answer isn't really known, but a rough estimate is many millions of ponds.



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RUGIT awayday part 1

In York at the moment for our annual RUGIT ( Russell Group IT Directors) two day meeting.

Started with an update about the JISC Technology Consultative Forum. This forum is part of JISC's engagement strategy, and we are represented on it. One of the things we will be looking at is the services JISC offers, are they the ones we need and want, and what value do we get from them. The forum will give views, advice and suggestions, and also provide a means to discuss a strategic ambition about what could be achieved for HEIs and colleges by acting together for the common good. It's met once so far, and one of the main outcomes was to look into the provision of cloud services across the sector. Can JISC help broker cloud services for us for example. Priory topics for the next forum will be the research life cycle, teaching, learning and e-assessment, cloud services, remote management of services and information security.

We also had an update from UCISA on recent activities. We are in the final stages of putting together an Information Security Management toolkit targeted mainly at people responsible for implementing security management policies and procedures. That should be released soon. Social media and learning spaces toolkits are also in production. There's a few best practice guides which have just come out, including one on Effective Risk Management. And of course I got to give a plug for the UCISA conference in March, the programme of which is now complete, and looking good, though I say it myself :-)



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Equality and Security

Yesterday I had a catch up with the other leads in our Equality Objectives Project together with some colleagues from HR and Simon Fanshawe who is advising us. Some good discussion on training for managers in equality issues, particularly around policy implementation, and giving people the confidence to use the policies fairly and consistently. We also looked at data, what data we held, where the gaps were and how we could improve it, especially on the staff side. We're doing a lot of work on staff recruitment, and have started to turn our attention to student recruitment. Equality ad diversity issues obviously overlap a lot with widening participation, but they are not the same. One of the issues we keep coming back to, is the importance of the question "why?". Why do we want a diverse workforce, why do we want a diverse student population. Summed up nicely by Simon as Diversity trumps Ability every time.

Today I've been in London at a RUGIT meeting where a significant amount of the meeting was spent discussing cyber security issues. We had speakers from the CPNI, who gave a very interesting and informative overview of where they felt the high risk data in Universities is, which is mainly in some research areas likely to be targeted by intelligence agencies. We had already asked our Security SIG to have a look at their 20 critical controls and how they might be applied in a University environment. There was general agreement that very few of them could be applied across the board, but were relevant to high risk areas. We also had a look at how some Universities were handling mobile device management, and discussed our relationship with UCISA.




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MOOCs

This mornings main session at RUGIT was about MOOCs, Massively Open On-Line Courses. We had a presentation from the University of Edinburgh, who launched 6 MOOCs in January of this year. It was a very interesting presentation, and very timely, as we are discussions what Sheffield should do about them next week!

MOOCs are open to everyone, there are no mandatory qualifications and are free to enrol on. The learners who enrol on them aren't really students - they pay no fees to the institution which has no commitment or relationship to them. There is also a huge drop off rate as people enrol at the beginning and then drop out after only completing part of the course.

The courses are fully on line, but there is evidence that people doing them organise physical meets.
They are very lightly tutored and usually supported by teaching assistants, not academics.
They do offer assessment in various forms, and have low study hours per week. The MOOCs currently offered by Edinburgh are short (5 weeks) and have no relation to each other. At the end you get a certificate of completion rather than credits.
They are a completely different business model to traditional HE.

MOOCs come out of many years of technology enhanced learning. For example, on line and on campus eLearning, and online and off campus distance learning. You need to understand how to do teaching and learning on line before starting a MOOC, and apply the same rigorous approval and quality assurance processes to all.

Many companies offer a framework through which courses are offered, providing the hosting and all related administration. Edinburgh joined Coursera. After they launched their 6 courses 300,000 people joined them - that's a lot of admin you don't want to handle yourself, despite the big drop off.

The frameworks have on-line spaces for learners to self support, wikis, discussion forums etc which are moderated. Courses tend to contain a lot of video, but in short clips.

