From a Distance...

Aurasma demonstration

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Sexton) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:04:00 +0000

Yesterday was a bit of a special day - my birthday! So, now I'm a year older, but not sure about wiser. The other special thing about yesterday was we had a demonstration of Aurasma - described on their web site as the world's first visual browser. Its a relative simple app that allows you to link content (eg a video) to a trigger image which could be a photo, an object or even a building. You can download the app (Aursama Lite) for iOS or Android, point it at the trigger image and see the multimedia content on your mobile phone or iPad.

These "auras" are so easy to create people were making them during the presentation! We're now looking at how we might use it. We've got ideas for marketing, for open days and in academic areas - hopefully the first academic project will be 3-D teeth. I'd also like to use it to show students how to use things - for example we have lots of videos, such as how to issue and return books in the Information Commons and libraries. You could easily link these to a trigger image of the actual machine. Of course, lots of issues to consider - questions were asked at the presentation about security, the size and availability of the app, and whether we can integrate it with our own mobile app, CampusM. Lots to look at, and I'm confident we can develop something quite exciting.

Not an awayday

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Sexton) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 09:00:00 +0000

Last Friday myself and the three Assistant Directors spent a few hours of quality time together in an awayday follow up. Every year we try and have one or two days of facilitated training and planning away from Sheffield, and then a couple of days during the year to follow up on how we're getting on with our actions. We didn't actually go away, and we didn't have a full day, but called it an awayday all the same!

We spent some time reflecting on the last 6 months, identifying achievements and frustrations. Although there were some frustrations we could point to, there were many achievements, and even the frustrating experiences had led to a lot of learning, especially things that we could do better to stop them happening again. We also looked forward to our current planning round, and in particular how we can prioritise better - we need to include everything in our prioritisation processes, and be much more transparent. Our staff also need support in being able to say no - we never have the resources to do everything that we're asked to do, but need to make sure that we target our resources to supporting key University objectives effectively.

We also talked about Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) - how do we know we're being successful, and delivering what our customers want? Do we really know how well we're doing?

A useful few hours as always, but lots of actions coming out of it which we're going to work on over the next few weeks.

Speed dating and the Olympic challenge

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Sexton) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 10:35:00 +0000

Last night I went to an IT forum hosted by The Chemistry Club in London. First time I'd been to one of these, and it had been recommended to me by some colleagues who'd been to one or two. Attendees are CIOs and IT heads from private and public sector companies and senior representatives from various sponsors of the event ( aka suppliers). It's very well organised, and I can only liken it to speed dating, not that I've ever done it you understand.

You're sent an attendee list in advance, and have a phone call with one of the organisers where you discuss what you'd like to get out of it, what your current issues are and who you'd like to talk to. Everyone does the same, and then when you get there, you're met by your personal "introducer" who, armed with all the information on an iPad about people in the room, who you want to meet, and who wants to meet you, introduces you to people. I had a whale of a time! I'm not exactly a shrinking violet when it comes to these things, and enjoyed meeting many new people, as well as catching up with some I already knew. I was surprised that people actually wanted to meet me, and I spent quite a lot of time talking to people about how we support a bring your own device culture. I also managed to talk to some quite senior people from one of our suppliers, who shall remain nameless, about their discount policy for bulk orders, and how we can deploy corporate apps to iPads. Ooops. Might have just given it away.

The speaker at the event was Gerry Pennell, CIO of the London Olympics, who I've heard before and is excellent. He gave a fascinating insight of what it's like to provide the technology for this massively public event. Many of the systems are new, and the challenges are huge. There is technology in every venue measuring something and gathering data which has to made available immediately to many different devices, in different formats for different purposes. That could be large screens in the venue, or to the media companies, or journalists, or commentators, or to the general public on their phones or iPads. The stakes are high, and if everything works, no-one will really notice, but if it goes wrong, the world will see and remember!

Testing is paramount, and they've built "the Olympics in a room" in a huge lab in Canary Wharf, and they're running test events. One of the other problems they're facing is the very short timescale to get their kit into the venue. For example, Wimbledon finishes only 3 weeks before the games start, which has then got to be completely recabled and have all the new stuff put in, commissioned and tested. Scary!

Finally he challenged everyone in the room to look at their readiness for the games, which will be remembered as the UK games. What change control policies are in place for the duration of the games, what flexible working arrangements are being made to reduce transport issues, what are the ISPs and telecoms providers doing about infrastructure and the potential strain on the 3G networks?

Very good talk, and an interesting Q and A session afterwards, ranging from had he got any spare tickets ( no), what's the biggest change since the last Olympics (consumer technology), what are they doing about malicious intent (lots but he wouldn't tell us what), and between the opening and closing ceremonies, what would he be doing (depends on whether things are going well, or badly!). That last question was mine and I was quite proud of it.

All in all a good evening and probably worth repeating occasionally.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

SAP Upgrade Success

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Sexton) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:19:00 +0000

One of the projects we've had to put a lot of effort into over the past few months is the upgrade of our SAP systems - HR, Payroll and Finance. After taking the systems down last Thursday evening, this morning we went live with a fully upgraded system. This was a large and complicated project that has taken many months of planning and preparation - building and testing the various SAP systems, downloading the software and doing trial installs and building a complete copy of all of the SAP systems to test the connections and interactions.

There were quite a few components involved with the project. Not only did we want to upgrade the SAP software to the latest version, but we also wanted to restructure how the SAP systems connected to each other to make them more resilient and better performing. A key part in doing this work was the virtualisation of the SAP infrastructure onto a new cluster of high capacity servers. In doing this virtualisation work, and going from 13 physical servers to two big ones, we will make considerable reductions to our power consumption and reduce our carbon emissions considerably.

