No more news until 2009

But in the meantime here is a picture which was taken by my father last week in Ripponden and was used by Look North for the weather picture on the 6:00 news. A very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all.

IT Services Newsletter Christmas 2008 edition

Feedback on one-to-one meetings

In earlier newsletters there has been some general information about the feedback that I received directly during the one-to-one sessions with everyone in IT Services. When I met with a number of you I promised to provide an anonymised summary of the information and the issues that it raised. I have done that now and it is attached to this newsletter in a tracker format. During 2009, we will begin to work our way through the 71 challenges that you raised with me. I hope that you are able to see your words and phrases in this document directly but let me know if you feel anything has been mis-interpreted.

Change Management Programme
This programme is now up and running and Peter Bollands has begun introductory meetings with some of us. You can find the documents at H:/Exchange/ProjectManagement/Projects/IT Services Change Management/. There are going to be a lot of discussions in January and February and a program for this will be published to this directory shortly. One of the first things that Peter is going to facilitate is a self-assessment workshop over four half days based on the Information Systems Management and Governance framework published at http://www.ismg.ac.uk/. Philip Briggs attended a one day event hosted by Manchester University and UCISA which showcased this framework and its use in several UK Universities and a commercial organisation (Hewlett-Packard) and we feel that it will highlight strengths we already have as well as areas for improvement. Robina Chatham begins working with LSS Board members at an event on January 9th. We are all busy completing Myers-Briggs assessments at the moment. Jermyn Consulting are also now contracted to work on the service and business continuity work and will meet with Jeff Lucas towards the end of January to begin that process.

Student PC cluster provision

In the last newsletter there was an update on a review conducted with the student union of current provision. As a direct result we have been obtaining quotes from two University-approved furniture companies for replacement chairs and new mobile/flexible furniture for group study space. Budget has been agreed to begin the process to improve some of this facility especially in terms of "health and safety" and it will improve our student experience. If you haven't had the time, I would urge everyone to visit F Floor Richmond Building to have a look at the brand new thin client student cluster facility where the old refectory used to be located. This is a fantastic environment and sets a high standard for future student PC cluster provision on campus. Many thanks to Sara Eyre and the team in technical services who are bringing all this online for January 2009.

Consultation on Making Knowledge Work - corporate planning event

Thank you to those who took part in Wednesday's consultation events around the University's values and internal communications. This was a face-to-face meeting rather than an email! If you are interested in the feedback from the two sessions or making comments then its all posted here

Regular Meetings with PVC Rae Earnshaw

These weekly meetings have continued. Rae has been working on a couple of priority areas for the next Information Strategy Committee at the end of January. The first of these relates to information access/security recommendations and is a joint piece of work with Susan Mathews. The other area is a proposal to ISC that the University undertake an "options appraisal" for providing its student email - which includes continuing as we are, but also introduces the options of outsourcing student email, as well as not providing it at all (students bring their own). This is a developing area in the sector with about 15 UK Universities choosing to outsource student email to Google or Microsoft. It is important that we evaluate and respond to what is going on in the sector - especially when it directly impacts student experience. Some email facts that you may be interested in thanks to Geoff Bell:

We delivered around 400,000 messages last week, so around 22 million this year.
We currently reject around 95% of email that is sent to us because it is spam. If we didn't do this then we would have to have a much larger primary email system. The AntiVirus software and hardware system costs us around £10k/year.
Total cost ~£70k/year, or about 1/3p per delivered message.

There remains a standing invitation for anyone who wishes to use this meeting as a way to communicate with the PVC and senior management to just let me know.

Some other bits of news in the last month

Thanks to Mark Jones, new data storage capacity was added for our G and H Drives in Learner Support Services and the rest of Corporate Services over last weekend without service interruptions.

Thanks to Rick Graves and colleagues for the first time we have been able to publish individual web-based personalised student exam timetables. These have been issued to all students for January exams.

Following discussion at the LSS Board meeting a number of cases for training support were approved within IT Services. This process is open to all and four staff in IT services made proposals. As a result Ray Brown and David Dodwell will be completing the Comptia A+ network and certification courses, Mahmood Tariq will be undertaking a Part-Time BA in Computer Systems Administration (at Bradford) and Andrew Nicholson will be taking part in a German Language BA module (at Bradford). Look out for the next round of proposals if you wish to pursue further training opportunities funded by the University

And Finally

A very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all readers.
Thank you for all that you have achieved in 2008 - have an enjoyable break and see you in 2009.

Values Consultation

At the end of November I posted some feedback on a recent event within the University aimed at its "Managers". We were all asked to cascade face-to-face the overall feedback from the event which we did on Wednesday morning and this is what we submitted out of the two sessions held that morning. Comments continue to be welcome:

Session One

For values such as creativity and flexibility to have substance then we need to do something about the rules, procedures, policies, guidelines and committee approvals that all get in the way.
We need less bureaucracy so that we can get on with our work – instead of finding ways to work around the various “systems” – it does not feel enabling, it feels stifling
Every time we get a new VC we seem to start all over again – values require continuity over extended periods and shouldn’t change every five years.
Building works and refurbishments are critical to the University demonstrating commitment. People get cynical when the building gets its first coat of paint in 28 years (rather than celebrating the new paintwork we complain about the shabby carpet)
Some of us didn’t know what was meant by “internal comms” – this has not been communicated” What is this? Who is this? Who does it affect? What is its scope? Who is Stefan etc
Have we understood why we need values at all, and who are these values for: staff, students, both (common?)
What is the driving force, the big idea?
We need to think about how our personal values map onto organisational values – maybe we are working for the right (or the wrong!) organisation for us
In some areas the values are not positive – cynical, apathetic, nothing will ever change
A lack of straight forwardness in communication leads to Chinese whispers and gossip
There are a range of tools at our disposal – we don’t always use them in appropriate ways – example is expectations about responses to emails, or emailing someone who sits in the same office etc

Session Two

An important value is Respect – respect for each other and respect for others
We work in a service environment where lack of respect affects staff morale – dealing with stressed customers is an example e.g. cannot update my PC at lunchtime
Student values have changed a great deal – the “me, now” culture is very different – I pay for this, I know my rights – staff are not always appreciated either by students, peers, or colleagues – is it a surprise that people get fed up? e.g. lack of discipline in lectures
Values are important – aspirational and positive – having goals and a vision is important
The media portrayal of society is changing – respect for elders, fear and insecurity etc – organisations need to respond to the changes in the society around them
Staff should enjoy coming to work at – plenty of activities, time for conversations, morning and afternoon scheduled breaks to meet each other – all this has gone – is it for the better? - we are all too busy doing our jobs – do we have lunch breaks any more: lunch is for wimps
There are two key functions that IT Service delivers that are absolutely fundamental to how we communicate – telephones and email. Take these away and the University could stop functioning as we now know it
Time poor, there is not a relaxed atmosphere, every one expects an instant response