One thing I hadn't realised is that MOOCs have a start time and an end time with timed assessments. Learners can't join anytime and go at their own speed, they have to keep up.

All of the features of MOOCs, for example the automated assessment tools, are open source because of the enormous licensing costs if you use a commercial product. There also deals being done with some publishers to make their materials available for free on line.

Currently there are no credits earned through completing a MOOC, one reason being the difficulty of validating who exactly is doing the assessed work!

Future of MOOCs not certain, the bubble could burst and they could fade away. Or they could expand and diversify and we could see the emergence of specialised MOOCs in unique areas.
One thing is for certain, they are not a money maker!

Some interesting things to consider when we look at whether to go down this route. I think the important question we will need to have a clear answer to, is Why? There will also need to be a clear understanding of the resource implications, they are not a cheap option.



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Genomics for Geeks

Opening session at RUGIT is Human Genetics and genomics. The Science of the 21st century and why it needs infrastructure. Delivered by Ewan Birney from European Bioinformatics Institute. EBI.

Absolutely fascinating talk. Great for me as an IT Director with a couple of degrees in Genetics!

As usual, I've made notes during the talk, and they are reproduced here. Hope they make sense.

Starts with a crash course in genomics for geeks. Hope I understand it!
DNA is a covalently linked polymer nearly always found in anti parallel non covalent pairs. Only 4 monomers which are ATCG. Always written as a string of letters. 1 monomer is a base pair.
A genome is all of our DNA. Every cell has two copies of 3 times 10 to 9 base pairs in 24 polymers (chromosomes).
Is that clear to those of you reading this? Don't worry if its not.

Fred Sager, who won 2 Nobel prizes, invented DNA sequencing in 1977 (incidentally just as I was completing my first degree). Costs have come down, and sequencing much better. In 2007 saw next generation machines, huge drop in costs. Halving in costs every 6 months.

Molecular biologists share their data. Submit to a global database. Synchronises every night. But amount of data increasing hugely. So, data compression scheme now used for DNA sequencing.

Back in 2000 effectively sequenced 1 human. It was epic!
Now, same data volume is generated in 3 minutes in a current large scale centre. Now, it's all about the analytics.

We now know about populations. Only 3 in 10,000 bases between any two individuals are different. Very inbred!
We all have a bit of Neanderthal in us, c2%.

DNA sequencing has 3 potential big impacts on medicine

1 Germ line impact.
Everyone has different risk of disease, but shift is small
Some bigger risk. One is FH, Familial hypercholesterolaemia, or high cholesterol levels.
With FH, if spotted, there is drug that works. Most discovered by cholesterol test in 30s. Seem don't get picked up. So, could pick them up by sequencing.

2 Precision cancer diagnosis
Cancer is a genomic disease where a cell uncontrollably grows.
By sequencing cancer you can understand its molecular form better. Sequence normal as well.
To spot changes, sequence heavily to see errors. Very data heavy. But already showing results. Different molecular forms of cancer react differently to different drugs.
Sequencing of cancer will hopefully become standard practice.

3 Hospital acquired pathogens.
Provides clear cut diagnosis of pathogens
Can be used to sequence the environment, eg a hospital
Can spot things before they take hold, for example asymptomatic carriers. Happened in Cambridge recently.

What can geeks do for biology?
Biology is a big data science
Not quite as big as high energy physics, but only 1 order of magnitude smaller.
Heterogeneity and diversity far larger
Always have dirty data
Need stable algorithms
Very high dimensional statistics problem
Often I/O not CPU bound.

Biology needs geeks!. Can we Convert physicists to 21st century science. NB Don't tell Brian Cox....

Infrastructures are critical, but we only notice them when they go wrong.

EBIs technical infrastructure:
20 PB of raw disk. Don't back up but is mirror in US and it's cheaper to fly discs over than do tape backups!
20,000 cores in 2 major farms.
A VMware cloud allowing remote users to directly mount large data sets
4 machine rooms. 2 London, 2 Cambridge. Only 1 near them.
JANET uplink at 2 Gb/sec, permission to spike to 10 Gb/sec. Moving to 40Gb/sec

There's a big need for data to be available in multiple places. Eg hospitals
Need to broaden base of infrastructure in Europe.
There's a lot of species. Each one needs to be sequenced, data cleaned, kept, curated, available.
Need a robust network with a strong hub.
This is the ELIXIR project and the Hub is at EBI.

