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?