Exec Away Day

The executive team had an awayday yesterday and spent some time revisiting work we've being doing over the past year. We confirmed the departmental vision, and looked at aways of making changes to achieve it - the comments from the world cafe meetings were very helpful. We also discussed ways of communicating within the department - especially as were are now on 13 sites - and how to liaise with the University, at an operational level as well as strategic. We also had an interesting presentation on leadership and management, what makes a good leader and why is it different form management. Lots of discussion on delegation, and how it can sometimes be difficult to delegate if you feel people are already overloaded.

I'm at the Sun Microsystems Worldwide Education and Research Conference for the next few days, so expect a couple of pictures of San Francisco!

CRM

The University's been doing a lot of work over the last few years on CRM (Customer Relationship Management), particularly for prospective students. We've developed a system in-house which brings together on one screen all interactions with prospective students, including what information they've been sent, what open days they've attended, what course they've applied for, what accommodation they've been allocated, any phone calls they've made or emails they've sent - a very popular system which has gone down very well with most of the departments who have used it. It also allows people to book places on open days through a web form. Now this pilot phase is being extended - imaginatively called CRM2 - and I'm on the Steering Group. As well as improving the current system, we will be extending the project to include all interactions with students - the virtual student file - by utilising technologies such as our document management system.

Part of the Steering Group's remit will also be looking at ways of improving the way prospective student enquiries are actually handled - guidelines have already been produced, and we've been running some training session on how to get the best out of our phone system - (how many people for example haven't set a personal voice mail message?)

Mystery shopping is being carried out - not just on academic departments, but on professional service departments as well - to see how calls are handled. We all have to realise that anyone who deals with an incoming phone call, or an email, or speaks to a visitor, is acting as an ambassador for the University and should deal with the enquiry professionally.

This is an exciting project, with implications for all of us - I'll keep you posted on developments.

Does a Second Life avatar use as much power as a Brazilian?

Yesterday I spent the day at a JISC consultation event in London. This was an opportunity for various representative groups, including UCISA of which I’m Vice-Chair, to tell JISC what our concerns and issues are, and for them to tell us what plans they have for the coming year.

UCISA do a “Top Concerns” survey amongst it’s members every year, where senior IT Managers have to suggest, and then vote on, which issues are important to them, and what issues are likely to become significantly more important over the next year. The results of the last survey are here. The ones we discussed with JISC were:

Funding – particularly sustainable funding. We are constantly being asked to do more as technologies become more functional and critical to the organisation, but resources do not usually increase. It is also easier to obtain capital funding rather than recurrent, and yet it is in staffing that many of us need to invest. Capital funding can come from number of sources, including SRIF, and the JISC themselves, and I personally have been in the situation of being allocated money, and not having the staff to spend it.

Another issue we discussed was the whole area of “Green IT”. I’ve mentioned power consumption of PCs and Data Centres in previous posts, and I have heard that IT accounts for 2% of global carbon emissions – more than the airline industry. There’s a lot of work to be done to reduce our carbon footprint, and we need to be looking at the what happens wherever students are learning, not just in the University but at home and in student halls, as well. Even Second Life avatars leave a footprint…

The third area was the whole area of e-learning, including the changing needs and expectations of students, and the use of new technologies (blogs, wikis etc), as well as virtual learning environments.

The JISC outlined a couple of communication themes to us, including Libraries of the Future, and Changing Student Expectations. Some of this will be informed by a project carried out by UCL for the JISC and the British Library looking at the behaviour of the researcher of the future, or the google generation - it's an interesting read.

Oh, and don't you think my Second Life avatar has pretty hair?

T shirt

Apparently someone in the department (who shall remain nameless for now), dared someone else in the department (who shall also remain nameless, but is fairly closely related to me...), to buy this T shirt. He hasn't yet, or if he has, he hasn't worn it. You will know if he does.

PC Power

Had an interview on Friday with someone from HEEPI (Higher Education Environmental Performance Improvement) who have just started a 12 months study for JISC "Managing Environmentally Sustainable ICT in Further and higher Education". Funnily enough, contact was made via this blog because of the post about energy savings in data centres. We talked a lot about a project we carried out last year, looking at energy usage of PCs, given that we have about 12,000 of them on campus. Usage various tremendously between different makes and models, and also between different states of the PC. For example when your PC is idle and goes to sleep, you might think it’s using practically no energy, but we found some models that were using nearly as much in that state as when active. Our recommendations now are that all machines are turned off at night, and the power supply is also turned off – many machines draw power from the socket even when they are turned off! Of all the machines tested, the Mac mini used the least power – by a long way. Sun Rays were also very low, and that’s one of the reasons we’re looking at using them to run our new managed service which will be thin client based.

Data issues

It's amazing how after two days back at work, a holiday seems so long ago! Lots of things to catch up on, and lots of junk emails to delete. Not spam - we filter most of that out, but all of those companies who've got my contact details because I put my business card into their jar at an exhibition to win an iPod, all of those recruitment companies who think I'm going to use their services, all of those companies who think an unsolicited email to me is going to make me buy their product (how wrong they are).

