From a Distance...

Learning from London 2012

noreply@blogger.com (chris sexton) — Thu, 16 May 2013 14:28:00 +0000

Emma Norris from the Institute for Government on What can we learn from London 2012. Author of this report.

Scale and complexity was huge.
Serious challenges along the way including security, financial etc
But was perceived to be very successful

So, how did we deliver such a complex, risky project so well?

Two main ways of doing it, new ways of working and new ways of engagement

New way of working
Politics was dealt with head on, using its advantages and minimising risks. Real openness between different parties. Turned it into an advantage

People and skills.
World class recruitment and leadership in Finance, HT, IT, project management etc
Also hired the best people to the teams, mixed teams, multi skilled
Stability , personnel stayed the course

Design and governance
Delivery bodies were built from scratch, responsibility spread across different government departments. Everyone had clear roles and responsibilities in different organisations. Lots placed at arms length form government

Programme management and delivery
Failing to deliver on time was not an option!
Focused on getting the scope right, and didn't change it
Large investment in project management £725m spent on it!
Delegate authority to bodies such as TfL, Olympic delivery authority

Some failures. Eg G4S security, they tried to treat it as business as usual. Didn't step up and adopt new ways of working.

New ways of engagement
Budget. Often public sector projects go over budget. This process was transparent. Quarterly reporting that drove efficicnet behaviour.

Vision
LCOG created a vision that tied everyone together whilst allowing flexibility to meet all agendas including benefits to London, the country and sports participation

New skill sets.
Civil servants developed new expertise in major project management and delivery
Commercial skills and intelligent client role developed in partnership with private sector.
Are these skills being redeployed?

Some overarching lessons:
Project trumps silo
Bring together right people in effective teams
Personnel stability and personal relationships matter
Political cooperation creates space for project success
Change and time discipline are crucial
Limit Innovation
Arms length bodies and the public sector can deliver
Budget transparency matters
Design in safety and sustainability from the start
Beware false economies
Plan, assure, test
Be bold and ambitious

Lots of lessons from this that can be applied to all major projects. Especially with £727m is available ;-)

Excellent talk, and I suspect the report I linked to at the beginning would be an interesting read.

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How to make sure a 70 year old business model stays relevant

noreply@blogger.com (chris sexton) — Thu, 16 May 2013 13:27:00 +0000

Next up, Mike Dixon from Citizens Advice.
Interesting body. Considered to be lovely, and trusted. Everyone has a soft spot for them.
12.6m unique users of the website in last year, but not a good site, rated about 3/10. So, it's not all about technology!

Now looking to digitally transform their services. Their guiding principles are:
Content tailored to user profiles
Flexible digital publishing
Truly accessible, responsive design
Assisted digital-ready content driving core processes across channels
Easy out of the box solutions for local bureaux
Devolved content creation and management
Integrated social functions including peer to peer sharing, knowledge sharing.

Can't buy the above off the shelf!

Again, taking a digital by design approach with agile development. Also, pruning web pages as they move to a new CMS.

Looking at personalised social intranet. Has to be more compelling than the Daily Mail sidebar of shame. Or as he put it, the sidebar with a newspaper attached. If your content isn't compelling, people won't read it.

Fast moving digital content and debate is as important as more traditional forms of influence. Need a mixture of:
Slow web, downloads, projects, serious pieces
Integrated team and people blogs
Twitter, Facebook, integrated feeds
Tumblr etc, fast stuff. Snappy, rolling, short cuts

6 months ago, no social media presence. Now have >300 active twitter accounts, sentiment analysis shows very positive reaction. Huge number of followers. Really driven by one person. So, can change your organisations presence and reach very quickly.

Great talk, and although from a different sector, much in common.

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Data

noreply@blogger.com (chris sexton) — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:04:00 +0000

Next up 3 short talks about data

1. Technical director of Open Data Institute On Adapting to an Open Data World

What is open data?
Data for everyone, not limited by funding, who you are, or what you intend to do with it.
ata that is reusable, published with a permissive licence, machine readable in standard format, reliable and trustworthy.
Has to be good enough quality to base decisions on.

Accountability - citizens expect to know more.
Protection of Freedoms Act 2012.. Right to have data behind an FoI response in a machine readable form so you can analyse it yourself.
Move to more transparency, eg Tesco website with detailed information about all of their products. ( can't help thinking this might not be the best example following the horse meat scandal :-))

Open data can help with efficiencies. Can inform key activities, make better decisions.
Also improves collaboration eg open street map, legislation.gov.uk
To get the best out of open data, have to engage a community around it.
Use of open data requires tools - publication, analysis, visualisation, interactive guides, questionnaires.
Better quality data is easier to reuse. Need to focus on quality that makes a difference.
Open Data Institute trying to help organisations who are publishing and consuming data.
They run short course, lectures, on- line guides, training and consultancy.

