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. 

Sunshine on Leith

Yesterday I was in Edinburgh for a UCISA Executive meeting. It's a lovely place, but a long way to go on the train - just under 4 hours each way. Still, the journey is one my favourites in the UK - past Durham Cathedral, the Angel of the North, Alnmouth, Berwick on Tweed, and the wonderful bit where the train runs so close to the sea. And I do get lots of work done on the journey. Had to go up the night before, and stayed in Leith, because Edinburgh was full!

I only know Leith because it's where the movie Trainspotting is set (despite in being filmed mainly in Glasgow), but it was very different to how I envisaged it. This was my view on a quick walk before breakfast this morning.

We had the meeting in the Edinburgh School of Art Boardroom - definitely a room with a view, and apparently a location for a number of movies! This is not a good picture, but might give a flavour of what it was like overlooking Edinburgh Castle!

One of the main items on the agenda today was how we present ourselves to our stakeholders. We have a website of course, and a lot of publications, and we put on loads of events. But how discoverable is our content? We have so much content, but you'd have to know what it was and where it was to find it. And we only have one "view' onto our website. No matter who you are, you come in to the same place. Our discussions today were very reminiscent of the ones we're having in Sheffield about our own website.

We also looked at progress on a number of projects, including a toolkit on Designing Learning Spaces. UCISA's toolkits are a great resource for the sector. Recent ones include one on Major Project Assurance, and one on Information Security Management.

Displays and a Peregrine

Last week I went to visit Samsung at their HQ in Chertsey. We're talking to them about some technical help for a future conference. It was a really interesting day. From looking at their consumer products, including tablets, phones and some pretty impressive flat screen TVs in their consumer showroom:

to talking to them about future teaching and learning technologies. We looked at different display technologies, including interactive touch screens for teaching spaces, and some rather neat touch 3D
screens - almost Minority Report like! There was also some nice curved monitors, apparently easier on the eye for people who look at screens all day as the peripheral vision is less strained.
I particularly liked an advert they were showing on a lot of their screens - not necessarily anything to do with the product, but it had some rather excellent footage of a Peregrine Falcon!

Happiness and a balloon

The conference closed this lunchtime, and I'm glad I stayed till the end. I had considered leaving yesterday, but the sessions have been good, and because the focus of the conference Is not normally what I would come for, the content has been refreshingly different. Most of the attendees run or are from IT support teams, service desks or service management teams, and it's been really good to get a different perspective on things, and I can see things that we could do in Sheffield to improve not just the customer experience, but also the happiness of our staff.

Happiness was a theme this morning, with a session on Rewarding the IT Service Desk from the University of Leeds. The have been through tthe SDI's Service Desk certification programme! although their original thought was that it would be mainly about processes, it was really about people. They've invested in reward and recognition to reward individuals and build a customer focused team as happy people give better customer service. Staff satisfaction has increased to 100%. Interesting to see some of the things they do, including putting themselves forward for external awards which improves morale, and they do as a joint effort, so improving team working.

The last session was on Leadership, and was delivered by Andy Parfitt who for a long time was controller of Radio One. Great talk, but he invoked the Chatham House rule so I can't tell you what he said. I can say though that happiness played a big part. In fact, the only thing that matters in running any service or business, is how happy the staff are. It was an excellent talk, and I can recommend him for any conference organisers out there.

I've also just realised that if I had left early, I wouldn't have seen the after dinner entertainment which was the wonderful comedy maigician, John Archer. If you're into magic like me, you might remember him as the first guy to fool Penn and Teller on a show a couple of years ago where they tried to guess how you'd done a trick. They couldn't work out how he'd done his, and he did the same trick last night. And he wouldn't tell me how he'd done it. Apart from apparently swallowing this balloon

he also produced a magic square in seconds from a random number given to him by someone in the audience. A magic square is a 4*4 grid of numbers where every group of 4 adds up to the same number, in this case 62. I don't know how he did it so quickly. There must be a formula. I'm off to look it up.
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What to do if all your IT goes up in flames

Interesting session today about Business continuity and disaster recovery, focusing on the aftermath of the Crowmarsh Fire. Covers some theory and best practice around BC and DR, but I'll just focus on the Dr after the fire. A slightly scary story from the IT Manager for two small Local Authorities in South Oxfordshire.

