Data, data everywhere....

Yesterday I went to a meeting of the N8 Library and IT Directors to catch up on progress on a shared initiative looking at research data management. We have four groups looking at areas of collaboration - metadata, archiving, architecture and training. The latter group is looking at commissioning an on-line training package, developed specifically for us similar to the information security one we use, to raise awareness of the issues around research data management, particularly amongst researchers. It's an interesting project ad hopefully will lead to some real results.

Today another meeting about research data, this time between representatives from ourselves, Sheffield Hallam, the Children's Hospital, Sheffield Teaching hospitals and the City Council. This was again to look at whether there was the possibility of collaboration specifically in two areas, storage and "big data" analysis. It's fair to say the appetite for collaboration over storage was not shared by all present, including us, but it is obviously an issue for some in the NHS, especially with the amount of data being produced by some genome research groups. A Big Data initiative however, where we share data with each other was supported, and we'll be meeting again to look specifically how to take this forward.

Also today were degree ceremonies, and we were doing our usual recording and streaming of the ceremonies, producing and selling DVDs and USB sticks almost immediately after the ceremony, and the short " handshake" videos which are very popular. Not forgetting of course Print and Design Services doing a roaring trade with our Varsity Gifts.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Leadership, change and donuts

Today I went to one of our Sheffield Leader cohorts, to talk to them about change management and leadership. Instead of a formal presentation, it took the form of an hours conversation - a question and answer session. An excellent group, some interesting and challenging questions, and the time seemed to fly by.

First question was  - what do I do? Always an interesting one. Lead the department, keep the vision, act as an ambassador, network, be the PR person, negotiate and influence, work with colleagues on strategy, monitor the internal and external environment, promote the CiCS culture, go to lots of meetings.....

Another one was how did CiCS come into existence, which made me think back to late 1995 when the then Registrar asked me to pull all of the IT in admin departments (as they were then, now we're Professional Services) together. The Department of Corporate Information was formed, which was a very short lived department lasting only months, until it was agreed that it would merge with Academic Computing Services, and to get a name that embraced both, Corporate Information and Computing Services was born. We've had a number of changes since, gaining telephony, Corporate Services, (AV, Print and Design, Timetabling and Performance Space) and Learning Technologists. Combined with my experience of bring the North Trent College of Nursing and Midwifery into the Medical Faculty in 1994, I've had to manage a lot of organisational change :-)

Most of the other questions were about leadership, managing change, what had I learned, what techniques did I use, what was my style, etc. Some of my answers below, but I should point out that I'm not saying these are right, or that I stick to them all the time, but I do my best:

• Recognise that not everyone thinks like you. Other people are not put on this earth just to annoy you. I love change and positively thrive on it. Some people don’t. Instead of seeing change as an opportunity, they will see it as a threat. You need to understand them, and find out what is their fear.
• Talk to people, but more importantly listen. Go to see people in their place of work, not your office. 
• Gain trust. Be as open and honest as you can be, but more importantly, be credible. Say when you don’t know what to do, or have to change your mind, and admit to mistakes.
• Take risks, use your instinct. This isn't right for everyone, but in general I think we're too risk averse.
• Listen to different points of view - let  colleagues question your assumptions until a decision is made - then you all have to stick to it. Be firm, If you’ve made a decision, stick to it, see it through, but explain why.
• Accept people won't like what you're doing all the time. I joke that I have a broomstick and pointy hat in my cupboard for when I turn into a wicked witch.  If you have their trust and respect it shouldn't necessarily stop them liking you.
• You can always tell a good leader because people are following them, but that's no good if you don't know where you’re going. You need a very clear vision, know what you’re aiming for
• Communicate. Obvious, but not always done, and not always done to good effect.
• Language is very important - you have to use a language everyone understands, and that language is different for different audiences.
• Consider that feedback is a gift - don't be defensive, thank people for it. 
• Learn from mistakes. Investigate what went wrong and learn but don’t blame. 
• Coach staff so that you don't solve their problems but get them to a stage where they can solve their own problems. People often come to my door saying, we have a problem, what shall I do?. I always say, what do you think we should do? Nine times out of ten they tell me, and they're right.
•  Never make permanent enemies. Get on with people, especially people who matter and can get things done for you. Porters have always been people I try and get to know. Give favours freely. You never know when you might need them. 
• Listen. Know what's going on, walk the floor - a good leader likes gossip 
• Share credit for success but shoulder the blame for your staff,
• Be aware of your own weaknesses so that you can compensate and form a team with people who are complimentary to you. I am not a detail person - detail turns me right off. I'm also not a doer or completer. So, I have to have people around me who can see detail, and get on and do things. See if you can guess who they are :-)
• Use the Tinkerbelle principle -  if you can get enough people to believe in something, it will happen. Never say if, say when. Used very successfully to get the Information Commons built!
• Finally, maintain a sense of humour at all times, and a sense of perspective. Always ask your self, what's the worst that could happen?

