Space...

Moving away from technology, this morning's sessions were on space.

First up was the University of Warwick's PVC for planning talking about estates planning
Some interesting figures about UK University estate (all figures exclude student accommodation)
Capital expenditure on estate was £2bn in 2012/13. Revenue cost of supporting the estate is £1.9bn/yr
Size of HE estate is just behind NHS. About 7 times the size of Tesco estate!

Currently there is pressure on capital expenditure, little government funding now, most has to come from reserves or borrowing.
But there is a massive investment in the University estate because space is:
Central to operational effectiveness
Crucial to staff and student experience
Critical in ensuring ability to meet many different demands
Provides a competitive advantage
A third of students have rejected an institution based on the facilities they observed
80% of students say the quality of the facilities have influenced them to accept an offer.

Are issues about how we creatively use space, and space use and utilisation is very important. The effective use of our space is a particular concern of government
Analysis of space usage indicators over last decade tells a positive story, the total net space per fte student is down by 9%. However, the office space for academics is only down by 0.6 % We are not using office space efficiently.

Space norms and metrics can provide information against which opportunities and constraints offered by existing buildings can be reviewed.
Expansion of the estate in relation to growth can be forecast.
Expectations regarding space allocation between departments and amongst colleagues can be managed
But difficult to benchmark as few universities publish space use

Estate is core to the delivery of the academic mission
Student expectation, staff recruitment, retention all depend on high quality facilities.
Capital spending has to be linked to improvements in space management and utilisation
You need space norms, metrics and benchmarking to inform decision making
The sustainability agenda is very important

Last week's UUK efficiency report has a section on delivering value from the HE estate, and emphasises the need for academics and estates departments to work closely together. You can read the report here.


This was followed by talk on helping students to use technology in learning spaces. Primarily it focused on providing power for mobile devices using USB, not 240volts!

Previously discussions have focused around raised floors and floor boxes, but this is now unrealistic. Devices are less hungry for power and USB is fine.
They have some neat little devices, including this which is basically a big battery, which when charged up will provide 8 students with power all day. There are lots of configurations for using them - in middle of round tables or near soft seating and they can be built into furniture or a building.
I was quite impressed with them- so much better than floor boxes!!
They also had some neat collapsible computers in desks, can use space for computers or as desk space.


Finally we had a talk from DBS who design and install technology in teaching areas, residential areas and hotels. They shard a case study on what they'd done at Kings college for some new student accommodation.
They had had built 700 bedrooms, and put enough infrastructure in for at least 7 devices per student.
All the rooms had a flexible digital screen, and wired and wireless networks so all devices can connect to it. It delivered free IPTV and gave access to learning materials, streamed lectures etc

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Diversity beats Ability

On Friday I took part in "The Big Message" discussion. Along with a number of other Heads of Department, we were talking about Diversity - why it matters, how it can add value to the educational mission of the University, what barriers there are to diversity, and what actions we need to take to overcome them. The conversations had been taking place all week with different groups of staff, facilitated by Simon and Roy from Astar-Fanshawe, and will result in a message about how diversity can help us work more effectively with each other and enhance our teaching and research. Our first question we had to work o was "how can diversity enhance our educational value", and the obvious answer from our group was "how can it not?".  Some great discussions around how diverse teams work better   - "diversity beats ability" - and how being at University is about learning new things, coming into contact with new ideas, new cultures etc, all of which are enhanced if we have a diverse population of staff and students.
Some of the most interesting discussions were around barriers. Recruitment was one which as already been identified, not picking the right person for the job, but recruiting for a team can be difficult.  The tendency for mini-me-ism - recruiting people in our own image, with our own personality and skill set. Lots of talk around diverse meaning a truly integrated polulation - a diverse group of students is not truly diverse if chinese students only talk to each other in chinese, and the UK students stick together for example. Lots of good action plans came out of it - an excellent session.

