Timetabling as a change management project

One of the good things about attending conferences  is finding out how other colleagues have approached projects which are similar to ones we are involved in, often in different ways. Yesterday I attended a session on how UCL had approached their Common Timetabling project, which is very timely, as we have just completed a pilot in our own such project, and have encountered a number of problem. UCL had similar reasons for doing it - to facilitate interdisciplinary study, to provide better timetabling information to students, to use teaching spaces more efficiently and to make more efficient use of modules and resources.  Their timetabling is decentralised, with each department producing its own timetables, and they decided to leave it that way.  In order to facilitate common timetabling they decided to introduce a block structure, with mornings divided into different blocks and streams for lectures, and lab classes etc in blocks in the afternoons. There were some issues with this, and initial pilots weren't totally successful, and some departments refused to cooperate. However, what is important, is that UCL approached this as a massive change management process, with a long timescale of 3 years, a lot of work on risk management, and a lot of resource put into it. Change managers were recruited and a lot of effort was put into "readiness assessments", as well as using dedicated staff and temps for data hygiene. Sobering really, and has led me to consider our own project, and whether we need to allocate more resources to it. Think the answer might be yes!

Following on from this session was one from LSE about how they've implemented CampusM, the mobile app for students. I've given a similar talk so many times about we did it, it made a pleasant change to listen to someone else. They've done it in a very similar way to us, but with some different data and features. They've also branded it LSE Mobile.

Web 2.0 Changes the World

There's one session from CISG last week that I haven't blogged about - and it's the one I had a starring role in! Well, I say starring role, I was mentioned a couple of times and a rare photo of me rapper sword dancing appeared in it. It was from my mate Brian Kelly from UKOLN, and was entitled What if Web 2.0 Really Does Change Everything. Blogging about it is made considerably easier as Brian has published his talk and his slides on his blog. As usual it was entertaining and thought provoking - I thought he was particularly brave to describe the audience (predominantly MIS based) as slow moving and controlling, and not particularly innovative, risk taking, agile or user focused. He did of course recognise that you couldn't take many risks with running some backend processes such as the payroll. He then went on to explore how the sector needed to change and embrace Web 2.0 and social network technologies, moving from a risk averse to a risk management culture.

In the very valuable networking that goes on over coffee and in the bar at these conferences, Brian, myself and others had many discussions about some of the opportunities these technologies provide, and some of the issues perceived as barriers to adopting them. I think it's fair to say that there's a number of us who are very frustrated and at times depressed at the lack of enthusiasm and adoption in parts of the sector, made worse by the knowledge that there are still parts of our sector (and large parts of other sectors) actively blocking access to them.

Mastering the Hype

Last session at CISG last week was Mark Rascino from Gartner talking about the Hype Cycle for emerging technologies. I've written about this model before - it's simple but I find it very useful, particularly for explaining the maturity of technology to non IT managers. I've seen the cycle many times, but it was very interesting hearing explained in more detail where it comes from. We all know about the hype that surrounds an innovation - and how that innovation is going to be the next big thing. a peak is reached, and then the hype is replaced by cynicism, and the innovation is criticised for not delivering. At the same time as this fall from grace, developments take place, there is progress, and the innovation matures and becomes productive. These two processes combine to give us the hype cycle...


Gartner publishes about 70 hype cycles a year, and in this session Mark picked out some of the key features of the emerging technologies one.

Things about to reach the plateau include location aware applications and speech recognition. Interesting that speech recognition is an emerging technology as it's been around a long time - it's just taken ages to become productive.

Techologies on their way out of the trough and on the way to the plateau include electronic ink (being used in thin, flexible displays such as on the side of USB sticks to show how much space is free) and various Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs and wikis.

In the trough is public virtual worlds - apparently only in the education sector is Second Life and other such virtual worlds finding an application.

Over the peak and heading towards the trough is microblogging (70% of Twitter feeds from corporates are inactive), and mesh networks (might be past the peak but there are some great applications of this technology, including using energy generated by trees to detect forest fires - read about it here).

Cloud computing is apparently at the peak - after the recent hype, there's cynicism starting to appear. Joining this are ebook readers which are due to plummet soon!

On the way up to the peak is augmented reality (apps already being developed for the iPhone), and right at the bleeding edge are augmented humans - Bionic eyes are only a few years away.

As with all new technologies, you have to know when to adopt, and when to give up. Adopting too early or too late, and giving up too soon or hanging on too long are traps we need to avoid.

