Value for Money

One of the things we've been doing over the last few days is writing our value for money report - part of a series of reports produced for the University to show how we're achieving value for money, pointing out areas where we could do it better, and looking at future strategies. We have some excellent examples from CiCS, especially around infrastructure, voice and data and printing.

We've expanded our local cloud server and storage infrastructure making use of aggregation, resource sharing, standardisation and thin provisioning. This means we only grow capacity when it is really needed. We make the best use of resources by sharing - we supply capacity that meets peak demand, but not all peaks are at the same time. It also means we can clone test systems from live data ensuring that upgrades have a good chance of success with minimal storage overhead. We can also snapshot systems prior to upgrades etc quickly reverting if things go wrong.  This usually answers my main question at our weekly CAB (Change Advisory Board) which is "what happens if it all goes horribly wrong?" Usual answer - we'll have taken a snapshot so we revert. I have to admit that the "we" in the above paragraph definitely doesn't include me - some much cleverer people than that do it all.
Last year we had 750 virtual servers in production and development, this year we have 1063.

The way in which the network is being designed and deployed is also relevant to VfM.  Wherever possible we install an appropriate amount of outlets that meets the users needs (not too many, not too few) and only patch those that are actually being used. This in turn means that we can install fewer switches than under the previous ‘standard’ model making savings on both capital and operational spend.
We’re also revisiting older deployments and retro-fitting the ‘only patch used ports’ model, enabling us to reduce the amount of kit needed in those properties (making operational savings there), with recovered kit then being deployed in other areas (making capital savings on those projects)
Continued roll-out of IP Telephony and underlying infrastructure provides better/easier access to voice services for users whilst reducing the amount of network equipment needed to provide it.


My final example, from many more listed in the report, is the My Sustainable Print Service which went live in April 2014; the service was made available to all Staff and PGT and the Students Union. Student print equipment was replaced in the Information Commons as part of this agreement improving quality and functionality. The recurrent annual saving for the university is £1.4M; 19 tonnes of carbon saved, reduced from 24T to 5T. A new fleet of approx 555 new multifunctional print, copy, scan devices has been installed on campus. The legacy fleet has been removed and so far totals 1500 devices which have gone to a Social Enterprise; toner cartridges have been removed and/or sold with an approx value to date of £5k.



As user expecttions increase and  IT becomes even more ubiquitous and critical, we will keep exploring ways of making our services more efficient and demonstrating value for money.

Presentations, Pecha Kucha and Printing

Spent much of the last couple of days writing presentations. One to give next week at a conference which is a Pecha Kucha, or 20 slides for 20 seconds each. I must admit, I'm not entirely sure about this style. I find it quite difficult stick to 20 seconds, often wanting to digress into a story... I will just have to be more disciplined! The other is also to give next week to postgraduate research students about possible careers after they've finished their PhD, trying to open them up to things other than a career in academia. Many transferable skills are acquired doing a PhD and then writing it up including critical thinking, problem solving, writing, organisational skills and project management.

We've also had a a departmental meeting this week where I outlined our proposed new service portfolio and we had presentations on our staff creative media service and our graphic design and wide format printing service. This service has just won a national award for some design and printing work they did in of the catering outlets. Space was limited, so they designed prints to cover the cupboard doors.great work and a deserved winner.



Our external speaker was Chris Murray from epiGenesys, who gave us a fascinating overview of their history and the sorts of things they do.

Also this week I've been to a steering group meeting about how we develop the Sheffield Professional concept. Look out for some exciting announcements!

Now I'm on my way to Lancaster for a seminar on Innovation which I'm looking forward to.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Successful completion of My Sustainable Print

This morning I went to a celebratory event for the end of our My Sustainable Print Project. All of our print champions were invited (the people in departments who really worked with us to make this happen), as well as some of the CiCS team and Sharp, our suppliers.

It was an opportunity to thank everyone for what has been a technical and operational challenge, as well as a huge culture change across the University. Our  network of print champions, the suppliers and the different teams within CiCS have collaborated and cooperated to get to where we are today.

