First the bad news....

First day back at work today, and a mixed day - good news and bad news! Lets get the bad news over first. eMail's been down all day.  I know there's about 550 unread emails in my inbox, and I can't get at them. Some might say that was a good thing, but not for the guys trying to fix it. A hardware failure last night - a disc array broke - and the whole file database needs rebuilding. 7 hours or so into the rebuild (at half five tonight), it failed. Lots of hard work from the unix and filestore team, including starting  to mount the most recent backups in case the worst happens and we can't get the database rebuilt. Expecting an update in the early hours of the morning, and an early meeting tomorrow to decide on actions.  Great team working on it though - thanks guys.

And now for the good news - over the past year we reviewed our VLE and agreed to implement Blackboard - Learn 9.1 as a major upgrade to MOLE (My online learning environment). Today we reached a major milestone of implementation project, with the go-live of MOLE2 to the first pilot department - the School of Dentistry.

Over the next few weeks, students and staff in the School will start using the new system, and over the next few months, the VLE Project team will be in touch with all Faculties and Departments  to discuss the best time to move to the upgraded service, and it’s hoped that around half the courses will move to the new service in September 2011, with the remainder moving in September 2012. All courses built within the current MOLE environment will be transferred to the new service as and when required, so no investment of time and energy in building courses now will be wasted.

It's been a team effort, as most successful projects are,  so thanks to the whole team - colleagues from LeTS, CiCS, Dentistry & the Library.

To iPad or not to iPad

For the last few weeks I've been testing an iPad. I'm particularly interested to know how useful it is in meetings, and whether it could mean I don't have to carry a laptop around.

On the plus side, I find the keyboard very easy to use to input text and surprisingly fast once you get used to it.  Pages creates documents very well which seem to export to Word without any problem. I can open word docs and pdfs, and although some complicated formatting might get lost occasionally from Word to Pages,  nothing  has caused me any problems so far.  Connectivity seems good, connecting to Eduroam or any other wireless network, and switching to 3G if no wireless available. There's some neat apps around for accessing your files from the cloud (we just need to get our filestore linked in to it). Email is great, and access through our portal to our web based systems fine, with VPN working well if you need it.

One of the things I'm really impressed with is the battery life.  Often I only need to charge it up every two or three days, and recently I used it non stop for 6 hours in a meeting, and it still had 40% battery left. That's certainly better than any laptop.

In meetings it's less obtrusive than a laptop, both in terms of noise (I sometimes wonder if people realise how noisy their keyboards are), and  it sits almost flat on the table and doesn't give the impression of a barrier between you and the rest of the attendees.

It's also always on - just like a phone, there's no booting up involved.

So - what are the downsides. Well, there's some that I hope will be fixed fairly quickly, such as the inability to open the keyboard and input text into some web forms - our own collaboration service uSpace for example, and I couldn't input my blog though the blogger web interface, had to download the app.
I'd also like to be able to annotate documents and pdfs - just like scribbling in the margin of a printed page.  There's probably an app to do that, but I haven't found it yet.

But the main issue is that it has been primarily marketed as a consumer device, owned by an individual with an individual iTunes account. Apple really haven't got their heads round it as an enterprise device, owned by an institution.  There is no real way of deploying or paying for apps on an institutional basis - when we raised this with Apple it was seriously suggested that we purchase a load of iTunes gift cards. Sharing devices also seems to be difficult, as they are synched to individual iTunes accounts.

As a consumer device it's excellent - especially the way it handles and displays images, movies, books and music  - but we could do with some of the corporate issues sorting out if they're going to take off institutionally.

Another blog

About three years ago when I set this blog up, I was fairly certain I wanted it to be only work related, and that's the way it has mainly stayed. There's been a few posts about stuff I'm interested in, and some brief references to holidays, mainly to explain blogging breaks. But I did get criticised once for including posts about morris dancing in a work blog, which made me smile.

So, in order to have somewhere to post personal stuff I set up another blog, which has remained untouched ever since - until now! Due to some sudden rush of blood to the head, I started posting to it last week while I was in Whitby at Folk Week, (that's why I've not been posting here). Not sure how it will develop, at the moment it's very much a what I did on my holidays sort of blog, so will have to see what happens to it.

So, the audience for this one is probably me, but it's not private and anyone can dip in, if you like looking at other people's holiday pics and videos! So, if you want to know what Molly dancing is, or see a rapper team ambushing a late night extra, or see ceilidh dancing to Tamla Motown, take a look here.

Hopefully will be back to work blogging next week, but until then, here's another picture of morris dancing :-)

Building a warehouse is not easy

Continuing staff development is something I'm a great believer in and try and promote in the department as much as possible. Often it's easy to forget that senior managers need development as well, so each year we try and ensure that the exec team get a couple of days away together to work on plans, to reflect on the past year and look at how things have gone and how we can improve.

