Be Inspired

Last year some of you might remember the 24 Hour Inspire - 24 hours of lectures in memory of Tim Richardson. If you want a feel for what it's like to stay there for almost 24 hours, you can read about it in my blog which I wrote when I'd recovered.  I'm really pleased to say that its happening again, but I'm not happy that I'm going to be away at a conference at the time.

It will be well worth turnng up, and being Indoired!

Programme is here - I'm assured it will be bigger and better this year, but not sure how that's possible.

Demise of XP and other things

More strategic liaison meetings with the Faculties this week. Discussion centred around their priorities for the coming year and how we could help, and also about what developments we were planning which might impact on them. We're well into our planning round at the moment so we're also looking at financial forecasts and proposed budgets for next year.

Had a meeting this afternoon with senior managers to talk about recruitment. Two particular areas - trying to encourage movement between different departments for Professional Service staff by promoting internal secondments for short term posts via our Sheffield Professional web site. We've used this route recently to successfully fill a number of posts, but we've identified process issues to sort out, especially around the speed of filling replacement posts. We also talked about how to improve the pool of applicants for our externally advertised posts - being less precious about what is an "essential criteria" for example, including "a good honours degree" which appears in many job specs where it is not actually necessary.  Language is also important - we've found for example that advertising an "IT Assistant" rather than an "IT Technician" increases the proportion of women applying.

One of the big things we're doing at the moment, like many places, is pushing people to get their machines off Windows XP and onto OSX, sorry, meant Windows 7 or 8. :-) Lots of communication with departments, but not a lot of time left. Lots of info for Sheffield people here. Another of the famous CiCS videos might be about to be launched.....

Changing Landscapes

Yesterday I gave the opening presentation at the UCISA Changing Landscapes event organised by the Staff Development Group and held here in Sheffield. My job was really to set the scene for the day, and I decided to outline what the "Changing Landscape" was from my perspective as an IT Director, the way these changes are affecting how we deliver services, and the impact on the skills needed by our staff and students.

As usual, I enjoyed giving the presentation, despite staying up late the night before writing it - it doesn't matter how much notice you give me (almost a year in this case), I'll still be finishing it off
right up to actually standing up and talking! Changing Landscapes was perhaps an appropriate title for a conference given the effects of the weather at the moment!  The main trends I covered were:

• Consumerisation
• Mobility
• Cloud
• Social Media

All are linked, and together with the rapid changes in technology we're seeing, are having a major impact on the way we deliver services.

To illustrate consumerisation of IT I like to find some gadgets that are around, or just being developed - a sensor in a babies nappy with tweets you when it needs changing, a football with a sensor inside to tell you how to improve your game, an internet enabled fridge which send recipes depending on what's in it to your internet enabled fridge. These all go to make up the Internet of Things I mentioned the other day, or the Internet of Useless Things as someone referred to it yesterday....

We had some interesting stats on mobile, where the number of students owning tablets or eReaders has gone up from 7% to 29% in one year. We are definitely entering the post PC era, and its expected that tablet sales will outstrip PC sales sometime this year. A recent Gartner prediction is that by 2017 there will be more words typed on glass than on keyboards. And the iPad was only released in April 2010.

 I like to showcase a bit of what we're doing here in Sheffield, so I showed how we use social media to interact with staff and students, using our Twitter feed and Facebook pages as examples where our aim is to have a conversation, and not use them merely to give out notifications. And we're looking to engage with innovative videos and infographics. No-one can forget our Save it Like a Hero video (which despite much criticism from within the department has been a huge success with the audience it was aimed at - students), and today we have a Valentine's theme to our tweets and posts - Fall in Love with Safe Computing. Sweet.

The talk was filmed, so I'll post a link when it's up, just in case anyone is interested in watching it.

