Gartner Group Higher Education Event (Egham)

A little behind real time here is a brief extract of my notes from Day One. Will attempt to link the actual presentation slides when they are provided (post event) as stopped taking more detail notes when realised that slides would be provided!

There were five presentations covering the Higher Education Scenario, application strategy, application development methodologies, software licensing and pricing and finally learning in virtual spaces. Here are some of the key points noted during the day

Quote: at the core of Higher Education is a meeting of minds not a bringing together of bodies – and technology is one of the key enablers – using technology to enable our Universities.

An interesting equation: yield = function (people x processes x technology)/investment. Not sure that this is right – if you increase investment it decreases the yield? Maybe lower investment enables higher yield?

An interesting graphical slide on strategy – getting from A to oBjective – and this is a case of story telling so that our students through to the senior management team can relate and understand (that sounds like a great challenge).

An interesting technology strategy map – putting the key issues on a 2x2 matrix comparing two axes: organisational efficiency (improves institutional ROI) versus personal productivity (improves student/faculty experience). Strategic importance of each technology – low, medium, high.

Do you know how many applications that you have? Only one hand in the room. Now is the time to get control of this. Question - what if the presenter was a loss adjuster – someone has broken into your University and stolen all your applications and all of you data and backups – so what is the value of the applications portfolio? This is an asset and it has a value – but what is that value – the one University has computed this at £29 Million.

The role of the IT Service as an asset manager – managing the information and system assets for the organisation. If you are an asset manager not an expense manager you are investing to increase the asset value/adding more value to the organisation, not someone whose job is to try and decrease expense (or overhead).

Economic Crisis will lead to suppliers doing some laundry on their supported applications and system – introducing RISK. Why have you got the application portfolio that you have - through a series of perfectly valid silo decisions – each decision with a fully justified business case i.e. an accidental architecture.

Quote: You cannot buy a PUPPY you buy a DOG. The majority of expense is incurred after birth – looking at Total Cost of Ownership of applications – if you own an application for 15 years from the decision to the go live to get the new system this represents only 8% of the TCO. ie 92% will be incurred in the years after going live.

Challenge: Show me where you are investing your time as CIO on the 92% - most IT organisations love squeaky wheel syndrome like six year old’s playing football where we all run after the problem – great firefighters. In organisations which value firefighters you will find lots of arsonists (then people can rush around as heroes).

For every application there should be a projection based on (a) next 7 years or (b) half the expected remaining life of the application. And this has to be based on our understanding of what we know now e.g. current strategy might be managing an application down and reduce cost, and squeezing the value from it rather than investing in new functionality.

Also who is the service owner? Do we have a name against each of our services/applications – responsibility must be vested in an individual role but this is not a “user” view – but the business managers/leaders - the process owners responsible for the outcomes of that service or system. Its the same for the supply side ie no good having the application expert (their baby) rather need someone with an enterprise view. In Universities this includes students of course – proxies to represent them in this process.

Quote: If you want friends in Washington - get a dog (Truman and now Obama) – you will disappoint more people than you please.

All plans are based on a consistent set of assumptions – ensure all assumptions are identified and documented – people don’t talk about their fundamental underlying assumptions.

Proposal to do this as a pilot for 2 or 3 selected applications and use separate teams to see what they come up with (Darwinian – don’t be prescriptive).

The stakeholder community must generate options – what are the choices available to the management team. We have a litre bottle of demand and a 5 oz cup of supply (good visual). First option is the “do nothing” – what are the costs, benefits, risks and timescales for doing something – to make the best potential use of the 5oz cup. This can be used to create the application portfolio opportunities and priorities.

The Cost of “Quality Of Service” will increase over time as the profolio becomes larger and more complex and the agility and responsiveness will decrease where there are lots of hetergenous components – that is if we do nothing i.e. just do this for me – silo benefit not organisational benefit – that will make you popular with them (the 8% of the cost) but what about the total cost of ownership. CEO and CFO want to see the opposite – agility improving, cost down. Need some investment in the quality of data so that we can make better informed decisions.

Jim Duggan Gartner Research – TIME methodology – Tolerate, Invest, Migrate, Eliminate – on a 2x2 matrix comparing technical integrity and business value. JISC animation worth looking at on SOA – good way to understand this - was recommended.