IT Services Newsletter #14

Finance Business Services System (FBSS) Project
At October’s FBSS Project Board there was a message of thanks and appreciation to IT Service teams in delivering the COA system infrastructure against tight time timescales to enable the training and development work to commence according to schedule. There was a particular appreciation from COA on the ease of use and capability of the Sun Global Desktop (SGD) set-up that they were provided with during this process. Thank you to those involved for making this part of the project happen so effectively.

Award for ALPS - Supported by IT Services at Bradford
A University project - The ALPS CETL – won the 2009 Handheld Learning Awards for Innovation & Best Practice. This involves colleagues from across the University and our participation is led by the School of Health Studies. We are particularly pleased that this award is shared with John Fairhall and Zee Miran who provide the pioneering “shared support service” on behalf of the consortium based at the University of Bradford. Congratulations to everyone involved and especially John and Zee.

Shared Services and Collaborative Working Project
Geoff Bell and I attended a full afternoon’s workshop with KMPG the facilitators. The results of that workshop have just been circulated – basically there are a number of significant hurdles in respect of IT collaborations because the Council have outsourced to IBM (two years into a ten year contract), the Health Trust have ruled IT “out of scope” and the West Yorkshire Police service already act as a regional collaborator within the Police service and have a number of policy (not technical) issues with sharing data networks for fairly obvious reasons. On this basis, the potential areas that the group came up with were fairly limited but included less controversial areas such as printing/copying (where all participants have “spare” capacity including InPrint and Design at Bradford University) and also shared call centre operations. Our interest was in Clearing/Enrolment and potential plans to contact alumni for fundraising in the New Year.

Leeds College of Music (LCM) Merger
There has been a lot of activity in the last month preparing a bid to the Funding Council (HEFCE) for the set-up costs of merging the University with the College of Music. This has been done in consultation with colleagues at LCM. There are a number of new opportunities from closer collaboration with what would become a new “Academic School” and there are also a number of challenges with merging a wide range of corporate and support services and systems. We have identified a wide range of services that would be affected, and this could lead to a significant project for us, if the project is approved towards the end of December by the HEFCE Board.

Student Account Provisioning Workshop
Russell Allen facilitated the first of several workshops with representatives from every Academic School and colleagues from IT Services. We are looking at how we currently provision IT accounts for new students, with a particular focus on the needs of flexible, distant and “non traditional” student entry. This is going to be a growth area in the new Corporate Plan for the University and we are trying to facilitate some more streamlined and effective working procedures. It is already clear that the current approaches in Schools can be fragmented and sometimes down to individual preference – and we reached a consensus that there were some opportunities to make this better in terms of both student experience and reducing our manual administration. The next workshop takes place in late November.

New University IT Strategy 2009-14
The new IT Strategy was approved at Information Strategy Committee (ISC) - subject to a inclusion of Research requirements.

Improving the student printing experience
The self-service student printing facility is continuing to work very effectively. We will hopefully be able to compare the print volumes with the new service compared to the previous system and see if there has been a reduction (as forecast) in the volume of paper that is being printed. We will need to factor in the additional student numbers on campus – it seems even busier than usual, perhaps affected by the closure of the Communal Building for refurbishment. During the last month an additional printer was fully commissioned on Level Zero, potentially increasing capacity by 50 percent. There are plans to further increase capacity for the busy end of calendar year assignment deadlines.

Leading-edge computer aided assessment
Hopefully you will have seen the article in the current News and Views around learning and teaching. It’s a very positive piece. The University is hosting a major UCISA seminar on e-assessment on November 4th with John Dermo as one of the keynote speakers, and involving other colleagues from LSS and IT Services. We are establishing a very positive position in the HE sector around e-assessment and should continue to be proud of this association.

Update on Library Management System (BradFinder) project
All the major modules are now implemented, with telephone renewals now operational. Next steps are transferring Virtual Scholars records to BRADfinder (the project starts in November), implementing the Electronic Resources module to allow better management of the Library’s electronic journals and databases packages (starts January) and lots of new functionality for BRADfinder (email alerts for new items based on saved searches, RSS feeds for items on order etc). For the photocopiers in the Library, a trial has started of the Ricoh iMFP software, that will enable printing via Pharos on a photocopier.