Renewing Newcastle

Tonight I went to hear Marcus Westbury speaking at the Octagon Centre as part of The Engaged University initiative. Marcus is a renowned regeneration expert who played a leading role in the regeneration of Newcastle, Australia. Very similar issues to Sheffield, it used to have the largest steel works in Australia, and when it closed, it left a huge hole in the city. When he returned to his home town in 2008 he wanted to open a bar, but despite there being 150 empty buildings in the city centre he couldn't even get a reply from estate agents. So, he formed a not for profit company called Renewing Newcastle which worked with the property owners to lend the empty properties to someone who wanted to try something, on a rolling 30 day lease. And it all took off from there. Spaces were lent int the state they were in and had to be fitted out by the people lending them - often for as little as $60. They allowed people to fail, took risks, and it didn't matter. Thre's some amazing success stories, and the previously run down area is now vibrant with many independent businesses. Yuo can see Marcus talking about it here:

DIY transforming a dying city from Marcus Westbury on Vimeo.

Tomorrow Marcus will oversee a major event by our School of Architecture, where students will draw up  innovative plans for empty buildings in the city centre.They will work in boarded-up premises in groups, led by architecture staff and creative partners, to come up with ambitious and thought-provoking suggestions.

Really exciting stuff and I really hope that some of these ideas can be used to transform some of the neglected ares of our city centre - especially around the Castlegate area.

Funding letter, comms and connected devices

Yesterday morning we had our  UEB (University Executive Board) and Heads of Department Forum. Had a regular catch up from the VC (or acting in this case) and it was noted that since the Autumn statement where various things relating to HE were announced, including the lifting of the cap on student recruitment, we had heard - nothing. No letter from BIS to HEFCE signed "love Dave and Vince". But lo and behold, it arrived yesterday afternoon. I spotted it on twitter, were it was live tweeted, 140 characters at a time, by the The Times Higher, who looked as thought they had ripped it up and given it to 3 different journalists who did a stirling job in getting the news out. Nothing really unexpected - the reduction in funding  was expected as we finally transition to the new fees regime, although there was a slightly bizarre increase in capital funding. If you're more interested in its length rather than it content, then the best analysis of it together with15 years of grant letter funding, is in this great blog post by @registrarism, or Paul Greatrix from Nottingham University.

Today I was at the Professional Service Executive, where as well as the HEFCE letter and our planning priorities,  we had a presentation on our new internal communications strategy - One University. Lots of exciting stuff in it. Reclaiming email as a useful tool rather than for sending information no-one is interested is only a small part of it but one which I'm sure will be welcomed!

Rest of the day has been spent writing a presentation for later in the week, and in doing so I came
across this site:

It's the Wolfram connected devices project  whose goal is to provide a definitive, curated, source of systematic knowledge about connected devices. Quite an undertaking!

Planning Priorities

We've started our new year round of Strategic Planning with the Faculties - exchanging information about their planning priorities and ours so that when we come to submit them as part of the planning round, they are complementary to each other. Currently our plans consist of 5 priorities in three areas  - new developments, business as usual and things to change. These will be discussed and refined over the next couple of weeks with fellow Professional Service Directors and colleagues from Faculties. So, here's our first pass:

 
Priorities
Research support
- provide and manage the key elements of IT infrastructure that are needed to support effective research and innovation (network, storage, HPC, support) as a central facility, which will for a high level of standard delivery be free at the point of use.
Infrastructure
- invest in the development, build and design of our IT infrastructure (especially in storage, as a major priority in the coming year) to enhance the University's strategic agility, as well as the  sustainability and cost effectiveness of the Universities key business area
IT and information Security
- accelerate the rollout of information and IT security training and awareness, together with increasing our ability to protect the University’s information resources due to increased risk of cybersecurity threats and compliance challenges.
   
Learning and teaching
- develop a new model for supporting learning and teaching working with learning technologists in departments, research innovative and flexible use of space, improve availability of the learning platform, review lecture capture and other teaching technologies,  improve digital literacy of staff

Student system review
- play a major role in the review of the student system including scoping requirements, reviewing and mapping current business processes and market testing of available systems

Business as usual
Mobile
- ensure that all services are appropriate to the devices used by our users

Wireless
- accelerate wireless rollout to cover 90% of campus by end of 2015

Support the University’s Digital presence
-  including MOOCS, iTunesU, new website

Sustainability
- an increasing number of services to support and critical nature of IT systems to the University's business, mean that new services have to be sustainable, scalable and resilient.

Process improvement
- continuous improvement of University processes to improve efficiency and provide better services

Things to change
Digital by design
- think digital first. Don't take paper based processes and digitise them. Design digital processes so that customers prefer to use them.

