How cool is this

I'm always on the look out for innovative ways to implement technology. Well, I'm dead impressed with this restaurant where the menus are projected onto the table tops, and diners can order food, change the look of their tables, play games and even order a cab home. Looks great fun, providing it works. So, how does it work? If the information is being projected onto ordinary table tops, it can't be interactive. So, the tabletops must be active in some way (LCD?)

Just think of the potential for it going wrong.

So, any similar uses for this technology in a University?

Our Shared Vision

First Senate meeting of the new session today. As always, the main item of business is the VCs report where he gave a good overview of what's happened in his first year at Sheffield:

• The new University structure is operational
• Faculties are the primary focus for decision making
• A University Executive Board is operational with Faculties represented
• There's openess and transparency about what is being discussed

He also talked about the global situation and how that could affect us:

• The Global financial crisis will have knock on effect
• What's the financial sustainability of HE sector nationally
• Will there/won't there be a change in government, and if so what effect will it have
• Demographic changes will begin to kick in in the next 5 to 10 yrs
• There's an atmosphere of greater competition which will lead to increased selectivity in funding

There was some good discussion about our aspirations as a University, and how we can achieve them particularly in the difficult financial climate. Some very positive vibes about working together and having open debates on the way forward.

The rest of the agenda fairly uncontentious. A couple of questions about how successful the new on-line registration system had been. We were able to confirm that overall it had been a success, but there had been some departments where there had been problems - presumably the question came from one of those departments. I think we did a good job - the implementation of a new system is rarely without problems, and this had very few overall.

MI View

Had the first meeting last Friday of our Heads of Professional Services with the new Directors of Faculty Operations - very useful and I hope a sign of us all working very closely together. We looked at how we might interface with each other, and discussed what functions are best suited to be carried out at a Faculty level, and which are better carried out by a Central service.

We also had a demonstration of MIView - a dashboard of information specifically for Faculties, initially looking at planning data, but being expanded over the next few months to include financial and HR data. this has been developed as a joint project between us and the Corporate Planning Office and is being very well received. Of course, as Sod's Law is alive and well, just before the demo there was a server problem which caused me to dash out and frantically call the Helpdesk to get it fixed!

What not to print

Printing has been on my mind again! On Friday we had a very good presentation to the CiCS User Group about our Print Service. It's an excellent service, completely self financed and offering a range of services including print buying and estimating, graphic design and large format printing, which is in big demand for posters and exhibition type material. Demand for printing in some areas is decreasing - and we are actively encouraging that - so the service has diversified, and now prints all manner of things, including promotional gifts. They even printed sticks of rock for the Information Commons opening.

One of the projects they are heavily involved in is an environmental review of printing, reviewing how, why and where printing is performed on campus so that we can make informed judgements about how best to reduce costs and make sure we're handling material in the most cost effective and environmentally friendly manner. For example, the amount of high volume duplicating is decreasing as committee papers are increasingly stored and distributed digitally. But, if all the recipients then decide to print the papers off on their own individual desktop printers - it's more expensive, and less environmentally friendly.

Student printing is another areas I've been thinking about. Students complain about the cost of printing, but we've charged them the same for printing one sheet for 10 years - 5p. We also set all of our printers to print double-sided by default. But - some departments are refusing to accept assignment and essays unless they are printed single sided AND double line spaced. I wonder if they realise how much this is costing the student (and the planet!). Why can't they accept them electronically I wonder?

My mission is definitely to reduce the amount of paper we print as a University - it is nothing short of ridiculous - over 100,000,000 sheets last year. I still see people carrying huge piles of paper into committee meetings, which is barely looked at, and then presumeably binned.

User Group

Our User Group yesterday - about 50 people normally attend from all areas of the University, including students. We normally do a few presentations of things we're doing, new projects etc, and ask for questions from the floor. Yesterday we demonstrated Clearspace, our new social networking software which was very well received, gave an overview of the student satisfaction survey results and our action plan, and an overview of the Print Service. However, the item which caused the most discussion was our move to Office 2007 (2008 for our mac users).

There was a general acceptance that we had to do it, but a number of issues, particularly in relation to file formats and their incompatibility with previous office versions, and whether staff would have to upgrade their PCs to run the new versions. Lots of discussion about why we don't run Open Office as standard and avoid the "Microsoft treadmill" of upgrades. The student reps were very clear that they want to run the industry standard versions of Office, and as Microsoft make their software available cheaply to them, that 's what they have on their own laptops, and that's what they need on our PCs. I have to say we agree with them. We were asked whether their was any possibility of us moving away from our dependence on Microsoft in the future, and the answer is it's unlikely! However, we did remind our users that we have very little Microsoft infrastructure in place, prefering to run open standards and systems wherever possible.

