UCISA Conference Day One (March 11) - Blackboard

Spent this morning in a workshop hosted by Blackboard on managed hosting. The issues around the participants from other Universities were around "extended hours" (which was referred to as 24x7 but under closer scrutiny this was too broad a term), overseas and international collaboration activities (and managing support for students on those programs), a specific about students based in China (accessing resources through firewalls etc). There was also a fair amount of debate about the total cost of ownership of providing services whether managed or not, including the capital and recurrent elements, and of course the people investment. One Institution has five people running the system infrastructure. Interesting that none have 5 nines SLAs (or SLAs at all). Quite a debate about the mission critical nature of VLEs. So how mission critical are they really? more important than email? more important than getting out to the internet? And if they are so important, our typical culture says if it's important we must keep control by doing it ourselves? The actual business case was coming down to other things like ensuring change is well managed, tested and resourced; difficulties managing a dynamic and interactive environment; finding at risk windows for rigorous test and changeover of systems; delivery of 99.7% SLAs with a guarantee etc. One unrelated snippet worth remembering: the hidden cost of JANET for campus students accessing managed hosting solutions – the recurrent annual osts of outsourcing e-mail were an additional £30k per annum (£30k to £60k) for one Insitution.