We allowed 4 days downtime to achieve server virtualisation, technical reorganisation, the simultaneous upgrades of the systems, and the technical upgrade from Xi to Pi (the way the systems talk to each other) and it required not only an awful lot of hard work from our SAP teams (basis and development), some of whom worked all weekend putting in very long days, but also co-ordination and collaboration from other areas of the department including Unix, Networking, Storage, Managed Desktop, MUSE and Communications teams who were all available and all doing their bit. We also relied on the teams in Finance and HR to test that everything was working as it should be.

We had been told that this was an almost impossible task by our SAP consultants, but everything had been handed over to functional teams to test by yesterday, and today we went live. A couple of minor glitches this morning relating to load and portal links, but nothing that couldn't be fixed quickly, and altogether a successful outcome. I'd like to personally thank everyone involved.

Although this was a technical upgrade, and functional improvements can now take place, there have been some benefits to users, including a much wider range of browsers which are supported - this morning I've had all of the systems running on my mac on Safari, Chrome and Firefox, and even on my iPad! Perhaps I can finally ditch Camino.

The Value of Difference

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Sexton) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 16:42:00 +0000

Today we had a meeting of the Equality and Diversity Board, of whcih I've been a member for many years. It was a good meeting - very enjoyable and stimulating, and I't not always you can say that about a meeting....

It was facilitated by Simon Fanshawe, (yes, that Simon Fanshawe), and very good he was too. I didn't realise he is Chair of the University of Sussex Council, so he has a good understanding of Universities and their governance, as well as being hugely entertaining, knowledgeable about diversity issues, and a founder of Stonewall over 23 years ago.

We were looking at what it means to recruit (staff and students) for diversity and difference in an educational environment. Of course, it makes sense when you think about it properly - in order to achieve what it wants to, the University needs to recruit different sorts of people, from multiple different backgrounds, with a variety of skills. So, we looked at the barriers to this, what policies we have in place, what might need reviewing and investigating, and also examples of good practice, where changes to recruitment and working policies have made a big difference. Changing the titles of posts can make a huge difference - removing post titles which have a male connatation like 'porter" and "technician" can make a big difference to the number of female applicants for posts for example, as can the use of a variety of role models.

We also looked at our student mix, and particularly the mix of "home" students, rather than international, and our relationship with the city and the region.

In general, we have a good story to tell and we have lots of good policies and support initiatives, but we are now looking to move these on, and make sure we all recognise the value of difference and diversity. Today was an excellent start.

But where's the hot tub....

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Sexton) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 17:00:00 +0000

Most exciting thing that's happened this week is publishing the floor plans for the new building we're moving into in a couple of months. Always a bit traumatic, trying to work out where everyone should go, getting working relationships right, making sure we've got enough kitchens, social space etc. There's been a lot of hard work over the last week, but, we've done it now. Will be great for many of us to be in one building, rather than spreadout across many as we are now. Seems to be some disappointment that the plans don't show a hot tub or brewery, both of which could apparently be heated from the data centre next door.....

Other exciting things happening at the moment include a major SAP upgrade happening right now, which is the culmination of a lot of very hard work - more on that next week. It seems to be going well, but I don't want to tempt fate too much!

We've had a strategic liaison meeting with the Faculty of Social Sciences. where we talked a lot about the need for identity management, especially for handling some of our international ventures, and the eLearning strategy that we're currently developing.

And that's it for this week from me - I've spent most of it without a voice, with a sore throat and an aching head. Home for the weekend to recover!

Back to a New Year

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Sexton) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 20:48:00 +0000

Happy New Year everyone - hope you all had a good break, and are raring to go with this brand new year! Sorry for slight delay in blogging - have been struck dumb (literally for most of yesterday), with a cold and sore throat. Oh well, first I've had this winter so can't complain.

So, what's been happening since we came back? We've had a good meeting on how we're going to develop our new portal - so much has changed since we came up with the specification over a year ago (we put the project on hold to concentrate on our Enquirer and Applicant portal), that it needs revisiting. Portal technologies have changed, and we now have Google apps, which change the way we deliver some services. More discussions over the next week or two, and some investigaing to do about how things like iGoogle might integrate with our single sign on, before we come up with anything concrete.

Exciting meeting today with our University Executive Board discussing our response to the Diamond Report on Modernisation and Efficiency. There's a number of projects already taking forward some of the recommendations including a review of procurement and the introduction of a managed staff printing service, but I have been keen that we introduce a structured approach to business process review and service improvement, embedding it into the University culture. We've been investigating Lean, and today we presented our proposals to set up a small team to take this forward, and I'm pleased to say they were approved. Our focus will not be on just cost savings, but realignment of resources to better support the University's objectives, improving services to staff and students, and simplifying processes, especially those large complex ones which often interface between professional service and academic departments. Watch this space!

Also this week we've considered the Woolf Report into LSE's relationship with Libya. It's a very comprehensive report, and contains a number of recommendations around the ethics of universities accepting donations. It raises a number of issues about due diligence which I suspect many Universities are now considering.

And finally, I got the report from the IiP assessor who recently reviewed the department - we reached the standard in all areas, and had many areas of good practice highlighted. One or two areas for development identified, but on the whole it was excellent - obviously a lot of good work going on in the department - well done everyone.

Merry Christmas

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Sexton) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 08:51:00 +0000

Well it's that time of year again - Christmas is nearly here! We had a great Departmental Christmas party yesterday - about 150 of us out for lunch, drinks and a disco. Much fun seemed to be had by all, and there's photos to prove it here.

I hope everyone has a great break, a Merry Christmas, and a Happy and Peaceful New Year.