We started a few years ago with a complete print audit of the University by our consultants, Wyse, and from that we realised how many benefits a completely managed print solution would bring.
Sharp were awarded the contract in Dec 2013, and began planning immediately, and the roll-out programme began on 6 January 2014. Between 6 january and 31 March 521 devices were rolled out across the whole campus.

As well as rolling out the new machines we also introduced a new Pharos control solution across the fleet, a new scanning function and  follow you printing for all staff so that everyone can print to any machine across campus. In addition,  all old photocopying equipment was removed, some devices were redeployed to student library locations and a procedure for logging support calls was established. Finally,  all old printers were removed. This was not without difficulties ;-)

The old printers were sent to a community enterprise in Sheffield, Aspire, which provides support to vunerable and socially excluded people. They have arranged for the printers to be reused or recycled, thus providing significant social benefit to the local community. So far we've removed about 1800 printers, with more to go.

There were challenges which had to be met during the deployment, including the logistics of ordering, storing and delivering so many printers to different locations, the aggressive timescales, the extent of remedial works needed (for example provision of additional power and data points), changing departmental requirements, health and safety issues around location of devices, and some product specific issues including an early problem with the scanning software.

However, the deployment has been hugely successful, and we are now transiting from deployment to management and support, with a fleet manager and two engineers permanently based on site.

One of our next developments will be the roll out of Everyone Print which will facilitate printing from mobile devices and manage guest print at the beginning of September
Some of the many benefits are:
1 Cost savings of c£1m per annum. Getting rid of expensive to run printers, replaced with more cost effective and more functional devices

2 Positive contribution to green credentialsReduction of power consumption of the print fleet by 80%
CO2 emissions reduced from 24 to 5 tonnes per annum
Reduced size of printer estate.
3 A fully managed service with a reduction of internal IT time spent working on printers. which can be redirected to other projects.

4 Improvements to service delivery with a team based on site working to a tight SLA with specific targets


Going forward, we now have a sustainable print coordinator based in CiCS who will manage the contract and the service, and act as coordinator with technical teams and support teams in CiCS as well as all suppliers.
We are looking at establishing a Service Advisory Group to input into development of the service

The Helpdesk are providing first line support, logging calls on our servicedesk software which handles the escalation to second line support provided by Sharp.

A benefits realisation group had been established which will analyse and report on savings and benefits. and produce case studies to demonstrate best practice .

Finally, our highly successful Print Champions network will be maintained to help us in collecting feedback and optimising the service.

Its really nice to see the completion of such a successful project, and I'd personally like to add my thanks to everyone involved - the Project Team, the technical teams in CiCS, the Helpdesk,  the print Champions and the suppliers  -  Sharp, Wyse and Aspire. Well done everyone! But we mustn't forget our comms team who worked hard to get the message out to the University about what was happening:






- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Sheffield Professional and an interesting print story

Interesting meeting today discussing our Sheffield Professional initiative which we have developed to make sure that we value the talent of our professional staff, and to promote team working and collaboration between professional services and academic departments. So far we've had three big events with the Registrar, and put together a set of useful web pages. Now we're promoting secondment and project opportunities to encourage movement between departments.

Last year we had an intern working with us to produce training and promotional material, and he produced several excellent short videos. We've just taken on another intern, with a similar remit, and he's just produced this as his first great video about our Sustainable Print Project:

SSB, HPC and mobile printing.

Good Service Strategy Board Monday. Discussion about how we support some new services - always an issue as we don't seem to stop supporting any! New ones coming up including various things related to scanning including our student eFile project. No new projects to approve, but some project closures and lessons learned reports. Also talked about our Service Advisory Groups and how we communicate their discussions to the wider community.

Also on Monday was our HPC@Sheffield day, a meeting of researchers from Sheffield and our partner Univerities to showcase some of the work going on using the N8 HPC facility as well as our own HPC computer. Unfortunately I could only attend to delver the short welcome, but the programme looked excellent, so much exciting science and research going on.

We're also piloting a method for printing from mobile devices, something our students and staff indicated they were interested in having. This week we ran a workshop for people in CiCS to come and try it out. Will be interesting to see how and what it's used for. I must admit I print very little, boarding cards being about the only exception, and I know some airlines are already piloting reading them from your phone!