Great talk as always, and a thought provoking way to end a good conference.

Vendor management and a lean university

An interesting presentation from Kings College London on vendor management yesterday. Kings have taken some very bold steps in their IT provision over the last couple of years as they've outsourced a lot of it - their email system, instant messaging, sharepoint installation and their global desktop have all been outsourced to a number of vendors. This has led to some interesting shifts in roles as they have to put a lot of effort now into managing the relationships with the vendors and the contracts.

An early action was to discover who in the organisation was talking to the vendors, and what was being said to them. It was important to make sure consistent messages were being given out, therefore restrictions on who spoke to who and what was said had to be introduced - I imagine this took some getting used to by staff, especially in the technical areas, who had been used to a rather more matey relationship with suppliers. Very good presentation which really highlighted how much work and effort you have to put in to getting the best out of an outsourcing relationship - it is not just about signing a contract and forgetting about it, but the opposite. An interesting side effect was increased resilence - particularly in having services run outside of London. One of KCLs data centres is in an area which has been told not to expect a stable power supply until 2020!

One of this morning's sessions was about the Lean process which has been implemented at St Andrews. This is a method of improving and simplifying processes with a view to improving the user experience and saving staff time. There is a lot of theory on their web site, and as an example of how it's been put into practice they showed a case study of a simple process of a student requesting a letter confirming they were studying at St Andrews. There's a video of it here - it's an incredibly simple process but took 7 to 10 days for the student and 30 minutes of staff time. An even more simple solution resulted in a 2 minute wait for the student and 2 minutes of staff time. You might laugh as you watch the video - but I bet we all have similar processes that haven't changed in years. Interestingly, until they got the right people in the same room, no-one had ever seen the process end to end - everyone did their little bit of it One of our priorities this year is reducing complexity and these are the sort of things we need to be looking at.

So, the conference is over, I'm on the train home - it was very enjoyable and in a beautiful venue. Just a shame the only time I managed to get into St Andrews it was pouring with rain! Still, I had a fantastic view over the bay from the hotel room and this morning the sun was shining. A couple of excellent sessions this morning to finish which I'll try and write up over the next couple of days.

The Art of War

JISCinfonet used one of yesterday's sessions to launch their new infokit on preparing a Strategy. Steve Bailey gave a good presentation on some of the issues we all face when defining a strategy and getting buy in from the rest of the institution or department. Many people are confused abut what a strategy actually is, and one definition is the art of war, which might apply in some institutions, but perhaps a more appropriate definition is the process of defining an orgsnisation's direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy, including its capital and people - straight from Wikipedia!

What Steve covered in his talk was why some strategies are not fully accepted by the organisation - the most common being I don't know what it is. Closely followed by it's not relevant to me. The other issue of course is that often they're full of motherhood and apple pie phrases - take several mission statement from different Universities or organisations and try and guess which ones are from which - the guess is that they are usually so similar that it would be hard to do.

So, the toolkit has been put together to share good practice and to provide tools to help draw up an effective strategy. The JISC infoKits are normally pretty good so I would suggest that this is worth a look.

Green IT

First session this morning on Green IT from Rob Bristow from JISC. A useful overview of the problem, as well as some suggestions for reducing our carbon footprint. Some interesting facts and figures - in HE and FE in the UK there are 760,000 PCs and 215,000 servers consuming 512Mwh of electricity and producing 275,000 tonnes of CO2 at a cost of c£116m. Worldwide, IT accounts for c2% of emissions - often referred to as the same as the airline industry, but this is not a good comparison as that applies only to the planes and doesn't take into account things like the running of the airports.

A typical PC generates 66kg of waste and produces 1tonne of CO2 throughout its life. Suggestions for reducing footprint of PCs are well know to us - automatic power down using wake-on-LAN if necessary, procuring low energy PCs and extending their life wherever possible. Also, the case for thin client needs to be carefully assessed. There's a good toolkit on the JISC SusteIT site for comparing the costs of thin client and traditonal thick client desktops.

Then there's the data centres - described as big hungry beasts - which consume 1% of the world's energy globally. And demand for them is growing as demand for processing power and storage increases. Rob used the often quoted statement that a heavy user of Second Life consumes more power than a Brazilian (the nationality, not the wax I assume....). Not sure how real that is, but it did prompt a Second Life user to point out that they also generated savings in that they didn't get out that often! Lots of things we can do to make our data centes greener - well documented so I'm not going into them all here but they include hot and cold aisles, better colling management, power efficiency, reusing waste heat and virtualisation. There was also a suggestion that we should run our data centres hotter as limits have increased.