Tablet news

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Sexton) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 12:40:00 +0000

Last week we had the second of our LEAN Rapid Improvement Events - another 5 days of people from all areas of the University locked (well not quite) in a room together, looking at a probleme and coming up with a solution. This time it was the way we maintain and manage our regulation on-line. Currently it takes a huge amount of effort in academic departments and in central ones, the process is complicated, and the data isn't always data timely or accurate. And yet this data is vital for so many of our student related processes - module choice, registration and timetabling for example. I was pleased to go up on Friday afternoon and have a presentation on a revised process which will simplify matters enormously, reduce the time taken and improve the accuracy of data. Great work by everyone on what has been a problem for the University for many years. Now we just need to put it into practice!

And in other news.....

Today sees the publication of our newsletter, myCiCSnews, which can be downloaded as a pdf from here. There's articles on learning technologies, research on the campus compute cloud, information security, and many more.
For the first time we've made it available in a tablet version, which works really well on iPads and other tablets, and includes embedded video etc. Click here to view. Both versions look great, thanks to some fine work on the content and design.

SSB, release and business continuity

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Sexton) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 12:45:00 +0000

Given that it's the run up to Christmas, its still extremely busy, and lots of meetings to attend. Monday was our Service Strategy Board, where we discussed a real variety of issues. Google features on most agendas these days as we start to roll out more of the apps, and see more use of it. Google+ has been activated now on the University domain, so we're piloting it with some people in CiCS at the moment, hoping to roll it out in the New year across the University. It will be very interesting to see the response. Those of us who have personal G+ accounts may find it confusing, or may like to see a separation of work and social circles. We will be watching whether it gets taken up in the learning and teaching area.

We also looked at issues around resourcing, especially in the development area - we have many projects ongoing, some outside of our control such as the changes imposed on us by UKBA, others are new projects we need to get on with such as our new portal.

Yesterday I had a catch up with our finance manager to see how our expenditure was looking against the budget, and looking at future financial planning. Also we had a really good discussion internally about how we implement release management into our service and project management framework. Interesting to see how the releases come not just from projects, but from small pieces of work we instigate, and from upgrades etc imposed on us by suppliers.

Today it was the Business Continuity Operational Group, where the main item on the agenda was a paper looking at Business Continuity issues around Teaching and Learning and how the University would deal with both major and minor incidents which might disrupt teaching or assessment. A really good set of guidelines for academic and professional service departments.

The Price is Right

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Sexton) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 11:26:00 +0000

Last Friday I was speaking at a UCISA event on What Price Your Service, which covered a number of aspects of pricing and costing services.

First up was Andrew McConnell who is chair of the British University Finance Directors Group, and has also sat with me on the UUK Group looking at Modernisation and Efficiency. Andrew gave a good overview of the financial environment and the challenges facing HE. Continuous change and uncertainty, cuts in resource, competition for student numbers, inflationary pressures on pay and non pay costs, the impact of spending on the REF and cash flow changes all contribute to a difficult picture. Although the viability of institutions does not seem to be an issue at the moment, we are operating on very fine margins, and many institutions are not generating enough surplus. So, we need to have entrepreneurial leadership and generate income from diverse sources, have robust financial, institutional and growth strategies and take the efficiency agenda seriously. I've written before about the UUK report (commonly being referred to as the Diamond report), and of the 17 recommendations, 11 touch on IT. Andrew called for better collaboration between UCISA and BUFDG, and between Finance and IT generally, working together and overcoming the language barrier that sometimes exists between us. He reminded us what Ian Watmore had said at the launch of the Diamond report - we used to say we had to spend to save, now we have to save to spend.

Next up was the University of Oxford, who have been looking at how their services are costed. Originally they worked on a simple basis, allocating expenditure to different cost centres, but more recently have been adopting the TRAC approach, and looking in detail at all aspects of expenditure including power, space, overheads, dependencies on other services etc. They received funding from the JISC, and have produced a toolkit for costing IT services, available here. They've found this model to be extremely useful in looking at how much services actually cost, especially in departments. For example they found a small department running their own exchange server instead of making use of the central one, who insisted it didn't cost anything. However, it actually cost twice as much as the central one.

Then I spoke about the work we've been doing at looking at where our expenditure actually goes, rather than how much things actually cost. We've changed our accounting structure to match our seven service areas, but this year manually allocated all expenditure - staff, non staff and capital, as well as expenditure in those areas which generate income - to those areas. So, using expenditure as a proxy for activity, we get the following results:

Then each of the service areas can be broken down, and we can see where the expenditure is coming from - is it mainly staff, capital etc. There's loads of information, and it's thrown up some interesting questions, as well as highlighting some issues. If you're really interested in seeing the results, and how and why we did it, you can see the talk here. All of the talks given on the day are here, and you will need Silverlight to view them.

Catching up

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Sexton) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 18:05:00 +0000

Lots to catch up at the end of this week, apologies for lack of posts, just didn't seem to get round to it! At the end of last week I went to a RUGIT meeting, the IT Directors of the Russell Group, and we had several interesting discussions around organisational structures, shared data centres and the recent announcement of £145m for eInfrastructure which has to be spent in an unfeasibly short timescale. We're very lucky that the new Chief Executive of JISC is one of our number, and Martin gave us an overview of the current review of jISC and some of the changes that will be made to current funding models. It seems clear that although the sector as a whole will be paying less for JISC services, individual institutions will have to pay more and we need to be putting something into our financial forecasts. Hopefully things will become clearer in the New Year, and it will be our role to ensure that this is seen as an institutional cost, and not something that can be found from within existing IT budgets.