Some fun to finish:
Over a beer.....At some point all the data we store is going to be DNA. Why don't we store it as DNA.
Did it on a napkin and got a letter in Nature.
Then did it! Stored all of Shakespeare's sonnets, JPG, PDFs etc.
2 PB information stored in less than a gram of DNA
But will be 600 years before it will be cost effective!

Great talk, I love science! Interesting Q and A at the end about how we as IT Directors can help genome researchers in our institutions, and how we can avoid the self assembled data centres in labs storing their data.


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Webcams and kiosks

This has been almost a meeting free week so far. Almost a miracle. Although one day was blanked out for a possible trip to another University which got cancelled very late, and another afternoon to travel to Edinburgh. But still, lots of catching up done!

Had some great chats with people as well. Discussed rolling out webcams across the campus, we used to have a few, but various things happened to them, and they died a death. Following the success of our own filercam, we need to resurrect a few. Concoursecam will be first. Mind you, nothing we do will be as good as the penguincams on the current BBC1 series Penguins.

Also looked at a possible replacement for our kiosks around campus and in the IC. Some nice ones about, and I of course liked the funky lighting on these.



Currently I'm in Edinburgh at the annual two day meeting of RUGIT, the Russell Group IT Directors. Already had a very interesting discussion about how to prioritise between different areas, particularly around the very high cost of our enterprise back office systems, compared to what we spend on supporting teaching and learning and research.

This afternoon we're looking at working relationships between JISC and RUGIT, and how we might use JANET to exploit new academic connections.



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Let it snow....

Yesterday I was at a RUGIT meeting - IT Directors of the Russell Group Universities. We talked about a number of things, including setting up a couple of new Special Interest Groups - one on open access publishing, and one on research support.  We also had quite an interesting discussion about  strategies, and the different approaches taken. Some have traditional IT Strategies - usually 3-5 year rolling plans written by the IT department and mainly about central IT. Others, especially where all IT is run by one department, have whole University strategies. One had a quite short, infrastructure strategy written by the IT Department, with the rest contained in departmental plans. Here in sheffield we are developing strategies for our service areas, so we have a Teaching and Learning Support Strategy, a Research Support Strategy, one for Communication and Collaboration,  Help and Support, Corporate Information, Business Activity and Infrastructure.

Everyone seemed to be struggling with the same problem - too much to do and not enough resources. Too many requests for work coming in and unrealistic expectations of what we can cope with, and  how long it might take. We're not the only place having issues with prioritisation either, and a distinct lack of services that we can stop offering in order to develop and run new ones.

Today has mostly been about snow. As chair of BCOG, (Business Continuity Operational Group), I often end up coordinating the University's response to events such as bad weather. Today we were making sure that our snow clearing and gritting teams were prepared, we had communications for staff and students, and that we were prepared to get venues ready for exams over the weekend and next week. We have a great weather adviser from the met office who keeps us up to date with the latest predictions. As I write this, we've had light snow for a couple of hours, but nothing serious so far.

Signing off for a week now - my annual pilgrimage to Center Parcs for a birthday treat - lots of sitting in the hot tub drinking cocktails I hope, even if it snows.

Research data, printing and HPC at RUGIT

Today I've been at a RUGIT, (Russell Group IT Directors) meeting in London. Slightly larger group than usual, as the Russell Group has welcomed four new members - York, Queen Mary, Exeter and Durham. So we began with a bit of an introduction about what we do, and concluded that we're a bit of a self help group - sharing information, having open discussions and collaborating. We have two sub groups looking at security and service quality, and as well as all of the RUGIT members we have representatives from JANET and the Russell Group itself.