The main services are provided by the LAs were waste collection, planning and building control, housing, food safety, council tax collection and benefit payments.

All services are shared between the two councils. All staff based in one place in Crowmarsh. Having recently relocated, and left a property which they now lease to Oxford City Council.
The IT department had 440 users. 1 main data centre with remote back up. Mostly on premise applications. Onsite back ups disk-disk-tape. Most Servers virtualised using VMWare. Most data stored on SAN technology. Some physical servers.

Om Thursday January 15. 2015, there was big fire at their location requiring 27 fire crews. Raged from 0330 till late afternoon, then reignited at night. A car loaded with gas bottles has been used in an arson attack. They effectively lost the whole building.

The story for the IT Manager....

Call from building manager at 3.30am to say building alight.
Took on role to raise senior management board and then initiate emergency plan.
Initiated the IT DR plan. Called suppliers to get plan started and equipment delivered. Had a contract with a company for hot standby. About a 4 hour lead time.
Made decision to use the building they had recently moved out of (Abbey House) where there had been a data centre. That had been identified in the plan.
Contacted BT to get numbers rerouted. That was also in their plan. Redirected to the switchboard in another building
Contacted IT team and relocated to them Abbey House.

Crisis management team had been set up including Senior Management, IT, HR, comms and members of emergency services. First meeting at 7am
Building had police cordon because no one knew why and if other buildings would be targeted
Back up tapes needed but there was only only one key to the safe which was on someone desk which had been destroyed in fire! Rang locksmith to break into safe. Had them before equipment had turned up

Existing infrastructure in building configured for use
DR plans checked so people know what to do
Equipment delivered to remote site by 11am
Set up equipment, rebuild of restore server.
Initial run of back up tapes, found problems with tape drive. Thought back up tapes were damaged :-(
Wasted several hours. But had been sent wrong type of tape drive. So had to get new one. But lost a day
Shared bandwidth with Oxford CC to get access to Internet and set up some temporary web sites

7pm, sent everyone home to rest.

Friday

New tape drive delivered and restores started.
Contacted key suppliers and asked for help where needed. Suppliers offered engineers etc. accepted all help.
Emergency laptops purchased to get frontline staff working. Housing staff especially as they dealt with vulnerable people, they used a hosted application. Bought Staff mobile phones.
Lot of laptops and mobiles lost in fire
Old XP machines used for temporary desktops.
Put up temporary web sites to give public information and key things they needed.

Saturday

Restore fully underway of key systems and data bases. Was an issue getting AD back
Had regular meetings of the team throughout the process
Migrated mail to Office 365. Needed to get mail working, was about to do it anyway so had licences, scripted process to automate user creation. Within 2 hours had fully functioning email system, through a browser. Didn't restore legacy system.
Building laptop image for use on Monday.
Live websites back up by Sunday night
Over weekend had an issues with available storage space for VMfarm.

Monday onwards

Limited number of desks, so only limited space, had to improvise!
Initiated VDI project to replace desktops. Had a new desktop within a week. A week!!!
All system and data recovery completed by Wednesday.
Challenge then was to get rest of business working.
Buy buy buy, build, build build
bought New laptops, thin clients, replacement physical servers. Built new desktops and laptops
Issues.

• Limited office space, staff had to work in rotas.
  
• Expectation of people about how long it would take to recover, assumption it would just happen
  
• Out of hours support for emergency changes, some providers didn't provide out of hours support.
  

Challenges

• Needed to minimise impact on services to the public
  
• Deliver major elections, largest set of elections for 30 years
  
• Office accommodation for staff. Leased some space, brought some old buildings back into play
  
• Communications to staff on what was happening, regular briefings in local town hall.
  

Where are they now?

• Just moved into new offices
  
• Still running on DR equipment.
  
• Impact on projects, lots of delays
  

Lessons

• Test your plans
  
• Be prepared to change plans, eg move to office 365
  
• Never assume anything, like there's a spare key!
  

Other points
Out of news after 2 days, so consider it. Success
25m insurance bill!
Video of damage, lot of damage not done by fire but water and smoke.
Had to do full data destruction process on all kit damaged

Really great case study.
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It's not just Facebook and Twitter

First session this morning is from a student about how students use technology in their everyday lives.