The very last question was about motivation - how do I motivate staff especially when things are going wrong? Obvious answer - coffee and donuts.

Phishing....

We've been subject to a fairly sophisticated phishing attack over the last week. An email which looked as though it had come from our Helpdesk, asking people to log in to their email account, and a link directing them to a very convincing fake of our main log in page. All standard techniques, but brought together to look real. We wrote a blog post about it on our CiCS News blog here, and prompted people to look at our phishing video produced by our intern last year.

Back to meetings...

Getting back into the swing of meetings this week. Yesterday was our Service Strategy Board - no project reports this time because of the 10 day closure over Christmas, but a full meeting looking at the many things that are happening in the department. All the news on our different service areas is here, and other things we talked about included operationalising our incident management policy. We have very good procedures for our Helpdesk, with the incident co-ordinator who is on duty all of the time our Helpdesk is open playing a leading role in communicating with our users and acting as the liaison point with the technical staff. Our service status page is very well used, and we even have bat phones to contact the Helpdesk and different technical teams, (they're not really bat phones, I wish they were). Now we're expanding the procedures to better document what we do out of hours. We also had very good feedback on our involvement in the Learning and Teaching Conference - Digital possibilities. More on that in a later post. Other things covered included a discussion on moving to agile project management and some training we're arranging for our project managers and other key individuals in the department.

Today I went to the first meeting of a Project Board looking at replacing our Learning Management System (which recently died), with a University wide one as the place for all development activity to be accessed, recorded and reflected upon.

Then this afternoon it was our PSE (Professional Services Executive) meeting with our Faculty Directors of Operations, and the main part of the meeting was a presentation from the FDOs on Faculty priorities for the coming year. This feeds into our planning process, and we will be meeting with all of the Faculties over the next couple of weeks so that we can explore how we might work with them to deliver their strategic objectives.

Happy New Year

Welcome back everyone - and a very belated Happy New Year. Here's to 2014, and I hope it will successful and peaceful one for everyone.

It's been a week of catching up for me - I've had four meetings with colleagues in what is almost a University meeting place, our Coffee Revolution - there's always several meetings going on in there. It's definitely good to get out of the office occasionally and chat with people away from phone calls and emails.

I've had a good meeting this week with a colleague fro procurement, where we looked at the ways we can work together, especially as we move towards purchasing services, not just hardware and software. That requires skills in supplier and contract management which we don't necessarily have.

We're also moving forward quickly now with the review of our student system, with secondments being advertised across the University for a project team to work full time on it. We're going to be using our Sheffield Professional web site for future ones which will be coming up soon.

The other thing I've been doing is keeping my eye on CES (Consumer Electronics Show - nice of them to name a show after me...) which has been happening this week in Las Vegas. I'd love to get there one day.  The consumer space is certainly driving a lot of what we do now, and we need to keep a watching eye on it. The big things coming out of it this year are curved televisions, health monitoring gadgets, wearable technology and drones. There's a nice round up in this BBC video here. There was also a "smart home" app which controls smart devices in your home - you can adjust the light, view rooms in the house, set heating controls, set the robot cleaner, start your washer - all remotely. If it would just do the ironing then it would be perfect....

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.