W also had an overview from the Chief Executive of JANET on a number of things including SuperJanet6 Procurement, the JISC Review of Janet, the JANET Brokerage Service and IPv6.

This week I've had feedback on the action plan which came out of the LEAN Rapid Improvement Event looking at student computer registration, and changes that we will need to make. Some of these will impact on existing projects such as our Enquirer and Applicant Portal development so it's important to get them fed in as soon as possible. We've also had discussions about our capital spending plans, and some fairly big investments we're making in our infrastructure.

Finally, two really good news stories from the department. On Tuesday I got the feedback from our recent Investors in People assessment, and I'm pleased to say we met the standard on all categories, with many areas of good practice highlighted. Not unexpectedly there were a few areas identified where we could do better and we'll be working on those, but in general it was very positive. Lots of good work obviously going on in the department, so well done everyone.

Then last night we had a reception for staff to say thank you for all their hard work during the year, and we also raised some money for charity as well. CiCS have always been very good at digging into their pockets for good causes, and last night was no exception. We had a raffle, and 73 prizes were donated, some from suppliers, but most from members of staff. They ranged from an IPod, various bottles of booze, chocolate, two amazingly hand decorated Christmas cakes, various electronic gadgets, cameras, to a dubious chocolate shape on a stick (let's just say it rhymed with stick).

Altogether we raised almost £700 to be split between Prostate Cancer Research and Ovarian Cancer Research. Well done folks!

Today I've speaking at a UCISA event on service costing, so a post on that will follow later.

Apps everywhere

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Sexton) — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 17:29:00 +0000

A couple of floors below the On Line Information Conference is Apps World. I couldn't get into any of the workshops (not without paying anyway), but did register for the exhibition and visit it a couple of times. It was very lively! Loads of app developers demonstrating apps for everything. And most of them multiplatform. A good indication of rise of the mobile device, and our apparently insatiable appetite for delivery of services to them.

The last session I went to at the conference was delivered by Steve Wing, the Head of Mobile at The Guardian, and he gave an interesting overview of how their delivery strategy has changed over the years. He strongly believed that mobile had been overhyped in the sort term, but massively underhyped in the medium to long term, and the effect it would have on those of us who deliver services underestimated. The often quoted statement that mobile user of the internet would be greater than desktop users by 2014, which was unthinkable only a couple of years ago, was having a huge impact on publishers. As well as the growth in hardware and apps, consumers want to have access to content and services wherever they are - not just physically but virtually. So, The Guardian now has a presence in Facebook, YouTube and Google+. The other driver is user expectations - we want a good experience, and are not prepared to put up with badly designed interaces or poor features. I loved him describe the "oh shit" moment at the Guardian when they looked at the ratings for their mobile site, and realised how bad it was...

They now have a range of offerings, from their normal website , to a mobile site, to apps for smartphones, to their recently releases iPad app. They've done a lot of research, and it was fascinating to see different usage patterns,both in terms of what users do, and at what times of day. So they've tailored their services - for example the iPhone app is updated frequently but the iPad app is more like the newspaper and static during the day.

His view of the apps vs mobile web argument? Both have a place. They have different roles to play - its all about user experience.

So, this conference has really reinforced my view that we need to get ahead of the game for all aspects of mobility - infrastructure, delivery of services and support. Mobile is just too important and compelling to ignore.

Collaborative Consumption

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Sexton) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 14:25:00 +0000

Today's keynote was from Rachel Botsman, author of What's Mine is Yours. She was in Australia, so it was a prerecorded talk, which worked really well.

Her talk was about collaborative consumption, and she believes that we are in the first stages of a collaborative revolution which is going to be as big as the industrial revolution.
Network technologies create the right infrastructure for collaborative market places.

A simple example is Taskrabbit - a site where people post a task and what they're prepared to pay for it, and network of rabbits bid to carry out the task. It's available as an app and a web site. You can get food, cleaning, shopping, things delivered. All rabbits are checked and reviewed and therefore they build up a reputation. The number one task posted is assembling IKEA furniture!
At its core it's about empowerment. using technology to enable people to make money around their lifestyle. 25% of rabbits are retired people. Some rabbits make $5000 a month.

Social technologies are enabling efficiencies and trust. It can match needs and wants, without layers of transaction costs in between. Also enables trust between strangers.

Efficiency and trust are the basis of this sharing evolution.
We've moved from being consumers, to creators to collaborators. Now we're sharing assets, not just music and photos but things like money, cars, space. We're back to the old behaviours of sharing and bartering, but enabled by technology.

There are 3 clear systems in this new market place:

1       Product service systems
Eg Boris's bikes. Bike sharing is the fastest growing transport system in world. Paying for the use of a product without needing to own it outright has been around for years, eg libraries. But now we have a different relationship to stuff. We don't want the stuff, we want the need and experience it fulfils. For example we don't want the CD, but the music, not the DVD but the film, etc.

Idling capacity, or under-utitlised assets are fuelling growth in this sort of system. Eg Car Sharing. Car companies are no longer in business of selling cars, but in mobility services. BMW in Germany provides cars you can rent car by the minute, with never a car more than 500m from where you are .
Peer to peer car sharing makes use of the millions of cars sitting idle for most of the time. For example Whipcar.com. Owners rent out their cars when they're not being used and set their own prices. The company provides the insurance. Claims are 80% less than traditional rentals. Accountability and transparency make a difference - people behave better when real people dealing with real people. There's a neat little video about it here.

2    Redistribution markets
Some are monetary eg Craigslist
Some free, like Freecycle
Some buying and selling like eBay. Lovely story about how this was formed - the story of the broken laser pointer.