Service management
- develop new service portfolio and use this to implement industry standard best practice service management processes

Civic engagement
- better resource the way we support and enhance events through the innovative uses of technology

IT service delivery model
- implement more efficient means of delivering IT services across the university, to reduce duplication of effort, improve quality of service, improve compliance, and build more effective career pathways for IT staff

How we collaborate
- make better use of the collaborative technologies available, including google apps, to work more effectively.

Co-Design

Today's meeting was the JISC Futures Forum - the body steering the co-design innovation process which I've blogged about before. We looked at progress on all projects - including the identity management one I posted about yesterday.

One of the most exciting ones to be funded as far as I'm concerned was the Student Innovation one - or the Summer of Student Innovation as it became. We gave groups of students free reign to come up with an innovation, and from the 36,  21 were chosen to be funded, and help given to take the development forward. You can see the successful ones here. Of these, six are being funded to produce useable services with pilots running in institutions from February to September 2014. These will be showcased at the JISC Digital Festival in March, and we're already planning the next round. A great project and we're really looking forward to seeing what students come up with next time.

Another strand to this project was The Digital Student - investigating the digital expectations and requirements of students as they come to University. The project has completed its initial investigation, and is now testing the recommendations on the community. The initial recommendations (in summary) are:

• Manage student expectations
• Equip students to learn effectively with digital technology
• Support students and staff to use their own devices (BYOD)
• Ensure digital content is device neutral where appropriate
• Enhance the curriculum with digital activities and experiences
• Engage students in projects to enhance their digital experience
• Develop and reward innovators – models of accreditation
• Encourage a culture of continuous organisational research
• Consider digital experiences alongside other aspects of the student experience – importance of joining up with other support services including IT, Libraries, Estates etc

No real surprises there, but the second phase will look at these in more detail. There's a blog just started here which has more information.

As well as looking at current projects, we spent much of the day discussing the co-design process in general, and how to take it forward. This has been a new departure for the JISC, working in partnership with stakeholders, which up until now have included RUGIT, CURL, SCONUL and UCISA. New partners will now come on board and the innovation process expanded. Lots of discussion on what type of projects can be classed as innovation, how to generate a pipeline of ideas, top down vs bottom up, communication, prioritisation etc.


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Identity and access management

In London today for Identity Management Task Force - this came out of the JISC Innovation initiative and is part of the co-design process where JISC and institutions work together on projects.

This is different to previous IdM projects as it's principally about people and processes, not about the technology. It's an area that exercises many of us in IT and libraries, and unfortunately, that's often where the issues seem to lie. However, it's much wider than that. IdM is principally about access to services, which categories of staff and students have access to what. And as well as staff and students we have the category of "other" which includes retired staff, visitors, alumni, collaborators, lay members of committees etc. Even "staff" covers a multitude of categories including subsidiary staff (employed by subsidiary companies), overseas staff, honorary staff, NHS staff, Student Union staff. When you then include all the different category of student we have, you can see that putting in place policies to determine who has access to what services including systems and library resources, and then managing that, is not easy!

It's also not just an IT/library issue! it involves Human Resources and Student Services, Estates, finance, and academic colleagues. Basically, it's a University issue.

Today we were looking at interim reports of a number of projects, particularly at whether we could define categories of users, governance and awareness raising, and some initial work on usability of services. We have been part of survey of students about how they access electronic library resources, and some of the problems they encounter. Common problems include:
Multiple log ins
Being unable to download resources
Being unsure about whether a resource is available
Being stuck in redirect loops.

It was difficult to tell from these first results how many of the problems were at the institutional end, and how many at the publisher end, but this will be the subject of further work.

All of the projects are due to finish at the end of February, so watch this space for further updates.





- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Gartner Research and MUSE

For several years now I’ve been a client of Gartner, an IT research and advisory company providing expert advice to all sectors - you'll notice I go to their conferences and summits, and we make a lot use of one to one phone calls with their expert analysts.

What many of you may not know is that all staff and students at the University of Sheffield can access Gartner Research. Just log in to MUSE, go to my services and view all services, and click on it.  There's some great stuff there.

And of course, because of the new feature we've just released in MUSE,  each time you select a service from the View all services page, if it isn't already listed on the My services panel, it will be added in yellow to a new right-hand column, so all of the services you need are easily accessible.