LSS Board Meeting today

Today's LSS Board meeting was a three hour marathon. The first section of the agenda included others from the Student Union and Estates to consider various options for decanting and moving staff to enable the major refurbishments that are planned to the Communal and JBP buildings where some of us live. It really sounds like things are starting to happen after an important meeting of the University Council on Friday that authorised the overall capital investment plan. It will be a difficult time for current student facing services as they adapt for an interim period before moving into the new space and that will be a challenge. It's looking increasingly likely that the IT Service will remain in JBP BUilding on the current floor (but refurbished) along with student facing services - comfortable seating, PC provision, some flexible learning and group study spaces etc. It's a very exciting project for those who have waited a very long time - the starting pistol is due to be fired around April next year for the decanting and then end May for the contractors on site. Probably will take about a year and a half before its all ready. The second section was on staffing and there were some submissions for the professional education and training fund and also an update on a new sickness absence policy that is being introduced from early next year. Third section was on budget - it was interesting that well over £1 Million comes into LSS from each of the fours divisions from external grants and bids. That is a big change over previous years I suspect. We also looked at the management accounts for November (on track) and the spend against a carry forward from last year. There is some money for new furniture and that is why the furniture suppliers have been around with tape measures in the last week.

Weekly update

A whole week has rushed past. So here's what's been happening in brief. There have been three annual review meetings with respect to e-strategy and IT futures with Academic Schools (Social and International Studies, Informatics and Health). These have resulted in a review of things that were requested before and new things on the agenda. When reflecting back on these meetings, I'd say that apart from one, they have been operational rather than strategic, and slightly adversarial (this may be too strong a word) - I hope to look back in a year's time and find that the culture may have changed in a positive direction. It's our job to help agenda the strategic conversations and on this occasion (as before) these meetings have been for the School to tell us their agenda and issues and for us to listen and respond. In reality we have a good debate on most issues that is fairly well balanced but the language that is sometimes used to describe situations is more negative than positive. Maybe its "spin" and good old plain yorkshire speaking. On Thursday there was a guest lecture from PVC at Coventry about the SMART-Campus@CU initiative. I've been following up the glossy hype with the reality on the ground. It's certainly a story which has provided debate this morning. I've attended a few end of term internal type meetings this week - the Technical User Forum (TUF) and the First Level Support Team meeting. The TUF heard about a range of great and innovative new developments here such as the major email upgrade over xmas including a new web front end, a new unified voice messaging service - voice to email and voice to SMS, the launch of a Secure Global Desktop service on Valentine's Day 2009 using VMWare and Virtual Desktop technologies and the launch in January of a brilliant 100 seat thin client cluster atop the atrium in Richmond Building. The techncial teams are also doing a load of moves and changes over the Christmas at risk period including a major upgrade to the student system infrastructure for test, devel and live environments with 8 new servers. Finally, we have come up with some creative ideas to try and get rid of recharges and be more transparent with the way we deal with "premium or added-cost" services. Need to get some agreements to this but looks possibiity.

Google at Westminster

Earlier this year I scanned some stuff about leeds met and Educause this is from the University Business magazine for December 2008

Employers restrict internet access

I bought the Guardian on Tuesday because it had a Digital Student supplement sposnored by the JISC (maybe that's where some of the money goes). It's worth a read but I thought that a page towards the back of the main paper made an interesting contrast - most employers restrict staff time on the internet - internet useage as a timewaster. Interesting.

John Sergeant Rules!

I'm afraid that I don't watch strictly come dancing or any of the other "celebrity" talent contests - although I did enjoy Peter Kay's spoof of them. But I have become interested in John's antics because we approached him to be our after dinner speaker at the UCISA Conference in Liverpool March 2009 about a year ago and before all this fuss about the dancing. Too many press cuttings to keep but when we introduce him it might be nice to have some bio information.....

Fourth Newsletter to IT Services

Staff Culture Survey

The results of the first survey are now available and have been stored on H Drive (Exchange/IT Services Consultation/Connect Survey/). The individual reports for each of the teams that comprise IT services can be found in this folder. Thank you to everyone that took part - over two thirds of us completed the survey which is a good return. There is feedback for every team except the Systems Team where there were not enough total responses to run the report and this is also a small team. Please take a look at this information and let me have your thoughts and reflections on the survey conclusions. The second survey will follow shortly.

Change Management Programme
This programme has been initiated as a result of recommendations in the MIS Department review conducted during the first half of 2008. The scope of the change management programme has (by agreement) been extended to include the new IT Services Division of Learner Support Services which incorporates the MIS Department. A project mandate has been developed and approved and will be overseen by a Change Management Board sponsored by Prof. Jeff Lucas. You can find the documents at H:/Exchange/ProjectManagement/Projects/IT Services Change Management/. This process will be transparent and all of the documents will be posted into this area. Rather than "push" this information out to everyone we will presume that you will "pull" the documents and information from this folder. The process has already started with all three consultants now working on the various aspects that they will assist with (they are Peter Bollands, Jermyn Consulting and Robina Chatham). The key objectives of this change management programme are as follows:

. Managing the implementation of recommendations established in the MIS Department Review during 2008
. Clarify University vision and objectives in terms of the new IT Service – how it should underpin the University, Academic School and Corporate Service Objectives.
. Interim budget and systems planning process for 2009/10
. Identification of potential ‘quick wins’ which will allow customers to experience positive changes from an early stage. This should encourage customers, and increase their support for the overall exercise.
. Early confirmation of a (potentially) revised structure for the IT Services department and appointments to the senior posts in that structure.
. A service catalogue which will enable the IT Services to be defined in terminology that its customers can understand. Ultimately this will lead to service ownership, service level definitions and related activity (a best practice approach to service management – framework ITIL)
. Specific resources to help with management development and individual coaching of the management team.

Office Space Consultation - a reminder

Estates and Facilities have been working on various potential plans for the JBP Building and Communal Building refurbishments. We agreed to provide an initial space requirement for this purpose which was sent out before the October reading week/half term as a draft for further consultation. The document can be found at H:/Exchange/IT Services Consultation/ We discussed this at IT Board and it was suggested that the easiest way for everyone to contribute to this consultation would be to use comments and the track changes features in word. So please take a look at the document add your comments, make any changes and please save it as a new version (by incrementing the version number by 1). After a month we haven't had any further input so the deadline for this opportunity is now Friday December 12th.

Review of student PC cluster provision

Within the document there is mention of a review of student cluster provision. We visited every cluster room supported by IT services during this month with representatives from the Student Union Sabattical team to do a condition survey. The detailed verbatim comments and scores provide an insight into what our student customers think about our current facilities in this building and in the other parts of the campus. There is also a document prepared earlier this year on PC cluster usage and observations that was presented to the e-strategy board. This can be found in the same location as the space consultation survey.

