Its been a busy week.....

No update to this for 7 days must mean that it has been a REALLY busy week absolutely no time to sit and reflect. Last Thursday was a Shere Khan event hosted at the University of Greenwich and we discussed a range of "hot issues" of the day. There is a shere khan facebook group and just to prove that it wasn't all work work work we had a brief tour of the Greenwich observatory at lunchtime. Here is a picture of the new Greenwich University campus - a world heritage site no less. The top issues have been posted in anonymised form to the UCISA top issues co-ordinator but they looked something like this:

Issue: Role Analysis and reward structures

Post HERA (and HAYS) continue to reverberate with some Universities still unable to deal with how IT And Technical staff are appropriately graded and rewarded - systems like HERA continue to be time consuming, opaque and not helpful in terms of our professional skills.

Issue: Introducing Service Management Best Practice

Best Practice service management frameworks (e.g. ITIL) appear to provide a suitable approach in Higher Education to professionalise existing services but there are issues around culture change in technical areas and issues around appropriate external consultancy to support our needs. This is a slow burner which could have long term impact not a quick fix.

Issue: Virtualisation of servers and desktop with new computer rooms

There is pressure on space and also on energy use with many new computer rooms and "data centres" on the drawing board. Consultancy expertise is sparce. We are being driven to virtualization for a number of good reasons and there are significant opportunities but we may be building new spaces that do not reflect the changing dynamics.

Issue: IT Strategies

Do we still need IT Strategies in detail or are we now looking at brief summary statements. How do we engage the senior management in developing and committing to the strategy and investment going forward. A good example is student and staff email - are we moving towards a generic HE strategy (outsource student email for example) and does this mean we could more easily share generic strategies.

Issue: Outsourcing or Technology Partnering

Are we still doing things that we could effectively partner or outsource and how do we identify these opportunities and exploit them

Issue: Twenty Four Seven

What staff contractual and reward arrangements need to be in place to deliver extended service hours that deliver student and staff expectations which continue to increase. Impact also on our third party providers when contracts are modified to reflect same agenda.

Issue: Organisational Change and Change Management

What kind of organizational structure and culture is now appropriate in the HE context and how different is this from current structure (if at all) and how do we address and deliver the change. Focus is also on our stakeholders as Directors and Heads of Service and the need for us to professionalise and build sustainable relationships within the Senior Management Teams.

Issue: Green and Sustainable IT

How do we deal with many of the operational issues in this area such as effective and sustainable equipment disposal, leasing versus buying especially of desktop and issues around data portability and security (on USBs versus paper)