A student who just completed 4 year law degree at Leeds. She used her iPad, iPhone, laptop, computer clusters and laptop loan during her course. Technology became more essential over the period of her course. People fight over plug sockets, bring extension leads into library etc

A laptop is vital for university studies, for making notes in lectures to dissertation research. Wifi everywhere essential. PCs are not past their sell by date and students still need clusters. Laptops are for more informal work. It's more studious sitting at a desk.

She has 5 email accounts, all accessed on her iPad and iPhone. That gives constant contact between her and tutors

Leeds uni app means she always has her timetable in the palm of her hand. Blackboard Mobile also very useful. Makes big use of Q and A during exam time,

Even Mac users use Word and PowerPoint. One Note also essential for making notes and synching between different devices. Using mini keyboard iPad becomes mini computer and its handbag friendly!

Tablets great for reading journals, and paperless.

Social media and students. Lot is procrastination based, but not all! Facebook great for group work, group conversations and reaching out to people. Think Facebook should be separate from their teachers.

Twitter great for social profile. Follow all the big employers, get news faster. Follow uni social media accounts to get instant updates. Just what students want.

Evolution of the library. Students only need two things from a library, wifi and power sockets. War at exam time for power. Will go round looking at how much power people have left. Leeds opened new library with plug sockets, comfy chairs, big bright spaces, space for group work. Sounds like our 8 year old Information Commons :-)

Development of technology. Office 365 has been introduced and has made email more accessible and calendars, more integration, reminders etc.

Leeds for Life on-line portfolio is great. You update throughout your time at University with all achievements and experience, Much easier to update than a cv and can be done on the go

University learning environment means educational materials accessible any time, anywhere, for example if you have to go home or are ill. Lecture recording just being trialled. Had a big fear that students wouldn't turn up, but made not difference. Used for revision. Much better coverage of those lectures that had been recorded, second learning experience.

IT service desk is great support for students for computer repairs, queries and the dreaded loss of work. IT service desk has to understand that student needs are different to staff. They have a physical service desk as well as telephone and email. Thinks more use should be made of social media to raise issues

Technology has changed so much in her 4 years at Leeds, can't wait to revisit in another 4 years.

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Red Kites, a Bee Gee and a role play.

Some other highlights from yesterday include seeing Red Kites circling overhead, beautiful birds, huge, and they come down so low I would be worried if I had a piece of meat in my hand! Also managed to get into the nearest village which is Thame after the sessions had finished, and discovered that Robin Gibb lived there and is buried in the churchyard!

Another highlight was watching the husband and wife duo which is Heidi Fraser-Krauss IT Director at York University and Thomas Krauss, Professor of Physics at York, do a wonderful session on what IT can do to support academics. With some very funny role play, they illustrated the different drivers academics and iT Directors have, and how we have to be careful to respect those. As Thomas pointed out, academics aren't paid to be compliant!

in summary, the plea from the academic was:
Understand my drivers
Don't put me in a straight jacket, I don't get paid for compliance
Offer me services that makes my job easier
Make it easy to use, easy to access, easy to learn
Centrally managed services have to be reliable, if we don't own them we'll be more critical

And from the The IT Director:
Supporting research is non trivial
Build trust and credibility, go out and see people
Don't assume you know what researchers want
Difficult enough to provide commodity services eg storage and HPC, specialist services are hard
Pick your fights. Don't offer a managed desktop to an academic who uses a Mac!
If you get it right academics will support you
Manage expectations

Excellent session which will be on line soon, and worth a watch.

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Real ITSM in the Real world

Just been to a session on Real ITSM in the Real World, a personal story about the Service Management journey at Newcastle University.

Have IT teams based in departments with their own processes etc, but are all now part of same central department.

Different levels of digital literacy. A couple of good examples. One caller phoned service desk with an intermittent problem printing. Found out it was only while they were having cup of tea. Problem solved by identifying that they were unplugging the printer to plug the kettle in. Another user phoned Helpdesk and when asked if the network cable was plugged in, he said he didn't know because he was only a brain surgeon! Teaches you not to make assumptions about what people understand when you are communicating with them.

In the early days of their ITIL journey, they documented processes, and published good practice guides. Then had a departmental reorganisation, and got a dedicated service management team. Defined roles for service owners and service leads, drew up a service catalogue, made people think about things from a service perspective, not a technology perspective.