Regular Meetings with PVC Rae Earnshaw

These weekly meetings have continued. We have discussed the recent meetings and service priorities with corporate services directorates and this was presented and approved (with some further additions) at last week's meeting of the Corporate Services Exec. We are now a good way through meetings with academic schools to pull together a companion document which will also prioritise this activity. We have discussed an E-strategy "program management" role, and Russell Allen has agreed to take on this responsibility in the New Year adopting the new guidelines from Jo Hills who was appointed to the Project and Programmes role within the Strategic Planning Office. We have also reviewed the Educause student evaluation of IT on campus http://www.educause.edu/studentguide/873?time=1226909532 and believe that this would be a useful way to take forward the promotion of student facing IT services to prospective (and current) student. There remains a standing invitation for anyone who wishes to use this meeting as a way to communicate with the PVC and senior management to just let me know.

IT Services - Furniture condition survey

Some funds have been set aside to replace funriture (desks and chairs) in a number of offices where we have health and safety issues identified by a recent condition survey by Wendy Wrigglesworth who is the LSS health and safety rep. We are also going to replace broken and worn out chairs in student clusters and put some decent furnniture into the group study rooms that will be re-commissioned in the New Year. If you have any specific requests for furniture that have not already been identified then please inform your line manager - there is a weekly meeting of the IT Heads on Thursday's at 14:00 and we will review the requests this week to forward to the preferrred suppliers for pricing.

Some other bits of news in the last month

Tanks to Jamie Ansell and colleagues in Estates, the plasma screen at the School of Health reception has been ordered after a long delay (not a technical delay) and should be in place for the New Year.

Thanks to Mark Jones, new data storage capacity was added which has relieved problems in various Schools including Management and Health.

A small team has been working hard on the SAINT system hardware upgrades which is a very significant change to both the hardware and software configuration to improve performance and resilience. This will be happening during the at risk period in December.

Sun microsytems have approached us with a view to publicising the great work that has been taking place with Computer Aided Assessment and the new facility that will be opening shortly in F Floor Richmond building using Sunray thin client technology. Sara and team have done a great job with this project which has been recognised as a national exemplar and will bring great credit to the University as the first installation of its kind in the UK.

Winter cycling

An excellent few hours on the hills above home around Wainstalls, Ogden Water and Fly Flats. The weather meant that in the valley there was thick freezing fog but above that there was blue sky and sun even if it was bitter cold. Some rather intersting photos as this was a rare occasion when its worth taking the camera.

Consultation event

There were three repeated consultation events this week each lasting about half a day where a fairly wide range of people from across the University were invited (some were three line whipped but not me BTW) into attending. It began with a brief overview from the VC and DVC about the purpose of the event (corporate planning) and followed in a World Cafe style for the rest of the morning. The event was about exploring the values that the University wishes to adopt and/or retain into in the next period and any new ones that came from the groups. A move towards more active rather than passive values was a theme. We spent ten minutes at tables exploring a value and then circulating. The most interesting one for me was creativity - and the fact that two colleagues at the table were much more concerned about how they find the time for creativity rather than how the organisation might support this value - which one might expect of a Univeristy environment de facto?? Mmmmm Then we went into smaller groups and talked about the specific issue of internal communications - what could be done to improve it (individual input), what assumptions we had made in reaching those proposals, picked an assumption as a group and explored that in more detail looking for the opposiste and then the shades in between. Our group selected the assumption from one of our team that internal communications should involve them being sent nothing (this is quite subtle actually - they explained that they don't mind looking for things that they need to konw (Pull) but hate getting told stuff they don't need to know (Push) leading to information overload. We went onto explore the notion of personalised information push and pull and by the end I was begining to think that there might be problem looking for a solution. However, the main conclusion was actually we should all talk more - stop emailing, pick up the phone, provide some spaces where we can relax, meet and talk to one another because actually most of the "real" internal communication is based on the chinese whisper and gossip. Maybe a new coffee shop is in order? or a Roman Forum?

Hospices

There was an excellent conversation on radio 5 yesterday morning between Nicky Campbell (who is himself a patron of various charities) and the Chairman of Namoi House Winchester and the problems that they are having as a result of the Icelandic bank collapse. The Chairman Professor Khalid Aziz was supremely eloquent and convincing in his argument and in my view a great ambassador for this hospice and the movement.

Student PC clusters on main campus

I think there's an old saying that goes something like if you can't measure it you can't manage it or something like that. Last week I took myself and three students on a tour of the "centrally provided" IT facilities on the main city campus. It took us just over two hours to do them all bar one (the bar one was in use for teaching a class). We rated the facilities on a scale of 1 to 3 where 3 is good and we spent a bit of time agreeing the various dimensions which ranged from accessibility, safety, equipment, signage, personal security, quality etc. The results will be published in some form of report that I haven't written yet, but I expect an article to appear in the student magazine next month...here are the verbatim comments from the students. Other views and perspectives welcome. It is an attempt to be constructive about how we can make improvements especially with the plans to invest millions in a replacment Knowledge Eschange facility we need to learn from the present:

The small numbers of PCs provided in the JBP library extensions were felt by all to the the best environment - combining natural light, good equipment and quiet study
The signage was generally felt to be out of date, negative versus positive (should we do an IMPACT Analysis?)
One of our party noticed that the toilet signage had been vandalised
The general safety (for students and staff) was felt to be very low especially at the lower levels of the JBP Building (level 01 especially) and at night - these are open 24x7 Monday to Friday
There were a variety of chairs scattered around - many were broken, some were exam style plastic chairs, some were 1970s provenance - many were not fit for purpose
There was nowhere to revive or take the recommended break from computers - colour, texture, coffee, papers - basically nothing offered
You cannot lock computer to take a break - not even limiting one computer per user - so when busy don't take breaks
The open plan group study areas were welcomed but they have no provision for laptop, PCs and some of them are sited in "silent" areas!
Why is there no space for vending machine, magazine, newspapers, sofas (waterstones, coffee bars etc)
Very few areas for group study - not necessarily rooms
What does silent study mean versus quiet study
There is a need for a good mixture of spaces
Why are the scanners all in one place - if you need a scanner you have to log out and leave room?
Richmond Building only has two rooms at top of building?
The working space for most users is very small e.g. for taking notes and nowhere to put belongings e.g. paper holders attached to PCs
No separation of benches/workspaces - people on top of each other ref privacy
Very aggressive signage - don't do this, don't do that
Basement feels very unsafe with no natural light
Documentation in cluster rooms - how to do thisis not in the right place - why not a pdf on the machines so you don't have to leave the desk to read the signs?
No access to a water fountain in JBP or Richmond building
One of the disabled access workstations on floor 0 is broken
And these workstations are separate from the others?
Lack of colours and creativity
Which room am I in - difficult to tell actually
Signage and advice about good posture and taking breaks?

