Minecraft, flying solaris boxes and a telling off.

We had some excellent talks this morning. Started with Michael Stephenson from Northumbria University who talked about using cloud services to implement two speed or bimodal IT. He had some nice demos of using Minecraft to prototype services, and even demonstrated a service status page in Minecraft which sent a firework up when there was an outage. He challenged us to think about what 10 year olds will expect from IT when they come to university. Some are already coding in Minecraft. His talk is here.

Next up was Paul Boag who challenged us to think differently about digital transformation. Paul has been to Sheffield to help us set up a digital transformation team, and as usual was lively, fun, and provocative. If you want to see a room full of IT people being told off, watch his talk.
He talked about students as consumers, and how we're all one disgruntled student away from a PR disaster. They all have a voice and will complain loudly about poor service. He chhallenged us to think about whether we're in denial as a sector about how our business model might need to change because of disruptive technologies. A bit like Blockbuster and Kodak were. Too many of us are dabbling in digital transformation and not doing it properly. One organisation which has it right is UCAS who are really embracing it. To be really digital, we need to stop long term planning the Government Digital Service doesn't plan more than 8 months ahead. It was a great talk, and I think his message needs to heard by all senior managers in Universities. Especially his final question - how much do e spent on our digital estate, compared to out physical?
He has a page of resources about digital transformation in HE, which is really useful.

After the break, Simon Moores on cybersecurity - chillingly entitled, "It's not if but when..." You can watch it here. He started by talking about how much stuff runs on old technology. Apparently  planes are just flying solaris boxes. I didn't like flying before.... He talked a lot about risk, and I particularly liked this apparently real question on Quora:

Something that was mentioned a number of times in the conference, is that in terms of cybersecurity, the emphasis is moving away from prevent and protect, to detect and respond. Analysing patterns of behaviour, machine learning, analytics, all important techniques we will have to ue.

Final session this morning was Paul Feldman from JISC talking about the future direction of JISC. JISC provides many services that underpin everything we do - our network Janet, access to publications, and lots of specialist advice and guidance. As the funding model for JISC changes, and we move to an opt-in subscription service, JISC will be working with us to provide the best possible digital services. His talk is here.

Fridge cams and robot projectors

A Happy New Year to you all, and welcome back.  The first week back after the Christmas break always seems longer than 5 days, and the things we talked about before Christmas a dim and distant memory. But, we son get back into the swing of things, and this week I've been having some discussions about setting up a Digital transformation team - I dont think it wil be called that, but that's it's working name.

We've also had a Process Improvement Unit Steering Group where we had a report form a recent event to improve and streamline the production of our prospectus which has been very successful.

I'm doing a bit of work over the next few weeks to help another University review its IT systems and services, and I've spent a day there getting to know the IT staff.

Finally, I've been keeping my eye on what's been going on at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. New technologies often appear in the consumer space first, and it important we keep up to date with them. Things that have caught my eye this year include wearable gadgets, which are getting smaller, and more integrated with clothing, 3D printing, which is quickly becoming mainstream, and virtual reality.

Some of the weirder gadgets include the smart fridge cam
 
which takes a picture of the inside of your fridge everytime the door opens so you can check what's on the shelves whilst you're shopping.





And the Tipron - a cross between a robot and projector. Apparently it learns the layout of your house and can wander into your bedroom and project the weather forecast onto the wall...  Spooky!

Digital transformation workshop

Yesterday I went to a Digital Transformation event run by Gartner

It was an interesting workshop, and introduced by looking at some of the drivers behind digital transformation, and some of the leadership issues, as well as some advice on how to start an initiative. As always, these workshops are made all the more interesting by having people there from a mix of sectors, and this session we had representatives from public sector, education and manufacturing. Here are a few notes I took:

Technology is everywhere, and has moved beyond the screen. The first 3D printed components are now in production Boeing 777s - technologies such as 3D printing are no longer for fun!  Information and intelligence are being added to many products, gamification is being added to digital learning systems.

Leadership in this era is becoming more complex. There are paradoxes:

Operational excellence vs business innovation. So, you must improve the business model that feeds you while creating a new one that won't let you starve.

Acting quickly to gain an advantage requires long term pattern recognition. It's not just about acting in the moment but having a long term insight and collecting the right data.

Working together beyond organisational borders while creating a united offering. we need to interact and collaborate with many different organisations and groups, but offer a coherent service to our customers eg Apple have a very coherent app store, but a huge number of people outside the company are contributing to it.

You are providing a product or service at a moment in time, but the digital value of that product needs to evolve over time.

Digital business and services are technology dependent, but technology alone is irrelevant. Social sciences, culture etc are just as important

Digital leadership therefore requires leaders to move beyond the management of definitive goals, and into  a world defined by numerous contradicting objectives with more team based delivery.

Digital business transformation is not a one off, therefore it is dangerous to call it a programme, which implies it has a finish. It is really a culture change.

