Merry Christmas

So that's it. Another year over, we've had the famous CiCS Christmas Party, and it's nearly time to finish for a well deserved break. I'd like to thank everyone for all of their hard work over the past year, and to everyone who reads this - whether inside the department or outside, I'd like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy and Peaceful New Year.  Here's a few pics of the Christmas Party to entertain you.

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:

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.

How to perfectly share a cake and other food related maths problems....

An exciting couple of days as two major projects have gone live. I mentioned the first the other day, which was our new web site which is getting some great feedback. The second, which went live at 1600 yesterday afternoon is our iTunesU site. It's been a bit of a long time coming - as a department we first suggested it a few years ago, but as a University we agreed that the most important thing was to get the content right, and now we have.  There's some brilliant stuff up there, with some good branding.  Looks great doesn't it?

Trouble is, I keep getting carried away watching stuff.. I particularly like Eugenia Cheng's maths tutorials, using food. Check out how to perfectly share a cake.

Another example of a collaboration between ourselves, Corporate Affairs and many Academic departments.

Push here....

I think everyone's trying to get the last round of meeting's in before Christmas - almost back to back ones for the last couple of days. Work is really starting to get in the way of preparing for Christmas :-)  Although I am pleased to see the decorations starting to appear in our building. One room is particularly spectacular - the one with Santa's runway. You know who you re.

Yesterday I chaired a meeting of our Incident Contacts project board where we're developing phase 2 of the system which will store departmental contacts, as well as all business continuity and incident management information, and links to information about fire marshals and first aiders. We also had a meeting to discuss how we might handle accounts and email addresses for our students when they leave us. there are various options that our move to Google gives us, all with pros and cons, so we need to think carefully moving forward.

We also had a Service Strategy Board meeting, where we looked at progress on projects, and our 'business as usual" work that doesn't fall into the category of a project. Unfortunately in some areas, this work has seriously impacted on other work which we hoped to carry out. I posted the other day about issues we have been having with our PC booking software and how we have had to turn it off, but this is nothing to the problems we've been having with another of our systems - our VLE. We've been plagued by problems since the beginning of semester, and despite working closely with our suppliers to fix, it is taking so much effort away from other things. We can only apologise to our staff and students. Lets hope normal service will soon be resumed - for all our sakes. It is so inconvenient to our customers, and so frustrating for us.

Today some catch ups and HR stuff, and then a meeting of our Professional Services Executive which took place in the University's new restaurant - Inox Dine. Open all day and evening, Monday to Friday, and open to the public,  I recommend it. We had two main items for discussion - one was the announcement in the autumn statement that the cap on student numbers was going to be lifted, and what that will mean for us, We also touched on how the government was going to afford it, but that's another story!

But, the most exciting item for discussion was the launch of the University's new web site. Sent live this afternoon, it's the result of a great collaboration between Corporate Affairs and colleagues in CiCS. I think it looks great, well done to everyone involved. Oh and if you wondered how we send things live.....

Thank You...

I love my department. No, seriously, I do.  They are  a great team of people to work with and provide an outstanding set of services  for our staff and students. This year, for the third year running,  we had the highest satisfaction rate in the UK for IT services to students in the Student Barometer. So, every year we have a thank you event. Nothing too special - a really good buffet, some beer, soft drinks and wine, and what has become a bit of a tradition - the CiCS charity raffle. We ask people to donate a prize, and ask suppliers to donate something, and also those of us who are lucky enough to go to conferences bring as many freebies from exhibitions back as we can. At a recent Gartner conference I had to buy a new bag to bring stuff back in :-) . We also try to pick charities that mean something to us, and this year it was Leukemia Research and a local autism support group - both chosen because they affect members of our staff.  As usual we were inundated with prizes - including  a one night stay at our very special University boutique hotel, 2 mini iPads, a Kindle, a case of wine, Amazon vouchers - and about a 100 more prizes. We raised hundreds of pounds (still being counted as I write this), and I hope everyone had a great time.  Thank you to everyone - you make coming to work every day a pleasure. Here's a small section of the prize table...

Cloud Advisory Board

Today I was at the JANET Cloud Advisory Board. This was established when the JANET Brokerage was set up with £1.5m of UMF money and has acted as a Steering Group for the brokerage activities. Now the UMF money is coming to an end, and we were meeting to look at how we go forward with JANET activities, especially in the context of changes to the JISC.

We looked back at some of what the brokerage had achieved:
Frameworks are in place for data centre to cloud and telephony services
New frameworks are about to be announced for archive to tape and file synch and share
Two commercial arrnagements are in place  - Google and Microsoft
Financial X rays have been carried out in 18 organsiations

In the future we agreed that as a sector we need to  be more confident and assertive with suppliers, with a more commercial attitude to providing services. We also need to be ahead of the game more - speed is essential and as the digital world is moving fast we have to keep up. We must become thought leaders, and the inertia for innovation has to be banished!

We agreed that we need to work together - collaboration with ourselves, with JISC and Janet, with our suppliers and other organisations is vital. 