A meeting yesterday to discuss how we provide management information to Departments and Faculties, especially in the light of the restructuring that's going on. We collect and store an enormous amount of central data - on student numbers, admissions, staffing, research income etc. It's also very high quality data, ie we're fairly certain it's accurate. At the moment there's a number of ways of accessing it, and what we want to do in partnership with the Corporate Planning Office is to make it easily accessible, preferably through a web interface, with a top level "dashboard" and the ability to drill down to more detail, to both static and live data. It's a new project, and one that will have to be delivered in phases. We'll be starting this project as soon as possible, with the hope of delivering the first phase by the summer. More detail will follow on our project pages.

Today myself and Dave met one of larger science departments to talk about how best to store their research data. It's a big problem for many departments as more and more data is produced - often it's kept on hard drives on PCs, or external hard drives, or on the shared areas on our fileservers. Last year we invested a considerable sum of money on a central filestore. It's got lots of discs which are protected in case one breaks, the machines are in two places so there's business continuity protection, and everything is secure and backed up. We obviously would like to move all of the research data in the University onto this. But - there are resource implications which we're currently trying to work through. Today's meeting was very useful - it was great to talk to a Head of Department about the issues they face, and hopefully explain some of ours. I must get out more...

No longer at a distance...

Well I'm back - yesterday at this time I was sipping sangria in the sun, now I'm dealing with hundreds of emails, trying to prepare for meetings and generally catching up on what I've missed. During the last week I've seen dolphins swimming by the side of the boat, read loads of books, walked on a mountain in snow in shorts, bare feet and sandals (due to a slight miscalculation of how high the mountain was and how cold it might be at the top..), and watched a comedy Elvis show! All good stuff. Normal blogging will return as soon as I get my head around it - probably tonight or tomorrow. Till then, some holiday pics - the dolphins - you've no idea how many pictures I've got of just sea to get that one - the view from our apartment balcony, and El Teide, the highest mountain Spain. Complete with snow - I just didn't notice it!Incidentally, if Tenerife is part of Spain (which it is), and they use the Euro (which they do), why does it count as outside the EU for buying duty free goods?

The importance of pronunciation...

UCISA Executive meeting in London last Thursday. Several interesting items discussed. The main one concerned the way Universities access electronic journals. The main technology used to authenticate to online journals has been Athens, but institutions are being encouraged to use an access management system called Shibboleth. I’m not going to explain the technology behind either of them – far to complex for me to attempt, but I’ve put links in for anyone who’s interested in finding out more.

The origin of the name Shibboleth is interesting, and why would anyone use it for an authentication system? Well, it originates from a Hebrew word meaning the part of a plant containing grains. According to the Book of Judges in the Bible, it was used to distinguish between members of two groups, the Ephraimites and the Gileadites, the Ephraimites having no “sh” sound in their dialect. The inhabitants of Gilead defeated the tribe of Ephraim, and the surviving Ephraimites tried to cross the River Jordan back to their own land. In order to identify (and then kill) them, the Gileadites merely asked refugees crossing the river to say the word Shibboleth. If they said it correctly they were OK. If they said Sibboleth, they were killed. Apparently 42,000 met their death because of this. In computer terms, the word is now used to mean a way of testing who you are, ie authentication and then authorisation to use services.

After that interesting diversion, back to the UCISA meeting! The reason we were discussing this, is that it is the strategy in UK universities to move to Shibboleth as a way of authenticating to e-journals, away from the current system of Athens. However, there has to be a transition stage where both are in use because many publishers have not moved to Shibboleth. Athens and the gateway service allowing institutions using Shibboleth to also use Athens, is provided to the community by Eduserve, and paid for by JISC. However, recent discussions between JISC and Eduserve on the costs of the gateway have broken down with no agreement. We were discussing what to say to the JISC, and what advice to give UCISA members on the bet way forward.

Phew, hope you got all of that – it really is quite complex, but there’s lots of info around if you’re interested in finding out more.

I’m off on holiday tomorrow to Tenerife for a week, so I doubt that I’ll be blogging until I get back – unless I post a few holiday snaps!

Internal Audit

Lots of activity around internal audit at the moment. The University has a statutory responsibility to audit aspects of its business regularly, and we get audited more than most departments. There are about 4 IT Audits a year, plus we get audited like any other department on handling of financial transactions, and we get involved in audits of other areas, such as an upcoming audit of our HESA return.

We’re just coming to the end of an audit on our SAP implementation, particularly looking at security and how we control changes to the system. Initial findings were given to us on Tuesday, and we’re now looking at our response. In some areas, the auditors will highlight areas where we do need to look at making changes to our processes, in others we will disagree with them, especially if we consider the risk or resource of doing what they suggest outweighs any benefit. Recommendations will be given to us in a final report, expected in a couple of weeks. We will be asked for a management response, which will then go to Audit Committee. This is an interesting committee as it consists mainly of lay members, ie not University staff. Their job is to scrutinise reports, and our response. If there are any “category1” recommendations – ie ones that the auditors feel must be complied with because the University will be at serious risk, then the Head of Department (ie me!) is summoned to the Audit Committee to explain themselves. It has happened to me on a number of occasions, and is not a particularly enjoyable experience, although the current Chair of Audit Committee is a very fair and reasonable person. Unlike previous occasions – I remember a colleague going to Audit Committee on my behalf when I couldn’t be there because I was in London. When I got back I asked him how he’d got on. “They gave me a very warm welcome”, he said. “They roasted me”. The next time I had to appear before them , I knew exactly what he meant!