In setting up a digital transformation initiative start with the why?  Why are we doing it. Define the digital business principles.

Then look at the driver, what do you want to get out of it? Is it business growth? Customer experience? Mobility? Operational excellence? IoT?

Then come up with a design plan. What are you going to do?
Get commitment to embark on a journey, not to finish it.
What is the blueprint? Narrow all of the ideas down to the digital business opportunities you want to develop.

Then look at what operating model you are going to use - how are you going to do it. Various ways you can begin including building a bimodal capability or implementing  a framework for working with small vendors. Establish the governance, and consider whether infrastructure and support changes are needed.
Leave the "how" till last.

The rest of day was spent doing exercises - looking at how digital transformation might work on a few different case studies. Interesting day, and very relevant to the digital transformation programme (oops, mustn't call it a programme), we are about to set up.

It's all about the digital...

This week it's mainly been about digital. Yesterday I attended an awayday with the University Executive Board (UEB) to talk about a Digital Strategy. First question - do we need one? Or shouldn't is just be part of everything we do?

Second question - what do we mean by "Digital"? In a University context, it often means digital teaching and learning, but the point I was trying to make yesterday is there is so much more to it than that. I came up with five other areas, but there are probably a lot more. There's also an implication that this is new - but we've been doing "digital" for a long time. I think we are extremely innovative in this area - we agreed that our strategy would be web based wherever possible back in 1996!!!  I know, I proposed it. And we've continued to be innovative. I shared a picture with UEB about the different strands of digital, what we've done, and what we are either going to do or are doing. It is by no means exclusive, and could have been a lot bigger, but it was to illustrate the point. it also showed the enablers that need to be in place to make it happen, not least, digital literacy. And I mean of our staff, not of our students. wr have a lot of work to do n theat area!

Anyway, here's the picture. Watch this space. Something is going to happen soon!

What to to when every employee is an IT employee

What to to when every employee is an IT employee

Look at where Total IT spend comes from - Mainly IT department and shared, but increasingly by business units, and more recently, employees. More jobs becoming deeply depending on technology. 81% of employees bring their own applications into the workplace. More work is collaborative, requires problem solving.

PWC have estimated that more than 50% of the changes in the way we work in the next 5 years will be due to technology breakthroughs. But, an unrelated survey by IBM on Millenials found that only 4% thought their IT organisations had no issues implementing new technologies. So, 96% aren't ready for fulfilling these increased expectations?

Three decades on we are still email centric organisations. So, is it about the organisations ability to change?

Accelerating pace of consumer technology.

CognIToy. Toy Hippo driven by IBM Watson.

Hello Barbie, records children's voices, processes, and replies. And stores it in the cloud. privacy concerns? .

Drones are very inexpensive. Are already delivering rings to weddings.

Wearables have wearables. Tiny tattoo like sensors on your skin.

These are changing what people are expecting to get

Emerging workplace technologies include Virtual personal assistants, Production studios and space planning.

So, what do we need to do to prepare for this.? Need a new skills and workforce strategy.

What are our top business goals?

What will employer expect from employees and vice versa

What skills do we need to meet those goals?

Sorts of skills we should be looking at are

• Digital acument
• Ability to change roles and groups
• Local leadership
• Effective partnering

What will our employees expect?

• Easy access to content and data
• Tablets, macs, smartphones
• Apps not applications
• Collaboration tools
• Engaged IT support
• Thriving enterprise social network
• Having the right tools for the job
• Stimulating work
• Ability to learn
• Autonomy in how the job gets done
• Digitally literate leadership

Who will we need in our teams? Think about some or all of the following. :

 

 

Posted with Blogsy

Digital workplaces

I'm at the Gartner Digital Workplace summit in London for the next couple of days, bit of a last minute booking, as this is a new summit and I hadn't spotted it until recently. Am hoping it ties in nicely with the work on digital strategy we want to start soon. I'll try and take as many notes as I can of the sessions. Will definitely be in note form and not joined up English, so bear with me! I'm also using a new blogging tool on my iPad as my previously one has died, so who knows what posts will look like.

Opening keynote is entitled "Workplace Reimagined, Agile, Empowered, Engaged"

Digital Business is the creation of new business by blurring the digital and physical worlds. Three components people, things and business. Difference to 10 years ago is that the things are smart.

Digital workplace.

Engaged employees are more enthusiastic. By promoting employee engagement digital workplaces create a workforce that makes discretionary contributions to business effectiveness. Has to be based on trust. Building tougher increases trust.

Need to bring consumer like experiences into the workplace. Our most sophisticated computing environment these days is often in our home. Digital workplaces have an explicit goal of creating a consumer like computing experience that enables teams to be more effective. Need to strive for digital dexterity. The things people want to use, will always change. Don't chase the tools. Chase what people want to do.

Use smart technologies and people centric design. Instead of us becoming digitally literate, our computers need to be people literate. Digital workplace strategies exploit rmerging smart technologies and people centric design to support dynamic non routine work. Need to connect people to people, people to things and things to things.