Today it was our Service Strategy Board where as well as catching up on project progress we talked about how work is requested, how it comes into the department, and how we allocate resources. Also, we had a presentation and approved a way forward to implement Agile Project Management which is going to lead some some big changes in how we run projects. We also approved a new project, to investigate how we store and retrieve digital media.

Tonight I went to the opening of one of our new buildings - The Pam Liversage Building  - great to see an engineering building named after a women engineer! It's a stunning seven storey building, and has been designed to join an existing building, with an atrium containing the external wall of the original building. It will be the home to our engineering graduate school, and there's more information about it here.

You can also explore the building using Google Streetview here.

Student Union unveiled for graduation

It's graduation week again, with 9 degree ceremonies taking place. I always love this time of year - makes me realise why we're all here. It's great to see so many students with their parents, friends and supporters celebrating a successful completion of their degree. The Octagon Centre looked great - it even had a blue carpet down for the occasion.

This year it was really good to see the hoarding finally come off our new student union building. It's a bit quirky, but I think it's great, lots of angles, gold cladding and very interesting spaces inside. Another good capital project nearing completion, and the campus is looking great. Even the Arts Tower is starting to emerge from its plastic wrapping to show off its new cladding.

As well as attending degree ceremonies this week I've been involved in lots of financial and budget discussions, in between fitting in lots of meetings before going on annual leave next week.

And for those interested in the Digital Economy Act, UCISA has just responded to the latest Ofcom consultation. A recurring theme in all our reponses to the Act has been a lack of clarity in some of the definitions used - especially ISP and subscriber. Despite some attempt to provide clarification in the Initial Obligations Code, we still can't say with certainty what a University would be classified as.

Off to Oxford again tomorrow for the UCISA User Support Conference where I'm giving yet another plenary session - hope not too many people have been at my last couple or they might be getting a bit fed up of seeing the same slides...

Pan galactic gargle blasters anyone?

After the excitement of IWMW10 yesterday, today I had a very good meeting with our Professor of Internet Law Lilian Edwards. Lots to talk about including our response to the current consultation on the Digital Economy Act. I also learned about Gikii - the legal workshop equivalent of a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster. The programme looks fantastic - wonder if they'd welcome some real geeks? The interaction between technology and the law is a fascinating subject and one which I look forward to discussing further.

Then it was on a train to Oxford for a UCISA meeting with the Chair of AUDE - the Association of University Directors of Estates. This came about because one of the things I wanted to do during my period of office as Chair of UCISA was to build up relationships with other organisations. Estates is an area where there is a huge amount of overlap with IT - from designing and installing the network infrastructure in new and refurbished buildings, to the provision of teaching and learning space including the technologies and timetabling. There's also the whole sustainibility agenda - power, data centres, etc. One of the topics we discussed at length was Business Continuity - as two of the main infrastructure providers we are often the departments turned to to get services back to normal. We're also the departments that are most likely to be mentioned in other depts business continuity plans as being able to solve the impossible! A system which integrated all data which might be needed to manage a serious incident was also something we discussed - buildings, occupancy, hazards, contact details, scheduled events.

It was a very profitable meeting and we agreed that there's a real need to understand each other better. I'm sure some joint projects, events and case studies will result.

Reducing costs and repealing acts

UCISA Executive meeting in London last Thursday. I'm getting used to the early morning trains to London now, but I still find the lack of connectivity frustrating - even the phone signal isn't enough to have a reasonable conversation for any length of time. Not that I usually want to in public of course, but getting and sending the odd email would be nice!

As a membership organisation, UCISA has a responsibility to help its members, and one of the main things we discussed was how we could help in these times of financial constraint. All of our organisations are reporting it as their main concern, but it isn't up to us to tell IT departments how to save money or manage themselves. What we can do however is give advice and share good ideas and best practice. A recent UCISA seminar on How to reduce Your Infrastructure Costs for example had presentations from a number of organisations, including how Westminster University estimate they have saved £1m by outsourcing their email, personal storage and productivity apps to Google, savings to be gained on printing, and a keynote from a Gartner analyst. All of the presentations are on the web site.