We've just had our two days, and it was very worthwhile - hard work as we had a facilitator who was excellent but believed in pushing us, as he should. Before the session he had conducted mini 360deg reviews of the whole team by interviewing all of us, and our direct reports, and had also attended meetings to see us in action and how we interact with each other. The information when fed back to us (all anonymously and aggregated of course), provided some some useful insights, and some areas where can take positive action to improve.

Communication is always an issue, and interestingly the feedback a few years ago was that we didn't communicate enough, now we do it too much, or at least in too many different ways :-). Something we were already aware of, and we do need to make sure we have focused and clearly explained channels of communication. We also looked at forward planning, decision making, management consistency, and of course did one or two exercises to look at our own team and communication skills. I have to say I was not very good at building a warehouse out of KNex - but then neither was my partner - we had nearly as many pieces left over as went into the actual construction!

Luck and chance

One of the reasons I like working at a University is that I get the chance to attend all sorts of interesting events. Tonight I went to a great talk by Dr Brooke Magnanti on Chance and Luck, delivered appropriately enough on Friday 13th. And yes, you would be right in thinking her name is familiar in a different context, but not relevant to this lecture! Brooke currently works as a neuroscientist at Bristol University but was previously at the University of Sheffield where she did her PhD in the Department of Forensic Pathology. The event was organised by Science Brainwaves, a student led organization whose aim is to bring science to the public. It's an excellent organization and deserves lots of support.

The talk focused on why we believe what we do about luck and chance - why for example so many of us do the lottery and believe that we're going to be that lucky person who wins when the chances of winning are 14 million to 1. Despite these long odds, 65% of British adults consider the lottery to be a likely source of retirement income.

We tend to use chance and luck interchangeably despite their different meanings. This is demonstrated quite well by the games we play. As a child, we play games like snakes and ladders which are totally based on chance. As we get older and understand more about chance, especially how it can be calculated, we become less interested in it, and want to believe in some element of luck. We mistake chance for skill, and guesses for instinct. That's why the lottery, or Deal or No Deal, are so popular, but they are no different to our childhood games of snakes and ladders.

Brooke also talked about our desire to seek out patterns in random sequences, and how we use heuristics to make decisions based on partial evidence, experience and rumour. I was particularly interested in the Availability Heuristic, where we assess the probability of an event by the ease with which we can think of examples.

A very good talk, and well done to Science Brainwaves for organising it.

Back to work

Well, I'm back - wonderful couple of weeks in Turkey. Lots of sunshine (and one day of rain which was unexpected!), lazing by the pool, reading and generally chilling out. So for those of you who follow me or @stuartba on twitter, it wasn't all drinking cocktails! I did have one or two I admit.

So, back to work, and the first task was obviously sorting through the hundreds of emails - I did wonder if you could get RSI though hitting the delete key so many times. Who are these suppliers who think I'm going to buy their product on the basis of a cold email telling me how good it is? Or who think I'm going to make time in my diary to see them and talk about their product which I've never heard of and am not interested in.

Had a good meeting this week about possibly outsourcing some more applications into the cloud - we're nearing a decision, so watch this space for details hopefully in a few weeks. As we all look to facing a future where finance is going to be tight (to say the least), our priorities are going to have to be supporting the University's core business of teaching and research.

Rest of the week has been spent looking our finances - the year-end outturn and next year's budget - interviewing and some other personnel work. Spent a couple of hours yesterday filling in a "Strength Deployment Inventory" - a personality type questionnaire - for an awayday with the rest of the Executive Team next week. Apparently I'm red. Hopefully all will be explained next week...

BBQ and off

Another successful departmental BBQ over - thanks to everyone who helped with preparation and clearing up afterwards. There's some pictures here.

There will now be a short interruption to blogging as I'm off on leave for a couple of weeks. If you're really interested in what I'm doing I will be updating Twitter occasionally. Otherwise, see you when I get back.

Great Expectations

Good plenary session from Stuart Lee, Director Oxford University Computing Service on meeting the expectations of users with the limited resources at our disposal.

He began by looking who our users are - they've gone from being just staff and students, to including prospective students, alumni, parents, auditors, government agendas and in fact the rest of the world. He illustrated much of the talk with video clips (a great way to keep your audience awake in the early morning slot after the conference dinner...), and for this used a lovely clip of Rolf Harris and Basil Brush! An important question is can we we keep extending our services to meet these new users?

And how do we know what they want or expect? Surveys etc can be used but occasionally throw up unexpected results. A recent Oxford survey of what staff wanted to improve their teaching had "bigger desks in lecture theatres" as the top answer - nothing to do with technology, but something that had obviously been worrying them..