Today we discussed several topics, the first being research data management. We all see this as an issue, and one that we've been talking about for a long time. The amount of data being produced and processed is rising rapidly, and with that comes the need to store it, and to curate it. The research councils now demand a research data management plan with all grant applications, and there is pressure to keep and manage data in a way that allows its reuse, which involves digital data curation skills including applying metadata. We have a draft Research Data Management Policy which is the result of a collaboration between us, the Library and Research and Innovation Services. Like many other universities we're looking at how we implement it once it has been finally approved. One of the areas we discussed was charging policies. If we charge, then staff will go off down to PC World and buy terabytes of disc because it's cheaper then what we charge, with no consideration of the extra services provided centrally including back up, mirroring, archiving, security, disaster recovery etc. If we don't charge, then it becomes a valueless service with no limits, which we can't afford. We need to get the balance right between value and cost. This is definitely an area where we're all in the same boat and there's opportunities for collaboration.

We also discussed printing. Most of us have a printing service for students, and have had for some time. Many Universities have already implemented a similar service for staff, and others, like us, are just in the process of implementing one. Despite the obvious benefits  - access to an improved service with faster printing, colour, A3, duplex, it being more sustainable, more cost effective, and the devices managed centrally - there is always initial reluctance. Staff are very wedded to their own printers. So, we had an interesting discussion about the barriers to change, and some of the cultural issues we have to manage.

Towards the end of last year, funding was announced for Tier 2 HPC (high performance computing) centres of excellence, 5 were funded, and we had short presentations from three of them:

N8 - Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Durham, Lancaster, Liverpool, Newcastle, York.
South consortium - UCL, Southampton, Oxford, Bristol
Midplus - Birmingham, Warwick, Nottingham, Queen Mary

All have been awarded several million pounds to establish regional HPC facilities, to improve research collaboration and to encourage business engagement. One of the things we discussed, given that the grants are for the initial capital and only one year of recurrent money, is how do we make this facilities sustainable? How are they to be funded when this money has run out? we will need to demonstrate the impact that they have had, not just in research and technological terms, but in collaboration and engagement with industry. It will be an interesting couple of years!

Our final discussion of the day was on benchmarking, Something we've been talking about on RUGIT for as long as I can remember, and it usually centres around how do we know we're comparing apples with apples,  as we all have different structures and services. Well, a small group of us is going to have a go. We'll see what happens.


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Horses, Researchers and Enterprise Architects

Last night I had my second visit to a Chemistry Club event, networking with peers, CIOs and senior IT staff from public and private sector as well as some suppliers. Very good event again, lots of good contacts made and some interesting discussions. The main speaker was Shailesh Rao, Director of New Products and Services at Google. Not surprisingly he talked a lot about innovation, and how development and implementation of new products and services can be speeded up by making use of cloud based solutions. His view was firmly that this is where the world is going, consumers are already used to working in the cloud, and we will have to accept and embrace it.

Today I've been to a RUGIT meeting, on a gloriously sunny day, so nice I

decided to forego the tube and walk the nearly three miles from my hotel to Imperial College. The last bit was through Hyde Park, and I couldn't believe how many horses I encountered, until I realised that the Household Cavalry were based nearby. I also watched some of them practising, with a lot of press including TV present, presumably for the Queens Jubilee.

This morning at the RUGIT meeting we had a presentation and a discussion with a Professor who is an applied Computer Scientist, about what academic researchers want from an IT department. Suffice to say it was a lively discussion! In summary what they want is:

Lots and lots of storage
Backup and fast recovery
Fast and reliable networks
Wireless everywhere
Compute power of different kinds
Reliable service hosting
Support for any device and operating system
Availability of skilled and helpful staff, preferably known
Ability to use their own community infrastructures and interface them with our systems

That list promoted an interesting discussion along the lines of most of the above were things that as IT Directors we would all want to provide, if we were funded to do so. So, how much of the above were researchers prepared to pay for?
It was pointed out to us that they have alternatives to using our services, as many of us know, and they would use them if they felt we weren't giving them the flexibility they needed. Flexibility was the key, to use what they want, when they want on whatever hardware, OS etc they want. Dialogue and speaking to each other in a common language was important. It was suggested that IT service staff should shadow researchers to see how they work. That seems like a good idea to me, and it should work in reverse as well, the conversation has to be two way. Academics have to understand how we work and the range of services we are supporting and the constraints we have to operate under as well. She did suggest that we should move to more agile and user centic development. And mean it! I strongly agree with that statement.

