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