Drew up ITSM roadmap, put in place incident management process, and held incident reviews. Recently replaced ITSM system, and introduced self service so calls could be tracked. Now introduced change and problem management for first time.

As a result, have seen benefits including learning from major incidents. Identifying causes of major incidents. Biggest cause was implementation of changes, which helped them introduced change management. Next biggest was electrical contractors causing power problems. They publish operational reports for managers, including the date of oldest open ticket. In two cases, customer had died before the problem had been resolved!

Department is now much more focused on the customer. They think more about impact and communication.Technical teams have gone from causing incidents by making unplanned changes from home on a Saturday evening, to piloting the change management process. Everyone is less defensive, incident reviews are blame free with a focus on learning.

Personal learning has included:

• Adapt. Understand your environment and adapt to your organisation's requirement, don't just blindly implement ITIL. Embrace the culture and get allies wherever possible.
  
• Improve. Start somewhere, then improve. Balance idealism with pragmatism. Evolution not revolution.
  
• Don't forget the people. Engage early and engage often and give constant reaffirmation. Set a good example, explain why and make it easy to do the right thing.
  
• It's a never ending journey. Break it into chunks to make the big changes seem less daunting. Focus on issues causing problems. Build on your successes, and accept there's no final destination.
  
• Never stop learning. There's always more you can learn. Talk to people - we're lucky that in HE we have a very collaborative culture. Use free resources, especially social media.

Enjoyed this very personal talk. We've implemented already some of what Newcastle have, but the learning is very applicable across the board.

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Dude on a Hill

Yesterday was a busy day. Attended our University Executive Board to present to them a change in the way we in CiCS interact with the Faculties and Departments to provide a much more integrated approach to IT support. It was well received, and so we will be starting a project now to implement it.
Then a mad dash to the station to get a train to a Oxford, and a taxi through the countryside to the venue of the UCISA Support Services Conference. I'm here not just to attend the conference, although I will be at some sessions, but for other UCISA business. Yesterday afternoon I chaired the Conference Organising Committee for the main conference next March. programme starting to come together with some great speakers already planned. Also making some changes to the poster presentations which are going to take the form of video case studies, and we have lots of ideas about how to make them more interactive.

This morning we had a meeting of USL (UCISA Services Limited), the commercial arm of UCISA, and had a breakdown of the outturn against budget of last years conference. Glad to see we made a surplus, and we will now start refining the budget for next years. Then it was the full Executive Meeting. One of the main items on the agenda was a presentation from UCAS about their strategic plan for the next five years. Really interesting, and it's obvious they are committed to a lot of change.

I made some notes which are below:

Their bold strategic vision is to connect learners to multiple destinations through a progression ecosystem with UCAS.com as their starting point
Their aim is to put the leaner at the axis of what they do in this changing landscape where students have more choice about when and where to study.

UCAS will not just be an application form, but will provide advice and guidance to an Increasing pool of people who can benefit from higher education

Better services to learners will provide benefits to HEIs

They aim to support all who have a stake in what is a unique national asset and possibly our oldest scared service

Strategic objectives:
1 Learners
Learners know that UCAS is where you find out about progression In education and make applications

2 Education providers
Be the trusted partner for attraction, recruitment and admissions.
Know that some services aren't working well and there are areas they need to improve to gain trust

3 Advisers
Offer comprehensive resources to support learners who want to progress eg teachers, parents etc

4 Data and analysis
Be the trusted and authoritative source of intelligence about achievement, progression and participation in education

5 Commercial
Be the premier channel for education providers and commercial customers for marketing to potential students.
This provides about a third of their revenue and is potentially a sensitive subject.

6 Business model
Be an exemplar of an efficient and effective shared service


Their strategy includes:

Digital:
Personalised content and services
Digital platform to manage all services
Innovative approaches to recruitment and connecting learners

Customer service:
Striving for exceptional customer service by applying customer logic and looking through customer lens

Digital acceleration
Want to accelerate delivery of ecosystem. Using agile. Redeveloping software and services. Have moved a lot into cloud

As well as technology changes, they are doing a lot of work round people and culture.
Emphasising innovation and courage. Want people to challenge status quo. Encouraged to be innovative and share ideas to improve customer experience

He finished with a couple of video clips, the first few minutes of this one is the sort of IT person we don't want.....