Stuart then took a look back at what technology had promised him when he was younger - he'd put together a wonderfully nostalgic set of film and TV clips demonstrating what the technology of the future would be - the Bionic Man, Dr Who, flying submarines in Marine Boy, cool new weapons from Star Wars, teleportation (Star Trek of course), jetpacks, James Bond type cars, telepathic communication, and my favourite - Thunderbirds!

Of course, much of that has never happened, but some things which were predicted are now possible. Stuart postulated that it's no longer possible to wow users with technology anymore - they're no longer amazed by what might be possible. The IT department are no longer the wizards who can wow the users with technology. I actually disagree with this - I think it is still possible to wow them - some of the consumer technology being developed still gets a gasp when I show people. It might be true though of technology in Universities...

So, we have more and more and users, with different expectation who are no longer impressed with anything, but feel they have the right to comment on everything. Something I did agree with totally is that sometimes we have to do a sanity check on whay users are asking for and emphasise that we are the professionals and experts in our field.

Some solutions - go for quick wins - find out that they want and give it to them. Oxford had produced a guide for academic staff on how to use IT to enhance the impact of their research which had been very popular.

Create sense of joint ownership - users must fell they have a say. They must however understand that IT is mission critical. It isn't a tax, or a drain on funding, or part of a faceless "centre". Get out and about - use their communication networks, don't set up your own, and let them know how much services cost. You can use budgets to manage expectations.

And most importantly - most of our users are at the University to learn, to teach, or to do research, not to test our IT systems.

A great talk, as always, from Stuart.

User Support Conference

I've been at the UCISA User Support conference for the last couple of days. Yesterday I gave one of the plenary talks on Web 2.0 and mobile apps - how can we use them to help our users, and what support issues are there. I covered what Web2.0 is, why we should use it, how we can use it, and what some of the benefits are. Gave some examples of how I use it - blogging, twitter, uSpace, - and how some other senior managers and IT staff use it. Mobility and the wide range of mobile devices and the services we can offer took up the middle part of the talk and a brief case study of our implementation of CampusM, our mobile app. I finished with a look at the funding issues we're going to face, and how we're going to have to look at different service delivery models - self service, out sourcing, and cloud. Finally, my vision that we are no longer the gatekeepers of information or systems, but we will have to be more facilitators and educators. But, even in the face of what could be severe financial cuts, we must not forget to innovate - it will not be enough just to keep the lights on.

Later in the afternoon there was a debate - the two statements being argued were:

"Should we continue to do more of the same , but do more with less as the unit of resource decreases?"

Supported by Ajay Burlinham-Bohr from Anglia Ruskin University.

Or

"Should we leave the bread and butter stuff to other and concentrate on developing more specialised, bespoke and higher quality services?"

Supported by Mike Roch from the University of Reading.

There was a lively debate, with both statements being ably argued. Mike starting by pointing out that we came into Universities to achieve excellence, not mediocrity, that we have the talent to do that but have to be selective how we deploy it. We should concentrate on what we're good at, and share things more. As a wonderful demonstration of spreading things too thinly he used the loo roll provided in the college, which was decidedly thin....

Ajay argued that we should face reality, and that IT in HE was a hobbyists paradise. commercial organisations wouldn't tolerate such technical diversity, and we should get our own houses in order before outsourcing our problems.

A lot of overlap between the two statements, and much tongue in cheek, but very entertaining, and a surprise win for Ajay who'd stated behind in the initial vote.

Student Union unveiled for graduation

It's graduation week again, with 9 degree ceremonies taking place. I always love this time of year - makes me realise why we're all here. It's great to see so many students with their parents, friends and supporters celebrating a successful completion of their degree. The Octagon Centre looked great - it even had a blue carpet down for the occasion.

This year it was really good to see the hoarding finally come off our new student union building. It's a bit quirky, but I think it's great, lots of angles, gold cladding and very interesting spaces inside. Another good capital project nearing completion, and the campus is looking great. Even the Arts Tower is starting to emerge from its plastic wrapping to show off its new cladding.

As well as attending degree ceremonies this week I've been involved in lots of financial and budget discussions, in between fitting in lots of meetings before going on annual leave next week.

And for those interested in the Digital Economy Act, UCISA has just responded to the latest Ofcom consultation. A recurring theme in all our reponses to the Act has been a lack of clarity in some of the definitions used - especially ISP and subscriber. Despite some attempt to provide clarification in the Initial Obligations Code, we still can't say with certainty what a University would be classified as.

Off to Oxford again tomorrow for the UCISA User Support Conference where I'm giving yet another plenary session - hope not too many people have been at my last couple or they might be getting a bit fed up of seeing the same slides...