2. Head of public sector consulting from IPL talking about Data Headaches.
Total amount of global data grew to 2.7 zetabytes during 2012, increase of 48%. Not just structured data anymore, mainly unstructured. Digital by default can only mean one thing, more data. Double edged sword. Online delivery of services cuts cots, but there is a cost in managing the data produced. Not solely a technology issue, requires people with the right skills.
People need to be skilled in information management and this requires a culture change, it not something that "IT can do".
Regulation and legislation provide the stick ( CEOs can go to jail). That's OK then as long as its not CIOs......
IM basics, housekeeping, metadata, quality. Everyone should be responsible for this on their own data. Think deleting emails. :-)

But, will need specialists to manage specialist data. Need skills in:
Assurance, data quality, master data management
Retention, records management, archiving, digital continuity (maintaining access in the future)
Finding, enterprise searching.

To get true value out of data, need not just to store it, but to analyse it. Trend analysis, predictive analysis, performance analysis.
Data visualisation with dashboards, heat maps, bubblemaps.
Layering data, eg with GIS.
Need people with skills in data analytics, and information designers to exploit the data in a good presentation layer.

Can ignore it, only going to get worse, have to do something about it- asset management is critical!

3. Independent consultant talking about legal aspects of data and cloud services

Legal risks of new technologies not just technological, but reputational.
All very contextual, and little certainty in this area.
All countries have different laws, but is a lot of guidance available.
Interesting clarification on whether data has to be kept in UK ( it doesn't).
Her view is that all personal data has to be kept in European Economic Area. Doesn't fit with our view. Hasn't mentioned safe harbor. In a question asked at the end it was acknowledged that it does apply.

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In With The New - 21st century government

noreply@blogger.com (chris sexton) — Thu, 16 May 2013 10:27:00 +0000

In London today for the Eduserv Symposium: In With The New. An interesting agenda, based on delivering customer centric services in a "digital by default" era. None of the speakers are from the HE sector which makes it double interesting. I'll try and blog the key points, but as usual, they may be in note form and you may have to fill in the missing bits yourself.

Opening session is David Cotterill from the Cabinet Office. Formerly from DWP I've blogged about seeing David talk before about Ideas Street, which was the catalyst for us purchasing Ideascale.

Today David is talking about 21st Century Government, the way the public sector is using technology to deliver services. He works in the Government Digital Service, which is very exciting.

Old model for technology in government, multi year sourcing contracts with a limited number of suppliers. Inadequate competition, smaller innovative suppliers locked out. Bad for users, bad for taxpayer, bad for growth.
Outsourced IT to one or more large suppliers. IT treated as not particularly important, "noncore" so could be outsourced.

Can't bundle IT up, need to break it down. Mission iT services and digital public services - these are unique services to meet customer needs. Concentrate on these. Back office ERP, and infrastructure are more commodity, can be swopped in and out. Use open standards so can swop to different providers and ensure decent competition. Unbundling the legacy big contracts. Effects are starting to be felt with big savings being realised.

What is 21st century government? Will involve things like gov.uk. Simpler, clearer,faster. Build a platform and then build services on top. Eg licence applications, e-petitions. Make it easier for people to do the things they need to do.

They've developed an IPad app for PM to use to run the country:-)

Key part of digital strategy is to look at the big services that citizens most often require from government and change them so they are digital by default. Digital teams being created to change the way services are delivered.

Need multidisciplinary teams - developers, designers, product and service managers, policy, comms etc. Must start with user needs.
Can't build websites with tools designed for building bridges. Previously, long requirement gathering process, very detailed spec, develop. 2 yrs later show it to users. Users don't like it!

Now, more discovery work up front on what user needs, produce alpha, test with users then either throw away and produce another alpha or go to beta. This method is cheaper, and faster and meets users needs better.

They have a dashboard for all services for GDS. Also a Government service design manual. Eg before go live a minister must be able to complete a transaction on your service. Also Cabinet Office standards hub, this is open and people can contribute. Definitely worth a look.

So, in summary, can build services that meet user needs and create big savings if you use open standards, open platforms, put user needs first and use agile, fast development.

Great talk from David, as usual.

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Cat test

noreply@blogger.com (chris sexton) — Tue, 14 May 2013 22:03:00 +0000

I need to do a post to test my twitterfeed which has been playing up. So here's a picture of my cat taking over my bed, and my laptop.

Petit animal isn't he?

Here am I sitting in a tin can

noreply@blogger.com (chris sexton) — Tue, 14 May 2013 20:43:00 +0000

Another Service Strategy Board yesterday. More project progress to discuss, a couple of successful project closures, but no new projects to agree. There's a couple of joint ones we are heavily involved in which re just about to start. One between ourselves and Corporate Affairs to redesign the University website, and one with Planning and Governance Services to look at coding structures in our systems. Some other developments we discussed included where we're going on MOOCs and the provision of creative media production facilities for staff. Unified comms, including integration with Google is going to be piloted, and we've got an interesting pilot going in the Information Commons with Ideascale, ideas and innovation management software. Looks like its going well, with lots of ideas and suggestions coming in. News from all of our projects is here - as I write this it's not been updated with the latest news as the meeting was only yesterday, but it will be very soon, and we update it every month.