Clip from office about IT guy encrypting laptop



And this is just a really good one of a guy dancing on his own. And how eventually everyone joins in!

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Media City and Digital Skills

For the last few days I've been in Manchester, based in Media City. It's a great place, a real buzz about the place. But, have been seriously hindered in blogging, as my iPad blogging app has stopped working after an upgrade, and I've struggled to find a replacement. Let's see how we get on with this one.

Yesterday I was involved in UCISA conference business. A couple of site visits to venues we'll be using including Manchester Central and the Museum of Science and Industry. It's important to get everything right at the venues, layout of rooms, organisation during the event, even menus, coffee etc and you can only really to do that by visiting and seeing the space and talking to the staff. Then we had a conference organising committee where we looked at the programme of speakers, and also some ways of modernising the event. Using video case studies of innovations from our members playing around the venue for example.

Today I'm at the UCISA Digital Capabilities conference, we're I'll be closing the event by talking about Dealing with Innovation. As always, I'll be interested to hear what I've got to say :-)

Opening session this morning has been on the digital capabilities needed by our staff, and reporting on some research currently being carried out by JISC. It is recognised that digitally capable students need digitally capable staff, but on the whole education providers do not reward or recognise digital activity related to learning and teaching. Digital capability is also not normally built into the strategic thinking of universities. The presenter also highlighted the importance of digital wellbeing, concerns over cybersecurity, cyber bullying, harassment, privacy of data, ethical issues, and issues of equality.

Other sessions this morning have been about what frameworks you can use to assess the digital competency of staff and students, and whether you can have a standards based approach. So, can you define a minimum standard of digital literacy which staff should have. If so, what is it, how do you measure it, and how do you up skill people. Interesting things on the list for staff. For example, teaching staff how to use google search for images. Not just in finding images, but in understanding the copyright implications on how you can use them. 

So, in finishing this post am going to include another photo from media city, the Blue Peter studio! Not because it's in any way relevant to this post, but half way through writing this I abandoned the app I was using and changed to a new one and I need to know how to post an image!

 

Looks like success!

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Keep right on walking

Today I've been either walking, on a train, or in meetings! The train bit was to get to London and back.

The walking bit was part of the Global Corporate Challenge, an initiative to improve employee health and well being all over the world. Teams of seven from organisations either carry pedometers or use their own devices (mines a Fitbit one) to measure how many steps you do a day for a 100 days, and your combined distance is plotted on a virtual map starting in Japan, and the aim is to see how far round the world you can get. And to get fit of course. We have a team of seven in CiCS, and we started the challenge yesterday. I usually aim to walk 10,000 steps a day, but I'm going to up it  over the challenge  if I can - today by walking to my meeting in London and back, and walking back from the station I've done 15,000. Not bad on a recovering and still painful sprained ankle! Of course, the published aim is to get fit, but we're only doing it to beat the teams from EFM and the Library....

The meetings in London were the UCISA Executive, and then a conference organising committee. We spent quite a lot of time at the Exec discussing our structure - we're made up of a series of groups, made up of experts in the relevant field who do an excellent job of promoting best practice, organising events etc. But, they do look a bit technology based, and maybe don't show the services we support - research IT or teaching and learning technologies for example. The support is there, but perhaps not obvious in the current organisation. Its a bit like trying to map a service catalogue onto a line management structure. We need to make the matrix clearer - and that's our task over the coming months.

The conference committee is now well into organising next year's event - getting the speakers booked is the priority at the moment. As a charity we have to look after our funds, so we can't afford the big fees that some speakers demand, so our negotiating skills are often put to the test!

UCISA - the future

I've been In Oxford for the last couple of days on UCISA business. Yesterday we had the first meeting of the organising committee for next years UCISA conference which will be in Manchester. We collected a lot of feedback from this years, and spent most of our time going through it, and working out what we can change to improve it. The feedback was actually very good, especially on the speakers. There were some minor issues with timing, and the wifi was a bit flaky, but otherwise, a great success. Just got to make next years as good. I'm on the lookout for good speakers, so all ideas welcomed!