There is no one vendor that will provide what we need. It's like an ecosystem of vendors that we need to stitch together. Need to use lighter weight technologies that will interact. Our teams need specialists who are not technologists. Need to have people who understand people.

IT will be measured in the future by internal customer satisfaction, not by how much money they save!

People need a more natural way of working. The way we interact with computers is improving. Apps that can talk and listen are not new, but apps that can interpret, learn and evolve are. Gartner predict that by 2018 25% of large organisations will have an explicit strategy to make their core computing more consumer like.

Emotion detection, already being used in some call centres. Facial recognition being used in marketing. What might these things mean in workplaces. Teachers with wearable cameras. Really will have eyes in the back of their heads. Workers in dangerous situations such as oil rigs wearing sensors to measure fatigue and stress levels.

HCI will become CHI where the computers are interacting with us.

Access to data, technology and people needs to be universal. Smart machines needed to create contextual experiences. Not talking about AI, ie replicating the way people think, but processing information and feeding it to us in a way we want. Building better tools.

How many people in room use things like Dropbox, when they're not allowed to? Loads. Convenience always trumps security and regulations! Need to change our policies, but also our language.

To really achieve a digital workplace, we need to involve people from outside of IT, eg HR, FM.

People will not only bring their own devices and apps to the workplaces, but will be bringing their own digital assistants. Different ones for different purposes. Amy from x.ai works across time zones to schedule meetings. Amelia from IPsoft handles front line queries and learns from experience. We will be opening up our data eg email and calendars to these digital assistants.

WYNIWYGWYNI great acronym! What you need is what you get when you need it.

Reimagine the workplace. Make it natural, make it universal, make it helpful.

 

 

Posted with Blogsy

Prioritisation and a joker

We had a SSB this week - Service Strategy Board, and high on the agenda was how we prioritise projects. What factors to take into account, what is the relative priority of our existing projects, and where do new ones fit. A lot of preliminary work has already been done, and we have a priority list already - based on a number of criteria, including whether something is statutory or strategic, and what is its reach and impact. Whether they are the right criteria is of course still up for discussion. I'd like to see more account taken of innovation and improving the user experience,  but there is still some more work to do.  I was amused to see that there was the provision for a wildcard, or joker, which I was told I could only use once ;-)  We also looked at the large pieces of work we do in the department that aren't classed as projects, and how we prioritise them. Perhaps the first question might be, why aren't they classed as projects? In some organisations any piece of work that takes more than a certain number of days is classed as a project. This work is linked to discussions that have been taking place on how we handle the workload in the development team and how that is prioritised.

Then yesterday we had a internal discussion following the workshop a couple of weeks ago on Digital Transformation, and how some of the work we want to do in this area sits with the priorities work. Given that what we want to do by setting up some sort of Digital and Innovation team is work in a Mode 2 way (if you're talking Biomodal working), does this sit completely outside this work?  We also looked at some of the work that we might do under the umbrella "Digital transformation", and the resources we might need to do it.

All matters for discussion over the coming weeks.

Towards digital transformation

Today I've been in a workshop, helping to develop a vision for our website. Well, that's how it started. What we actually did was come up with plans for digital transformation.

Earlier this year we set up a project to look at reviewing and replacing our content management system (CMS). But, we soon realised that what we actually had to do first is work out exactly what we want our web site to do, what audiences it serves, what we want it to deliver, before we even think about the technology. Today we had a workshop facilitated by Paul Boag, who writes a really good blog on all matters digital, to try and come up with a vision of where we want to go.

We know a University priority this year is "Digital", and one of the the things we were trying to unpick today was what "digital" actually means. At one level its a set of technologies - mobile, web, social media, new players such as digital assistants (eg Siri) - but more importantly it's the way these technologies influence behaviour, culture and user experience. 

Some organisations are approaching the challenges and opportunities of digital, by setting up Digital Transformation projects. Actually, I'm loathe to call them projects, as one of the things we discussed was how a project culture can kill digital developments, where the cost of failure is low and the process needs to be a quick build, test, improve. Much like the discussions we been having around bimodal IT.

One of the organisations we looked at is the Government Digital Service who  have been leading the digital transformation of government, making public services digital by default, and simpler, clearer and faster to use. They have a Service Design Manual which sets out all of their standards for building digital services.

During the day we looked at our business objectives, our customers of the website and its services, what our tangible deliverables are, and opportunities and threats. We did some hard prioritising, and it was painful taking some things out. But, we got to a stage where we have the outline of a business case for a major digital initiative, including the creation of a digital transformation team.

Won't say more than that for now, as we have a lot of work to do, but I'll leave you with one of the fun things we did where we used our artistic skills to illustrate two views of the future - one where we embrace digital, the other where we don't. Hopefully you might be able to tell which is which, but whether you can interpret them, well that's another story :-0

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.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Final thoughts...