Where did I leave my glasses....

Vint Cerf is the Chief Internet Evangelist at Google (what a wonderful title!), and is often referred to as 'The Father of the Internet". He's recently commented on Google Blogs about the future of the Internet - he insists we have only glimpsed a fraction of its capabilities so far and that in a few years it will dominate our workplace, our leisure time and our home lives.

He predicts that in the next decade, around 70% of the human population will have fixed or mobile access to the Internet at speeds of up to gigabits per second. Mobile devices, appliances and sensors of all kinds will become a major component of the Internet and will know where they are, both geographically and logically. So, the following scenario might be enacted:

You enter a hotel room and your mobile and your laptop will be told their precise location including room number. They will discover what other devices are in the neighborhood, so your mobile will discover that it has a high resolution display available in what was once called a television set. Your mobile will remember where you have been and will keep track of RFID-labeled objects such as your briefcase, car keys and glasses. "Where are my glasses?" you will ask. "You were last within RFID reach of them while in the living room," your mobile or laptop will say.

Lots of other possible scenarios are illustrated, ending with the reassurance that Google will be there, helping to make sense of it all, helping to organize and make everything accessible and useful!

Well worth a read.

Bring on the benefits

A full day looking at the University Collaboration Improvement Programme today in relation to Benefits Realisation. Re-defined the objectives, and came up with some new benefits, as well a fresh look at some of the business changes that need to take place. Lots of debate about whether the programme is concerned with technology, or collaboration in general - general concensus that it has to be about the exchange of information facilitated by technology. Other enablers are way out of scope, and our group doesn't have the resources to solve them. The next step is to develop a blueprint for what collaboration might look like in the future - a sort of day in the life of.

The three objectives we agreed for the programme are:

• To enable and encourage the university community to communicate and collaborate more effectively
• To promote inclusion, enhancing the sense of community for staff and students
• To enable and encourage collaboration between the university community and external partners

Yesterday I spoke to our new University Executive Board about how they might be more open and transparent in terms of release of Board agendas, minutes and papers, and how Freedom of Information and Data Protection Legislation might impact what is and isn't released. I must say, I'm really glad to see a change in culture with this move towards more transparent governance - it can only be a good thing.

Who was JANET?

All day RUGIT meeting yesterday. As usual, well attended - I think we all appreciate a chance to network and talk to our colleagues from similar universities. The first item was a presentation from one of the Research Fellows from the Russell Group of Vice Chancellors, who has a specific remit to liase with our group. He outlined what was happening with the RG since the appointment of a Director General last year, and the priority ares they were concentrating on. Some interesting discussion on the role of metrics in the assessment of research, and some crystal ball gazing about what effect a change of government would have on funding for Universities.

Then we had a progress report on the UKRDS, which I have mentioned before. This is a study looking at the feasibilty of establishing a UK wide research data service, which very importantly would not just look at storing data, but all of the issues around data curation, archiving and retrieval as well. The study is going well, with an interim report already prepared, and a final report expected by Christmas this year. Some interesting findings - it is predicted that the volume of research data needing to be stored will increase by 400% over the next 3 years; c50% of research data is estimated to have a life of <10 years, 25% an indefinite retention value, and 25% of researchers don't know how long their data should be kept for. When the new service is established, one of the most important decisions will be how long to keep data for, which ideally should be agreed at the beginning of the research project - but who knows how useful data might be after the end of a project, or what else it could be used for? Apparently astronomers are storing up to 2 petabytes of data every night, and are still analysing and finding interesting stuff in data many years old. One of the principles of the study and the data service when it is established is to unleash the potential of raw data being more accessible and discoverable.

Other things discussed included progress on a feasibility study for a Shared Data Centre for Higher Education (the SHED project) - this is particularly important for those Unversities who are running out of machine room space, especially in London; problems surrounding provision of facilities for on-line assessments, and a qualitative benchmarking study we are about to do.

Then it was off to the nearest pub for a well earned pint, before a reception at UCL for the retirement of one of RUGIT's founder members - Professor Roland Rosner - who was also one of the people who established JANET , our academic network, which was actually named after his secretary, and the acronym Joint Academic Network retrofitted afterwards!