It was interesting to see how much mass collaboration is going on in research using primarily cloud based and community developed tools. Most of them we hadn't heard of, and it did make us wonder whether we actually know what our researchers are using.

The key point being made was that IT services need to coordinate and support, not try and control.

Second major discussion was on Enterprise Architecture. It is safe to say this is not my strong point and something that I am grateful that I have others who understand it much better than me. We had presentations from Universities who had embraced Enterprise Architecture, employing a Chief IT Architect, an Information Architect and a Data Architect with appropriate policies, standards and procedures and some form of governance such as an Enterprise Architecture Group. We also had a presentation from another University which felt that all of these things got in the way of development, and that although architecture was of course important for reliability etc, it could easily become an end in itself. He made a wonderful comment that in an organisation he had worked in, the Architecture group was the only group less popular than project managers :-).
He proposed that we have more important things to worry about that will have a much bigger impact on our user community than getting the architecture exactly right. I don't think the two sides were really that far apart.

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Leaner and meaner?

This morning's RUGIT session opened with an update from the new chief Executive of JISC Martyn Harrow, and the Chief Executive of JANET Tim Marshall. The Wilson Review concluded that JISC should become leaner and more focused, and that there should be changes to the funding model, moving to a more subscription based approach. A Transition Board has produced a report apparently containing 35 recommendations which should be published next week. These will cover governance, funding, focus and legal issues. One of the major services which JISC funds is our network, JANET, which we all feel passionately about, and there was a lot of discussion about how this might be funded in the future, and it's relationship with whatever legal entity JISC becomes. I think it's fair to say there was a full and frank discussion on the future, with a number of different views expressed. I look forward to seeing the report which hopefully will produce a leaner, meaner JISC with a much clearer focus.

The final session of the morning looked at governance and organisational structure. Representatives from four different universities gave us an overview of how they were organised and governed, and we had a discussion on the relative merits, issues etc of each. It's always fascinated me how many different structures there are across the university system.

All in all a good couple of days, lots of ideas shared, opinions exchanged and contacts made.


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VLEs and beyond

Last year at the Gartner conference some of us visited the Open University of Catalunya just outside Barcelona to look at how they had developed their VLE.

It's not a big, designed system, there's lots of projects which contribute to it, it's more of an ecosystem than a VLE. Not all done in IT services.
They based it on an underlying ESB and a set of data standards. Then procured or built selection of modules. Eg some Moodle, some blackboard, some using blog tools,some other web services. Used common look and feel as far as possible. All web based, very agile, and easy to develop new services.

Very easy for staff and students to use. Lots of very rich media including audio blogs, electronic annotation, eFeedback, student video conferencing, video assignments. It also serviced a lot of different academic approaches, not a one size fits all approach.

A presentation on this to the rest of RUGIT kicked off a discussion on the future of the VLE, and how appropriate this sort of model would be to a research based, campus university, rather than a distance learning one.

We also talked about how we ensure an effective route for the adoption of technology and applications into our core learning and teaching offer. Most of us have a mixture of core, supported, recommended and recognised applications. So a recognised app might not come anywhere us, staff find it, use it and often fund it. When it becomes recommended, we give more help and provide the environment. When it's supported, we set it up and integrate it with rest of systems. Core systems are provided and supported and we expect everyone to use them. So, what's the route through all of these different stages? And how do we ensure the effective use of these different technologies?
Do we need to send people out into the faculties to look at the "recognised" apps, see how they're being used, see if they're scaleable, supportable.
Is there another layer of "discouraged"? (Some here suggesting Dropbox should be in that category! ) If there is, it should be between recognised and recommended. Most innovation sits outside of " core" apps. We need to encourage an environment of innovation in teaching and learning, whilst still being able to support core stuff.