We discussed what other things we could do, other events we might organise for example, including tips on renegotiating contracts, showing the value of IT, outsourcing and outhosting options. As I've said before, the government is very keen on shared services at the moment and one of the areas we touched on is IT as a shared service within the institution. Many of us who run relatively centralised IT departments are still aware of the many IT support staff out there in departments, file servers lurking in corners, IT staff re-inventing the wheel as they write their own systems for doing things instead of using centrally provided ones. Surely, we need to look at IT spend across the institution, and look for efficiencies in how we provide it, which will mean bringing distributed staff into bigger teams, physically located still in departments but with a much closer relationship with the central IT department.

We touched on a number of other topics, including a forthcoming meeting with the Chair of AUDE (Association of University Directors of Estates), where we're going to discuss a number of areas of overlap between IT departments and estates departments - more next week after the meeting.

We also were brought up to date on the Digital Economy Act and the effect on us. The more I look at this, the more of a mess it is, and the more I think we should be using the Government's web site to vote to repeal it! Peter Tinson wrote a good blog post back in May about the next steps for the Act. basically, the consultation on the cost of implementing the measures in the Act has now finished - both JANET and UCISA responded, and now the consultation is on Ofcom's code of practice. This initially focuses on ISPs with over 400,000 subscribers. There is still no clarity on what an ISP is, and whether University's (or even JANET), are ISPs. So, watch this space - I'll post on news on this Act as I get it.

The Arts Tower reappears

Programme Board earlier this week, with only one new Project Definition to approve - for a Student Attendance Monitoring system. This is mainly to fulfil the legislative requirements around the new Points Based Immigration system introduced by the UK Border Agency aimed at International students, but will also be used to monitor all students to enable us to pick up any problems and identify where support might be needed.

We also had our regular item of looking at progress on all projects, with good progress on a number of them including the VLE review, our portal review and our media hosting project.

Yesterday I had a never ending series of meetings, from 0830 to 1730 with even my 30 minute lunch break taken up with having a photo taken of the Exec for the Annual Report. I'm pleased to report that our intrepid photographer (who perhaps wishes to remain nameless) managed to get one decent one of the four of us with all of us with our eyes open and looking vaguely happy!

One of the meetings yesterday was the Professional Service Executive Directors with the Registrar looking at progress on a number of workstreams. These included work on Corporate Communications and Planning and Budget setting. One of the largest and most complex workstreams is on our Estates Strategy as we try to reduce our running costs and carbon footprint. This will involve some moves of departments, including the Professional Services, as one of our major capital projects comes to fruition. The Arts Tower is a 19 storey grade 2* listed building which opened in 1965 and has recently been undergoing a major refurbishment. It's spent the last few months completely covered by wrapping, and on cloudy days has disappeared from the landscape. It is just starting to reappear, and the top floor is already visible as the wrapping and scaffolding comes down. - it will take 26 weeks for the scaffolding to be struck completely.

Plans for the re-occupation of the building are currently been drawn up, and will allow some consolidation of services. It will be an exciting time. It is popularly believed, although there is no documentary evidence, that the Arts Tower is based on the the Seagram Building in New York. It certainly looks similar to me!

IT and Estates

ICT departments have traditionally enjoyed a close partnership with the Library, and the same is true for our professional organisations. UCISA and its library counterpart SCONUL have a good working relationship with joint events and regular liaison meetings. So, both in my day job and my new role as Chair of UCISA I’ve been thinking about the relationship with other departments and whether we should be building relationships with similar professional organisations. IT/IS departments provide services to all areas of the University but some of those services require closer collaboration with other departments to ensure that the University gets the most added value.

One of those areas is Estates, where we have a number of close links including:

The design and installation of the infrastructure in all new buildings and refurbishments – the pervasive nature of IT and its critical importance in teaching and learning and research means that we need to be heavily involved right at the beginning of the design process.