3    Collaborative lifestyles.
This is where not just stuff is shared, but things like time, skills, space
Task rabbit one good example, another is Airbnb. This matches people with places to rent with people who want to stay somewhere. You can find everything from rooms in houses and flats, to an Igloo, to a whole island. It's created a market for things that never had a market place before and put things in reach of people. In New York, more people will stay in Airbnb accommodation tonight than in a hotel. Also based on trust. There's only been two incidences of theft and vandalism in Airbnb and they lead to increased trust measures.

Trust is the new black, as said by Craig Newmark said yesterday

We are all building up reputation capital.
When you trade on eBay, or rent a room, you're leaving a trail of your reputation. Reputation will become a cornerstone of 21st century consumption.
Collaborative consumption is a massive opportunity.

In the Q and A session afterwards she was asked about privacy, and I loved her response. Privacy laws are national, the internet is international - it's a friggin' nightmare.

It was a fascinating talk, and I'd love to see it on line. There's some great places on Airbnb, I'm thinking of putting my car on Whipcar, and I wish someone would send taskrabbits to Sheffield!

She's done a TED talk which is worth watching:

Mobile By Me

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Sexton) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 14:08:00 +0000

Yesterday afternoon I presented at a session on Mobile, along with two librarians. One gave a very good overview of developments that are going on both here and in the US in using new technologies, including mobile apps, in University libraries. Her slides are here, and there's a lot of good, interesting stuff.

The second gave an case study of how he'd developed a mobile app for his library - I haven't got a link to his slides, but will post if I get one.

In the middle was me - looking at things from an IT Director perspective. Almost all of the other sessions are from the customer or information provider perspective, so I thought it was time to redress the balance, and go through some of the issues we have to find solutions to with this explosion in mobile. I started with an analysis of our "customers", the people we're providing a support service to. What's important is that unlike many other people in the room, they're not just a workforce, but we have 25,000 students as well. The Bring Your Own Device Wars that people talk apart have never really been fought by us. Or if they have, it's by using the phrase, "we don't support that". And that was only when we had control, when we owned the hardware, software etc, which we tend not to anymore. So, I talked about our recent mobile survey and the results showing very high percentage ownership of mobile devices, especially smartphones. Then the issues we have to deal with, including providing a good infrastructure -very pertinent to us in terms of wireless at the moment. I covered delivery of services to devices, whether by mobile web or apps - both of which I think have a place for different things. Apps can give a much richer experience with access to more features, but are device specific. And finally, how you support users who have a huge number of different devices.

That's only a very quick summary of what I covered, but the main thrust was that we used to talk about developing a mobile strategy, and now I don't think we need one. Mobile internet access will overtake desktop internet access in the next couple of years and will be the main platform of delivery, so we should be embedding it in everything we do - not seeing it as something separate.

Mobile is Everyware

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Sexton) — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 23:49:00 +0000

The next session I was moderating, so couldn't take a lot of notes, and it began with a short keynote from Paul Golding who' s CEO of Wireless Wanders. He's been in the mobile business 21 years and is an international guru on all things mobile. I've heard him talk a couple of times before, and he gives a very good overview of what's going on in the mobile world.

His key point is that Mobile is Everyware, and that we shouldn't be developing mobile strategies as it's now mainstream and will soon be the main point of delivery for our services. I managed to jot down a few key points and facts and figures which you might find interesting:

In 59 countries, there are more mobiles than people.
6trillion texts sent last year. Average response time is 4 mins compared to email of 48 hours.
We look at our mobile devices on average 150 times a day. That's once every 6.5 minutes.
Photographs used to be why people ran into burning buildings. Now it's mobiles.
35% of us have smartphones. Expect by 2013 it will be 80%.
Android and iOS are dominant and will remain so. HTML5 is important but will never give as rich an experience as native applications.
A year ago people looked at the brand of the device before they bought it. Now it's the OS which is number 1 reason. Selection of apps no2.
The computer we carry round in our pocket has senses, and allows us to make sense of and interact with the world. Will increase,
By 2020 everything that can be connected to the Internet will be with power supplies that can last 10 yrs.
The paradigm shift taking place is the move to information being collected, processed and streamed in real time.

A fascinating talk, and you can see Paul's slides here.

The next session was from a publisher about the philosophy of developing web apps and native apps, and the need for what he described as polymorphic publishing, or publishing for any device.

Finally, we had the story of the Little Red App, developed by an employment law company, providing useful employment law facts for HR professionals. An interesting story of their journey in producing it, and it looks as though it might be useful - will be downloading it later!

Craigslist founder keynote

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Sexton) — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 23:20:00 +0000

Today I've been at the On Line Information Conference in London. Not a conference I know much about, it's very big, with several hundred attendees and a fairly large exhibition. Started off as more for Information Professionals than IT specialists, but the two are merging and there's a lot of overlap now. I was there to speak, and to chair a session.

First however was a keynote by the founder of Craigslist, Craig Newmark on Effective Social Media, Past, Present and Future. He was fascinating. Speaking without notes or slides, he admitted to being a nerd who took things much too literally who decided to channel his traits into something useful.

He told the story of how and why he founded Craigslist. It began in 1994 when he was a discount stock equity broker in San Francisco. He became interested in the Internet through The Well and began to notice that people were prepared to help each other out. So, in early 1995 decided to start a mailing list about arts and technology events in San Francisco. It was the beginning of .com bubble and lots of stuff was happening. It grew, mainly by word of mouth, and eventually it was launched as Craigslist. What started as a hobby eventually turned into a real company, but didn't follow the venture capitalists route, charging for services and making a lot of money. He monetized very little of the site, and charged advertisers, not customers. His business model is doing well by doing good. Currently it gets 60m unique visitors a month and 40bn page views a month.