Home from an excellent Gartner Symposium, hope readers of this blog got a feel for the sessions. Of course, it wasn't all work - we did get an evening out at the National Theatre of Catalonia with some very good food, and an entertainment based on Magical Movie Moments - the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers routine was particularly good ;-)

The networking was excellent, and it was good to mix with CIOs and senior IT managers from all sectors. This year I though the ITExpo was very good, with many vendors to talk to. In the evening receptions, there was some very interesting ways of attracting you to their stands....

The difficulty now is capturing the excitement I feel when I'm there, and translating it into real things we can do back at base. There's a number of things I have taken away and am definitely going to act on:

Digitalisation, Digitisation, Digital Moments. whatever words you use, we need a Digital Strategy and should be working on a Digital First, or Digital by Design strategy. We need to idenitfy those "digital moments' that will improve the student experience, support our researchers better or improve processes and use technology to implement them. Use technology to digitalise our processes, not just digitise them


Look at the top ten business and technology trends -  make a top ten list relevant to the University of Sheffield. To socialise this with stakeholders and CiCS to get some joint ownership. To build the lists into strategic and tactical planning and refer to them frequently. And refresh the list every 6 months


The Internet of Things - what could we use it for? Are there "things" that we could make smart to improve our services to students for example? Could we increase the number of self diagnosing things to reduce our Helpdesk calls? Our printers already do this. What else could we do?

Think about implementing Bimodel IT

Digitalising processes

Now a session on digitalising processes. I'm not sure that digitalising is a word, but we'll see....

Moving from paper based process to mobile device is a great advance, but it's not enough value. Can get more value by adding other technologies.

First step on journey is atoms to bits, paper to device
Then human to machine. What work can a machine do that a human does now.
Rethink the work itself. What's the right resource to do it. Human, machine or joint?
Then enable more variable handling of work. So, not about standardisation. If you are a global company, need to take account of differences in culture, in law, in products. Need to scale and keep consistency and manageability

Atoms to bits. Digitising processes. Some examples:
Pay cheque in by taking a picture of it on a mobile phone.
ApplePay. Credit card stored in mobile phone.
Huge improvement in convenience for customer.

Good example of difference between digitising a process and digitalising one of a nurse in a hospital. Give them a tablet to do data entry....
Illustrated in five slides below.
















Utilising the Internet of things, adapters, sensors etc. Everything relating to the patients care is instrumented. So everything nurse used to collect, and a lot more, is now collected by machines. Because so much data being collected, can analyse and look for patterns. Eg by instrumenting the bed can monitor how much sunlight the patient is getting and adjust so that patient gets more.

Use technology to transform work, not just digitise it.
Does take some investment, but paybacks will be significant.

Automation for years has meant replacing physical labour with machines. In IT context it's been about standardising work and reducing paper handling. But, is that enough of an improvement?
We should be digitalising processes to transform people's working lives.

Some more examples...

The quantified self. Wearables, constantly monitoring ourselves. Lots of opportunities to use that data. Who would you share it with and why? Personal trainer? Your doctor? Your insurance company....

Jetdry, make mobile heaters for working in arctic conditions. If they break, they use a mobile machine to heat up the local area and the equipment so it can be repaired. Used to fly a technician out to do repair. Now use a pair of glasses on local field worker to give remote technician a video view so local worker can do the fix. Man/machine cooperation.

Get customers to do the work for you. Report things like broken traffic lights, potholes through a mobile app.

John Dere Combine Harvester, cost about $0.5m. If it breaks down, can miss the harvest. They have instrumented the equipment with sensors, and set up remote service to monitor the data coming in, analyse it, and predict problems and provide guidance about preventative maintenance.

Not just about reducing paper and standardising. Go beyond this. It's about augmenting work or replacing it.
Race with the machines, not against them.

Think about automation and digitalisation


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Opening Keynote

The opening keynote at Symposium is always a spectacular affair. Huge auditorium with about 5,000 attendees. Very loud music, lights, camera, action....




Mind you, I wasn't over impressed with this instruction!




Opening remarks from Gene Hall covering some of the things coming up over the next few years - robotics, sensors, smart machines. More intelligent things than ever before, giving us challenges around privacy, security and infrastructure. Enterprises that can't keep up with the pace of change will become obsolete, as will leaders! Technology leaders have to guide our management teams into the new digital age. Every budget is an IT budget. Every company is an IT company. Smart leaders are listening!

Now onto nexus of forces which has changed our technology platforms and changed digital business, cloud, mobile, social and information. Next big thing is going to be the Internet of things. Practically everything that can have, will have, embedded sensors.

Another big impact will be human behaviour. Ownership of multiple devices, constant experience of digital moments. Also a growing sharing economy, eg not owning cars but renting or sharing one. But not same for your screen!

CIOs need to build for Digital First. New digital business models will require new digital processes. Three things must change.