Data centres – business continuity planning requires close collaboration in the design and operation of existing centres including the installation of specialist equipment such as generators, air conditioning, fire and flood detection, monitoring systems and alerts. This in turn puts pressure on the Estates department to maintain and test such equipment. The growth in eScience and the expansion of High Performance Computing facilities has also lead to increased demand for space to accommodate the numerous racks of kit being acquired both centrally and by research groups.

The Green Agenda and the need to reduce power consumption and the carbon footprint is another area where close collaboration is required. For example, those racks of HPC equipment throw out huge amounts of heat which has to be removed – a huge waste of energy which requires careful design of both the data centre and the cooling system.

Last, but certainly not least, the design of teaching and learning spaces, as well as their management and utilisation. The operation of 24*7 facilities such as our Information Commons provides interesting challenges both for ICT and Estates departments.

So, you’d think that ICT and Estates departments enjoyed a good partnership wouldn’t you? At the recent AUDE (The Association of University Directors of Estates) conference, only half of the attendees thought they had a close working relationship with their IT Director. I wonder if the reverse question had been asked at the UCISA conference the response would have been any different? Probably not. Of course, there are good examples of working well together –the design of our Information Commons is a good example which was definitely a partnership between the ICT department, the Library and the Estates team. But in many areas there is still a lot of work to be done, and it’s something I’ve committed myself to trying to improve at the national level as well as locally, and we’ve already made a start from the UCISA end. I think the biggest issue is communication and understanding of each other’s concerns, which we can only resolve by talking to each other and close liaison. UCISA will be meeting represetnatives of AUDE soon to discuss areas where we might collaborate, how we might highlight examples of good practice and break down some of the barriers that obviously exist.

Scanning

Had a very good presentation last week on the way our Estates Department has approached the scanning of all the various document connected with University buildings, including drawings, floor plans, manuals and deeds. Previously over 100m2 of space was needed to store it, but over the last few months it has all been digitised, and is now available through a web browser to anyone who needs it, including engineers, architects, and planners. Very good project, and uses some very nice software to view the information - at the moment it is stand alone, but we need to work with them now to integrate it with our LDAP directory.

We've just begun a scanning project to look at the best solution for the rest of the University which will integrate with our corporate finance, HR and student systems and our document management system.

We also had a couple of meetings of our executive team last week. The first with our section heads where we spent a considerable amount of time discussing the results of an employee satisfaction survey carried out across the whole of the University last year, trying to interpret the results and come up with an action plan to address some areas of concern.

Our other meeting was mainly concerned with discussing our capital budget spending plans, and how we were going to do everything we wanted to this year, but without enough money to do it. Fairly common discussion that one! So, a few projects put on hold until we have detailed costings for the others to see how much we can do. Current priorities for the spend are general replacements (student PCs, servers etc), resilience (including replacing all of the air-conditioning in our data centre), and a replacement for our current managed desktop.

I'm off for a few days now - anyone really interested in what I'm doing can keep up with me on Twitter but don't expect anything riveting!

Waterloo

Departmental meeting last Friday - I really enjoy them - nice to see so much of the department together. We looked back over the last year and what we'd achieved, and looked forward to our two new strategies: Technology and Learning and Teaching. We had a presentation on action taken following recent surveys of our services, and launched our new liaison service. This will have 3 strands - strategic, technical and community. We also had a demonstration of our new collaboration product - uSpace.

I was pleased to present a number of long service awards to staff who'd been with us 30 years, and to one who'd completed 40 years service. Finally, this was the first occasion that we had our "above and beyond awards" for staff who had given that extra level of service. These have rapidly become know as the ABBAs, so maybe I should invest in a number of Mamma Mia DVDs to give out next time. Following the success of the karyoke at the Christmas Party, perhaps I should make it the sing-a-long version.

To outsource or not

Well, interesting first day back yesterday. Power off in our offices from 10.15 until 4.30am. Spent most of the day camped out in our Customer Services area with my laptop, trying to work whilst remembering how noisy it can be in an open plan space. Quite enjoyed it though - especially being able to talk to lots of customers coming through the doors. Think I'll do it regularly and really upset everyone.