Told my his friends and colleagues that as a manager he sucks, he appointed a CEO to run the company, and now he does customer service. As he said, he is committed to doing customer service only as long as he lives. After that it's over. He believes you have to be in touch on a daily basis to your constituency to learn things. People want a voice, and want to be listened to.

Connecting people to the Internet gives them a voice, a power that they've not had before.
He's also involved with a lot (over100) not for profit organisations and started Craigconnects to bring them together. Sometimes you get the problem of the sea of goodwill. Lots of organisations want to help but don't talk to each other. His long term aim is to help everyone on the planet to be connected on the net for the common good. You can get things done and make a difference if people are connected.

He talked a lot about the importance of social media, and its history. It's not new, It's just about people talking to each other, new technologies just mean you can influence a bigger audience. Even Martin Luther ran a social media campaign using a new technology invented by a nerd called Gutenberg.

His message was that we should use social media to support those things we believe in. We should persuade our Not For Profits to set up twitter accounts, Facebook, Google plus. Get links shared, retweeted etc. and propagate what's going on.

In response to a question from the floor he said that social media can be used by employees to feed back to the boss on what they think and want. Often bosses are out of touch with what employees are thinking. Well that's certainly not the case for the CiCS ones I follow on twitter :-)

It was a great keynote, fascinating guy - a real entrepreneur and philanthropist.

Working Differnetly Conference continued

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Sexton) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 20:37:00 +0000

The remaining comments from last week’s conference on new ways of working.

I went to a session on Cloud, given by VMware. Not surprisingly, the general theme was that Server Virtualisation is the first step on the journey to cloud computing. Some other points:

Cloud isn’t a new technology, it's a different approach to delivery. It enables the shift from in-house capital intensive IT, to the consumption of utility-based computing resources on an as-needed basis with an appropriate pay as you go model.
Cloud mimics the delivery of a utility eg electricity. For example, if you had your generator you’d have to deal with maintenance, capital expenditure, consumables, and wondering with whether it could cope with the surge when you turned the Christmas lights on.
Cloud has 5 characteristics:
On demand, network access, resource pooling, elasticity, pay as you go.
There are 130+ data centres in central government containing 90,000 servers running at 7% utilization.
A combination of virtualisation and cloud should drive down IT costs which you can reinvest in other parts of your business, and it should also increase agility.
Automation v important. Amazon have 1 engineer for 1500 servers.
The New world is using mobile devices. Users are demanding access to apps and data on the move. Desktops are expensive to refresh. Solve this problem by unlocking data from the desktop and putting it in the cloud whilst keeping it secure.

The next session I went to was on Security in a Mobile World, given by Sophos.
Some notes I took at the time:

We've lost the argument about connecting things to the network. People are bringing their own devices. Applications are increasingly being delivered by a browser.
Smartphones and tablets are scaleable and increase productivity. They are cloud ready, and they are cheap compared to a corporate laptop.
Do they cause problems? Operating systems change frequently. Windows tends to be stable, but these update themselves.
Then there’s app stores. How do you stop people downloading stuff like Angry Birds to corporate devices (why would you want to?)
Most organizations Acceptable Use Policies are inadequate and poorly used. Most were not written with mobile devices in mind.
Executive teams are prepared to accept the rise of these devices. There are 70m Blackberries in world and 90m iPads. There’s been a massive growth of not-enterprise ready devices. Will the use of them get regulated, eg by ICO? They will unless we take this seriously and deal with it. Hmm, I don’t agree with this. You can tell this session is being given by a security vendor.
Mobility and consumerisation will only work if it's secure. Secure working practices require a whole company approach. Can't just be legal dept or IT dept.
Consider the implications of the power of the device you've got. It's a tool to do your job. Treat them as tools of the job. You must demand individuals are accountable for their actions. Consideration must be given to what happens when things go wrong. In the main, failure is almost human not technology.
He’s skeptical of cloud because of security.

So, one session on how cloud and mobile is going to save us, and one telling us it all needs regulating. Well I suppose that’s balanced

Flexible working, and a wireless rip off scandal......

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Sexton) — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 10:31:00 +0000

Yesterday I went to conference on New Ways of Working. I was quite excited when I saw it advertised, as it was specifically for senior managers in HR, IT and Estates to attend together and look at how by working together we can improve ways of working. What a great idea I thought – those are exactly the three departments which could facilitate flexible working, by changing the way we design working spaces, by utilising technology, and by implementing flexible HR policies. We sent a representative from each of the departments, and although we got quite a lot out of the day, most came from us talking together and bouncing ideas off each other, rather than the conference. Apart from the opening plenary session, the rest of the day were track sessions, which tended to focus on HR, IT or Space, so there was little opportunity for joint discussion. My other big bugbear, was that this was advertised as a conference for the public sector, but it was assumed by almost every presenter, that public sector meant local authority – I don’t think education was mentioned once.

And now for the biggest outrage of all (fanfare……)
At a conference where we were looking at new ways to use IT, the only wireless network available cost £10 an hour (yes, that’s right), or £95 if you wanted it for the whole day. What sort of a rip off is that?? Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre, (and the organizers of the conference) – you should be ashamed of yourselves!