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Innovation and IT Lite

Meeting with Russell Group IT Directors and assorted Deputy and Assistant Directors in Oxford at the moment. There's about 30 of us here, and one of the first sessions we had was on Innovation, where we had someone who works in innovation at Virgin Atlantic talking to us.

They are an airline, not a software house. Very light touch in terms of IT, most of it is outsourced. Only have 100 IT staff. They have been voted the leading innovative airline.

Innovation = Invention + Exploitation+ Persistence.
Or, (new things or pragmatic new use of old things) + (get business value out of it) + (keep trying)

IT Lite team were set up to deliver fit for purpose business solutions, tools and models, rapidly . Team were set up outside of normal IT team, with a different culture. Very small, about 5 staff. Speed is very important.
Used 2 plus 2 model:
2 days to define requirements. 2 weeks to deliver working solution.
Used simplified project and product management.
Kept within a suitability filter:
Must have senior sponsor
Must have clear business benefit
Mustn't be business or mission critical
Must have small development effort (30 days max)
No significant impact on IT network and no additional hardware or software required.

In such an innovation team you need all-rounders, and people who can translate IT to business speak. Techies who scrub up well!
Need people who want to own a problem end to end.

Some good examples of what they developed include:
Scheduled flight dashboard
iPad application for pilots
Tactical SMS flight alerts
Disruption support using laptops
Facebook flying club application ( developed by customers)
IPhone app

Social Media Lite
Very Virgin, part of brand value. Customers listen to other customers.


Graph of virgin tweets compared to BA during snow. Virgin are red, BA blue!
Huge growth of followers on Twitter and Facebook.
Very fast way of communicating when things go wrong, eg snow, ash cloud
Also improves search engine results if you get customers talking about you.
App strategy is to have one Virgin App and keep it free.
Very lightweight skinning of website onto mobile devices.

Summary:
It's not about innovation, it's about business value.
The right culture of strong leadership and considered risk taking needs to exist
Prune early and be selective
Protect and nurture, create sandboxes and a sensible approach to investment
Know your limits and stay within them
Pick your targets, a mix of quick wins and high value wins
Expect success and get ready to turn a service created through an innovation process into a production level service.

Interesting presentation, and setting up this separate group outside of the IT team seemed to work. Wonder if it's something we should try? Especially to tap in to some of the great ideas both our staff and those in the Faculties have. Also co-development with our students, in the same way Virgin have done it with their customers for things like their Facebook app. Tesco have used something similar to develop their shopping baskets with customers. Crowdsourcing might have a role to play?




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Catching up

Lots to catch up at the end of this week, apologies for lack of posts, just didn't seem to get round to it! At the end of last week I went to a RUGIT meeting, the IT Directors of the Russell Group, and we had several interesting discussions around organisational structures, shared data centres and the recent announcement of £145m for eInfrastructure which has to be spent in an unfeasibly short timescale. We're very lucky that the new Chief Executive of JISC is one of our number, and Martin gave us an overview of the current review of jISC and some of the changes that will be made to current funding models. It seems clear that although the sector as a whole will be paying less for JISC services, individual institutions will have to pay more and we need to be putting something into our financial forecasts. Hopefully things will become clearer in the New Year, and it will be our role to ensure that this is seen as an institutional cost, and not something that can be found from within existing IT budgets.

W also had an overview from the Chief Executive of JANET on a number of things including SuperJanet6 Procurement, the JISC Review of Janet, the JANET Brokerage Service and IPv6.

This week I've had feedback on the action plan which came out of the LEAN Rapid Improvement Event looking at student computer registration, and changes that we will need to make. Some of these will impact on existing projects such as our Enquirer and Applicant Portal development so it's important to get them fed in as soon as possible. We've also had discussions about our capital spending plans, and some fairly big investments we're making in our infrastructure.