Spent some of today reading UCISA and JISC's latest briefing paper on outsourcing student email services. As well as the paper there's 4 case studies - one from a University who decided to go with Microsoft, two who chose Google, and one which decided not to outsource. Peter Tinson, Executive Secretary of UCISA, has written a very good blog post about the papers which sums them up better than I could, so go and have a read - and don't forget to look at the case studies.

This morning met with representatives from the Estates department to discuss some options for our space requirments over the next few years. Our main issue is the number of different locations on campus we have staff - 10 at the last count. By the very nature of some of our services we'll never be all together, but it would be nice to reduce the number down to 4 or 5. We had some ideas, but all depends on a complicated set of moves, beginning with the refubishment of our Grade II* listed Arts Tower which will start this year.

New buildings

Managed to drag myself out of bed and back to work today. Spent the morning trying to catch up with emails, and then had a very pleasant lunchtime looking round three of the University's new buildings which will all be occupied after Christmas.


The first was The Soundhouse, the rubber clad rehearsal and sound studios for the Departmentof Music. Lots of small soundproofed rooms, some with round windows at interesting heights, and some with very interesting sound baffles on the walls. There's also a couple of recording studios in there. We even found a PVC practicing on one of the pianos......






Next was the refurbished Victorian Jessop's Hospital - once the main maternity hospital, and soon to be home to the Department of Music. It was in a terrible state when we took it over and had been home to colonies of pigeons for several years. It's also listed, and was riddled with asbestos. But, the main staircase has been reinstated, and the whole building beautifully refurbished. There are staff offices, postgraduate space and some very nice teaching and seminar rooms. Many of them have been designed acoustically for the Music department, and all are very bright and airy.



Finally we visited Jessop West, a brand new multicoloured building which will be home to the School of Modern Languages, English and History. Each department has its own wing and in the centre is a hub with a fantastic wooden atrium. The picture above is from the 4th floor looking down to the ground floor. Each wing has individual staff offices and shared postgraduate teaching and research space. On the ground floor is a cafe, an exhibition space and the main University visitor centre. The spaces are excellent, and looks like it will be a brilliant building to work and study in.

Emerging Technology Hype

Spent yesterday afternoon in the Estates Strategy Group - the last time it will meet as the new committee structure comes in from 1 August - I seem to spend a lot of time at the moment in the last ever meeting of some committee or other. I'd love to count up how many I've served on over the last 25 years. One of them even came back to haunt me yesterday, when I was asked a question about the management of the Octagon Centre, and I was reminded that many years ago when it was first opened (in 1988 I think), I served on its first management committee. Not a lot to report from the meeting - lots of discussion about the recladding the Arts Tower and the decanting of everybody out of it, and various other moves round campus of different departments.

Spent some of yesterday afternoon looking at some of the new Gartner Hype Cycles which have just come out. I've mentioned them before - they're a graphical way of looking at the maturity of a technology. Most things start with a technology trigger of some sort (eg the release of a new system), then everyone things how wonderful it will be and hypes it up and it reaches the peak of inflated expectations. Then we all start to use it and it doesn't work as we expected it to, it's got bugs, it doesn't solve our problems , and we quickly grow bored and frustrated with it as it hurtles towards the trough of disillusionment. Then gradually it picks, up, bugs get fixed, we see a way it can be used and it is adopted and goes up the slope of enlightenment and reaches the plateau of productivity. That's the theory anyway.

The latest one to be released is the emerging technologies one - I always find this one quite exciting to see what's on the radar, and where some of our existing technologies are. In this latest one, technologies and trends at or approaching the Hype Cycle peak include green IT, cloud computing and social networking platforms. Corporate use of virtual worlds and Web 2.0 are slipping into the Trough of Disillusionment, while SOA (Service Orientated Architecture) begins its ascent of the Slope of Enlightenment.