Reflecting on a SMART action from a year ago

I had the good fortune to attend a personal development course last year and on one of these we all had to agree to some objectives for the coming year that were SMART....So one of these I went for was something like saving at least 10% of our energy use (electricity and gas) in the next year. Well the results have come through and we saved more than 10% and pocketed over £400 as a Christmas bonus (gross). I say gross because we had to invest - we bought two new kitchen appliances this year which are both AAA rated (they broke so were replaced because of that). We fitted a number of energy saving light bulbs and also measured where most of the electricity was going (all the IT equipment in the study was a major culprit). On that basis we fitted two sockets with power devices to turn off automatically 7 hours a day (0:00-07:00) and that has made quite a big difference. We also turned down various thermostats including the hot water boiler and the biggest thing we probably did was assess the loft insulation and have it upgraded. I think overall we're well out of pocket financially but we used less energy by more than ten percent so that was good. It's good to do something like that and see it through. It's probably what I'm programmed to do (ENTJ see post below!)

UCISA Conference Day Three and reflection

It was a rather late night the night before but a very good turnout for the first speaker of the day who managed to get everyone motivated with some pretty simple but effective techniques to ensure audience participation - must remember the use of yellow and red cards for some future event. We were doing a mini Myers-Briggs type self assessment - it was fascinating to do it in a group of about 150+ people because our speaker was able to get a pretty good profile of what the CISG audience versus the national population looked like: answer pretty close to the national for ESTJ. I'd had a go at the self-assessment in about 10 minutes before we got into the session and I had come out as an ENTJ. I'm going to look back and see what I thought I was about a year and a half ago last time I did a M-B and also I have one going back about ten years. As it is mostly about personal preferences you would normally expect a fairly consistent preference over time. Anyway, I just took a quick look at a more detailed portrait of an ENTJ on the web here and it said - Possible career path University Professor or Administrator.....oh my god....should that be a surprise. Maybe that's why I've stayed as long as I have and enjoy it so much (usually)?? There's also a lot of potential weaknesses which being aware of them allows you to potentially do something about them. The next session was on UKPASS and having heard this I cannot see why we are not a part of this and if we aren't need to find out when we will be. It cannot make much sense once this thing reaches a critical mass not to be applying through this route. As I left the conference there was time to hand in my badge, my questionnaire and say goodbye to Nick and Sue who have once again made everything run so smoothly. It has been an excellent event and well worth the time - not least to meet from breakfast till early in the morning with a bunch of people who are prepared to share both personal and business wisdom - as they say the best free consultancy you can probably get.

UCISA CISG Conference Day Two

The first full day of conference proceedings bgan with a presentation from the Netherlands (in English fortunately) describing a national approach to collection of research data involving every active researcher at its 16 Universities being managed within a central repository. It's called NARCIS. A top down approach seemed to be working quite well but it wasn't clear that a solution like this could work in the four countries of the UK. It was followed by an update on the REF from our good friend David Sweeney who is now a top policy wonk at HEFCE and he was very realistic and open about what is happening with some up to the minute feedback on where this might be heading. The next three sessions were all about different flavours of HOW you could deliver services from shared services (HEFCE view) through shared services (for corporate systems) and then outsourcing models presented by Simon Marsden at Edinburgh. Given the first two sessions of the day it was interesting to reflect that there was little mention of research systems as corporate systems or shared services.....The supplier showcases this afternoon allowed me to hear about the Servo-ICM services and how they are supporting 24x7 operations for HE customers including in-tend e-procurement solutions (based out of Sheffield University). I followed that up on the stand and expect to meet them again. The second session I attended was Salford Software, Microsoft and Manchester Met on the implementation of Sharepoint and live@edu. Some very interesting approaches on this one which has taken a couple of years already from initial consultations and even then timescales were "aggressive" according to the PVC who was speaking for MMU. I didn't get to the scenario planning session as I wanted to meet people in the exhibition including Agresso, WPM, Tribal, Salford Software etc and these were useful too as I had come with various questions. It's such good value for money and use of time to see so many suppliers in one place. The finish for 6:00 allowed me to go and buy a new shirt for tonight's black tie dinner and M&S are having a 20% one day sale so that saved a few pennies. The credit crunch is definitely biting on Deansgate every shop was open and they all seemed to be having pre-Christmas sales. Lots of shoppers though not sure how many of them were spending...

UCISA CISG Conference Evening One

Got over to Manchester on the environmentally friendly train....for 7:00 in time for the evening reception. There are quite a few business stands here in the exhibition with only one stand not claimed so maybe the credit crunch isn't yet affecting suppliers to HE (just yet?). There were a number of interesting conversations e.g. about Leicester's new library/IT Building, the relocation of IT staff at Liverpool to Senate House perhaps involving a change to dress code (suits versus jeans de rigeur) and more importantly (and possibly worth coming just for this) an insight into the effect that something called Unicode might have in various applications and systems interfaces. Don't touch with a bargepole seems to be current thinking and don't be first over the parapet. The main issue may not be the systems that change but the interfaces. UCAS are due to enlighten us all tommorrow so that should be worth attending. Must say that Unicode wasn't on my personal radar. Hopefully it is on others more gifted than me to understand what it might mean.

Review of the week

I've not been getting the time to provide an update so this is a quick summary of the last week in relfective mode. The week began with a discussion and update on "centralised timetabling" and the potential challenges with implementing the instruction to have this fully operational for next session 09/10. It seemed that the analysis co-ordinated by our PVC supported the high level of risk with such a timescale and the potential impact this could have on the organisation and on the student (if it wasn't working fully). The transition to personalised student timescales provided one of the challenges in terms of data accuracy and collection of that data in a sensible timescale. The main challenge was cultural rather than technical although it was recognised that the technology needed to work faultlessly too so this looks more likely for 10/11. Later that day I gave a lecture to the MSc students in Internet Security on the Data Protection and Freedom of Information Acts. There was a good turnout and most of them were interested in the subject mainly becuase there is an assigmment in this area! There have been a number of follow up emails from students and some of these have been sent in the middle of the night....During the week I also met with three of our associate deans learning and teaching as part of the introductory one-to-one meetings and it is interesting to reflect on the diversity of issues and perspectives that colleagues performing esentially the same role in three academic schools have on the IT service agenda. The week closed with a couple of hours spent with Microsoft learning about its current implementations of MS Exchange, Sharepoint, AD and other technologies in the UK higher education space. Many different approaches being taken here from strictly in house to completely outsourced and the split between student and staff provision (in some) and requirement for standardisation (in others). Plenty of food for thought and with the notional price tag ranging from zero (!) to £1.3 Million there are a range of price points too.