So, we will continue as an Advisory Board but maybe with a slightly different membership, and will act as a "critical friend" to JISC technologies which consisits mainly of JANET and Cloud services, advising on product offerings and services. We will also input into the different stages of a product life cycle including requirements gathering, testing etc. I'm looking forward to working with the new JISC, especially the new Director of Innovation,  on these developments.

During the day we had quite a lot of opportunity for discussion around cloud services, and one of the things I'm interested in is why more Universities, including us, aren't moving more into the cloud. Storage seems to be a favourite for many people, including many commercial organisations. Yet we, and I suspect other HEIs are spending vast amounts of money on on-site data storage. So, what are the barriers, why aren't we doing it? I asked the question on twitter and was directed to this article by Andy Powell which suggests that Universities think of themselves as special cases. Other reasons given included leveraging the already heavy investment we've made in on-site provision, cost, complex inter-dependencies with other systems, bandwidth and latency. All good things that need to be taken into account, but I think we really do have to look carefully at what we provide internally and what could be provided elsewhere, in a public, private or hybrid cloud. Cost comparisons need to look at the total cost of provision, including space, power, staff, and not just hardware and software. of course, moving stuff into the cloud has to have real benefits, in either service provision or cost efficiencies to make it worthwhile.

Gone, but not forgotten

Nobody likes removing services, especially one that is valued by customers, but sometimes we have to in order to protect a level of service. We had to do this very recently. We've been running a PC booking service in our Information Commons for several years. It means that students can reserve a PC and know that it will be available for them when they need it. However, recently we have had issues with it  - it has been failing  and unexpectedly logging out groups of students which creates a real risk of them losing work. Unfortunately our third party supplier of this software hasn't been able to provide a fix for us, so we've taken the difficult decision to turn it off. All of our PCs are now walk up only. So, although our students can no longer reserve PCs, we have a supply of laptops they can borrow which are bookable in the IC and library sites. They can also find free PCs here, or using the iSheffield app. We'll continue to work closely with the company that provides the software to find a fix - I hope it won't be too long.

We try and keep everyone updated with this and other CiCS news through our blog here, and our twitter,  and Facebook pages.

Fame at last ?

I seem to have made it to the home page of Google's Apps for Edu site, with a quote from my blog. Not sure how long its been there, but its about 2 years old.

Disasters, cables and music

It's been a busy couple of days. Monday was back to back meetings. A liaison meeting with colleagues in the Library where we talked about a new building we are helping to design, plans for a new student system, and some systems we are about to develop to improve our research infrastructure. We also had a meeting with colleagues in EFM to talk about another proposed new building, the problem with this one is that many of our optic fibre cables run under the site! Some complex discussions about how and where to move them to, and how we can minimise the risk of services being affected to buildings served by these fibres.

Yesterday I was in Oxford where I am a member of their IT committee to give an external perspective. Discussions included their disaster recovery plans - something we all struggle with. It's a balance of risk and how mic resilience etc to build in. It doesn't help when business impact assessments are very dependent on the time of year. You might think the HR system would have a fairly low impact if it went down, but not if it affected your REF submission for example, or the Finance system if a big research grant submission was due, or the student system at registration. The list goes on.

In the evening I traveled to London for the launch of JANET 6, our new network. To quote their press release, "Designed specifically for research and education, Janet6 is highly scalable up to 8.8 Terabits of capacity and uses state-of-the-art 100Gigabit Ethernet technology. Janet6 provides excellent bandwidth and a flexible infrastructure, enabling the UK’s research, higher-education, further-education and skills-development sectors to collaborate and compete on a global scale." Exciting stuff. And the project was delivered on time and in budget. You can't say that about a lot of public sector IT projects!

The launch was at the British Film Museum in County Hall, a very impressive venue, which had been made over for the evening



And when the big red button was pressed to symbolically turn on JANET6, the Internet lit up on our tables




We had a talk from Ewan Birney from the European Bioinformatics Institute about how important the network is from a research perspective, and a demonstration of the low latency of the network using two musician playing together, 400 miles apart. The violinist in the room with us, and the cellist in Scotland. Very impressive. Here's a two minute video recorded on my phone, pretty poor quality, and the first minute is them speaking, but you'll get the idea!




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The Social Business

Another session today was on how social business is changing the way organisations work by Stuart McRae from IBM

More companies now use social media internally than externally.
We are entering the post PC era. Apple selling 100m iPads in 2013. Usage shifting from creation at desks to consumption on the move
McKinsey estimates that social technologies could raise productivity in some areas by 20%
Driven by 4 disruptive mega trends. Social, mobile, cloud, analytics. (Now, where have I heard that before....)
Increasingly influential and vocal customers. We can't just listen to them. Need to interact and lead them,
Growing demand for 24/7 and mobile connectedness. People collaborate on the move.
If you want the best talent and employees, have to give them a working environment which gives them the best experience and productivity.

A Social Business strategy should be driven by the above challenges
It should enable the workforce to work more effectively, increase productivity and improve employee satisfaction
It should also produce exceptional customer experience, customer engagement and customer delight!

Primarily a culture issue, not technology.
Need to encourage employees to collaborate and not compete
Collaborate with partners to serve customers better
Engage employees in conversations with customers

Social businesses deliver better results by empowering their people to perform better and to serve their customers better.