Of course, my favourite topic, printing, got a good mention. Staff printing is out of control said Rob - and how I agree! The HE sector consumes over 21,000 tonnes of paper a year and printing accounts for c12% of ICT related energy use - most of the energy associated with printing comes from making the paper. Interesting that most of his suggestions for reducing printing were the same as the recommendations from our environmental printing review.

Sheffield University was one of the case studies in looking at the carbon footprint of HE IT use, and Rob showed some of the figures that came out of that study, and some of the findings which suggested priority areas for action - PCS and servers, then networks and printing.

The final point was that the reduction of energy use and carbon footprint must be part of strategic planning and not carried out in isolation.

For the sake of the kids....

The next sessions here at CISG09 were on Information Management, and Data Quality. Not necessarily riveting you might think, but Alison Allden (Chief Executive of HESA) used a storytelling approach to set the scene on Information Management. We were treated to stories of the Holy Grail, we came up against the Forces of Evil and met Heros and the Heroic.

I'm sure we all had a lot of sympathy with her examples of the Holy Grails of Information Management and the Forces of Evil (some of which are different sides of the same coin). So - the things we've been striving for (and have just about got there in some cases) - single sign on; interoperability; a single point of data storage (the one true database..); data quality; and standards. Those nasty forces of evil included bad data; multiple systems and consequent reconciliation; standards (the overhead of having them); variation - the diversity of not only institutions but the way thing are done in different parts of the same institution); the exceptions - those little things we don't do because they're in that last little bit of the system that we didn't quite get right.

Very interesting talk raising a number of issues which we'll all have to address, and a worrying conclusion that when things are too expensive or difficult we talk about them a lot rather than doing anything about them. That could happen over the next few years to issues which we really should be addressing including data preservation and curation, documentation and electronic records management.

The next session on Data Quality was also good, and included this rather amusing illustration of the importance of data quality:

We're dooomed (part 2)

I'm in St Andrews at the moment for the UCISA CISG conference aptly named Tips to Avoid the Bunker as we're surrounded by golf courses - and the sea of course. The first session was entitled Hard Hats Time and was given by Derek Watson, Quaestor and Factor of the University of St. Andrews. Interesting title - thought it meant VC, but it's a sort of Finance/Estates Director role, and the only one in the country.

The talk focussed on the current economic climate, how we got here, what it means for Universities, and what we can do about it. Fascinating talk, and his explanation of how the world changed in 2008 and the economy came close to collapse was illustrated with some scary numbers. So far the world economy has lost $2.8 trillion (a huge number - 11 noughts!), begs the question of how the hell did that happen, and did we have it in the first place! It's equivalent to the market value of Oracle and Microsoft added together and multiplied by 8 - that's a lot of money to take out of the economy.

In talking about how this will affect Universities it is useful to reflect on what they are. Universities were established to promote teaching and learning and research, and although they are in receipt of significant public funds they are are not public bodies but independent charities. The financial pressures being felt by us in the summer of 2008 (or those heady days as as they were referred to) included inflation, a looming pay settlement, rising utility costs, the rising cost of technology and other initiatives, student demands, and public sector funding not keeping up with costs.

Now, we are facing pressures on earnings, no investment funding, endowment funds which have lost value and rising pension deficits. That's as well as all the pressures we were facing a year ago - they haven't gone away. So, to quote Private Frazier, "we're doooomed". Well, maybe not, but we have to achieve financial sustainability - and for the non accountants like me - put simply that means earning more then you spend and creating a surplus to pay for new buildings, equipment etc.

So - how do we get out of this. Well the message I picked up can be summarized in one word - change. If you do what you've always done, you get what you've always had. The world has changed, the rules have changed and we now have to change. We need imagination and the courage to make tough decisions about what we can stop doing and what we can do differently. IT can lead to business transformation, and we can use it to help the rest of the institution change.

Overall, the world has changed, but the old problems are still there. This is illustrated beautifully by a quote from 1663, where the Scottish Universities complained to the government that their staff were not being paid enough, the buildings were poorly maintained, and if it wasn't sorted out, society would suffer. Sound familiar?

And why part 2 in the title of this post? This is why. Sound familiar?