A sideways look at things

For the last few days I have been appearing at 90 degrees in the photo. Someone has noticed which is kind of them so I've sorted it out.

The difficult third newsletter

They always say that the third newsletter is always the hardest (it’s a bit like that difficult third album) so here goes with Newsletter number 3.

The end of the first ninety days (and the start of the second ninety days)

I’ve nearly completed all of the one-to-one meetings – and I want to thank you for sharing your experience, knowledge and ideas. It has helped me get a much better understanding of how things work and how we rely so much on teams rather than individuals. I’ve written up all the notes and while some of the things we talked about have been followed up already there are some things that will take longer. Fortunately I didn’t end up with a long list of actions from every meeting! When the process is complete I will share a brief unattributed summary of the main conclusions. As you know I am also meeting with customers and this is something that will continue rather than be a one-off exercise. A few of us have spent time visiting the various Directorates in Corporate Services in this period and we have now assembled a tracker which sets out all of the things that we heard in those sessions to help us identify the priorities of this group of our customers for the coming year. This has been a big undertaking and I would like to thank Sara E, Geoff, Sara M and Philip for their input to this process. The latest version of this document is attached to this newsletter – feedback and comments welcome please.

Staff Culture Survey

I’ve been thinking in these first few months about whether it would be useful to have a “baseline” of the current way we do things round here (culture). The one-to-one meetings are potentially impressionistic and inconsistent and not a good basis for feeding back the current perceptions of the various individuals that make up the IT service.

Rick Graves told me about a piece of work he did a little while ago for an external company in the area of surveying individuals about how connected we feel to (a) the job, (b) the managers, (c) the University (organisation) and (d) our progress. A second survey covers the dependencies between teams and how they work together. The organisation that commissioned and used this work has 20+ years experience in this field.

We had a discussion about this at our weekly Heads of Service meeting (we are now meeting each week at 14:00 on Thursdays) and agreed to do both these exercises, inviting all in IT Services to participate. The mechanism is nice and simple – we all get to answer about 20 questions and this is in the body of an HTML email which is then sent back to an administrator role (Rick) fully encrypted, anonymised before loading into the sausage machine that produces the final reports. Rick assures that it is fully secure and protected – only Rick would know who had submitted to the survey but no-one including Rick would know what responses we had individually given. A pilot is currently happening within the MIS team and then the first survey will be sent out. We will all receive a copy of the output. To avoid survey fatigue the second survey will follow later. Please can I urge you to take part as the more of us that take part the better the information it will provide.

Successful Meeting Maker Upgrade and launch of Notify Link

This month there has been a major upgrade to the meeting maker service which most of us will not have noticed as it happened over a weekend. This provides a number of improvements to the way you can access diaries with a web browser (including drag and drop!) and also enables a new way of synchronizing mobile devices with calendars to be launched which has a number of great benefits – in terms of data security as well as ease of use. It also means that the opportunity has been taken to tidy up and archive older calendars to improve system integrity and performance. I would like to thank Mark Jones for the planning and preparations that were needed to make this upgrade a success and John Fairhall for the related work that is going on with Notify Link.

Office Space Consultation

Estates and Facilities have been working on various potential plans for the JBPBuilding and Communal Building refurbishments. We agreed to provide an initial space requirement for this purpose which was sent out before the October reading week/half term as a draft for further consultation. The document can be found at H:/Exchange/IT Services Consultation/ We discussed this at IT Board and it was suggested that the easiest way for everyone to contribute to this consultation would be to use comments and the track changes features in word. So please take a look at the document add your comments, make any changes and please save it as a new version (by incrementing the version number by 1). Within this document there is mention of a review of student cluster provision. We are going to visit every cluster room supported by IT services later this month with representatives from the Student Union Sabattical team to do a condition survey. It will be interesting to see what our student customers think about our current facilities in this building and in the other parts of the campus. This will be added to the documentation.

Regular Meetings with PVC Rae Earnshaw

These weekly meetings have continued. In the last few weeks we have talked about a new hot topic which is centralized timetabling, shared services (I attended a shared services conference at Loughborough this month www.share-he.org), updating of various web policies relating to information access and security (with thanks to Jacqui Cuthbert for all the assistance) and some interesting research that Rae has been pursuing into “Groupware” collaborative software solutions (which includes Microsoft Exchange/Sharepoint). There remains a standing invitation for anyone who wishes to use this meeting as a way to communicate with the PVC and senior management to just let me know.

IT Services - Office Relocations Completed

Everyone from Richmond Building arrived as planned in the last month so we are all located together for the first time. This has been a major upheaval and everyone is settling in – thank you for making everyone welcome. In addition, the ICT Support and Servicedesk teams have been very busy dealing with the knock on effects as staff in the VCs Office, PVCs office, Marketing and Corporate Communications have all moved around into new space or into the offices that were once occupied by the MIS Team. This has all gone very smoothly and on recent visits we have been complimented on the smooth way that phones, PCs and other equipment were transferred.

Some other bits of news in the last month

We have been pursuing a solution for “free” wireless access for guests, visitors and potentially the general public and it looks like there may be some interesting solutions that have emerged. More investigations taking place but hopefully this new service will be available in the New Year.

The plasma screens and LED worms are fully operational again in the atrium landmarks – and they are being run using Sunray technology which is low power and high availability. Thanks to Jamie Ansell for his perseverance on this long-running job and seeing it through to completion (until someone decides to move them again!)

We have been assisting with the set up of the new International Office that has been established in Dubai. In addition, there have been new developments to provide overseas recruiting agents with on-line web access through the e-vision system. This has already been rolled out to 4 agents and is getting positive feedback.

We entertained some visitors from the University of West Bohemia who were on a study tour investigating how UK Universities manage information and system security. They were on their way between Warwick and Edinburgh so enjoyed their visit to Bradford.

Out of Office

Wanted to share this which has recently been circulated about an out of office reply that went a bit wrong - one to add to the support documentation.......

Protecting Memory Sticks

I have acquired a number of memory sticks over the years. I just read an article about how to password protect/secure such a device for sensitive or personal data. So I had a go at downloading the free software called Cryptainer LE and after a fair amount of messing around managed to create a 25MB secure partition on one of them which worked. As the article said this is fiddly and not something you would easily explain to a non-specialist like me (euphemism for someone who is most likely to carry sensitive data on a USB stick). So I'm thinking about buying a USB with security built-in such as the Kingston DataTraveler Locker. This could be a useful thing to hand out to a number of work colleagues too - I routinely (every quarter) create secure CDs for disaster recovery purposes and this might be a better solution. I wonder if anyone has any other experiences to share on how best to go about this?