Today was a day long meeting of the Executive Committee, where we had a really in depth look at how UCISA operates, what is it for, and how might it change to better service the members. We also looked at the groups we have, and whether they're the right structure. We touched on our relationship with other bodies such as JISC and RUGIT, and our sister organisations - most of the professional services have membership organisations covering HR, Finance, Estates Student services, Libraries etc and it's important that we work with them. Lots of good discussion, and rather a lot of actions to take forward.

UCISA videos are up

Just a quick note to say that all of the  videos from UCISA15 we are allowed to publish are now up on the UCISA YouTube Channel.

Some you might be particularly interested in are:

Mary Curnock Cook from UCAS and her opening keynote - some really interesting stuff about demographics



Michael Wignall from Microsoft talking about when Digital Life meets Digital Work


Emer Coleman talking about "When excellence is Just a Click away"



And if you really want to see me and Tim Kidd in action talking about when networks go bad, it's here! And as always, some artistic licence may have been taken in places....



But I would recommend you have a look as there are other excellent ones there.

Final round up

A final round up about UCISA2015.

It was really enjoyable, with some great speakers and exhibitors, but I hadn't realised how tiring it would be as chair of the conference committee. Hat's off to everyone who's done it before me!

We had some good social events, and one of the perks of being chair is that you get to be part of arranging them We took a very plain room and turned it into a gothic/spooky themed event for the informal dinner, and the main formal dinner was in the wonderful surroundings of the museum of Scotland. Not a brilliant picture below, but it was a spectacular space. 

The other perk is that you gt to meet and sit next to the after dinner speaker. In this case the very lively and entertaining Gyles Brandreth! He was still tweeting about the stories we discussed into the weekend!



















The only session I haven't actually written about, was one I helped to give. Together with Tim Kidd from JISC technologies we did a case study on the outage we suffered back in October, where the whole of the Yorkshire and Humberside region lost connection to the internet for just over 3 hours. We presented it as a lessons learned study, and both sides had some serious lessons to learn, especially around communication. Hopefully there'll be a link to a recording of it up soon, so I might just share it!

Only a couple of weeks to recover, and then we start planning for next years UCISA in Manchester!



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An inspirational morning...

This morning's session was brilliant - 4 excellent speakers, and we started with a solar eclipse!  A couple of weeks ago we'd decided to put the start time back, to allow people to watch it, and I've spent the last few days worrying that it would be cloudy and we wouldn't see anything. But, the sun was out - before the moon moved over it of course, and delegates got a great view - through the special glasses of course - don't they look cool!

We had four speakers - the first three talking about future trends and the last truly inspiational. Because of staring late we didn't have a break, but well done to all the delegates, and speakers for sticking with it. I was chairing the session, so wasn't taking notes for this blog, so these are just a few of my thoughts and memories.

The first session was Nick Jones from Gartner talking about trends in mobile technology. He covered the different platforms, operating systems, apis, app development tools etc, and what we should be looking out for. Secure the app and the data, don't try and secure the device was a key point. Watch the consumer space, that's where the innovation is. And we need to up our game in terms of user experience. Think gamification and employ psychologists for really good UX.

Next was Michael Wignall, National Technology Officer for Microsoft UK, who talked about when Digital Life meets Digital work. I think I can best illustrate the world he described by sharing the video he showed. Two different women, one a scientist looking for project work, and one an executive looking for a scientist.



What was really cool about that - all the technology in it is either in beta or in development right now. And no-one logged in to anything!


Third up was LJ Rich, presenter on BBC Click, journalist and musician. Boy was she lively. Her talk was pure "presentational caffeine".

 It was a brilliant, manic look at so many different examples of new technologies, especially around the internet of things. Who could forget the device that makes cauliflower taste of chips.



or brain controlled wearable cat ears (I so want a pair....).

Or this water based interface - great for playing games in the bath!



Out final speaker was Baroness Grey-Thomson. Luckily she didn't mind being called Tanni. One of the greatest paralympians ever. Winner of 11 gold medals, holder of over 20 world records, and 6 time winner of the London marathon.

