Efficiency and VFM in Universities

Next up is Sir Ian Diamond, who has been leading the efficiency agenda for several years.

HE is one of most important economic sectors, very effective in our contribution to the National Economy. Nice infographic:

Education transforms lives and promotes social cohesion. We are a very effective sector, but have also to be efficient.

In the last five years there have been a number of changes. HE has been focussed on increasing efficiency and value for money. Capital fudging has reduced enormously but investment by Universities has been maintained,The tuition fee value has been eroded in England, efficiency and cost saving is mandated in other parts of the UK, the science and research budget has had a c£600m real term reduction.

We are faced with challenges, but this is not new. We have had to meet efficiency targets over the last 10 years, and these have all been met. For example, over £435m has been saved between 2011 and 2014 in procurement efficiency. Pay growth has been in line with public and private sectors. Huge savings also made in IT ( have they?).

Efficiencies also made in shared services and estates

Gold star to N8 universities who have done magnificent things in equipment sharing

What's the future?

Unprotected departments in government are being told to model cuts of 25% to 40%. BIS is biggest unprotected department. Clear sense that there will be big changes in BIS. 

Areas we need to look at include (all in last Diamond report):

• Maintaining a high quality workforce.
• Delivering more value from our university estate. Will be more estate sharing. Need to utilise space better.
• Deliver a world class and sustainable research base. Need to make a robust case for greater investment in the research base.
• Harness the benefits of asset sharing.
• Unlock the value of higher education data. Huge opportunity in open data. Need to facilitate and stimulate greater use of open data.
• Collaborate! Need more collaboration and sharing of good practice.

It is imperative that we demonstrate what we are doing and evidence our success

UUK, HEFCE RCUK and professional bodies must work together to develop a framework.

Posted with Blogsy

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.

Value for Money?

Back from a great week in Whitby, and luckily to a fairly quiet week, as far as meetings are concerned anyway. Lots of work going on - installing 700 new PCs in our student computing areas including the IC, and getting our new Enquirer and Applicant portal ready to go live in - about 48 hours! I love it when people ask us whether we have a quiet time over the summer when there's no students here - it's usually our most frantic time!

One of the main things I've been doing this week is drawing up a value for money report  - all professional departments and major committees are doing it for the Audit Committee. In these financial times its a subject everyone's interested in, and one where we in particular have a very good story to tell. In terms of what we've done over the past 18 months the highlights are:

• Introduced a new service strategy with  particular focus on customer service & business value, putting in place structures and processes that underpin the requirement to provide both high quality and value for money IT services.  Specifically we are now presenting our services to customers via a "service catalogue". Service Advisory groups have been set up to oversee our seven main service areas. We have introduced change management, incident management and problem management processes which have improved reliability, resilience and effectiveness of our services.

• Comprehensive strategies and operational plans have been developed for all of the service areas. These have been widely disseminated and discussed in the department, are aligned with the University's mission and are used to allocate resources and set priorities.

• As well as the above service strategies,  there are overarching themes for all areas of the department which are: sustainability, reducing complexity, doing more with less, improving the student experience and resilience.

• Individual computer servers have been replaced with a handful of more powerful computers capable of running many services at once. This has four benefits: a small number of staff can continue to manage the increasing numbers of services; direct costs of computer purchase and maintenance have been significantly reduced; indirect costs of energy and cooling have been reduced, and CiCS are able to offer hosting services for other departments with a very rapid turnaround and at a low cost.

• Work to upgrade our main Data Centre's cooling system is taking place in conjunction with the Estates department. Meanwhile, computer servers and the racks they occupy have been resited in order to improve cooling air flows. Computing equipment is being monitored for energy usage in order to understand better energy usage patterns.

• The increased use of the University records store  has assisted large departmental moves  reducing the demand on more valuable space.

• A managed staff print project has started to manage university wide printing strategically, to provide best value by driving the volume to shared multi function products  reduce purchasing and operating costs and   electricity costs.

• Design and Print Services are developing web-to-print  job submission for staff and students to support 24/7 ordering and an EU tender has been completed for the University's outsourced print ensuring VFM.

• A specialist consulting company has been engaged to review contracts for hardware, software and services and renegotiate on our behalf where feasible, with payment only by results.

• CICS core accounts have been restructured to allow more efficient reporting and to reflect the new service-based approach to CICS activities. Together with careful allocation of staff cost, this will enable each of 32 major services to be costed and its VFM assessed.

• A Business Process Improvement toolkit has been produced and a pilot LEAN programme has been established

• Over the past two years student and staff email has been outsourced to a free service provided by Google. This allows us to decommission and not replace a large amount of computer hardware, including mail storage.  The associated backup of mail data is no longer necessary.  The introduction of Google Calendar has enabled us to decommission the previous software  and its associated hardware and further improvements in efficiency are anticipated as we make increasing use of Google Apps and associated cloud storage.

• Over the past 6 years all computer data storage has been centralised on to two large data servers, and individual computer disks decommissioned.

• Increased automation of University processes such as student registration will reduce lead times for many student activities and remove unnecessary hold-ups in the flow of data and information. 'Mobilisation' of student facing services is reducing the need for students to use a desktop computer for many tasks, improving their overall experience while not substantially increasing support load on CiCS.

That's quite a list - and only a selection from the report, there's quite a lot more. Of course, there's some areas where we need to improve VFM. Areas we've highlighted include the increasing burden of complying with FoI legislation and responding to requests (although I'm not sure what we can do about that without some change to the legislation), some of the duplication of effort between the central services and departments, and timetabling.

Lots of work planned for this year to address these and many other issues.