Helmsley

We can highly recommend this place after a very brief stay this October half term. Helmsley is a pretty nice market town and this small hotel which has recently been extended and has a new health spa is top notch. We didn't go swimming in the outside pool (too cold), but we did the like the teddy bear (brown) which doubled up as the "do not disturb" sign. The service was excellent/outstanding and the owner was very visible around the place. It seems to make a difference when the owner of these sorts of places is also the manager. We also liked the shop in Helmsley called Cinnamon Twist for home made breads and cakes especially chocolate muffins its almost worth a visit on its own account.

Ebay experience

I'm just selling something on ebay which I haven't done for a few months and they've gone all security conscious. So you need a 4 digit PIN code to sell an item which they give you by phoning your primary contact number with an automated message and the PIN. That might be a way to solve our recent password problems?? Anyway it didn't actually work (so maybe not!) so I ended up using the ebay live chat facility which was basically an online chat session with a support analyst who solved my problem quickly and efficiently and at no apparent cost (e.g. premium rate phone call). I liked this facility very much and wonder why we cannot also offer this to our University customers. maybe we can......

So that's where all the money went....

BP HAS ALL THE MONEY

THE mystery of where all the money has gone was solved today as BP announced profits of £1200 a second.

BP uses tubes to suck money out of your trousers

Economists, baffled at the disappearance of more than £1.8 trillion in the last 12 months, now believe it is sitting safely in the account of the multinational oil giant.

Bill McKay, chief economist at Donelly-McPartlin, said: "I'm so relieved. We've been looking for this money for ages.

"Some claimed it had been abducted by aliens, while others insisted it had been stolen by pirates and buried under a palm tree in the Caribbean.

"But I always had a feeling that BP would have it. You see, money is a bit like a salmon. It swims around in the ocean for a while but sooner or later it always finds it's way back to BP."

Meanwhile the company has produced a new promotional video of chief executive Tony Hayward explaining how the company can now afford to buy a Sony Bravia 46-inch LCD TV from Comet every second.

Mr Hayward is then seen clicking his fingers at regular intervals while saying, 'there's another one, and another one'.

Chancellor Alistair Darling said: "So basically, you privatise something that ends up making £1200 a second and you nationalise something that loses £1200 a second.

courtesy of the Daily Mash

THES Article on academic blogging

Worth reading this interesting article - is this self-referencing?

Let's move to bradford...

My word some positive national press for Bradford! Guardian Weekend 25.10.08. Mind you the two local residents sound familiar.....

Start of term password "wash up"

Started today with an hour to discuss the problems that some students faced with changing and remembering passwords prior to and at the start of term. Over 1,600 password changes recorded out of a total of 5000 new students through the pre-enrolment portal. That's over 30% but then you could always say that 70% managed without a hitch. As with these things as we discussed the issues we discovered that there were a number of different reasons why ranging from technical glitches (data transfers not working quite right), delays in fixing problems not instantaenous (leading to multiple duplicate requests), international students not understanding our messages (especially chinese students whichwere then translated), students not understanding instructions and just clicking (easy to see why that might happen) and then other issues about communication. I suppose we have made a good start in the problem definition and getting to some of the root causes so now we can move foreward with some potential innovative solutions. Target for next year is less than 100 (there will still be at least 100 students I guess who cannote deal with this technology thing).

Bohemian Rhapsody?

OK this wasn't quite the Queen classic but a visit from Ales and Michal from the University of West Bohemia (which is in Plzen in the Czech Republic). The URL definitely gets a high score in scrabble! These guys are on a study tour and after two months researching managed to get responses from 6 Universities (including us) to talk about "security incident handling". Ales has a chief security role and led the meeting with an agenda which covered CESNET (the equivalent of JANET), the issues of staff working at home, the issue of staff and students connecting unprotected and virused equipment, the issue of firewalls and access servers and basically all the same sorts of issues we face here. Interestingly, we felt that the incidents at Bradford were probably a factor lower (2-3 per month versus 20-30 per month) so perhaps the various policies and procedures are working to our advantage. It will be interesting to see how we benchmark against other UK places in the final report. Perhaps the main action out of the discussions was a need to clarify some policies on retention periods for email (years?) and firewall logs (weeks?) among other things. The University is close to Prague (80 miles) so next visit will hopefully be reciprocal!!

Worlds Best Universities?

Yet another league table.....

Blue Ted

I have something in common with John Hegley - well in fact Billy has that now - it is an identical blue threadbare teddy. Mine is called Bluey. Don't know where mine came from but its in the same dreadful state but Billy looks after it every night for us.

Marathon (but it was on a bike!)

We thought we had done quite well to do it in 5 hours.....until the butcher in Hebden Bridge told us he had done it in 2 hours and 20 minutes......well done David (the butcher!)

Shared Services Conference Day Two and Summary

Here are my notes from the conference.

What are shared services?
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has developed a working definition of the term ‘shared services’. It can be summarised as ‘institutions co-operating in the development and delivery of services, so sharing skills and knowledge, perhaps with commercial participation’. The focus of shared services in on Institutions sharing services rather than simply ‘outsourcing’ or buying in services from third parties to replace in-house activity.

What is driving shared service initiatives?
Central government has issued documents in which shared services feature in strategic plans for public services. This initiative is in the context of the Gershon report for the Treasury which sought back-office savings from the use of shared large-scale transaction-based IT systems. The funding councils are committed to supporting Higher Education to seek cost savings and make service improvements through specific use of shared services.

Shared services already in place
There are some good examples of shared services including:

• Universities and Colleges Admissions Services (UCAS)
• The JANET network – Bradford is connected through the regional Metropolitan Area Network (YHMAN)
• M25 consortium of Academic Libraries – sharing resources and services for the benefit of students and researchers in the London area
• The out of hours IT help desk support service (NorMAN) hosted at Northumbria

What benefits could shared services bring?
As well as responding to political impetus, there are a number of potential benefits including:

• Delivering value for money and potentially lowering total cost of ownership
• Improving service standards that a single Institution might not afford
• Maximising resources to release back into academic priorities
• Continuity and resilience of services
• Shared expertise and knowledge

Some challenges of sharing services
There are challenges associated with sharing including:

• Loss of control/confidence in service provider
• Contract management expertise and delivery
• System Integration issues
• There is currently a tax (VAT) on shared service provision which reduces benefit
• Danger of “one size” fits all solutions

The Conference Exhibition
There were six suppliers that exhibited existing or planned services. These included:
• The financial and business system supplier Agresso – offering a shared service through its technology partner InTechnology to provide a high availability, remotely hosted Shared Service implementation of the “Agresso Business World” product.
• UCAS demonstrating its market intelligence, market monitoring and research service providing specialist analysis solution based on the UCAS applicant cohort.
• Logica presenting a shared eco-data centre solution for those Institutions looking for replacement or new space for IT servers and data storage.
• Steria who presented cases studies on BT and the NHS. The NHS example reduced finance and accounting costs through sharing common services across NHS Trusts – this is related to an initiative in the West Yorkshire Health Authority.
• Parabilis provides an e-marketplace for the HE/FE sectors integrating finance systems to provide one platform to place purchase orders and receive electronic invoices.
• Microsoft promoting its email and collaboration services for students through external hosting – a university labelled “hotmail” account for students.

