IT Services Newsletter #7

Student Satisfaction Survey

At LSS Board, it was agreed to conduct a baseline student satisfaction survey of IT Services at the University of Bradford. This will be for a relatively small cohort of students in the first instance, aiming to get a representative sample of UG and PG students. We will be using an agency called TORA (The Oxford Research Agency) as they have experience in the UK HE sector and they have worked with other UK Universities. We need to be wary of survey “overload” and in future are looking to combine surveys with other colleagues in LSS to maximise returns and minimise the impact on students. This is an attempt to move away from some of the more anecdotal evidence about the customer service provision and IT Service provision to a more specific and statistically significant sample. More details to follow, but if you believe that there are any questions that we should be asking students then please let me know in the next couple of weeks.

Extending out of hours IT support in person

A date has been set for a “soft launch” of the NorMAN out of hours support service. The proposed date is April 6^th – the start of the new tax year, but no relation! “Soft launch” means we will not publicise widely so that we can set reasonable expectations for staff and students of what can be done through a remote service point. The initial contract is for one year. This shared service is operated from Northumbria University and is a 365 day service covering weekdays 5:30pm through 07:30am and through the weekend and public holidays. Thanks to Roger Goodair for co-ordinating with Northumbria and pulling together various documentation to pass to NorMAN for training and set-up of the service.

Environmentally friendly “pull” printing now trialling at School of Health

Another “soft launch” this time at the Unity Building of the Pharos system which combines printer and photocopying facilities for students and introduces a concept called “pull” printing. What this means is that students send something to print and then they release the print using a station located physically next to the printer they have selected. It should avoid piles of unwanted print outs on printers, saving some paper, and saving some students money on the paper they never collect. It also means that they can collect print at their own convenience at a time and place that suits them best. Once the trial is completed, the plan is to move all other centrally-provided student printers onto the Pharos system for the start of next academic session. Thanks to Dougie McHattie and Simon Bower for getting this ready to launch and for supporting the students and library staff during the launch period at the School of Health.

SAINT hardware upgraded

During the “at risk” period in December, IT Services moved the SAINT test and development services on to new hardware systems using a new “architecture” that is more resilient and provides better performance. This was followed up on Thursday 26th February and Friday 27th February when the “live” service was migrated onto new hardware components during the University 'reading' week. By completing the work by 2pm Friday it meant that e:Vision, online applications and enquiries were not affected over the weekend. The upgrade has been successful overall - there are a few issues that are being followed up including with third party packages/suppliers. Overall performance has been good and can be monitored at: http://www.brad.ac.uk/admin/SAINT/servicestatus.php

There were a lot of IT Services people involved in this exercise, and it also involved the SAINT Team in Academic Administration. A session is planned to pull together the lessons learned for such a complex undertaking to transfer knowledge to other system upgrades. Thanks to Philip Briggs and Tim Squire-Watt for co-ordinating all these activities.

ICT Service Desk Annual Report

At the last IT Board, our colleagues in ICT Support provided a comprehensive report on activity and service levels during the calendar year 2008. The report will soon be made available via the intranet . The team were able to report that over 90% of jobs raised with them through our job tracking system (RMS) were completed within target, and that the total volume of jobs increased by 12% over 2007. In February 2009, the service desk team also began a new customer satisfaction feedback process which resulted in 5% of our customers responding to a simple information request when there job was completed. Over 95% of those who responded rated the service excellent or very satisfied. This customer feedback will be continued on a monthly basis and will be reported to the IT board. This information will shortly be posted to the web for all to see. Thanks to Christine Thacker and Roger Goodair for putting the report together and for introducing these customer feedback initiatives.

Web Content Management System (CMS) and Web Team update

The e-strategy funded project on CMS is coming to an end and work is moving from a project status to an ongoing business status. The final stage of the CMS Project will be a formal agreement on the end of the project. This is envisaged to take place during March. The final activities of the project will be for Russell Allen and Claire Gibbons to write a final stage report and a project report which will include a section on the lessons learnt. The Press Office was prioritised as the first new site using the Site Manager product from Terminal Four. This has been developed and went live on 24^th February; see: http://www.brad.ac.uk/mediacentre/ . The Web Team has now been formed with the appointments of Paddy Callaghan as the Web Developer and Kate Wellham as the Web Editor. Congratulations to Claire Gibbons and her team on the successful launch of the new technology, with support from colleagues in IT Services.

Combating e-mail overload

Do you suffer from receiving or sending too much email? I guess sending newsletters via email makes me guilty! A number of people came together last week to discuss the issue of e-mail overload which has been reported through consultation forums e.g. the Making Knowledge Work sessions for the corporate plan, and through recent meetings with representatives in academic schools e.g. SCIM and SSIS specifically. Did you know that we receive around 1 Million messages a week, that 95% of them are rejected before delivery to individual mailboxes (junk, spam etc) and that there are approximately 25,000 active email user accounts for our staff and students. Each message we send costs about a third of a penny. We agreed various approaches in this meeting which will be written up and circulated – Gartner Group (IT industry consultants) make various recommendations to tackle email overload that have been “proven” in case studies. The first thing they suggested we do is ask a lot of questions prior to taking action. On that basis, we agreed to ask specific questions in a staff survey which is happening soon on staff well-being.

UCISA National Conference 2009

During March (March 11-13) there is an annual management conference for the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association. Last year I was elected (unopposed – no other volunteers!) to Chair the conference for the three years commencing 2009. This is my first event in this role and it is at the new Liverpool Exhibition and Conference Centre. There is a parallel poster session taking place this year, and John Dermo has agreed to provide a poster and represent Bradford University to promote the Computer Aided Assessment project funded partly by the JISC which was launched in January. It is great to be able to promote our work on a “national stage” and I am grateful to Sara Eyre and John Dermo for putting this together. Geoff Bell and I are also travelling early to the conference for a pre-event presentation by Blackboard on its managed hosting solutions. The conference includes an exhibition with over 60 key suppliers to Higher Education and this is one of many events and seminars taking place around the conference programme. I'll be blogging from the conference over the next three days.