At the moment I'm at the Gartner Higher Education Conference, but unfortunately the hotel is suffering a major systems failure and has no reservation systems or wifi so communication is a bit tricky. So, not many updates from me at the moment as I'm reliant on finding wifi from somewhere else, but as soon as its fixed you'll see updates from the sessions.

Service Strategy Board

Service Strategy Board yesterday. Another good meeting - always lots to discuss. As usual we went through  reports from all of our projects as well as getting reports from all of our service managers.

Particular things we looked at included:

• A review of our recent filestore upgrade. This had a timeline of everything that had happened, and focused on lessons learned, and made a number of recommendations for future such events. The timing of this one hadn't been easy, it had to come before our VLE upgrade, and it did have the potential to disrupt some exams processing, which is one of the reasons the work was carried out through the night. We discussed whether we should have a dedicated upgrade/downtime window during the summer, but discounted it as it was felt that users would expect all work to be done within that period, which would carry its own risks, and it would be difficult to time. We agreed that we would probably  always have to build at least one downtime window into our planning for the summer, and we would have to ensure that our customers understood the reason for this, but that we would arrange the time in order to cause as little disruption as possible. 

• A proposal to build more formal gateway reviews into all of our projects. This will be at major milestones, and will give SSB the opportunity to consider strategic priorities  at key points, and contribute to the consideration of project options.

• A proposal to look at providing a mobile print service to allow students and staff to print from all of their mobile devices. The first stage of this will be to assess demand.

• A proposal to implement a mobile app for our VLE.

• A revised service catalogue - our first major review has taken place.

And I thought I'd share this with you - you'll know I was at the JANET Brokerage last week, and I admired their new mugs. So they sent me one. This is how it arrived. Well, that's the Brokerage for you.

Where's my printer gone?

Today I lost my printer. Somewhat careless you might think. Actually, it was ceremoniously removed from my office, as part of a move to a more sustainable printing system we're implementing. Before it went I had to set up a new printer queue, which was as easy as clicking on a link. Even I managed it with little supervision.  Now I can print to any printer, and release my job by swiping my uCard. This means that I can be sure confidential things aren't printed to an open printer. It also means that I don't actually have to release things that I've printed by mistake, so it should reduce waste. Actually, I hardly print anything anyway, preferring everything to be available on my iPad, so I don't think it will inconvenience me at all, and will in fact be better, given that I've now got access to much better printers. So, although this particularly unflattering photo might make it look as though I was hanging onto it, I'm not really at all sorry to see it go. I'm not sure Ian's ever had that response before when removing a printer! Probably a good candidate for a caption competition.

We're aiming to reduce the number of printers in the department from 33 to 17 - it would be fewer, but we're on 7 different sites. Once we're happy with the proof of concept we're carrying out here in CiCS, we'll start piloting it and rolling it out across the University. It will have major benefits both in reduction of waste, and providing an improved service for staff.


Last week I mentioned that we'd got exceptionally good results in the student barometer survey, and today we have our own press release. Not sure about the stock photo though :-)

Straight back to meetings..

Back from hols, and the usual trawl through several hundred emails, then straight into meetings. 

Service Strategy Board yesterday, and as well as updates on all of our projects, some interesting discussions. Many centred around our move to Google Apps, and how we can make better use of the app suite, and how it integrates with our other services. For example, we currently run a collaboration suite (uSpace) based on Jive, and given than a lot of the functionality this offers for learning and teaching is now provided in Blackboard 9, and we have Google apps, and our licence runs out next year, it's definitely time to review it. We also talked about the need for a "dropbox" type of service. Many of our staff use dropbox or something similar to store files and synchronise then between different devices, and we need to decide whether to provide something similar, standardise on Dropbox and offer guidance on security issues, or use Google apps. One area where we have already decided what to do involves instant messaging, where we will be turning our current service off soon and moving to Google chat.

We also looked at the relative priorities of improving our reporting mechanisms, Service Orientated Architecture, and a new identity management system. Some concensus that identity managment has the highest priority, but that it's not just a technical issue and will involve a much better understanding within the university of the different roles individuals have and the impact of this on services they can access. SOA also important of course, and we'll be continuing to embed it.

We also looked at how to better manage the transition from a project to an operational service, and there was some differing views about the value of a transtition group - options paper to be discussed at next meeting.