Other things in the last couple of days that have kept me busy include a meeting between UEB and all Heads of Departments where we had a very interesting roundtable discussion about our curricula and things which are in addition to the core subjects - interdisciplinary studies, enterprise, student activities, civic engagement.

Those of you who've followed me for a while will know how excited I am by space, and on clear dark nights I often go outside to watch the ISS pass over. Over the past few weeks I've been captivated following the commander of expedition 35, Commander Chris Hadfield on Twitter. He's been in space for 146 days, and has done more to involve people and educate them about space and the science that goes on in the ISS than any other astronaut. His photos are amazing, as are his vodcasts (one of my favourites was how you throw up in space), and the news coverage about his cover of Bowie's Space Oddity must mean that you've all seen it. Well, he and his fellow astronauts returned safely to earth today in a Russian Soyuz rocket, and Twitter won't quite be the same again!

Enterprising Students

noreply@blogger.com (chris sexton) — Thu, 09 May 2013 08:28:00 +0000

Last night I was honoured to be invited to the Vice-Chancellor's Celebration

of Enterprise Dinner. The University has a strong commitment to embedding enterprise education, and this year we've had the first ever Vice Chancellor's Celebration of Enterprise, a week long festival of over 50 enterprising events and activities across the campus. Last night was the presentation of awards to our enterprising students. There are three categories - Commercial Concept, Business StartUp and Social Concept. This year there was even an audience award, where the 3 students nominated in each category had to do a one minute presentation on stage, and then we got the chance to vote with voting devices. The students were amazing, all stuck to one minute, and also their concepts over in an enthusiastic and engaging way. We had poems, cartwheels, props and even improvised comedy. The winner was from our table, and Guillermo had invented a new design of temporary structure called HIVE which was formed from interlocking triangles.

The winners in the other categories were all very well deserved. The Business Startup was shared between a concept for a "cycle hub" in the city centre and a company supplying polymer based oil and fuel filters for engines. The Social Concept was won by The Bear Socks Company. A company selling socks to help bears. Obviously. The Commercial Concept ( which was won last year by Edward Miller who formed ReAxive which has produced all of our Google Street view images and the gigapixel graduation photos) was won by Nourish, a fast food company producing high quality nutritious, locally sourced breakfast and lunches as an alternative to other fast food outlets. Particularly pleasing to me was that Nourish has been set up by the daughter of one of CiCS staff members, so good luck to Lauren and congrats to the proud Mum Susan.

A great night in a spectacular setting, and a fantastic showcase for our enterprising students. Credit also to our inspirational Director of Enterprise Education, Professor Elena Rodriguez-Falcon who does a fantastic job.

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Digital by Design

noreply@blogger.com (chris sexton) — Thu, 09 May 2013 08:00:00 +0000

The Cabinet Office have an initiative to modernise government called Digital by Design, and that could form the tag line for the University's new Digital Engagement Strategy. Although led by our Corporate Affairs department, it is a collaborative project with us and aims to make us the best in the sector at digital communications and marketing. On Tuesday I attended the University Executive Board with the director of Corporate Affairs to present the outline to them, and I'm pleased to say they were strongly supportive. We want our communications activity to be digitally led, not taking printed documents and converting them to digital. This includes everything from the prospectus to our events calendars. We've already made a start by redesigning the University home page, and the rest of the website will follow, and we've launched the Virtual Open Days and Google Street view of our buildings. Much more exciting stuff to come, with the focus on producing exciting, rich, high quality digital content. Hopefully,we'll be expanding our creative media facilities and support to allow staff as well as students to produce material.

There's also going to be a bigger focus across the University on engaging with our customers on social media. This is something we do very well already, especially in CiCs of course, but we need to spread this across the institution.

The redevelopment of our portal, MUSE, fits well into the strategy as it will allow us to surface content from the website to our staff and students in a more focused and targeted way. Eventually we'll be expanding this to prospective students, alumni and other stakeholders. It's an exciting project, and going well. Here's a sneak preview of what it might look like.

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We're on Streetview

noreply@blogger.com (chris sexton) — Fri, 03 May 2013 13:09:00 +0000

Edward, our friend and graduate who set up Reaxive, has done some sterling work for us photographing our degree ceremonies in very high definition and turning them into taggable pictures on Facebook, and he's also done some Google streetview images of the interior of the Information Commons. We were so impressed with his work, that the University engaged him to extend this across the campus. We have a Virtual Open Day in our department of Physics and Astronomy where you can walk around the Hicks Building, and seven other buildings are now open on Streetview.

Today we even made it into The Guardian!