New technologies appearing on it for the first time include context delivery architecture - something that is being discussed at all the big IT conferences - and erasable paper printing systems, or a way of printing on treated paper which then has the capacity to erase the information from the paper, allowing it to be reused more quickly and more often. Apparently Toshiba already have a paper that can be used up to 500 times. Although it's on the cycle, it's not predicted to reach maturity for another 10 years, so maybe our Print Service don't have to be looking at it just yet.

Senate

Senate meeting yesterday afternoon - 2 major discussion items. First was the on-going process around restructuring. All of the Faculty Pro Vice Chancellors are now in place, and the new University Executive Board (UEB) will take over on 1 August. UEB consists of the Vice Chancellor, 5 Faculty PVCs, the 3 cross-cutting PVCs (Teaching and Learning, Research and Innovation, and External Affairs), the Registrar, Director of Finance, Director of HR and Academic Secretary. More professional service reps than before (still no IS rep though but I'll keep working on it...). We're promised that there will be much more transparency of decision making - no inner cabinets, just a collective responsibility, which is a good thing. There's still a lot of work in progress around the role of the Faculties, including their governance structures, but this seems to be progressing well. I'm in the process of meeting all of the PVCs - I've had 3 very positive discussions so far - about how we might work in partnership with them to provide the most efficient, cost effective service to them, and add value to the support they already receive from their departmental staff.

Second item on the Senate agenda was the capital programme, with details of new buildings on the cards, as well as significant refurbishments. The most significant refurbishment is the Arts Tower. It's over 40 years old, and a Grade II listed building, and in drastic need of a lot of money spending on it! I wonder how many of you realise that it's inspired by the Seagram Building in New York - which has twice as many floors. The building will be gradually emptied over the next few months, (with the exception of the Estates Department who have bravely agreed to move into it during the works), and then the outside cladding will be replaced as well as an internal refurb of some of the floors.

Another two major refurbishments are Western Bank Library, and University House (Student's Union) which will have a significant amount of work done on it to create a variety of new spaces.

I've mentioned the concept of Learning Hub before, but rather tha a new build, we are currently looking at trasforming the Edwardian wing of the old Jessop Hospital into teaching space, including self help space for students for the English Language Teaching Centre and Modern Languages Teaching Centre. They will have to get rid of the dead pigeons first though!

Dead pigeons, and a lucky one

Went for a walk round a deserted building this morning - part of the Jessop Hospital which has been derelict and empty for several years. We're looking at possible uses for it, including turning it into teaching space. Some nice rooms with plenty of light, lots of corridors and poky rooms (typical of an old hospital), and numerous dead pigeons. Even a live one which had been stuck in a room for a while so a colleague caught it and threw it out of a window. It felt good to be wearing a hard hat again - not done it since the IC opened. It will be an exciting project if we get the go ahead.

Exec meeting this afternoon, where we discussed many strategic issues including whether staff should wear uniforms. Other discussions centred around how we manage our involvement with teaching space, and how projects should be handled at the delicate go-live stage, where it's important that everyone is kept informed.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, Chelsea Flower Show was brilliant yesterday.

Estates

One of the more interesting meetings I’m involved in is the Estates Strategy Advisory Group – we had a longish meeting yesterday discussing priorities for capital projects in the University. Lots of interesting developments on the cards, as well as some major maintenance projects. When they’ve finally been approved and I can release details, I’ll let you know.

A couple of major building projects are really coming on – the Jessop West development to house English, History and Modern Languages has a lot of its green and blue cladding on – the wing yet to be clad will be red, and I’m told it will look spectacular. The original Jessop is being refurbished for Music, and practice rooms will be in the new Soundhouse on Gell St which has also started having its rubber cladding put on. These building projects have a major impact on us, as we have to design and oversee the voice and data networks in them, usually up against tight deadlines. We are upgrading our telephone switch at the moment so that we can use Voice Over IP (VOIP) – basically running the phones over the data network, so new buildings will only have one set of cables instead of two.

On my way to Oxford at the moment for a UCISA Planning Meeting, a Conference Organising Meeting, and a Communications meeting, so it will be a busy 2 days.