She was truly inspirational. The whole room was engrossed. Very funny, interesting, personable, and some great anecdotes with serious messages.  Ejected at the age of ten from a cinema for being a fire risk in her wheelchair, she was taught the most appropriate response by her mother  "I have never spontaneously combusted in my life". She told us to always do the best we can, to be nice to people around us, that "technology can help me to make the best contribution I possibly can", and that parking in a disabled space without a blue badge should be a criminal offence! Truly inspiring end to the conference.

Cybercrime and cyber criminals

Really pleased to be listening to Charlie McMurdie, cyber security expert. Previously in the police, now an adviser for PWC.


Globally cybercrime costs $ 388bn a years in terms of financial losses and time lost. UK alone lost £408m from 250,000. Cybercrime is now classed as a Tier one threat.

93% of large businesses breached
Attacks by outsiders up 73%
Average cost of incidents was £65k to £115k
No of security incidents round the world rose 48% to 42.8m
70% of UK companies experiences downtime as a result of security incidents

Used to be mainly brute force, but now more subtle. Cyber criminals don't want you know about them. What to stay on your network longer. Much more sophisticated.

Cybercrime rising significantly in Europe. But Europe dominates other regions in detecting security incidents, a 41% jump in 2014.
Lot of intelligence sharing. Working better between agencies and pulling in intelligence from industry partners

Starting to be seen as a business enabler, not just province of IT department. Is now interest at board level.

Universities at particular risk. We have business reputations to maintain. Most of high end R and D is done in Universities. We are potentially more at risk than a traditional business. Students are the new generation, everything is technology enabled, lots of turnover.

Not just interested in stealing research data, but also a threat of contaminating date, either to discredit it, or don't agree with it.

Different sorts of cybercrime.
Nation state or commissioned attacks. hacktivism, cyber terrorism, organised crime.

Cyber criminals are becoming increasing sophisticated. 16 yr old lad, using old Dell PC, had 120 registered domains, 40 online identities designed to steal personal banking data. His computer had 16 virtual machines with 8m pieces of personal data on the hard drive.

Amount of mobile devices has increased. Are causing more problems than laptops and computers.

Hacktivism . Loosely organised gangs eg Anonymous.
Ryan Cleary, 19 was running a million node botnet. Used to knock over PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, CIA, FBI, NHS, together with other members of teams, especially Lulzsec.
Principals were in UK. Her team got them! Have to take all of them out at the same time, infrastructure disabled etc.

Some other great examples in her talk, amazing how these hugely well organised attacks are often no more than a bunch of very young people.
Lots to watch out for.





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The wind of change.....

Next session is from Alison Allden
Chief exec of HESA

Exploring the HE Information Landscape. We don't know a lot about it.
Only discovered last year that there are over 500 demands for data made by over 90 organisations to our institutions.
HESA data collected in July after a student has arrived, and released to us in following January, 15 months later.
Liken HESA to a dinosaur, becoming extinct?
So, has to change.

HEDIIP, information landscape project.
Introducing unique learner number. Will enable us to track students and link data.
About to report, and will produce a blueprint for a different information landscape.




In the centre, HESA transformed.
HESA must change its approach to the collection of HE data.
HESA cached.

Aim is to:
Enable timely data collection and reporting
Reduce the burden on data providers
Drive improved value for money
Deliver data that is fit for purpose
Support changes to data governance

Developing a business case at the moment.
Website for cached programme coming up.

Value of information, why do we have it and why are we collecting it?
University guides, helping students choose
League tables
Supporting students choice, KIS is open data.

Sector is changing, collecting data from a wider range of stakeholders.
Dramatic increase in requests for data.
Mainly market research data.
HESA now publish subject benchmarking reports to explore students, qualification outcome, employment. Can be used to look at your portfolio.

Can be used to look at strategic issues.
Interesting pic about proportion of women in education, women are pink, obviously




Or look at trends in education. Showed a slide showing that Computer science is the only science subject where number of graduates has declined in last 10 years.

Trying to make the data more accessible. There is a HESA app.
And building a next generation HEIDI, working with JISC, enabling us to build dashboards etc. Will be a licence to use it with tableau.

In conclusion, HESA has to change, but so do we. We will have to work together to take this forward


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When excellence is just a click away....

Opening session this morning is from Emer Coleman.
When excellence is just a click away, Average just won't cut it

Students have changed rapidly. They are not the people our educational system was designed to teach.