Sharing, collaborating and more awards.

noreply@blogger.com (chris sexton) — Thu, 02 May 2013 18:07:00 +0000

In the HE sector we are very collaborative, much more so than in the private sector, despite being in competition for students and research grants. It's a theme that came up a lot in the last couple of days, as I've been out of Sheffield. On Tuesday I traveled to another University where I am a member of their new IT Committee. They have some major projects, replacing nearly all of their enterprise systems, including finance, HR, payroll and student. Because they obviously like a challenge, they are using a best of breed approach rather than an integrated system to cover more than one set of functionality :-) That's in addition to the other challenges we are all facing and other projects in areas such as learning and teaching and research. I'm there as an external to offer advice and guidance where I can, and give an outsiders perspective. Of course, it's not entirely altruistic, as there is a lot of learning to be done from visiting other institutions. In this case, I learned of the existence of the McKinsey Report into The Social Economy: Unlocking Value and Productivity through Social Technologies. I've had a quick look and the summary looks very interesting.

Yesterday I was at the Janet Brokerage Advisory Board. Well, that's how it started out, but as the funding which established the Brokerage was from the University Modernisation Fund which was time limited, we're now a Sector Advisory Board looking at Cloud Solutions. Extremely interesting and productive discussion, and one of the most enjoyable meetings I've been to for a while. We were looking at the way JANET, as part of the new JISC, could help Universities with adopting cloud solutions. What could be revenue generating (ie what would the sector be prepared to pay for), and what should be provided free as part of what you would expect from an NREN. We were looking at services, not just infrastructure - SaaS, IaaS and PaaS (Software, Infrastructure and Platoform as a Service). JANET are working on getting vendor agreements with our major cloud vendors (eg Microsoft, Google and Dropbox) to save HEIs legal fees and make services easier to adopt. We also talked about HPC and how much of that could be in the cloud, and why we are building our own. Collaboration with each other played a big part of our discussions - on procurement, on negotiation of contracts, on sharing facilities, services, good practice and business plans. All good stuff, and I look forward to seeing the business plan which is the next stage of the evolution of this service.

Last week I posted about Tim Birkhead's award for teaching together with the video that we helped with, and tonight it was good to go to a celebration in his department. They were also celebrating being awarded Athena Swan Silver status which is great news for them. The Athena Swan charter recognises employment good practice for women in STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine). The University overall holds a bronze award, and this is the first silver award in the Institution, so well done on a good week of news for Animal and Plant Sciences.

Various meetings and Peregrines

noreply@blogger.com (chris sexton) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 10:21:00 +0000

On a train, on way to Oxford for the second time in a few days. Last Friday I was at the first organising meeting for the next UCISA Management conference. The last one has only just finished, and we're staring again. Trying to think of appropriate themes, and good speakers. We had some excellent ones this year so it will be a hard act to follow. Today I'm on my way to Oxford University where I am an external adviser on their IT Committee. They have a very different governance model to us, and have some major projects on the go so it will be interesting to see how I can contribute.

Yesterday I seemed to be in back to back meetings all day. These included a catch up on our Equality Objectives project, particularly looking at diversity issues in our student population, followed by the closure of the first phase of our Incident Contacts project which has been very successful. Also had our first SRDS (Staff Review and Development Scheme) planning meeting for this year, and a catch up with colleagues about our new University Digital Strategy.

Open in the background on my mac all day is the live stream for our Peregrine Falcons, George and Mildred, who are incubating their 4 eggs. They're due to hatch in the next 2 to 3 days, so there should be a flurry of activity, and I suspect some gruesome feeding and disemboweling of pigeons! We're handling the live stream ourselves now after some initial teething problems with the initial supplier, and it seems to be holding up really well.

Mildred didn't seem to like the grey paint, so pecked it off!

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Inspirational lectures

noreply@blogger.com (chris sexton) — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 15:56:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I went to the Inspiration for Life lectures which supported the charity set up by Tim Richardson, one of our lecturers who died earlier this year. I was truly inspired by some great lectures.

Thanks to some stirling work by our Learning and Teaching Technologies team, all lectures were recorded, and most are now available to watch.
You can see them here.
You have to click in "view more weeks" after opening the link.

All are good, and everyone will have different favourites. Mine include Brendon Stone, Mike Braddick, Elena Rodriguez-Falcon, Ed Daws and Vanessa Toulmin. But really, they are all worth watching, don't do it all in one go through! Not without plenty of coffee and energy drinks.

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Scholarships and awards

noreply@blogger.com (chris sexton) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 22:46:00 +0000

Back from London on an early train this morning, and into some catching up with the rest of the Executive Team and a facilitator we use for our training activities. We've got our annual awaydays coming up and are planning what to do. Current suggestions are around engagement - engagement with our staff and with our customers. Then a liaison meeting with our colleagues in the Library where we talked about identity management, revising and updating our Information Strategy and research data management.