1. Power. Change how the power in technology in distributed, 38% of IT spend is already outside of the central IT departments. Look at where the innovations are in our business units. People close to the customers and services can innovate digitally. We need to embrace this.

2. Technology investments. Change approach to sourcing. Take advantage of cloud market place. Can't base a digital business on slow moving software, hard to change. Need innovative, agile software which can react quickly. Why buy hardware? Use cloud.

3 People. Rethink approach to talent. Reduce numbers of people supporting infrastructure and legacy applications. Move these to cloud. Invest in innovation and supplier management. Run as lean as possible. Invest in digital business managers. Use DevOpps. Invest in customer experience. Crowdsource innovation. Be willing to fail, learn and try again.
Focus on the new talent needs - mobile, user experience and data sciences.
By 2017, talent needs will be in smart machines, Internet of things, robotics, automated judgement.

Become a bimodal IT organisation. Need to run safe, reliable services. But, need an innovative, agile section as well. Incubate our own start ups. Embrace outside change!

Hey, a drone just flew past the speaker!

Smart machines are new technology building blocks. Drones, wearables, robots, cognitive machines.
Smart machines will augment our decision making. Can make sense of information faster than we can.

Final point from this speaker, if the pace of change outside the organisation is faster than on the inside, then the end is near!

Next speaker talking about bimodal IT. All need a rock solid half. But need a creative, innovative half as well. Think about having 100 sensors. What you would you do with them. Gartner asked attendees. See results here.

New digital developments have increased the risks. Illustrated by a shark! Always sharks in the water, have to learn to swim with them. In digital business have to trust the untrustworthy. Need to create a calculated risk approach, decide which risks are worth taking and which aren't. Need a risk plan.
There's that drone again! This time I got a picture.




Digital business allows more about us to be known and recorded. Is this creepy?

Some technologies have unintended consequences. A man gets beaten up in a bar for wearing Google glass. Facebook experimented with order of results. Tell Siri you want to rob a bank and it will give you nearest banks!

Need to look at humanist or ethical effect of our new services. Don't just take a machine view, ie automate everything in sight without thinking of consequences.

Digital manifesto. 3 key principles:

1 Put people at the centre. All design should look at human requirements. Observe what people do, don't ask them for requirements.

2 Embrace unpredictably.
Bubble wrap originally designed as wallpaper! Then saw potential of wrapping when IBM needed to transport a computer. Hashtag not invented by Twitter, but by a user. Technology affects users behaviour. Welcome it.

3 Create, respect and protect personal space. Take privacy into account. Privacy by design.
Everything is opt in
Profiles open to the customer
Be careful with personalisations
Identify sensitive situations.
Apply rule of " how would I like to be treated?"

Be a Digital Humanist!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Top ten business trends and strategic technologies in education

Next session is looking at business trends in education and what strategic technologies we should be implementing to support them.

The goal: scaleable, affordable, quality education.
Because:
More people will need more skills
More people will need to re-skill more often
More people are more mobile

Also, cognitive machines will start to take over some jobs. Back in 2004 it was still accepted that a computer would never drive a car. Will be need for massive education and reskilling programme.

So, what are the top ten business trends?



Even prestigious research institutions are realising the importance of student success. Taking care of whole student cycle from recruitment to getting them into the right job.

The top technologies we should be concentrating on are:




Most self explanatory. Adaptive learning, when student and teacher discuss how learning can be made better. Exostructure is SOA by another name. ie not just infrastructure. Services are connected to from outside.
Digital assessment. If we do more online learning, which we will have to do for scale, will need to have way of assessing, and to know who we're assessing, and to trust them to be not cheating.

Then can start to match them up. Not a one to one relationship.



Gartner have provided us with a toolkit to look in more depth at the trends and technologies, to put them in an order relevant to us, and to add new ones.
So my action plan is to make a top ten list relevant to the University of Sheffield. To socialise this with stakeholders and CiCS to get some joint ownership. To build the lists into strategic and tactical planning and refer to hem frequently. And to refresh the list every 6 months.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Digital education moments

So I'm at the big European Gartner Conference at the moment - Symposium. One of the the things I like about the Gartner events is that they cover every sector so I mix with CIOs from all sectors. However, this afternoon is a sector specific forum, so just education and kicking off with a session on digital education moments.

First question we're asked is what sort of leader we are?





Looking at the difference between digitisation and digitalisation and its relevance to education.

Ebooks are digitised, ie a first order effect, but adaptive etext books are more towards digitalisation, ie realising second order effects. It's about realising benefits, changing the way we do things, transformational.

What about MOOCs? Interesting discussion about whether they are really transformational, still based on old structure of timed assignments, have to be there at a given time. As they move more towards social learning and peer assessment, will be more about digitalisation.
On hype cycle, MOOCs look like they will be obsolete before they plateau because they're not sustainable at the moment, no business model. Coursera does not yet have sustainable business model, relying on venture capital. But, lots of technologies that are being developed and used in MOOCs will be important including gamification and social and adaptive learning.