I'll give you some key points from the sessions I went to. First the plenary session – some random jottings from the 4 presenters:

Innovative use of IT means that we can connect without travel, reducing the impact on the environment.
Devolving power to lowest level, whether customers or employees, will produce a better fitted organisation to deliver good public services.
People focused buildings save costs and encourages a more flexible workforce and improves work life balance.
During the London Olympics lots of people will need to travel, so 50% of civil servant will work from home to relieve pressure on transport networks.
IT is an enabler, not a solution. To get real transformation you have to deal with people, processes and technology.
Highly adaptable and multifunctional spaces in buildings mean that you may not have a personal space, but your team does.
Look at roles. No point of hot desking if your job is to come in and sit at a desk.
With flexible working you need to monitor and manage performance, not attendance.
We often assume that change means moving from one period of stability to another different period of stability. This isn’t the case anymore.
We’re in a state of constant change now, and It’s going to continue, no matter what happens politically. Organisations need to be able to respond to that change.
Apparently most leaders are men. I joke not, that’s what he said.
Biggest disciplinary issue in Public Sector at the moment is use of social media. That’s me done for then.
Most young people have better and more technology in their coats when they come to work than what they are given to work with.
Rapid user led development needs to be encouraged, but it’s not being. There is huge talent out there but most of the Public Sector is frightened by it.
Good leaders are people focused. Outstanding leaders don't see a distinction between doing work and working with people. (did I mention that most leaders are men?)
Energy costs will continue to rise, carbon reduction will not go away. We need to look at the way we use space.
Hampshire council for every 3 employees have 2 desks.
Mobility is the norm now and we need to embrace it. Moving form a model of cellular space, to open plan, to communal space working, to breaking the link between the workstation and individual. Finally, getting to a model of a full non territorial environment. Staff work in the setting most suitable to the activity they are carrying out.
Work is an activity, not a place.

I'll post something from the rest of the sessions later - think that's enough to be going on with for now!

University of the Year

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Sexton) — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 08:47:00 +0000

Really, really pleased to hear late last night (via twitter of course), that we've scooped the top prize of University of the Year at this year’s Times Higher Education Awards.

Announced as the winner at a ceremony at the Grosvenor House hotel in Park Lane, London, last night, the judges said Sheffield had stood out as a result of a strategy “based on its values and rooted on its founding principles”. In particular, they praised our “determination and grit” in focusing on our local community. Great news - I'm proud to work here.

Here's a picture of our Student Union President Thom Arnold and Education Secretary Jon Narcoss proudly holding the award - and looking very dapper in their tuxedos.

Thanks to Thom for the pictures.

Shares in post-it notes anyone?

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Sexton) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 09:27:00 +0000

A fairly major event took place all of last week for those staff involved in registering students - we had our first LEAN Rapid Improvement Event. Facilitated by the excellent LEAN Unit at St Andrews, we were particularly looking at how students get registered for a computer account and issued with a UCard. Staff from many different areas of the University took part over the 5 days - from CiCS, Student Services, Student Union, Institute for Lifelong Learning, Medicine - and I'm sure there were more I've missed. I wasnt there, but have reports back that it was an excellent event - hard work for everyone involved who had to completely and in detail map out current processes, uncovering many things along the way, including how many different "statuses" we have for our students:

Also how the process which was originally degined for undergraduate students arriving in September, didn't fit other students - part time, postgraduate etc. Then come up with actions to radically change and improve the process.

Lots of hard work involved, and I'd like to thank everyone who took part - especially under the pressure of the stop clock! Of course, the really hard part starts now, as we have to make the changes that the group came up with.

We've got a second event coming up in December, and hopefully we can then persuade the University to get LEAN established to radically improve and streamline processes across the University.

One of the other things I missed was our departmental meeting yesterday. Normally I am there, but due in part to the lack of public transport from a small North Yorkshire town on a Sunday which meant I couldn't get back from a weekend away until yesterday, I couldn't be there. So, instead I decided to use some of the technology we use in Teaching to give my report - we use Echo 360 for lecture capture across the University, and I have a version for personal capture installed on my mac on my desk. So, I used that. Apart from forgetting to look at the camera rather than the screen, I don't think it was too bad, and I'm going to use it now for recording other short messages which will probably go on here. For anyone who missed it, or wants to look at the technology, it's here.

The death of the PC?

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Sexton) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 22:01:00 +0000

Today I was at the last meeting of the UUK Efficiency and Modernisation Task Group in London. Following the publication of the report, it's now time to get an action plan together and start to implement it. The 17 recommendations have been grouped into five workstreams, and various constituent groups will act as delivery partners, overseen by UUK and a monitoring group. Key to the success will be a hub - a place to share good practice, discuss initiatives and be signposted to case studies and useful information. The group is still finalising details, and the plan will be published soon - I'll post a link as soon as it's ready. UCISA will be one of the constituent groups helping to deliver on the plans.

Following on from recent discussions on the increase in mobile devices, the rise of the tablet and the question about whether we need PC labs anymore, I was interested to see today that Gartner has released figures showing that the sales of PCs in Western Europe have declined by 11.4% in Q3 of 2011. In contrast, sales of smartphones have increased by 42% in the same period, with Google's Android operating system leading the market at 52%, Apple iOS at 15%, and Microsoft down to 1.5%. Rory Cellan Jones has summarised the figures in a good blog post here, concluding that:

"So the overall message from Gartner seems to be that the PC has entered a period of decline, that netbooks are dead, mobile computing is the future, Android is winning the smartphone wars, and Microsoft and Nokia have already been left behind in the most important technology industry of the next decade."

"Then again, this time next year, the world may have changed again".

Efficiency, continuity and resources

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Sexton) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 22:02:00 +0000

So, back from Gartner Symposium, and into a day of meetings. First off a discussion with a colleague about how we're going to implement the recommendations in the UUK's Modernisation and Efficiency report. We're coming up with some themed workstreams which we're discussing with our Professional Service director colleagues later this week before we take them to the University Executive Board.

