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...