This evening I went to a scholarship presentation evening organised by our Alumni office - thanks to the generosity of many alumni, parents and friends we have awarded 38 undergraduate and 6 postgraduate scholarships worth over £125,000 to deserving and talented students who are in need of extra financial support to fulfil their true potential. It was great to see the students get their certificates:

And also to see a couple of student societies who get support from the alumni fund - the Singers Society and the Dance Sports Society. Great performances from both.

I was also really pleased to hear tonight that Professor Tim Birkhead from our Animal and Plant Sciences Department has won Bioscience Teacher of the Year. There's a really good video about him, which we played a part in getting made.... Well done Tim - a very deserved award.

Networking

noreply@blogger.com (chris sexton) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 08:28:00 +0000

Last night I attended another networking event at the Chemistry Club. I've been to a few now, and find them invaluable for making contacts and finding out what is going on in other sectors. I had the pleasure of talking to a number of CIOs from the government sector including the Ministry of Justice, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and our own BIS. Much of the discussion was around some of the challenges around BYOD (Bring your Own Device) and the growth of social media. Many sectors are interested to talk to us about both of these. BYOD is not really a concept for us, students have been turning up with many different devices and expecting them to connect and work on our network for years. They were also exercised by the announcement that the post of Government CIO had been abolished, and that digital reform of government would be pushed through by the Cabinet Office Government Digital Service, with Mike Bracken who spoke at our recent UCISA conference leading on this. His blog is definitely worth a read to see what's happening in the government digital space.

I also spoke to a couple of suppliers, and had an interesting chat with the Head of Future Media at the BBC about where things were going in that area. Our main speaker was Lewis Wiltshire, Director of Media Partnerships at Twitter, who spoke about how twitter can be used in different sectors to reach out to people and enhance your "brand", the definition of which varies according to what sector you're in. He had some interesting statistics, 40% of twitter users never tweet but just read content, 60% of tweets are during or about television programmes, in the UK 80% of tweets are from mobile devices compared to 60% in the rest of the world.
He talked about successful twitter campaigns, and how hash tags can be used very successfully to communicate and influence millions of people. Afterwards I had a chat with him about when hash tags go bad, and what can be done to avoid that.

Very useful evening. In my position I think it's important to network externally as much as internally, to get out there as much as possible, to find out what's going on, what we should be watching, what other sectors are doing, and make contacts. You never know when you might need them :-)

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Back of a napkin and creative problem solving

noreply@blogger.com (chris sexton) — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 21:41:00 +0000

One of the final sessions at the Gartner HE sessions last week was a workshop looking at new ways of communicating strategies. Instead of lots of words, we had a go at using pictures. Someone once said if you can't communicate your vision, it doesn't matter how good your strategy is. So, we had a go at a technique described in the book, Back of a Napkin by Dan Roam. Jot down some ideas, and draw some pictures. Mine was a student with a smiley face holding an iPad with a world map on it in one hand and a martini in the other. Got it? Student centred (happy student), mobile (iPad), world class (map) and anytime, anyplace, anywhere (Martini!). Wonder if there's a job for me in design?

Today we had the second of our Registrar's events as part of the Sheffield Professionals - a series of initiatives to ensure that we value the talent of our professional staff. Another excellent session with representatives from professional service staff from across the University, and a mixture of talks, discussion and networking. We even did some creative problem solving based around thinking of an object, then describing its attributes, then using those to think of solutions to problems. Good fun and quite productive once you got used to it! At the last event in November we asked participants for one big question which we subsequently answered - this time we got more, so the page will be updated soon.

Information - a cost, a risk and an opportunity

noreply@blogger.com (chris sexton) — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 12:28:00 +0000

Session on Information.

Four major drivers changing the way we collect and manage information:

1 Customer engagement. We need to know the profile of our prospective and current students, need to know them better. To do this we need to aggregate information from different sources better. Challenges in doing this include variations in data quality and different data models from different sources. There are many more ways now we engage with our customers, eg social media. How do we aggregate information from Facebook and twitter?
Need to know our customers better so we can customise and contextualise information for them.

2 Operational effectiveness and efficiency. Poor information management and poor data quality can cause duplication and inefficiency. How much data are we storing that we don't need to, or that no-one owns.

3 New revenue streams. Take data and add value to it, turn it into information. Can be valuable asset.

4 Regulation and compliance. An increasing demand on us. Includes privacy, security, accountability, governance. We need to manage our information well to ensure compliance.

Information is a risk, a cost, and an opportunity.

Data stewards - people responsible for data quality and data life cycle management - are emerging in many sectors. Some companies appointing CDOs, Chief Data Officers. Should this be responsibility of CIO?