Finally, two really good news stories from the department. On Tuesday I got the feedback from our recent Investors in People assessment, and I'm pleased to say we met the standard on all categories, with many areas of good practice highlighted. Not unexpectedly there were a few areas identified where we could do better and we'll be working on those, but in general it was very positive. Lots of good work obviously going on in the department, so well done everyone.

Then last night we had a reception for staff to say thank you for all their hard work during the year, and we also raised some money for charity as well. CiCS have always been very good at digging into their pockets for good causes, and last night was no exception. We had a raffle, and 73 prizes were donated, some from suppliers, but most from members of staff. They ranged from an IPod, various bottles of booze, chocolate, two amazingly hand decorated Christmas cakes, various electronic gadgets, cameras, to a dubious chocolate shape on a stick (let's just say it rhymed with stick).

Altogether we raised almost £700 to be split between Prostate Cancer Research and Ovarian Cancer Research. Well done folks!

Today I've speaking at a UCISA event on service costing, so a post on that will follow later.

Segways, competition law and reviews

I've posted in the past about Segways, and how much I like the look of them, and this weekend fulfilled my ambition of having a go on one. It was fantastic!  Now I want one even more. Very easy, and very intuitive. The steering is so sensitive I swear I only had to think about which way I wanted to go and it went, with virtually no movement from me. Very sensitive gyroscopes inside. Stopping was the hardest - move your weight from your toes to your heels, and if you lean back too far it goes backwards. But I soon got the hang of it. Would love to see the ban on their use on anything other than private property over here relaxed, as it has been in many other places.

After that excitement, it was off to London for a RUGIT meeting (Russell Group IT Directors). Good meeting, lots of discussion. Started with a look at how we're all approaching the "do more with less" situation we're finding ourselves in. General agreement that we need to stop doing things we don't need to do, and focus on supporting teaching and research. Then we had a real debate - given the introduction of differential fees and the new market economy in Universities, how much does competition law stop us discussing the things we've always shared in the past.  UUK have published guidance, which is very helpful, which we will of course be following, as well as applying a good dose of common sense.

As well as our internal discussions we have a number of invited guests - a representative from the Russell Group attends to bring us up to date with the latest issues our VCs are discussing. The CEO from JANET was there and we spent some time discussing their response to the JISC review. In particular, if the funding for the JANET network is moved from central (as most of it is at the moment), to devolved, then there is a danger that the network could be broken up.  This is something none of us want to see, and in fact most of us would say that we value JANET as a most essential service. This led nicely into a discussion with the CEO of the JISC about the future of the JISC, the current transitional arrangements, and consultations which are taking place including those on governance and the future of services such as JANET.

Finally, an observation. There were 18 Russell Group IT Directors round the table, with 5 iPads, 3 Macbooks, 2 windows laptops, and 8 notebooks/bundles of paper. Interesting?

Narnia in the Library, and a tidy data centre

It's always interesting to visit another University, and some of us we were fortunate to have some time after the RUGIT meeting and before our flights home,  to visit Queen's University Belfast. The main point of interest was The McClay Library, only recently opened, and replacing existing libraries on site, as well as housing all library and IT staff, and the main data centre. It is a lovely building, and we had a very good guided tour. Of course, it's virtually impossible  to walk round and not compare it with our Information Commons, but it is a different sort of building. It is the library, and therefore has different functions. there's lots more books, obviously, and it is very quiet. There are silent zones, and whisper zones. no places where students can work more noisily, apart from in the group study rooms.  It has a very fine atrium complete with real trees, and  lovely wood finishes. The furniture was also very high quality, and some very nice wood chairs and desks.


There's also a very impressive door leading into the C S Lewis Reading room:

I was expecting to go through it and enter Narnia, but instead there was a rather nice reading room,with a map of Narnia on the table in the middle. No Aslan in sight.

Finally, we had a look at the data centre, which is right in the middle of the building. It's very bright and shiny, and tidy! I'd never seen one like that before. Didn't know it was possible. And lots of coloured cables. I know the colours make no difference to how it works, but they do look nicer!