The Conference Programme
There were parallel workshop sessions provided by Universities and organisations that had undertaken shared service initiatives. There were also presentations from the suppliers. The keynote was Tony Hey, Corporate VP of External Research Microsoft who headed e-Science program and before that was Dean of Engineering at Southampton. Tony’s presentation was Microsoft product specific but the vision was interesting: “low cost, low complexity infrastructure to streamline and enable student and faculty interactions”. I made contact with Dominic Watts the HE Business Manager for Microsoft and will follow this up. We are following up on the discussions about “Microsoft Exchange” at the University.

There was an excellent presentation by Northumbria University which is hosting an out of hours IT help desk service for 15 UK Institutions. Increasingly students and staff are using technology and networks around the clock but traditional support services are not available for peaks of activity which occur outside traditional office hours. LSS is already investigating this solution as a way to improve customer service and responsiveness. We were already following this up with Northumbria and aim to reach a decision on viability by Christmas 2008.

Broken Laptop

Poor excuse but lack of postings is not lack of interest (although lack of time IS a problem) but the laptop is intermittently blue screening......it's finally time to replace.

Shared Services Conference

I'm attending a conference on Shared Services at Loughborough University. My laptop has broken (again) but there is an internet connection on the TV in the room which I am typing on. I went to the Library to use the PCs there with a username and password provided by Imago who are the private company who provide the conferencing facilities but it didn't work (not joined up) but was impreessed by the cafe in the library ground floor and the study and PC facilities. The conference was opened by the VC at Nottingham Trent and a Microsoft speaker (Tony Hey Corp VP of External Research and es Dean of Engineering at Southampton. I was interested in the Amazon S3 service and the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) as well as the Microsoft Exchange service that is now available as a shared servicee (2 pounds per user per month?). Followed this up with Dominic Watts on the Microsoft stand. The next session was a discussion workshop led by Duke and Jordan on shared Corporate Information Services. Here I learnt that ULCC is hosting 50 VLE instances for customers, that 25% of HEs are looking at new finance systems (and that no-one in HE is currently sharing) and that Library Systems are currently the most fertile area for sharing (>25%) are sharing but is this really library catalogue versus LMS sharing. Very few IT people here mainly Finance, Estates, PVC portfolios. Interesting conversations about change management, culture and the drivers for shared services generally. I'm going to follow up Oxford's decision on groupware and two places that have used SEC (Derby and Kings) to outsourcee Exchange and migrate from Novell to Exchange. Intechnology also host Exchange for a University too. Worth coming for these connections alone.

A bit of benchmarking (thanks to Sheffield)

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.

Mmm sounds familiar - we only hear from the departments who have the problems and those that bat along OK are no supportive in a positive way. I also think that we did a good job at Bradford in the round and although we had technical problems with the pre-enrolment portal (the new thing that involved tech of course) the re-enrolment was smart admin in action. How soon we forget the days when every student new or re-reg had to queue for days on end with paper in hand. OK we still have queues and we still have some paper...but I have been round long enough to remember when we had a team of data inputters who didn't complete keying in the paper reg forms until Christmas............

Meeting someone new to the University

Reflecting on a very interesting lunchtime meeting with a new colleague from University of Manchester. There were a number of observations that were of interest. One of these was about our size and the fact we are predominantly teaching not research. Our size (all of Bradford fits in one of the four faculties at Manchester) providing a scale that should (and does?) enable more agility and the need to meet and consult with fewer people to get things moving. Refreshing to sometimes be reminded from someone else's perspective. Our scale is a definite advantage we should exploit that much more - sometimes we get too bogged down in the details.

First Year Experience Forum

There was a forum meeting yesterday. it looked at the following areas:

• What are your expectations of 1st Years
• Induction Highs
• Induction Lows
• Induction issues to address

Here are some potted notes with thanks to Becka Currant (edited by me)

Members reflected on the above areas and posted their thoughts to sheets round the room. A summary of the issues and areas identified will soon be available. It was surprising (to me at least) how much of the discussion had an IT component. My own FYE was very different no computers or systems that I can remember. In fact hardly any area of dicussion didn't have an IT compenent.

Experience with the Pre Enrollment Portal– we had issues but whilst it was working it gave us a more positive experience than in previous years. Did it ultimately work? Yes, but when it didn’t it was an issue.

First year that students have had access to IT account prior to arrival. Made a huge difference especially for those depts who needed students to access secure pages prior to arrival. Issues of forgotten passwords and people wanting to change them as quickly as possible. Issues of formula password generation and changes. Access to BlackBoard better than it was a year ago.

BioMed – more problems with BlackBoard than previously (students saying they don’t have access to BlackBoard as students were registered but not enrolled into BlackBoard modules). But the students can get into BlackBoard – the issues are with SAINT and BlackBoard not usernames and passwords.

Should we have automatic registration into BlackBoard for students for their modules? Deadline for enrolments is end of Week 1. Should be able to automatically get onto BlackBoard modules as not much choice in 1st year. Issues are also between BlackBoard and e-vision – students think that if BlackBoard isn’t populated they are not registered but this isn’t the case.

Issues of some students not receiving information on usernames and passwords in advance. Students were contacted by email which was followed up with a paper enrolment pack.

For those working need timetables earlier to help plan their time. Timetables need to be issued earlier than Week 0. Also need to highlight compulsory and optional activities. Online delivery also means that students don’t need to necessarily turn up for all of it. Early information is not accurate so changes have to keep being made. Issues of room changes and lack of information about what is needed where. Data needs to be quality.

Can we deliver Health and Safety information online?

Students want their timetables – can well tell them when they can get it and how?

Knowledge base is being built to answer FAQs. Really useful book will be going online next year as a searchable base of information.

Accommodation issues – less problematic than before and because of PEP and ning provision concerns were addressed more quickly. Again areas can be put into materials to help people understand what will happen.

Issues with Office 2007 – students and staff need help with converting documents. Do we need to tell students what to come to University with? Issues of IT skills and ability. IT Help need to add dates.

Lots of things to think about and work on for the next cycle but a very useful forum and meeting to get these issues debated with staff and students round the table.

Gartner Security Event

A friend at Lancaster provided this useful link to a recent seminar in London that he attended.