Managing information for the sake of information is not what's needed. Need to focus on business priorities.
Need to look at what information could be disruptive, and not ignore it. Don't make mistake of music industry ignoring downloads, or travels gents ignoring ubiquitous access to fare information. Do MOOCs fall into this category?
Don't focus on traditional business intelligence reporting. Be more proactive. Use information as evidence to support decisions.
Avoid silos. Application integration is not enough, need data integration with same data models.
Don't go overboard on the "big data" thing. It's not a substitute for information management.

Information is an asset and we need to look after it. Optimise applications for information sharing and focus on making information usable.
Metadata is not an afterthought, should be at the core of information management and we need consistent semantics to define things.
Don't forget governance.

Applications come and go, information is permanent.

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Business capability modelling

noreply@blogger.com (chris sexton) — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 08:25:00 +0000

In a session on business capability modelling, which I know very little about.

Organisations often struggle with a gap between strategy and execution. High level ambitions and goals need to be translated into actions. Often just jump straight to how we need to change, without looking at what we do.
We need to understand what our organisation does, and what we need to do differently in response to strategic challenges and opportunities.
Need to understand what is commodity and what is unique and differentiating. Different set of questions for different capabilities. Differentiating ones will have more investment and be more strategic.

Can create a map of your organisation on one page. Effective tool for having discussions about where strategies need to change, and where there needs to be investment. Look at what is strategically important to your organisation, and how mature or effective the processes are within it. You can very quickly see where there is a mismatch, ie things are strategically important, but have low maturity. Helps to identify where focus for change needs to be. Difficult to describe, but some good diagrams in the presentation.

Can also map where spend/investment is happening, and compare with what's strategically important. Often see a mismatch. High levels of investment going into areas which aren't strategically important, often historical.

Business capability models can be very effective as translation devices, using a common language which is not technology based so you can have meaningful discussions with your stakeholders.

I've just had an aha moment. I can see how we can use this to discuss prioritisation with departments, especially when we get a number of requests from the same area. Also how we can test whether we're investing in the right areas.

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Gartner HE session catch up

noreply@blogger.com (chris sexton) — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 07:19:00 +0000

Following the session on service portfolios and catalogues, we had a workshop where we worked with one of the Gartner analysts to write a service portfolio. Starting from scratch, we came up,with suggestions which we discussed as a group, and then with the session. Some of the ideas we have in our service portfolio/catalogue such as Support for Teaching and Learning, and Support for Research as headings were well received, but I realised that there were areas we had missed out, for example project management and process improvement are services which have a high value, but we don't include them. Lots to think and talk about when I get back!

We've also had a session from a colleague at another University about the challenges he faced when appointed recently, and some of the actions he's taking to implement transformational changes. Very inspiring, but obviously confidential so I can't say much, but I did like his use of pictures, maps and diagrams which he had used to have conversations with senior executives. An architecture map which showed the linkage between different applications and services had been very helpful in explaining why changes considered simple to the customer, were in fact quite complicated.

Finally, we visited the University of La Sapienza, one of the oldest Universities in Europe, but housed in a very 1930s Mussolini inspired building! With 140,000 students it was huge, and they had some interesting IT challenges. One of the systems they had recently developed was to help them in their Research Assessment exercise, and was a very complex algorithm to assess which research papers to submit based on criteria including journal impact, citations etc. They'd also made big changes to their student systems to implement many self service processes.

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Service portfolios and service catalogs

noreply@blogger.com (chris sexton) — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 10:04:00 +0000

Now a session on the Art and Science of Service Portfolios and Catalogues.

IT organisations are transitioning to service based organisations. The service portfolio is critical to this. Defines what you are trying to optimise and is a critical communication tool, especially with senior executives. Also important for IT staff in terms of what it is the IT organising is optimising.

Need to be very clear about why we are doing this, what is it we're trying to do. Also, don't copy somebody else's! Don't do it bottom up. Don't creat the service catalogue first, or you will create a technical service list. Needs to be top down to create a service portfolio.

Why is service management important? IT is a service organisation. It cannot optimise what it does not manage.

What is a service? An action that delivers a benefit to a recipient. Hardware and applications are not services. It's an action, not a thing. There has to be a recipient - a buyer or a consumer. Also, must be a benefit and you must be able to articulate it. Service typically made up of 3 components, a technology, people and processes. But, doesn't have to have all, eg project management, very high value but doesn't involve a technology.
For example, eMail is not a service. Communication and collaboration is the service. That's what we need to optimise. Email is a technology.

Traditional IT based organisation supply drive, very technology and asset centric, inward looking, insulated and monopolistic, cost obsessed.
IT service based organisation is demand driven, internal customer centric, process based, competitive and engaged, service obsessed.

In a service based organisation, process improvements have to be correlated to required service outcomes and outcomes have to be measured with SLAs. Staff need relationship and business expertise, as well as technical and process expertise. Strategic multi sourcing important. Also need good costing models. Anything that is free or seen to be free is undervalued by the organisation.

Relationship managers are trusted and strategic advisors.
Product management also key, responsible for service end to end and defines the improvement path.