Will be different models coming up for education based around digital technology and personalisation. Anytime, anywhere, any pace learning will become the norm. Need to consider what technologies will be strategically important in delivering

Three examples of a digital education moment, well worth a read, and helped me understand what it means.
Teaching and learning:



.
Nearly everything in above scenario already exists. Much of it is in consumer space. Only thing that doesn't is the augmented reality encyclopaedia.

Turn this into a strategic technology map




Another example from administration:




Is number 4 a bit creepy? Interesting debate about whether it is as the information is out there.
More technologies aren't there in this scenario, but still a lot in consumer space.





Final example is about research, making sure researchers have computational and storage capacity they need as an event develops.



Again, almost everything in above scenario exists, even smoke dust. Still a lot of building on consumer apps, but also a lot of reliance on cloud storage and HPC.




So, our job for next week when we get back is too look at how we can support our institutions business model by implementing new technologies to transform value, performance and funding. Identify our Digital Education moments, and look at what technologies we need to implement them.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

From Chief Information Officer to Chief Digital Officer

Speaker 1 from McGraw Hill
How does the CIO shape the future?
Ask ourselves if we are we realising the maximum potential of our technology investment on our campuses.
Over past 15 years we have looked a lot at infrastructure and commodity services. These matter deeply to the organisation, but we we all have limited managerial time and budget. We need to minimise the cost/time on commodity offerings.

Focus on the learning ecosystem. Make it open, accessible and interoperable. How come we can't share identity easily? And we still buy technologies that are walled gardens. What can we do to make open learning ecosystems happen. We need learning content repositories. Open APIs, personalisation.

Become the Chief Digital Learning Evangelist. Influence future pedagogy. Help academic staff engage with TEL. Make sure your governance model takes into account learning outcomes. Moves budgets from administrative computing to teaching and learning. Speak in the language of learning outcomes. Enable disruption.

Speaker 2 from Notre Dame University

We all need to be digital evangelists. The core of everything we're doing is being disrupted by digital:

The classroom. Students bringing devices in, wireless being strengthened. Better collaboration and versatility.

Libraries are collaboration spaces with wireless and power, places to learn socially. Major changes to design.

Creating and managing learning materials. Digital learning materials are being built and delivered.

Enabling digital publishing. Digital publishing needs to carry same weight as traditional ways.

Orchestrating the mobile ecosystem. Students want to do everything on their devices. Not just academic. Whens the next bus, how long is the line in the cafe.

Enhancing campus life for students, whilst the campus is their home, we have to provide the services they want, even if it has detrimental effect on our networks.

Producing and managing video. Being produced at exponential rate, needs storage and curating.

Building new production facilities. Creative media suites for audio, video, editing.

Archiving, curating and preserving digital assets. The digital archive. Opens up data and information for all to use

Supporting research and analytics.

Delivering a demanding fan experience. Build a relationship with community who come to our campuses, no matter who they are. They have to leave with a positive experience.

We need to become evangelists for the next thing in education. We won't be calling it digital for long!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

JISC Digifest, Designed Digital

At the JISC Digifestival in Birmingham.
Opening keynote from Diana Oblinger , CEO of EDUCAUSE on Designed Digital.

Many things in our institutions that we call digital are bolt-ons, or retrofitted. We're still not designing digital. Our role is to design and implement a true digital experience for our staff and students.
Digital not just about work, but about society, especially civic engagement. We need to capture ideas to crowd source innovation,

Demographic changes drive new consumption patters.

How can we use our expertise as IT Professionals to drive changes in education?

Student Engagement
When you are engaged, you learn more. Use the best technology has to offer, not just text on the screen to produce an immersive, collaborative learning experience. Example of molecule in 3D.

Higher order learning comes from complex challenges. Gamification can assist this, integrating game elements into simulations and scenarios. Transform assignments into challenges.
Practice helps develop expertise. Also, generates data. Develop practice environments, virtual client simulation, artificial intelligence interactive agendas. And collect the data, use to feedback to students and teachers.
You can do many things with data. Feedback to instructor, can track student learning and see where you need to intervene for example.
With large amounts of data, patterns emerge that can be used for personalisation. Creating individual learning pathways for examples which are tailored to student needs and behaviours using adaptive learning engines.

Student empowerment
Not all of our students are the same. Some lack sense of belonging, some don't believe in ROI of investment, some have financial worries. Many are juggling coursework and work.
Some examples of how good IT can assist.
Career coach, a tool that links to local employment trends, income potential, required education.
Students need help with complex lives. Counselling and intervention software can monitor, engage and support students. Case management, dealing with student holistically, bringing together data from different services. Early alert system can make a difference to student completion rate.
Predictive analytics and intervention can advise students on how they are progressing through a course.

Alternative models
Education is a tightly interconnected interdependent system.
We now live in a course rich world, eg MOOCs and private providers. Finding ways of bringing these in to system by giving them credits.
Competency based education big in the US. Demonstrate mastery by completing tasks. Many student systems don't support these different models.
So, instead of IT leading, we're pulling things back.
Delivery systems and support models need to change to support different models, eg work based learning.