Need to empower employees, even when it requires working across organisations
Corporate IT has to go away and become cloud based to achieve this.

20th century collaboration tools are no longer good enough. Eg email.
Email model vs social media model. With email everything is pushed to you, just in case you might need it. With the social media model you pull the information - when you need it, you can find it.

"It's not information overload, it's filter failure" , great quote from Clay Shirky

Encourage sharing of information, eg tweeting. Success comes from changing user behaviour, from "knowledge is power" to "knowledge sharing is rewarded".

Content needs to get away from being document centric. Move to online creation and collaboration with mobile device support. Focus on sharing.
Simplify the media. Focus on content and communication.
Make the content discoverable, use tags, social bookmarks. New generation of knowledge management.

Adoption is key to business success.

A thought provoking talk there's a lot more Information on this topic on his website.


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I've looked at clouds....

We had a session today from Tim Marshall, CEO of JANET on Cloud.

One of the first things he suggested that we should do,is make sure we know what's going on around us. Don't do things in a particular way just because we always have done.
A wonderful example is TVs coverage of tennis matches which is always for. The end of the court. That's because the aspect ratio of TVs used to be 6 by 4 and the end of court view fitted better. Now the aspect ratio is much wider, so you'd better a better picture if you put the camera in the middle, opposite the umpire. But, they've always done it like that...

We also need to examine our appetite for risk? Is it too low? Can cause innovation inertia.

Cloud doesn't change our business. Our business is not running IT. Our business is teaching, learning, research etc. Cloud is about changing the way we do our business, not the business itself. It's also about IT becoming more service orientated.
Much of the infrastructure is commodity now. If someone can do it better and cheaper why don't we let them.

We have to look at why we might want to keep things out of the cloud. Is it because we love the smell of a hot server in the morning...

the essential characteristics of cloud are:
On demand self service
Broad network access
Resource pooling
Rapid elasticity
Measured service

Tend not to get all of it, but bits here and there.

JANET 6 is our world class network which launches next week. It needs using. We should look at co-location. Get the tin out of the institution and somewhere else. (More than 50 miles away so people can't get in there cars and go and hug it.)

Several options from do nothing, to fully off site, via hybrid

UCAS uses cloud for burst capacity. Doesn't happen by magic. Took a lot of work to prepare UCAS applications to be cloud ready. But benefits huge.

Risk and innovation needs balancing.

What are the advantages of cloud?
Capacity, reliability, flexibility for large scale applications that are peaky
Cost effectiveness. Office 365 and Google are free.
Business Continuity
My comment, it's about service delivery and improvement
Cloud is about value, not cost

Barriers.
Mainly culture.
Some technical, ie getting applications cloud ready. But are lots of tools you can use.

Some competitive reasons eg HPC often kept in house. But why? Maybe culture. A lot of is commodity and people are buying it from amazon on their credit card as we speak.
JANET working on a provisioning portal for amazon

Some barriers are senior management who are concerned about cyber security




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Whack-a-Mole of new ideas

Next session was from Abilene Christian University about lessons from their mobile learning initiative

ACU is in Texas and has 5000 students,
They were the first university to establish a comprehensive 1to 1 mobile learning initiative that provides every student with an iPhone or iPod touch.

One driver was innovation and providing something to attract students.
But, the primary driver was the student profile.
Students coming in now were born in 1995, (he made the point that some of us have t shirts older than that)
They've never lived in a world where disaggregation isn't possible; where you can't always pause and rewind live TV.
They inhabit a world where you are always connected. There are more text messages sent now in a day than there are people on the planet.
Consumption spreads faster today, eg it took 2 years for Facebook to get to 50m users. It took 39 years for radio.
Implementation to saturation is very fast. It is only 3 years ago that the iPad was invented.

The world has changed, but have our classrooms?
Are our students engaged?

At ACU they had been trying to address the above two issues. In 2007 the iPhone was released. The Internet could now be in your pocket, all the time.
They set out to explore how this could be used in HE to foster innovation, and decided to give one to very student.

Some myths around innovation that they leaned during this implementation:
Innovation doesn't happen in eureka moments.
Innovation doesn't have a methodology. Need lots of trial and error and risk taking.
Best idea always wins. It doesn't.
People love new ideas. Not all do. Need to give people permission to go slowly. So, when they decided to roll out iPhones to all students, ( and they told faculty staff after they'd announced it),  they told staff they didn't have to let students use them if they didn't want to.

Resistance to change is part of our culture.
Are we playing Whack-a-Mole with new ideas? As they come up, we smack them down.

Organisational cultures are like an iceberg.
Top of iceberg things you can see. Artifacts
Below the surface are exposed beliefs. What we think is important
Down below. Basic assumptions. Things so engrained we can't find words for them. Each bottom one trumps the one above.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast

Only way to change culture is to work together to solve a problem. We need to reframe our discussions into a problem that we can solve collectively.

As you think about innovation on campus, remember that it's not about the technology. It's about the students, and preparing them for  the world they are going to inherit, not the ones they live in now.