Services should be expressed in terms of the ultimate end customer. Need to collectively agree who the real end customer is. That's who the service portfolio is aimed at. Other parts of the IT organisation are not the end customers.

Have to be careful that you are improving services not processes. Change management , incident management, problem management, etc all important and have to improve them, but can only go so far with them.

Difference between service portfolio and service catalogue? Hierarchically related. SP is a strategic value-based description of the IT depts mission, role and capabilities. Contains roughly 15 things. No mention of technology or vendors. Ignore IT department boundaries and think about the whole service to the customer.

SC is an operational tool, aimed at day to day use, transactionally orientated, should simplify service requests from customers. Can mention technology.

Typical items frequently masquerading as services:
Email, network monitoring, security, videoconferencing, PCs, printing.
All important, but reinforces the message that It manages the technology and the asset. Underselling ourselves, and missing what the organisation actually wants.

A business value orientated service portfolio would include things such as communication services, workplace services, project management.

Value statements are important in setting out the portfolio. Aimed at senior executives, so need to think about how they see value. Some examples, Employee retention, employee productivity, reduced risk.
Must be explicit, meaningful, defensible, measurable, differentiating, crisp and memorable.
Structure could be:
Action .... in order to..... deliver benefit
Anytime anywhere work capabilities in order to improve job satisfaction, reduce travel expenses.
Then think about whether you have meaningful SLAs for them.

Summary

Build portfolio from scratch. Don't copy generic examples
Don't ask a customer to provide your value statements
Build a catalogue only after creating a portfolio. If you've created a service catalogue first, set it aside and go back and write the value based portfolio.
Don't publish portfolio until its polished
Refresh it annually
Remember both the portfolio and catalogue are user tools, and are not there for the convenience of IT!

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The Learning Stack

noreply@blogger.com (chris sexton) — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 08:40:00 +0000

At the Gartner HE Conference at the moment. Some excellent sessions. This one from Marti Harris, on Building The Learning Stack.

Our institutional relationship with most of our customers will ultimately be in a cloud based ecosystem, particularly with students around learning platforms. The future learning environments will have to balance our assets - applications, platforms and content - to form a collaborative, agile learning stack. The extent an institution adopts a learning stack concept will determine teaching/learning agility and future relevance. It will consist of things we do ourselves, and services including SaaS and other cloud based offerings,

As well as known assets, we have a considerable amount of unknown assets, including software, services and devices being used in our academic environment. Even with known assets such as the LMS there is redundancy and overlapping functionality with other admin systems.

Can build the learning stack on a context platform to include services including, lecture capture, mobile apps, social media, eportfolios, web conferencing etc.

Sandboxes are important to allow experimentation. Can easily remove and add things. Could the context platform be an existing LMS such as Blackboard? Yes, but will be more viable providers in next 5 years who are developing a much more flexible and agile learning environment. Or could be built on Sharepoint, or Google apps, does not have to be a conventional LMS. Different disciplines could have different versions of the stack.

This very flexible agile learning environment will need to be managed flexibly. Cloud will be important, as well as sharing assets and services with other organisations.

Students' expectations set by their consumer experience. They can do everything on-line, so why do they have to stand in line?

More choice now for learners, from getting a degree, obtaining credits, or just learning for knowledge with no credits. Also most courses are delivered through a hybrid on-line and on-campus model. MOOCs could be disruptive to this model. They are on Gartner education hype cycle just over the peak heading towards trough of disillusionment. Gartner view is that it will rise to plateau of productivity fairly quickly, but will have a different name and will have changed to be more integrated with other forms of learning and will have credits that can contribute to a degree. Also, students will be able to take "MOOCs" at other institutions as part of their degree course. Challenge will be to identify the student and ensure that they are learning.

Interesting to see that investment in education technology companies is rising, lots of start up companies and new providers. Will of course be followed by mergers and acquisitions!

Sourcing of marketing, development and delivery is increasing as an option for many institutions, especially with special online courses and programmes. MOOCs good example of this, but may lead to changes in delivery platforms that can be used for more traditional courses.

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SSB, HPC and mobile printing.

noreply@blogger.com (chris sexton) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 21:08:00 +0000

Good Service Strategy Board Monday. Discussion about how we support some new services - always an issue as we don't seem to stop supporting any! New ones coming up including various things related to scanning including our student eFile project. No new projects to approve, but some project closures and lessons learned reports. Also talked about our Service Advisory Groups and how we communicate their discussions to the wider community.

Also on Monday was our HPC@Sheffield day, a meeting of researchers from Sheffield and our partner Univerities to showcase some of the work going on using the N8 HPC facility as well as our own HPC computer. Unfortunately I could only attend to delver the short welcome, but the programme looked excellent, so much exciting science and research going on.