The State of the HE Sector

courtesy of Univeristy Business October 2008 and they got it from UUK conference and the Patterns of Higher Education Report

• From 2000/01 to 2006/07 the sector as a whole has seen an increase of over 50% in its total income
• In 2006/07 50% of the sectors total income came from funding council teacing and research grants and from tuition fees from Home and EU students
• The UK's GDP spend on HE is 1.3%. THis falls behind major international competitors
• For the first time there has been an above-average growth in student numbers in education and social studies
• In the 10 year period from 1997/98 to 2006/07 tNon-EU international student enrolments have more than doubled
• The number of part-time enrolments at undergraduate level has grwon more rapidly (50%) than full-time ones over the last decade.
  
• 82% overall satisfaction rate of UK students
• 80% of students go on to successfully complete their courses in the UK

IT Services Newsletter Number 2

Two thirds of the way through the first 90 days

So far I've been able to meet one-to-one with 36 people in the IT Services team, with further meetings scheduled in the next month. I've also been meeting and listening to a number of our customers too. From an internal perspective, this has been an opportunity to learn more about the current organizational culture (the way we do things round here) and the variety of tasks that we undertake both individually but more often as part of a wider team - that's within IT Services but also within LSS as well as with others (e.g. Estates and Facilities). We have a vast amount of organizational knowledge and skills stretching back over 30 years in some instances which is a tremendous asset to the University. Some people have talked to me about how the interfaces between our current internal teams are disconnected at times rather than enabling. Some have concerns about policies, procedures and documentation. There are lots of initiatives and ideas that have been discussed. From an external perspective there is a willingness to collaborate and work with the IT Service, and a desire for us to be proactive in the way we manage problems and requests. There is often praise for individuals who have dealt with specific requests and I have tried to pass those on directly because this sort of positive feedback doesn't always get fed back.

Pre-Enrolment and Registration Success

OK so some of you may be thinking: how can some of the issues we heard about during intake week enable this to be labeled a success? There were system performance problems and a decision was taken to take down the pre-enrolment portal. We also encountered many password changes through pre-enrolment (over 500 recorded when I last asked) which were dealt with prior to student arrival by colleagues in the Learner Support Centre and latterly by the ICT Service Desk. This meant however, that all this pain was out of the way by the time students began lectures and accessing services for learning and so far there has been positive feedback about the smoothness of the overall process from many quarters. My own view is that we should encourage innovation and be aware that this may increase risks. We must try and mitigate and minimize those risks and with hindsight we could have done more about this. We will learn some lessons about the process we went through which means it will be even better next time. That is the essence of continuous improvement. Around two thirds of our new students chose to pre-enrol before arrival and those students had a much smoother experience than in previous years. Here is an update that was circulated by Tim Squire-Watt the SAINT Team Leader on the 24th September:
Following a recent conversation with Student Administration and Support (SAS) and Hub staff, I am pleased to announce that on balance, enrolment has been a successful event this year. All the students who have arrived have now been enrolled and apart from a few who need to complete IT self registration, these new University of Bradford students now have their corresponding email and IT accounts.
Re-enrolmentStudents are continuing to re-enrol successfully via e:Vision. The vast majority of undergraduate have now re-enrolled with some students who are still making decisions on transfers have yet to complete the process (around 350 students).
Student Loan CompanyAll home undergraduate students who have successfully enrolled or re-enrolled who have a completed applicant for financial support in place have now had their attendance confirmed and the majority, due to the UK banking sector's new 'faster payments' scheme have now received their first installment of their maintenance loan and/or HE grant payment.
I would like to thank everyone who has contributed to the registration and intake processes - the ICT Support team who set up and took down the equipment in the Great and Small Halls, the staff who manned the service points at evenings and over the weekend, the systems team who worked to resolve the performance issues to a satisfactory conclusion and those who contributed in a range of other ways to ensure that registrations happened, documentation was available, student payments were made, invoices were raised, and passwords were sorted out.

Regular Meetings with PVC Rae Earnshaw

These weekly meetings have continued every week. We have discussed a number of issues including challenges with making this year’s student HESA return, corporate mobile phone strategy, video conferencing strategy, Management Information to support Research, funding for network infrastructure upgrades, proposals to tackle email/meeting maker synchronization with mobile devices, SAINT system performance issues and Rae has assisted with proactive communication with senior management. There remains a standing invitation for anyone who wishes to use this meeting as a way to communicate with the PVC and senior management to just let me know.

Recognising exceptional performance

In the LSS Newsletter Sara congratulated a number of Learner Support Services staff who were successful in gaining an award in the recent Performance Recognition exercise. Awards take the form of a pay increment or one-off lump sum, and are offered in recognition of exceptional performance. There were a number of people in the IT Services team who received awards in recognition of work in the last year so congratulations to all of them

IT Services - Office Relocations

We have made significant progress on the planned relocation of IT Services staff from Richmond Building to JBP building. Paula Burnett and Susan Schmassmann moved on the 18th September and all of the remaining members of the MIS team will be moving week commencing October 6th which is about two months sooner than we had hoped when the first of these newsletters was circulated. It means that some student facilities are being relocated and moved to accommodate staff, but this should not impact student experience. There will be a short transition period and the move has been hastened by the relocation of the PVCs and others from D Floor into the Richmond Building E Floor offices while refurbishing work is completed on D Floor. Thanks to Sujit Brar for co-ordinating, Pat and the LSS admin team for facilitating and those who have helped to relocate and move equipment etc. It will really help communications and build relationships when we have all the IT Services team together for the first time.

Some other bits of news in the last month

The communications link between the School of Management and JBP Building has been upgraded which will improve resilience and this has been funded by YHMAN. There is more work to do up to Christmas and this will enable a major improvement in service.

The Network team has reduced equipment maintenance costs by about £16k per annum. The major contributor towards this saving is that we no longer subscribe to hardware maintenance contracts for the new core network equipment; instead we are keeping hot spares for the equipment in-house (equipment has lifetime warranty). Other contributors are re-negotiating the annual rental on the School of Management/city campus data link (saving of about £4K per annum).

Owing to the changes inherent in upgrading the Accommodation management systems (Room Service), the software which translates invoice and credit note transactions from Room Service to the Finance system Powersolve had to be rewritten. The initial, bulk run completed successfully at the start of the year — invoices to the approximate value of £577k being loaded to the Finance system. The rewritten application is Oracle based, and performed both correctly and quickly: transactions were extracted from RoomService and installed in Powersolve with a considerable time-saving over the older, Microsoft-based, application.

Newcastle University Visit

Last Friday (the day after Greenwich) was a day trip to Newcastle University during freshers week including a full campus tour. Things we liked: the posh student restaurant, the brand new sports facilities (top class), the quadrangle, the Library (apparently charter marked and it shows), the student computers in the library. Things we didn't like: the building site next to the main self catered Halls (its going to be a noisy year), the building and old school facilities that house the English Faculty (although it will relocate in the next few years), the emphasis on booze, the priority investment in Health, Medicine,Dentistry. I think we felt that it will be a grand place when its finished (£200M investment programme in next 5 years) but you may not want to be part of the building site while it gets there?