Then the Business Continuity Steering Group. A couple huge pieces of work finally signed off - a complete rewrite of the University's Major Incident Plan and the Incident Communications Manual. Lots of hard work involved, but we've now got some really quality documents. Now we have to implement them - Duty Managers are already recruited, and we'll be starting to train the other roles including Incident Managers in the New Year. Lots training, testing and communication now. Then we'll hope we never have to put it into practice.....

This afternoon started with our Service Strategy Board. As well as the normal look at progress on projects and other issues the service managers have raised we had a lively discussion about priorities and how resources are allocated to them. In the light of some of the things I posted last week, and the need to really move towards more innovative services, it was timely. I think it's fair to say some full and frank opinions were expressed, all in a constructive way of course. One of the main issues is the balance between large projects which require considerable resource to be allocated to them, and the lots more, smaller pieces of work which will benefit many and be quick wins, but unless they have resources allocated to them, will never happen. So, do we prioritise the larger projects, throw all our resources at them to get them done, or allocate a percentage of time to the smaller pieces of work, which means the large bits of work take longer....

Of course, it's never quite as simple as that, as there's other factors to take account of. But something we need to address fairly urgently.

What next?

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Sexton) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:20:00 +0000

One of the hardest things after a conference is putting what you learned into practice. It's so easy to come back and just get back into the same old routine.

The Gartner one I've just been to was different from most others I go to as it covers every sector, and only a small number of attendees are from education. There were just over 4000 attendees, nearly half of them at CI O level, and a real mix of areas covered. It's good for us to look outside of our sector and see what the rest of the world is doing.

So these are just my first thoughts on what I think we need to be doing and the areas that we need to concentrate on.

Most of the current trends are driven by the consumerisation of IT, BYOD (bring your own device) and the wide adoption of social media, all fuelled by mobility and cloud services.

Taking social media first, we're getting pretty good at using it in the department. I posted about it a couple of weeks ago, and it was picked up by Brian Kelly in his post here, which gave us a lot of kudos! It is definitely here to stay and isn't going to go away at all, so we really do need to find ways of making it work for us. My biggest challenge is getting more of the department to engage with it.

Mobility is another area we need to prioritise. We have been ahead of the game in terms of the development of our mobile app, and we need to really push ahead with it again. I know we have plans for doing so, and have found some resource, but we need to put the development of web based, mobile, transactional services at the forefront of what we do. We need mobile friendly web sites and services as well as dedicated apps. There's also the question of having the right infrastructure in place, including pervasive wireless, and good support structures.

Cloud is another area where we have begun to develop, our mail and calendar services for all staff and students are in the cloud, and increasingly our document storage is as people are moving to Google docs and Dropbox. There's still a lot more we can do, and we need to consider cloud based services alongside in house ones wherever it's appropriate. The development of SaaS and IaaS will make this increasingly an option .

There's some great developments coming up, including context computing, and tracking them through things like the Gartner hype cycles is a challenge which we need to address and then choosethe ones to implement to bring the biggest benefits.

So, we need a reliable, robust infrastructure, with an agile development framework so that we can respond quickly to changes and move more towards innovative services rather than keeping the lights on. So, that's Monday sorted as we work out how best to achieve that!

Context computing

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Sexton) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 10:52:00 +0000

A good session this morning on context computing.
Context is based on a set of principles and technologies designed to make services more usable, relevant and fun. Using more information sources, more social information leads to hyper personalisation of services. It's the integration of mobile, social, digital and physical worlds.
Theres a lot of it already about. Face recognition and emotional detection already being used on vending machines in Japan so they can make judgements about what you might want.
Smart products exist, eg glasses with electronics in so know when full or empty and can order your next drink.

Consumers are motivated by emotions. Detection of emotions will be increasingly important in next few years.

By 2014 40% of smart phone users will opt in to context services that track you. Will trade off some privacy for better services.

Last decade of Internet dominated by search, a pull technology. Next decade will be dominated by proactive push technologies. Will be personalised and involve social information and be multi channel.
Information will be key, and will be collected in 4 key areas:
Intent. What does user want or want to do?
Environment. The current state of user. Where are they, what are they doing. Social dimension, community
Identity, validating who you are, reputation information.

Will be very complex, and one of the biggest challenges will be that all this information comes from different places. Currently no standards. Will require sophisticated information models.

New technologies being developed such as Emotion ML, a mark up language to tag events with emotional context.

Mobile consumer application platforms becoming increasingly important as most of the information necessary for contextual computing will come from mobile devices. Many different architectures exist, Apple and Google are taking an early lead, but lots of others coming up eg Appcelerator and Kony. Gartner have a magic quadrant for MCAPs which is worth a look.

Ensemble interaction being developed, ie interactions that cross more than one device. Eg TV and mobiles. So, you could be watching TV, like the look of some clothes someone is wearing, point mobile phone camera at screen, find what they're wearing and buy it. This is already possible. A NFC (near field communication) enabled phone will pick up information from smart posters.
Smart posters exist in Japan with web cam in it, looks at you and decides about what sort of advert to show you and enables you to pick up a discount voucher on your phone.

Starhub have developed smart changing rooms which detect the RFID tag in clothes you're trying on and chooses the music to play. Hmm, not sure about that one!

Social media very important to context. Can deduce influencers.already developing " Pay with a tweet" for music downloads, Ie pay for a music track by tweeting about it.

Managing risk, the dark side of context aware computing.
Gartner predicts that Google, Microsoft, Nokia and Apple will continuously track daily journeys and digital habits for 10% of the worl'ds population by 2015.
Some people will find this creepy and won't want it. Some will see that it gives them better services and see the advantages.
Privacy will be important. Need simple, transparent privacy policies, and easy ways to opt out, and to correct deductions about behaviour.

Good session to finish the conference on, and some interesting things on the horizon.