Today I had a really interesting meeting with the Education Officer of the Student Union, about the use of technology in learning and teaching. We looked at how feedback to students could be improved, issues around printing, what new technologies were available especially in teaching areas, lecture capture and podcasting, and how we encourage and help teaching staff to be more comfortable with using technology. very positive meeting, and lots to think about.

This morning we had a CiCS User Group, about 40 of our customers from all areas of the University. Normally we give some presentations of new developments, but this time changed the format and four of our service managers gave an overview of what was going on in their areas. We covered teaching and learning, research and innovation, communication and collaboration and corporate information.

Finally we had a short presentation on our Managed Staff Printing project. We have a target of reducing printers across the University by 65%, and a move of a number of Professional Service departments into newly refurbished accommodation in the Arts Tower which is happening in the next couple of months will achieve a reduction of 80% - not bad!

Print and Design Solutions launched

One of the problems with being away from the office so much is that I miss some local events. Last week while I was in London our Print Service had an open day to launch their new name and brand. They are now Print and Design Solutions, putting more emphasis on the different services they provide. They have a new web site showcasing the range of services they offer - these include print and design consultancy, events and promotional material, document production and binding and creative design for electronic publications. They also do some really nice things with digital photos - huge posters, float frames, canvas prints and fabric prints. Great for presents or brightening up your office!  The open day was a great success, and thanks to everyone involved.

Operational plans, carbon targets, and why do people print so much....

One of the regular meeting the Exec team have with all of our Section Heads today. Most important item on the agenda was our operational plans for this year and next, which have been drawn up by the different sections under our seven service headings. Next task is to amalgamate them into one plan for the department, and to look at priorities. Interesting how some priorities have changed  - as I mentioned yesterday, wireless is top of everyone's list. Lecture capture and streaming, which we do a limited amount of, was not in demand a year ago, and now is so that we will have to expand our service. Too many other things at a high priority to list here - the difficulty will be finding the resources to deliver them!

We also talked about projects to enhance the student experience (very important in the light of higher fees), how to improve and speed up decision making in the department, and our great Vice-Chancellor's open forums, which are highly recommended.

This afternoon it was the Corporate Social Responsibility Committee, where the main topic of discussion was reducing our carbon emissions. Lots of work already done, but a lot more still to do. We're picking off the buildings on campus which have a high energy consumption and concentrating on them. Of course, the buildings which consume the most energy per square metre are our two data centres - despite all the good work we've done on virtualisation and layout etc. But, lots of good things planned to improve the air con etc.  Paradoxically one of the other buildings with a high energy consumption, is the one doing all of our research on energy and climate change.

The other big agenda item was developing our sustainable procurement policy - we already have a policy on ethical sourcing, fair trade, supporting local businesses, and this will build on that. There's a lot of work to do looking at the environmental impact of our suppliers.

Finally, I managed to get a plug in for our managed printing project, which should reduce the amount we print, and make that which we do more efficient. People still seem to print everything - including the covering emails with the agenda attachments (you know the ones - please find attached, etc, etc.....  And they print everything single sided. And powerpoint slides on a whole page with solid blocks of colour.  Grrrr

myCiCSnews

Sorry for lack of blog posts - am in middle of promotion round, and this week has so far been spent either scoring cases, interviewing candidates, or in assessment panels. Very interesting role, and one I've done for many years, and a way to find out so much about what people do in the University.

Other people in the department have of course been busy, and I'm pleased to announce that our latest newsletter for staff is out with articles about Research Support, Telephony Developments, the Helpdesk, Governance and how we might approach the future funding reduction.

It's liked to from our staff news page, or you can download a pdf copy direct from here. 

Congrats to all concerned in its production including our own print service for the design.

Suppliers to the University

Busy week this week - lots of HR stuff with promotion cases due in today, our SRDS (Staff Review and Development Scheme) Moderating Panel meeting this morning, and a meeting earlier about a scheme for 360 review of senior management staff.

Also this week it was our suppliers exhibition. Organised by our Procurement Department, it brings together many organisations who provide services to the University to have a stall, show off their products and meet staff and answer questions. As a major supplier of services to the University we like to make sure we're represented, and this year had 4 stands. The Print Service had examples of the different things they can print (its not just paper!) - mugs, pens, bags, posters, etc, and information about how to print in the most environmentally friendly way.