There's lots left to do in this digital world. It's about designing for digital, and about people and machines, not one or the other.

Questions to ask ourselves:
What will it take to exceed expectations tin this digital world?
Do we have the capabilities required to deliver value from IT?
How can we optimise education for a digital future?






- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Birmingham,United Kingdom

Taming the Digital Dragon

Next session is on the CIO Agenda, what are the practical implications of the things covered at a high level in the keynote.

Spending priorities - need to invest in new technologies, but also to refresh our core infrastructures to be ready to take advantage of new technologies.

Where is this innovation coming from?




Large IT vendors not the leaders, (apart from Google). Will be a large number of small vendors, we will have to work with more partners, and probably more immature ones.

Some questions CIOs need to ask themselves:
How do we get our core services digital ready?
What's the role of cloud?
How can we be fast enough?
How do we lead in an increasingly digital era?

Main reason for investing in cloud is not cost, it's innovation and agility. Risk can be managed, and benefits are there.

Many CIOs are running two speeds of IT, fast and traditional. Some using a separate, fast team, some using agile for small projects, some use methods like SCRUM.

Partnering with new, smaller organisations can produce fast, innovative results.

No more vanilla in IT any more. No right answer, all organisations will require different solutions.

Think about the digital strategy, and how it integrates with the IT strategy.

Ask ourselves, what will our digital legacy be.

In summary
Do
Refresh and review infrastructure to be digital ready
Introduce and strengthen two speed approach
Reinvigorate sourcing and partnerships to get more innovation
Define and pursue your digital legacy

Don't
Avoid digital leaderships gaps, overlaps or ambiguity



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Leading in a Digital World

Opening keynote of conference proper this morning. Huge auditorium, very slick and professional as usual.
Conference theme is leading in a digital world, focusing on not if or when we go digital, but how fast. We need digital strategies that are integrated with our business strategies.
4 forces driving what we do, cloud, mobile, social, information
We are entering an era of digital industrial economy where every budget is an IT budget.

What should CIOs be responsible for in this new era? They need to manage, and have skills in the following five things:
Digital technology architecture
Enterprise information architecture
Cyber security and risk
Industrialised IT infrastructure
Digital leadership

3 imminent and important challenges:
Digitalisation, what it means, how it grows
Suppliers, and how digitalisation affects them
Information and the opportunities and risks it presents

Digitalisation
Transformation of the business. Unprecedented combinations of new technologies. Digital products, services and customer expertise. More transparency, higher effectiveness. Internet of everything. Better connection with customers.
Some Gartner predictions:
By 2017 10% of computers will be learning
By 2020 1 in 3 knowledge workers will be replaced by smart machines they trained.
By 2020 there will be 30 billion devices connected to the intent.

Suppliers
Suppliers will change. In digital industrial economy we will see a new wave of vendors. We will need different supplier management skills.
There will be more IT, not less.
Largest growing technology market is the consumer one. Mobile, smart devices have taken over the technology world. By 2017 more words will be typed on glass than on physical keyboards.

Information
Everything connected to Internet produces data. Data is consumed and produced by smart devices. Is a lack of organisational skills to manage this explosion of data. An opportunity, but also a risk. Cyber security will be an ongoing concern. Big data creates vulnerabilities in our infrastructures. We need to create privacy by design in our infrastructure. Use data driven predictive security. Rapid detection and response will dominate security budgets by 2020.

We are seeing rise of Chief Digital Officers. Are they competing with CIOs? Or are they change agents? CIOs need to build their five skills listed above to become the digital leaders. We need to harness digital technologies to transform our organisations.

Things, people, places and systems come together in the Internet of Things, Nice illustration using a city plaza, buildings and cars communicating with each other. Cars that autonomously move them selves when parking becomes available somewhere cheaper.
Senseaware is an early example of digital future. Monitors everything about transport of organs by FedEx and sends information about location, temperature, light exposure etc.
Financial institutions will also change. Already seeing beginning of this with Kickstarter, bitcoin, peer to peer lending.
Parkatmyhouse.com. Can rent your driveway out as a parking space. Someone else parking in your drive used to be a problem, now it's a revenue stream. Everybody can be a technology company.
Every company will become a technology company

Internet of things, will be a huge range of smart objects. Some as simple as a sensor that tells you when a plant needs watering. Some as complex as a car. Every piece of domestic equipment will be controllable and able to report on its status. Already appearing.
Adidas have a football with sensors that link to an app to tell you how to improve your game.
A smart cooking thermometer is linked to an iPhone app to monitor your cooking
Huggies, nappy manufacturer have a sensor called tweetpee! Tells you when nappy needs changing.
Nike fuel band, wrist band monitoring health.