Executive meeting

Three main items on the Exec team meeting yesterday - internal communications, money and working with the new Faculties.

Following the voting we did at the departmental meeting about how we communicate with each other, we discussed a number of ways of improving things. One will be to formalise the reporting back from the Exec meetings - at the moment I give a short update on this blog (which I will continue to do), but we're also going to produce a regular digest of matters discussed and make sure it's posted on MUSE. Further development of Just for CiCS (our internal newsletter) and the departmental meeting will also continue. We were disappointed that the survey showed that some member of of staff don't have regular team meetings, and they will become compulsory now for all staff at least once a month. All staff will also be encouraged to use myChat and to have it open all of the time - I'm using it to have chats with two people as I type this!

Budgets are being looked at for next year, and in particular what projects are coming up which we may need to set aside large sums of money for. Three in particular are on the horizon - upgrading the telephone switch, implementation of Zimbra, and replacing the current managed desktop with a web based version. All will require substantial investment.

I'm going to an awayday on Friday with the rest of the Heads of Professional Services to look at how we will work with the new Faculty structure, and I've produced a paper for discussion. As soon as it's finalised, I'll circulate it so that everyone can comment in their teams.

Geek and Poke

Just found this great blog - Geek and Poke - some ace cartoons!

Edit: when I posted this, I'd only looked at the cartoons I could see on the first page. Since then I've had a look at some of the older ones, particularly those related to project management in IT - I'm sure there's some our Programme and Project Management Unit could use in training materials!

Interesting Acronym

One of our number who retires this year gave a fascinating talk about his 40 years in IT. From his time as a high energy physicist in the Rutherford labs in the 60s, to the challenges of being an IT Director today. Chatham House rules for most of the talk, obviously, so I can't repeat much, but it is amazing how much we currently take for granted, that is still fairly recent. The network we all use for example - JANET - he played a key part in establishing. I bet most people think it stands for Joint Academic Network - well, it does now, but when it started, it was the name of his PA!

The final session was an interesting and lively discussion led by Jeff Haywood from Edinburgh on students' experiences of CIT. Lots of good stuff from his research on students in Edinburgh. Students tend to overrate their IT skills, especially males, and when they get to university, although their skills are good, they're mainly for social use rather than academic. In schools their use of IT has been very standardised - they're not used to finding out how to do things themselves for example. They're very good at file-uploading and sharing, social networking, word processing and the internet, but their technical skills are not so good - things like antivirus, patching etc. What they want are fast, seamless web services accessed though a single point - this is very important to them.

In terms of help and support, it's not clear from the research whether help reaches the most needy. Laptops and connectivity are the main areas for support, and it's needed 24*7. Most students will turn to peers, friends and relatives for help before using helpdesks etc. Most can connect to wireless networks, but find vpn difficult. There's a need for proactive help - don't wait for the students to come to us, but get out there and help them. Induction before arrival is also important - send them information as soon as they've accepted a place.

Green computing, and a look into the future

At a RUGIT (Russell Group IT Directors) meeting in Liverpool for the next couple of days. Two interesting sessions today. The first one was on how we can use less power, especially for research computing. One of the scenarios examined was the use of PCs to perform tasks for High Throughput Computing, when they’re not being used, eg student open access PCs. This often uses a piece of software called Condor, and Condor clusters are in use at many UK Universities. One of the debates is around energy use – such PCs are usually in labs or classrooms, not the air-conditioned environment of a data centre. So, less power is consumed. But, we encourage everyone to turn their PCs off at night, so by leaving them turned on so jobs can be run on them, power use is increased. There is some research to show that using PCs still uses less power than dedicated computers in data centres, but this is still in its early stages.

We also looked at how power usage from our data centres (machine rooms) can be reduced. Basically, computers produce a lot of heat which has to be removed, usually by air-conditioning. Use of DC power (rather than AC), water-cooling, using waste heat to heat buildings, fresh air-cooling instead of air conditioning, are all things under consideration.

The second session was a look into the future – what will IT be like in 5, 10, 15 years time, and what effect will it have on our services. After an introductory talk looking at things like Moore’s Law, we split into groups to look at specific areas. My group had the task of looking at what consumer devices might be like in 5 years time – what will replace the iPod, iPhone etc, and what features will they have. We all agreed that they will be always on, always connected to “a network”, but we weren’t sure what that would be. They’ll have tactile interfaces, presence awareness and will communicate with each other. High definition video will be present and they’ll have a bigger virtual presence than their physical form, with either roll-out screens, virtual reality, or video projection. They’ll know who we are, where we are and what we’re doing. IT Services will have to accept that students will bring these devices to University and expect them to work and be supported. There'll probably be no need to provide University email systems, or wireless networks, as they’ll be available from so many other sources. Identity management and authentication will be key issues.