The Learning and Teaching Technologies section were there to answer questions about AV equipment, and the Computing Services stand had a "Green IT" theme, giving away green pencils made from recycled CD cases, and a quiz to test how much staff knew about environmental issues, with a bottle of champagne as the prize.  Questions such as how much does it cost the University if you leave your PC switched on overnight (c£70 per year)), and how much have we saved so far by virtualising our servers (c£400,000 over 5 years). Continuing our green theme, Transport Services were promoting our hybrid car, the Toyota Prius for those wishing to use it for University travel.

It's a great opportunity to talk to staff, and to find out what their thoughts and concerns are and get some feedback on our services.

Energy and Carbon Management

One of the agenda items from the User Group that I didn't post about yesterday was our Print Management Team. This was established following our Environmental printing Review last year, and is made up of staff from CiCS, Estates (Environment team), Procurement and an academic department. Its main objective is to reduce the environmental impact of printing - to print less on more appropriate devices. They are promoting and sharing best practice, reviewing and rationalising the range of imaging equipment we have, and reducing the cost of print. this is a favourite hobby hose of mine, and print has a significant environmental impact - in 2007/08 the University printed 40m A4 sheets of paper of which only 34% was recycled, used 1,300 toner cartridges and produced 448.77 tonnes of CO2 from imaging.

The try and address this, the team are carrying out a series of print audits where they spend some time in departments carrying out a review of the departments printing needs and how they actually print, and producing a set of recommendations. This will result in an audit toolkit which will be on-line and anyone will be able to use it to look at issues such as total cost of ownership of different devices.

Today this was put into perspective as we had a departmental meeting, and had a presentation from the University Energy Manager on Carbon and Energy Management. One of the main Climate Change Act targets is for a national 34% reduction in greenhouse gas by 2020. HEFCE, our funding council, in its Strategy for Carbon Reduction in Higher Education aims to ensure that HE meets, and if possible exceeds, the government targets. There will be "funding incentives" to encourage us to meet the targets (fines if we don't??).

Like all HEIs we have an enormous utilities bill of many millions of pounds, and the bulk of our carbon emissions come from electricity. Apparently our carbon emission volume is equivalent to filling 520 Arts Towers!

So, how do we achieve the our carbon management objectives, and how do we reconcile business growth with carbon reduction? We need to embed a low carbon vision into all of our corporate strategies, management our space better and improve the efficiency of our building stock by investing in improved controls and equipment. We also need to work differently which will require significant behaviour and culture changes from all of us - staff, students, visitors and our suppliers. Some difficult decisions will be need to be taken.

Design, Print, Deliver

Lots of activity around printing this week. It began with a visit to the Print Service - an excellent team in the department producing very high quality printed materials for the University. There's an impressive array of them on display - and as the production of standard printed materials is declining (more later), they're diversifying into other areas - promotional materials, conference posters and banners, photographs in mounts, albums etc. We specifically went down to have a look at their new equipment - the latest high volume digital mono and colour printers which will enable us to do more work in house, are very efficient and allow us to do smaller print runs, all at a very high quality.

Then yesterday we had a discussion about some of the recommendations coming out of our environmental print review, specifically looking at how we can reduce print, and make what we do have to print more energy efficient and cost effective. Discussion centred around staff printing as student printing is pretty much taken care of - all managed, all double sided by default, large efficient printers, only printed when the job is released - and they pay! It's in the students' interest only to print what is absolutely necessary. Not so for staff I'm afraid. So, a number of options we're looking at, which will all involve a much more managed service for staff, and a much clearer indication of how much printing actually costs. This may meet with some resistance, especially if we reduce the models of printers we will support, and actively discourage or not allow individual printers. Hopefully we will be able to persuade people of the benefits - both cost and environmental. There will need to be culture changes as well, including the way we handle papers for discussion at committee meetings. More on-line collaboration in advance using uSpace, more display equipment in meetings rooms, more personal devices for access to digital papers. When will the iPad be out I wonder....

