The falcons are back

This week we've had a liaison meeting with our colleagues from the Library. Talked about a range of issues including Digital Preservation and identity management, as well as the future of our Virtual Learning Environment. That last one is an interesting question - will large, fairly monolithic software packages continue to dominate the VLE space, or will a variety of solutions exist, loosely connected into an environment for students to access learning materials? We already know that Google apps and YouTube are being used, and there's a number of other services emerging. Will be interesting to see what happens.

I also chaired a Business Continuity Operations Group - this is a group which looks at BC for the whole University and has representation from Professional Services and Faculties. We have a big work programme which we're gradually working through, and a pilot of Business Impact Assessments in departments is coming to a close, and will shortly be rolled out across the University. This will help departments with reviewing their BC plans, and also when updating their risk registers. Many of the actions in our work programme are the result of either reviews of real incidents (a recent fire is a good case in point), or simulated incidents. We hold these at a University level, and also for individual departments or groups of departments. I suspect its getting close to us having an IT simulated one, although we seem to get enough real ones to keep us on our toes. A rather devious ransomware attack is keeping some of us busy at the moment.....

And some good news - we're about to launch our new Creative Media Room for staff. It compliments the great facilities we have already for students, and everyone's welcome to drop in and see it next Friday between 1200 and 1400.

And finally, as its Friday - a picture of one of our Peregrine Falcons,  who've returned to the nesting platform.  Not sure if it's George or Mildred. You can keep a lookout for them here, and follow them on twitter (@peregrines2014), where a motion sensor on the camera should send you a tweet when they land.

Curry for lunch

CiCS User Group yesterday - always a good turn out, and we did presentations on our new iTunesU site which has just gone live and the new University web site, both of which I've blogged about recently. We also brought everyone up to date with work we're doing on Unified Communications which will integrate many features of our voice system, including voice mail, with Google apps. All messages, whether email, voice or chat will be integrated and accessible from one place. We're also rolling out soft phones and mobile integration - all exciting stuff. The final talk was on Infrastructure Demystified. usually the most hidden (until it goes wrong) part of what we do, we thought it was important to make it more visible - it is certainly critical, and we spend a lot of money on it. It was an excellent presentation - interesting and simple enough for non technical people to understand.

Last week we got together with our colleagues in the library for a joint awayday - we try and do it once a year and have a set topic to work on. This year we were refreshing our Information Strategy. But first, we had to cook out own lunch as a team building exercise!  Led by an excellent chef at the Tideswell School of Food, we made onion bhajis, lamb curry, dhaal, rice and indian salad.

No serious injuries, lots of team work, and an excellent lunch. And we did a lot of work on the Information Strategy, which has served us well for about 10 years with minor amendments, but was in need of a major refresh. Hopefully we will be able to share the revised version soon, when it's been through the approval processes.

Google+, Libary Clouds and the future of student computing rooms

I spent most of last week doing things I can't really blog about - promotion and regrading meetings, scoring Exceptional Contribution Award cases, that sort of thing, so sorry for lack of posts!

A couple of interesting things happened, which its probably worth mentioning.

Google announced that Google+ is now part of the apps suite. We've already enabled it as part of our test domain, and now we'll be looking at the implications of rolling it out.  I'm particularly interested in how we can use "hang outs" for desktop video conferencing across campus. There will be issues for those of us already using it for our personal accounts, I'm not sure how that will work.

We had a meeting with our colleagues from the Library, who are replacing their existing library management system with a totally cloud based one. They have signed up to be part of the  Ex Libris early adopter programme to implement this next generation of library systems. They hope to migrate fully by summer 2013, and we look forward to working with them on this exciting development.

And finally, one of the sessions I didn't get to at Educause  (there are about 20 parallel sessions so often there's two or three on at the same time I want to go to), was on the future of the Computer Room for students.  As student ownership of laptops increases, and we can virtualise more software, we're often  asked why we provide open access machines. In practice, they are one of our most popular facilities, in the Information Commons there are about 550 available 24/7, many of them pre-bookable, and there is stil huge demand for them.  Peter Tinson attended the session, and has written a really good blog post about it and some of the issues surrounding the provision of student machines, and I recommend a read of it here.

Lean and cake

This week we've been fortunate to have a visit from Heidi Fraser-Krauss from St Andrew's University, following our visit there last week. She came down to talk to staff from a number of departments including Student Services, Finance, HR, ACS, External relations and of course CiCS about what LEAN is, and how they've implemented it in St Andrews. A very informative presentation, and lots of good disucssion and questions.  What came across more than anything is the need for senior management support and a champion. LEAN also needs managers to relinquish some of their "command and control" and let the people who actually do the job suggest changes, and then help to facilitate the changes. This can be hard, and  many people I've spoken to about LEAN agree that one of the biggest barriers to change is middle management. The manager's job is also to set challenging targets - there's no point starting to change a 3 week process to get it down to two and a half weeks - go for a day, or an hour. Challenging is the polite term - I preferred Heidi's description of "pant-wetting" targets. So, lots of things to think about but a very positive attitude from everyone there, and I think we've probably got enough momentum now to get on with it.

Other meetings this week include a newly reinstated CiCS/Library Liaison group, where we talk about matters of shared interest. Research data storage, the Library's new technical architecture, learning spaces (including our plans for Information Commons phase 3), and how we support international collaborations were all on the agenda. The latter is an interesting one, and focused a lot on licences, both of electronic resources, and software, and the many different licening models we have for both. Some  allow access to our international collaborators, some don't, and some we just can't work out whether they do or don't.

We had the second of our coffee and cake meetings with a random selection of staff yesterday, and as ever, the cake was excellent I'm told. We're always happy to get feedback on how these things have gone, and suggestions for improvement. We have tried to find an informal space to have them in, and someone suggested a pub yesterday. Not sure about beer and cake.....