LEAN and Lego

About 18 months ago we set up our Process Improvement Unit, which has done some great work looking at a number of processes across the University. There's some case studies of completed projects here,  and a list of projects currently being worked on here.  As well as carrying out process improvement events, the team also have a training and awareness remit, and today I attended a morning session on process improvement awareness together with other staff from across CiCS. It was for people not directly involved in process improvement events, but for those who might be sponsors, or have members of their team involved. With process being an estimated 90% of what the University does, it's vital that we take process improvement seriously.

One of the tools the team uses is LEAN, and we had a quick look at the history of it  - it came from Toyota who saw what Ford were doing in the US in car manufacturing, and decided to improve it!  there are two main pillars in this model of process improvement - respect for people (if the end result is worse for the people involved, or customer service is worse, than people will not participate again), and continuous improvement (constantly thinking about how to do things better)  - they have to go hand in hand.

We looked in more detail about a couple of imporantt concepts - value and waste. In summary, every part of a process has to add value, and waste has to be eliminated. Well explained here.

And then - a practical exercise - building things with lego.  Ziggurats to be precise. I can't give too much away, but a great demonstration using production line techniques of many LEAN principles.


I was Queen, of course, and was pleased that by round three, I had plenty of Ziggurats coming my way!


Very enjoyable and informative day.

Services, Planning and Water

When  we introduced Service Management a few years ago, one of the first things we did was construct a Service Catalogue, and divide our services into seven categories, each one having a Service Manager and Service Advisory Board.  Recently we began looking at constructing a service portfolio, which has a different audience and purpose, and as part of that it was natural that we review whether our service areas are correct and still fit for purpose. We come up with a new suggested structure, and have started to look at how it might work, and yesterday our Service Managers and Process Owners met for a first look at it. The portfolio is written very much from a service and value perspective - what do we do that adds value to our customers, and I think we've made a very good start. Lots more work to so though - watch this space.

We've also started to look at our plans for next year, and the first thing we do is look at our top five priorities in the following areas:
New developments
Business as usual
Things to change.
Its a nice easy way of focusing the mind on what we want to achieve, and we've put together a first draft which will get refined over the next few weeks and incorporated into our final planning statement.

Today I've been to Oxford as I'm on the University IT Committee  - always interesting to see how another place works, and also to give them some helpful advice if they're doing something we've already been through. Implementation of major new Business Systems is something they're in the middle of, and Information Security also high on their agenda, as indeed it is on ours. One of the advantages of a long train journey is the amount of work I can done on it, including reading lots of papers - about the only time I get chance. Although yesterday I spent the latter part of the journey looking out of the window at the water everywhere - there were times when the train looked as though it was going through a lake!

Save it like a Hero

Communicating with students is not always easy. Lets face it, many of them are a lot younger than us, and have grown up in a completely different environment to us. We know they don't like reading emails, and it can be difficult to engage. For the last year or so we've had an intern working with us producing videos which seem to have gone down very well, with staff and students. Today we launch a new kind of video - we have our own superhero, FileMan :-)  Bit of a departure for us in style, but we're willing to see how it works and if it catches the students attention to read the web pages on saving files, which have been written in comic book style.  What do you think?



The web pages are here.

Collaboration and communication

Yesterday I got together with colleagues from 3 Universities who, like us, are reviewing their student systems. All of us coming from a different starting point, and all at different stages of our projects, but a lot to learn from each other. We'll be keeping in touch during our projects, sharing information, letting our project teams network with teach other, and jointly getting a feel from suppliers about their products, roadmaps and capabilities.

Later in the day I talked to the rest of the exec team about planning for next year, and had a very productive meeting about a review of our Process Improvement Unit which we need to do over the next few weeks to secure its continued funding.

Today was one of those days where my diary was full of end to end meetings - some requiring teleportation to get from opposite ends of the campus in no time.

One of them was looking at our new portal and how we keep developing it. Most of our discussion was about how we improve the way we target communication to staff and students who actually need or want the information, rather than blanket staff and student emails. We want to reduce the amount of emails, and use our portal to both push messages and allow customers to pull the ones they're interested in. Hopefully it will benefit the senders and receivers of information if we get it right.