Finally, to continue singing the praises of the Print Service, it doesn't just print but provides a very high quality graphic design service - often at very short notice. During our tour of the facilities on Wednesday, I remembered that I'd promised to do a poster for a conference next week and had done nothing for it. A couple of us had a hasty meeting yesterday, scribbled something on the back of an envelope, gave it and some pictures to one of the designers, and by today had an excellent poster. Very professional, and done in 24 hours - thanks guys!

Re-using labs, and getting rid of paper

Liaison Meeting with the Faculty of Science today- lots on the agenda, including big discussion on teaching space. We're trying to make the best use of our estate, and reduce space if we can - we need to reduce our carbon emissions, like all Universities, and reducing space is one way of contributing to it. In order to reduce space, we have to utilise what we have much better, and we were discussing today ways of doing that. Our common timetabling project should help, but we're also looking at other innovative ideas, such as using laboratories as computer rooms when they're not in use for practical classes. Obvous we can't have hard wired PCs in there, but we could have a stack of laptops using the wireless network that could be brought out when needed. Issues to address obviously such as what applications we can deliver to them, can we cope with 75 simultaneous connections to wifi, have we got the staff to maintain them - but nothing insurmountable. Of course students could also use their own laptops, if we could get the applications to them. Hopeful our new desktop project will solve that one...

Another area where we need to improve our carbon footprint is in printing - and we are currently going in to departments carrying out printing audits to see how we can help them print less, and where they do have to print, do it in a more efficient and carbon friendly way. I'm still amazed by how little people consider the cost (£ and C) of printing. The number of meetings I go to and see people clutching folders of single sided papers, carefully printed out by clerical staff I assume, often with colour banners, and presumeably filed when they get back - despite the fact that nearly all papers are held electronically centrally. Or thrown away, often having never even been referred to in the meeting. Hobby horse of mine I'm afraid!

Finally today we had a long look at our budget, and discussed costs, prioritisation and timing of our capital spending. Very difficult to do when you can't get good cost estimates for projects which are not complete, and will be making decisions about possible changes to technologies and infrastructure. Lots of flexibility needed!

Don't print this....

Went to my first meeting of the University Corporate Responsibility Group today - very interesting, and an area where we can add a lot of value. "Green IT" can contribute to many of the workstreams we're looking at in terms of reducing the University's carbon footprint. Every project CiCS initiates has to have sustainability built-in and an environmental impact assessment carried out, and we've done a lot recently - PC power usage which led to us changing our recommendations for PC buying and a campaign to turn all devices off when not in use and automatic powering down of machines, low power servers, virtualisation to reduce the number of servers we run, and changes to the design of our data centres. The last one is a major project and will require substantial investment to reduce the cooling we need, but will significantly reduce our energy usage and costs. Printing is another area where we will be making a number of recommendations (like - DON'T PRINT). Have I mentioned I think we print too much?

Business travel is an area we'll be looking at over the next few months. Is the journey really necessary - can we improve our video conferencing facilities to reduce the need? If there is a need to travel, what's the most efficient and carbon friendly way of doing it? I was thinking about my journey last Friday - I had a 3 hour UCISA meeting in Oxford, and spent 5 hours on a train getting there and back. I suppose I could have used teleconferencing or videoconferencing but would have missed out on those 5 hours of uninterrupted time to read papers, write papers and do all of those things that I don't get time to do here. Interesting conundrum.I do always use the train though - never drive.

Printing efficiently

Programme Board meeting discussed progress on all existing projects, and only approved one new one - Print Audit and Submission Software. This follows on from our environmental printing review and we're trying to ensure that we print as little as possible, but when we do print, we do it in the most environmentally friendly way. The University needs to take tighter control of its print spend and make the best possible use of existing resources.

Print submission & ordering software gives users a choice of where to print and makes best use of our equipment and resources, and print monitoring software will raise awareness of the cost of printing and help us to manage our print spend. Hopefully we will be able to reduce our spend and our carbon footprint. But - and this is a big but - the software alone will not solve the problem. There'll need to be a big change in business processes and behaviour. Giving up individual printers on desks, and moving to networked, efficient, multi-function-devices (photocopiers for the uninitiated) will require a culture change. Thinking about NOT printing rather than printing, not printing powerpoint slides one to a page with full colour backgrounds with white text, printing double sided - all require a conscious change in behaviour. Without that, we won't get any of the benefits of the service.

