Monday 28 November 2016

Wolverhampton weekly newsletter #6

I am assembling a list of “moles” which have surfaced that don’t so far appear in planning and tracking documents that I think I have seen.  My aim is to keep a personal track of this list, how I see them (which I haven’t validated yet), and track any decisions that are made. I am going to keep on digging!

I have had several more introduction meetings during the week.  As a result of one of the discussions, I will be meeting the Marketing team leaders to understand where they are going with digital marketing strategy.

We have continued to progress the systems/data investigation work and provided updates.  The request is now posted to the University contracts system and we are speaking with interested parties.

The Collabco event was very well attended although I only made the morning networking session.  Reports indicated that it had been extremely well received and we have established ourselves as the “reference site” for them in UK HE. There is an excellent testimonial video from staff and students.

On Wednesday evening, I arranged to meet the interim IT Director at the University of Staffordshire.  It was useful to get an understanding of what is happening at another local University, which has some similarities with us.  They are embarked on a new Digital Strategy too.  They are addressing this with a staff review, scaling down of remote and out of hours support and bringing Faculty and Directorate IT satellites into the orbit of IT which has been separated from Library.

On Thursday, I spent several hours on a tour of the Data Centre/Server Rooms and related spaces.  I have taken some photographs and will endeavour to put them together with a commentary.  We also visited the switchboard and security areas in MA building as we were passing.  There were a number of key observations. One of the “interesting” things was coming across another significant sized DAS space outside the MI Server Room with a bunch of test equipment, storage and office space - I understand that this used to be the location of IT back in the days before MX building.

Final meeting of the week a catch up with Faculty IT who were cordially invited to the Christmas Do which was finalised this week.  We booked Slaters with a visit on fireworks night as the Christmas Lights were turned on.  We appear to have at least 30 people who have expressed an interest so hopefully it will work out OK.

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