Early morning start

On train on way to London at the moment – going to RUGIT meeting – lots of work to do on way down, but getting increasingly annoyed that East Midlands Trains seem incapable of supporting the business traveller – no power sockets for laptops, no wireless network. Thank goodness for my USB modem and iPhone – could do with some sort of power generator for MacBook though – solar panels maybe or a hamster in a wheel……

Thinking a lot about strategy at the moment – how we bring together all the work we’re doing on collaboration and new technologies, particularly with our recent decision to implement Clearspace. We’ve done a lot of work on a Teaching and Learning Support Strategy which I hope is about to be circulated wider and presented to the Teaching and Learning Committee, and a Technology strategy which will got to our Executive Board later this year. Work needs to start now on a research strategy, and one of the areas we will be working closely with the Library on over the next few months is how we manage research data - not just storage but the whole life cycle management, including curation, metadata, storage and archiving. I worry that there are some areas of the University who don't see the management of research data as a concern, despite the amount being generated, and who are content to store it on local servers, PCs or even CDs. Will CDs be readable in 10 years time I wonder?

Friday Loltiger

Good meeting yesterday with the IT Director of another similar University - always nice to share issues and find out that we all worry about the same things. One thing that makes Universities different from many other sectors is our willingness to share information - we happily exchange policies, guidelines, etc so that we can all learn from each other, not invent the wheel and share best practice.

Information security is one area where we exchanged a lot of information. You only have to pick up a newspaper these days to read about another memory stick going missing, or a laptop being left in a taxi. In an organisation as large and complex as a University how can we ensure that we don't end up with our data in the hands of a tabloid newspaper - what policies and procedures do we need to have in place, and how can we educate our users on information security matters.


Finally, as it's Friday, something to make you smile. I love tigers, and this picture just made me laugh.

Answers on a postcard...

Document management project update meeting today - several presentations about where we are, and some of the pilots we're running. This is a project that many people have sweated blood over - we've had tremendous problems getting the system to work as we want it to, and in getting live pilots off the ground. It has emphasised how important it is to get your business processes right before trying to model them in systems and workflow. I fear we still haven't got it right in some places. Still too much reliance on paper and signatures. But, progress is being made, and we are cautiously optimistic....

One of the problems we are still struggling with is the overlapping functionality of software - we have recently decided to implement Clearspace from Jive software as part of our Innovative Communications project. This is primarily a Web 2.0 social networking suite of software including blogs, wikis (confusingly called documents), forums and groups. It also has some (limited) document management functionality. Livelink (our document management software), also has groups, discussion forums and some collaborative functions. So - which bits of which software do we implement, and how do we ensure that whatever we do, everything is integrated, and our users are clear about what bits of which software to use for what??

The new students are here

Well it's certainly busy on campus - I love it when the students come back - there's a real buzz about the place. Just bigger queues to get my lunchtime sandwich. More students needing help with connecting, more asking about connecting Xboxes - this morning when I suggested to our network guys that we needed to look at how to handle consoles, it took less than 10 seconds for one of them to suggest that they needed a couple to play with, I mean test!

On line registration system seems to be working well, so that's good, and at the moment everyone seems pleased with the way things are going.

Had a good Executive Meeting this afternoon - looking at how we're going to interact with the new planning round put in place following our University restructure. First task is to pull together all of our existing strategy documents and put them in a format which will be easy to understand and digest. A major task is to identify which KPIs (key performance indicators) we are going to use and report on. Lot of debate about what metrics to use, and how and who to benchmark with. For example, is a systems up time of 99.99%, or responding to phone queries in two hours a KPI? Or is that just us doing our job?

More later!

"Is this where I get the Internet?"

This weekend several thousand new students arrive at the University, ready to start their courses and a new life in a new city. After they've got their keys to their room, unpacked their cases, the next thing they all want to do is connect their laptops to the internet. In order to do that they have to be registered with us to use the computing service, have a user name and password, and register their laptop on the network, once we're happy that its security and antivirus software is up to date. Teams of our staff have been working this weekend, some at the IC but mainly at the student village. The student village had a real party atmosphere - for once the sun has shone all weekend, and there was a BBQ, balloons, music, helpdesk, stalls and lots of current students in bright t-shirts helping the new arrivals.

We were registering students in the dining room, using our self authentication system on the banks of sun rays we've recently installed. It was hectic! Particularly this morning, as many students didn't arrive until late yesterday (traffic in parts of Sheffield was extremely slow moving!), so the queue had built up very early on, and didn't diminish for a lot of the day. The 10 or so staff we had there worked really hard, running a workshop for students who were having trouble getting their laptops to connect as well as dealing with all the other queries. A few interesting trends - nearly everyone came in asking "is this where I get the internet?" No concept that you use a computer for anything else. I didn't speak to anyone who had a stand alone PC - all had laptops. Big increase in the number of macs students were bringing. And, lots of questions about plugging other devices into the network point - especially Xboxes. Something we need to look at.

Well done everyone who was involved this weekend, and thanks.

Tomorrow we start University registration in earnest - fingers crossed for our new on line registration system!