Three things universities do best:
Discovery
Memory
Mentoring

Which can be delivered on line, and which need traditional methods?
We're now in the conceptual age, following on from:
The Agricultural Age
The Industrial Age
The Information Age
The Conceptual age

What can be done by machine, will be done by machine
3m packages from Amazon could be delivered by drones.
All in the near future.
Benefits, fewer cars etc. But, fewer jobs.

Kodak had 179,000 employees. They invented the digital camera. But fearful of what it would do to their traditional model, so didn't iterate it. Company folded.

Questions to answer about future of jobs:
Can someone overseas do it cheaper?
Can a computer do it faster?
Is what I offer in demand in the age of abundance?

Are our institutions ready for the next disruption?
Often our technology at home is better than what people have at work.

What does a truly digital institution look like?
Don't fear failure. Fail. Fail fast and learn
Collaboration not silos.
Rely heavily on collaboration tools, email relegated to only when necessary. Access information quickly, through a simple search.
Open by design. Use open products like Google. Only lock down when necessary. Expect to work from home.
Valued by outcomes.
Staff value more what their customers say about them than their managers.

The future is here, just not evenly distributed.


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Opening keynote - UCAS

Well, UCISA 2015 has started. I've given my opening address welcoming everyone here and thanking the volunteers, and we've had an excellent welcome from the VC of Herriot Watt, Julian Jones. He emphasised that technology is at the heart of what we do. Fewer organisations have seen a greater rate of change than universities, and the reatest part of that change is in technology. he also said that he'd never been to a conference before where the programme had been reorganised to cope with a solar eclipse, and thought that we were his sort of people!

Opening keynote was from Mary Curnock Cook, Chief Executive of UCAS. Here's some notes from her talk.
The UCAS mission is to inspire and facilitate progression in education through information and admissions services,
It's a charity, with a commercial subsidiary, operating in Cheltenhem with 450 employees. As a charity, it is regulated. Have to report on the public benefit they deliver. So, they have to help learners progress etc.Not just about admissions.

They have no government funding.

Serve 163 universities, 167 university colleges and colleges offering HE.  c700 other HE providers
In 1962, less than 100,000 applicants. Now 700,000. . Much more diverse now.
In 62, nearly all men. Now more women then men, also worrying.
First shared service, argueably the most successful.
Business processes almost the same now as 62.
UCAS one of busiest web sites in country.
Now offer advice for post GCSE, not just HE. Advice on apprenticeships etc.
Trying to get good advice to kids earlier.
Big social media presence

On just  one day in August....
55m UCAS.com views
5m exam results
239 log ins per second
18000 phone call
5.5pvs
1.25m log ins to Track

Thanks for the cloud. No way they could afford to gear up server capacity for this short time of capacity.


Key drivers of change in applications is not fees
Changing qualification landscape.
No of BTecs going up. Now 100,000 people coming into HE with BTEcs.
Demographics, no of 18 year olds dropping. No of vocational qualifications growing.
Big challenge for selecting organisations.

UCAS IT function is complex!
Moving to SOA.
Building a profile based on a learners journey.
Thought they would spend 50% on core services, and 50% on change
Closer to 90:10. Transformation plans slipping away. Every year something would go wrong with legacy systems.
So, proposed digital acceleration
Increase investment in short term. Every pound spent on legacy system is a pound wasted,
Need to increase velocity of change.
Used to traditional approach to project management - waterfall, prince2 but this eant working. 
So, moved to Agile. Embrace change, quality comes from feedback. Adapt as you go along. Collect information as you learn. Deliver working software as early as possible and as often as possible with feedback loop built in.
Good diagram of the benegits of Agile:

At "Wagile" at the moment, bit waterfall, but agile.
Gradually rolling it out.
Keeping an eye for what they want at the end

It's all about culture and mindset, not IT.

Great opening keynote.








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UCISA 15 is here

Well, for the past year I've been chairing the Organising Committee for the Annual UCISA Conference - and now it's finally here! I'm in Edinburgh, at the conference centre, waiting for it to start. The programme has come together really well, as far as I know all the speakers are turning up, the social events and the exhibition are organised and well under the control of the UCISA office.

Most of the plenary keynotes, including one from me and Tim Kidd from JISC tomorrow, will be live streamed here. Can't wait for it to start!