3D printing will totally revolutionise product manufacturing,
Can already print concrete. Jewellers using it. US military has deployed it to fix components.
Gartner predicts that by 2017 at least 7 of the worlds top ten multichannel retailers will be using 3D printing.

Analysing data produced by Internet of things is a huge challenge. Also need decisions, not just analysis. This needs processing power. IBMs Watson is a cognitive computer. Computers can drive cars. They can make sophisticated decisions, and we will have to allow them to do so.

We need to move from running IT to being an information and technology leader. We need to find ways of enabling the digital future and embrace innovation. Explore emerging technologies.

Good start to conference proper.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Social, Mobile, Digital

Well, here I am at the Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit in a lovely sunny London. Shame I'm going to be in conference sessions in a windowless room for the next 9 hours!
Will blog as much as I can, but as usual, it will be in note form.

Opening keynote is from Daryl Plummer, on Succeeding in the Digital, Social and Mobile Enterprise. I expect to hear those three words a lot during this conference, together with with "cloud".

The way we engage with each other has changed. The way we engage with technology is also changing. From wearable technologies to 3D printers, innovation is allowing us to engage in new ways. We need to be adaptive and aggressive about how we deal with these changes which are taking place.

Consumerisation revolution started with the PC, and is continuing. After the PC, the web, allowed people to interact with information everyday. Now we have mobile, cloud, social software. Think mobile first. Have to accommodate the mobility of people in all of our services.

The consumer is changing. Live in a culture of we, not me. Expect to be able to share, to interact, give feedback and expect it to be heard. Engaged, not passive. Experience orientated. Informed not ignorant. Connected. Consumers expect to collaborate. People will use technology and avoid telling IT department if they are disconnected. Dropbox good example. People will use it even if IT dept say they can't. Twitter and Facebook still banned in some places.

Employees are business consumers. ( NB Consumers not users. Not drug addicts :-) ). Will acquire technologies that IT dept not aware of. We need to help them and connect with them.
This disruptive innovation has 4 main forces, social, mobile, information, cloud.

Need to think about different ways of using information. Sentiment analysis is more important than surveys. Mining for trends is more important than mining for data elements. The wisdom of crowds can be mined.

Interfaces changing. No longer roll, click, lean, type. Now gesture, touch, talk, swipe. Services need redesigning for mobile. Can't just move them.

IT is moving out of the domain of IT the department. Our role will be to add value, coordinate, facilitate - not control. We need to concentrate on improving the experience. Simplicity of design, simplicity of use. Architecture and strategies need to change. Identify scenarios for change - especially in how we interact with employees, customers, partners. Put control into hands of customers. Lots of good examples. Airlines, on line check in etc. Some airlines use iPads for entertainment, continue watching movie after flight has landed.
Guardian, moved to cloud, launched Guardian API, launched on Amazon cloud. Extended their engagement, kindle edition, Facebook apps using API, social sites etc.

Digital engagement initiatives require input from portal managers, web developers, mobile managers, enterprise architects, content specialists.

If we don't get involved, it will happen without us.





- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Digital design principles

I'm quite impressed with the work of the Government Digital Service, set up by Martha Lane Fox as a team in the Cabinet Office to transform government digital services. I've heard a couple of their key people speak at various conferences, so will have blogged about some of their principles before, especially their tagline  -  Digital by Design.

Today I've been having a look at their  principles for designing digital services - and they are excellent. We certainly adopt some of them to a greater or lesser extent when developing services,  but I think we could do with having a close look at all of them. The website is extremely well set out - very concise descriptions of the principles, and for each one a drop down set of examples of how they've put the principle into practice. In summary they are:

1 Start with needs
  - start by identifying and thinking about real user needs and design around those — not around the way the ‘official process’ is at the moment

2 Do less
 - only do what you can do. If someone else is doing it — link to it.

3 Design with data
 -  learn from real world behaviour and continue this into the build and development process — prototyping and testing with real users on the live web.

4 Do the hard work to make it simple
 - making something look simple is easy; making something simple to use is much harder — especially when the underlying systems are complex — but that’s what we should be doing.

5 Iterate. Then iterate again.
 -  start small and iterate. Release Minimum Viable Products early, test them with real users, move from Alpha to Beta to Launch adding features and refinements based on feedback from real users.

6 Build for inclusion
 -  build a product that’s as inclusive, legible and readable as possible.

7 Understand context
 - don't design for a screen but for people. Think  about the context in which services are used. Are they on a phone? Are they only really familiar with Facebook?

8 Build digital services, not websites
 - services don’t begin and end at websites. Might start with a search engine and end somewhere physical.

9 Be consistent, not uniform
 - wherever possible  use the same language and  design patterns — this helps people be familiar with  services. But, when this isn’t possible,  make sure the underlying approach is consistent.

10 Make things open: it makes things better
 - share code, designs, ideas, intentions, failures,  with colleagues, with users, with the world.  The more eyes there are on a service the better it gets — howlers get spotted, better alternatives get pointed out.