We're also piloting a method for printing from mobile devices, something our students and staff indicated they were interested in having. This week we ran a workshop for people in CiCS to come and try it out. Will be interesting to see how and what it's used for. I must admit I print very little, boarding cards being about the only exception, and I know some airlines are already piloting reading them from your phone!

At the moment I'm at the Gartner Higher Education Conference, but unfortunately the hotel is suffering a major systems failure and has no reservation systems or wifi so communication is a bit tricky. So, not many updates from me at the moment as I'm reliant on finding wifi from somewhere else, but as soon as its fixed you'll see updates from the sessions.

Equality and Security

noreply@blogger.com (chris sexton) — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 15:51:00 +0000

Yesterday I had a catch up with the other leads in our Equality Objectives Project together with some colleagues from HR and Simon Fanshawe who is advising us. Some good discussion on training for managers in equality issues, particularly around policy implementation, and giving people the confidence to use the policies fairly and consistently. We also looked at data, what data we held, where the gaps were and how we could improve it, especially on the staff side. We're doing a lot of work on staff recruitment, and have started to turn our attention to student recruitment. Equality ad diversity issues obviously overlap a lot with widening participation, but they are not the same. One of the issues we keep coming back to, is the importance of the question "why?". Why do we want a diverse workforce, why do we want a diverse student population. Summed up nicely by Simon as Diversity trumps Ability every time.

Today I've been in London at a RUGIT meeting where a significant amount of the meeting was spent discussing cyber security issues. We had speakers from the CPNI, who gave a very interesting and informative overview of where they felt the high risk data in Universities is, which is mainly in some research areas likely to be targeted by intelligence agencies. We had already asked our Security SIG to have a look at their 20 critical controls and how they might be applied in a University environment. There was general agreement that very few of them could be applied across the board, but were relevant to high risk areas. We also had a look at how some Universities were handling mobile device management, and discussed our relationship with UCISA.

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Medicine, comms, waste and value!

noreply@blogger.com (chris sexton) — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 16:35:00 +0000

Today was our departmental meeting - didn't start well as the coffee didn't arrive in time, and at 9.30am that's important! However, things soon got a lot better, and we had a great presentation from our PVC for Medicine, Dentistry and Health on the challenges facing a faculty so closely interlinked with the NHS. We also heard a lot about their strengths - in particular ScHARR - our centre for health related research which does much of the research into public health that you'll see reported in the national media. A very good overview of one of our most complex faculties.

We also had a presentation from our comms manager about how to find out what's happening in CiCS. We have our own Google site - Just for CiCS where we gather together everything that people should need to know. The news is collected in two main sections - About Work and About People - as we include social news as well as work related.

The news can be updated within minutes of a member of the comms team hearing about something, and we have a comms flow which includes automated tweets and facebook updates:

So, news is spread round the department first via J4C, then if it is relevant to the rest of the University to our news blog, and then if it's relevant to students, to our Facebook page. Finally, every month we send an email newsletter out to all staff and students which is a digest of the most relevant news for them.
I'm sure we don't get it right in all cases, but we'd be interested to have feedback and any suggestions for improvements.

Finally we had an overview from the Process Improvement Unit of two things that are very important to them and to all of us - Waste, which we need to get rid of, and Value, which we need to add!

Cloudbusting

noreply@blogger.com (chris sexton) — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:36:00 +0000

On Friday it was the MMIT (Multimedia Information Technology Group, part of CILIP) conference here in Sheffield. I was very pleased to give the opening welcome, and as the theme of the conference was "Cloudbusting - Demystifying the cloud", to give a very short overview of our experience of cloud services. So, I did a quick run through of the challenges facing us -
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Consumerisation of IT.

24/7
User interfaces
Mobility
BYOD
User interfaces
Social networking
User expectations
Critical nature of IT

No surprises there! My point was that all of these can be drivers to move to cloud based services, such as our move to Google. What's important is the quality of the service - it isn't about cost cutting. A recent benchmarking exercise shows that our email service is about 70% cheaper than a peer group, which is good obviously, but the real driver should be about service provision. A better service, available and support 24/7, more accessible, more mobile, and more innovative - google can innovate much faster than we can. Which is mainly a good thing, but not always :-)

I couldn't stay for much more of the conference, but the keynote speaker talking about Searching in the Cloud was fascinating. How do we find all of the stuff that's out there, and a particular issue, how do we link internal and external information. It can also be difficult yo keep track of your own personal stuff when it's outside the boundaries of your local system. How true!

Our Plan

noreply@blogger.com (chris sexton) — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 13:47:00 +0000

I think our new Strategic Plan web page is looking great. As well as a video from the VC about what we are and what we aspire to be as a University, there's some excellent case studies illustrating our guiding principles which are:

Achieving Excellence
Cultivating Ambition
Making a Difference
Working Together
Protecting the Future
Leading the Way

These range from the power of solar magnetic tornadoes, to providing free legal advice for the local community, to research on the social effects of alcohol pricing. Well worth a read.