The backchannel

One of the things in common about the talks I've given in the last couple of days was the the backchannel - the on-line discussion that goes on during the conference on Twitter. The IWMW had a very extensive back-channel - there were over 3,400 tweets from 314 twitterers with the IWMW10 hashtag, most from the UK, but some from further afield including Spain. There was a twitterwall prominently displayed on plasma screens around the conference venue. The plenary talks were streamed live and there was a big remote audience - I think the maximum number of connections to the live stream was 93. The Oxford conference yesterday also had its own hashtag, and although the audience was larger it was only for one day, and there were 168 tweets from 30 twitterers. That's not surprising - the web people are early adopters of new technology and have sought to amplify their conference as much as possible

For a speaker, this can be interesting! I'm not in favour of being able to see tweets during my talk - unless for a specific reason such as asking for feedback or questions - and this practice does seem to have faded. However, it is very useful during the Q and A at the end to have someone monitoring them and making sure the remote people get a chance to have their questions put to the speaker. It's also fascinating reading them later. What did the audience pick up on? What did I say that was interesting? What did they agree/disagree with? A quick analysis of the stats shows that there were about 300 tweets while I was speaking on Monday. Most were positive but some questioned what I was proposing - which is good, if everyone agrees then maybe I'm not being provocative enough :-). The biggest surprise seemed to be the cost of some government web sites (£105m for business link), and the most debate was over shared services and cloud provision and whether they could deliver benefits. I was pleased that the most positive comments were about my conclusion that IT departments have to change and become facilitators, advising and educating customers.

You do wonder sometimes, what you've said to provoke this, halfway through the talk:

"Odd feeling. In one moment inspired. Then, deflated"

So, I'm all in favour of the backchannel, - if you're in the room it provides an insight into what others are thinking and allows you to discuss and explore ideas, if you're following a conference remotely you can join in with the discussion, and if you're a speaker you can get immediate and honest feedback on your presentation. I was pleased to see that one of the presenters has already responded to the feedback he received in a blogpost.

However, I am still hugely disappointed at the low take up of these technologies by most of the HE IT managers - how many senior IT staff blog, or are on Twitter? They are missing out on such a good way to communicate to their staff, with each other and to keep up with what's going on in the world. Sigh. Tiny rant over....

Same talk, different audience

Today I've been to the Oxford ICT Forum Conference to speak on the challenges facing an IT Director in HE. The conference is open to all IT support staff in Oxford (and Cambridge) - those employed by the central IT service, the departments, and the colleges. The set up is very different to that found in Sheffield - the central IT service only provide the network up the outside of buildings for example. And I discovered that no-one knows how many university web servers there are as anyone can set one up (unlike in Sheffield where the firewall prevents web traffic going out unless you specifically apply for an exemption). **edit - I may have got this wrong - see comments

There were a LOT of people there - maybe 350? I gave the same talk as the one I gave to IWMW on Monday, (although I did remove the picture of Brian Kelly dressed as a woman on a bike) and it seemed to go down well, with a lot of comments and questions afterwards. I did think I might need a police escort out after suggesting that IT should be seen as a shared service within the institution before we start to look outside, given that they are so devolved - not even the business systems are in the IT department for example. However, perhaps I can get away with mentioning the unmentionable. It does seem to me, as an outsider, to be a remarkably inefficient way of running things.

During lunch I managed to catch up with the live stream of the closing session from IWMW10, to hear Brian Kelly making me out to be some sort of saint, and then Owen Stephens bringing me back down to earth with some good criticisms of my talk. You see, I have blackmail-able photos of Brian, but none, as yet, of Owen.....

PS - thanks to Tony Brett for the photo - but as he pointed out, it does look as though I'm having a Time Warp moment, and a jump to the left is about to happen!

Pan galactic gargle blasters anyone?

After the excitement of IWMW10 yesterday, today I had a very good meeting with our Professor of Internet Law Lilian Edwards. Lots to talk about including our response to the current consultation on the Digital Economy Act. I also learned about Gikii - the legal workshop equivalent of a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster. The programme looks fantastic - wonder if they'd welcome some real geeks? The interaction between technology and the law is a fascinating subject and one which I look forward to discussing further.

Then it was on a train to Oxford for a UCISA meeting with the Chair of AUDE - the Association of University Directors of Estates. This came about because one of the things I wanted to do during my period of office as Chair of UCISA was to build up relationships with other organisations. Estates is an area where there is a huge amount of overlap with IT - from designing and installing the network infrastructure in new and refurbished buildings, to the provision of teaching and learning space including the technologies and timetabling. There's also the whole sustainibility agenda - power, data centres, etc. One of the topics we discussed at length was Business Continuity - as two of the main infrastructure providers we are often the departments turned to to get services back to normal. We're also the departments that are most likely to be mentioned in other depts business continuity plans as being able to solve the impossible! A system which integrated all data which might be needed to manage a serious incident was also something we discussed - buildings, occupancy, hazards, contact details, scheduled events.

It was a very profitable meeting and we agreed that there's a real need to understand each other better. I'm sure some joint projects, events and case studies will result.