Environmentally aware printing

Yesterday I received the Report of our Environmental Printing Review. Initially this was set up to answer some questions we had about the cost and environmental aspects of printing - are we spending too much on printing, is our Environmental Footprint from Printing and Photocopying too high, are we getting best value from our current assets including our own Print Service, and are we promoting best practice amongst our staff?

The report makes interesting reading - and concludes that we print too much, we don't use enough recycled paper, and we don't print efficiently. We don't know how many printers we have in the University other than networked ones, there is no printing policy in force and printer use is not currently monitored. There's also a lack of awareness of printing costs and how to make best use of printing facilities across the university, including use of the University Print Service.

The Education Sector in general is a big spender on print - it has the third biggest spend on external printing in the UK. I was surprised how little use we make of recycled paper - only 34% of all the paper sold through our central stores is recycled. Printing is also a big user of electricity, contributing to our carbon footprint - the total energy consumption needed to produce the paper that departments and the Print Service used during 2007/08 was 7809KWh, which resulted in 4.19 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.

So, we need to reduce the amount of paper we use, ie stop printing as much. And when we do need to print it needs to be in the most energy efficient way possible, using recycled materials and appropriate machines.

Our next steps are to produce a printing policy and to include printers in our asset register.

There's also the BIG issue of culture change - how do we stop people printing everything, (in colour and single sided!) and demanding a printer on their desk. That last one could be tricky as I've got one.....

We've already started, but there's a lot of work still to do.

What not to print

Printing has been on my mind again! On Friday we had a very good presentation to the CiCS User Group about our Print Service. It's an excellent service, completely self financed and offering a range of services including print buying and estimating, graphic design and large format printing, which is in big demand for posters and exhibition type material. Demand for printing in some areas is decreasing - and we are actively encouraging that - so the service has diversified, and now prints all manner of things, including promotional gifts. They even printed sticks of rock for the Information Commons opening.

One of the projects they are heavily involved in is an environmental review of printing, reviewing how, why and where printing is performed on campus so that we can make informed judgements about how best to reduce costs and make sure we're handling material in the most cost effective and environmentally friendly manner. For example, the amount of high volume duplicating is decreasing as committee papers are increasingly stored and distributed digitally. But, if all the recipients then decide to print the papers off on their own individual desktop printers - it's more expensive, and less environmentally friendly.

Student printing is another areas I've been thinking about. Students complain about the cost of printing, but we've charged them the same for printing one sheet for 10 years - 5p. We also set all of our printers to print double-sided by default. But - some departments are refusing to accept assignment and essays unless they are printed single sided AND double line spaced. I wonder if they realise how much this is costing the student (and the planet!). Why can't they accept them electronically I wonder?

My mission is definitely to reduce the amount of paper we print as a University - it is nothing short of ridiculous - over 100,000,000 sheets last year. I still see people carrying huge piles of paper into committee meetings, which is barely looked at, and then presumeably binned.

User Group

Our User Group yesterday - about 50 people normally attend from all areas of the University, including students. We normally do a few presentations of things we're doing, new projects etc, and ask for questions from the floor. Yesterday we demonstrated Clearspace, our new social networking software which was very well received, gave an overview of the student satisfaction survey results and our action plan, and an overview of the Print Service. However, the item which caused the most discussion was our move to Office 2007 (2008 for our mac users).

There was a general acceptance that we had to do it, but a number of issues, particularly in relation to file formats and their incompatibility with previous office versions, and whether staff would have to upgrade their PCs to run the new versions. Lots of discussion about why we don't run Open Office as standard and avoid the "Microsoft treadmill" of upgrades. The student reps were very clear that they want to run the industry standard versions of Office, and as Microsoft make their software available cheaply to them, that 's what they have on their own laptops, and that's what they need on our PCs. I have to say we agree with them. We were asked whether their was any possibility of us moving away from our dependence on Microsoft in the future, and the answer is it's unlikely! However, we did remind our users that we have very little Microsoft infrastructure in place, prefering to run open standards and systems wherever possible.