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.