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Framework for a Modern IT Working Environment
The document discusses the modern IT working environment in universities. It outlines the various types of internal and external services that support core activities like teaching, learning and research. These include central IT services, managed research/learning environments, virtual research/learning environments, and external third-party services. It also examines how to balance and integrate these services to best enable the work of students, teachers and researchers.
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Framework for a Modern IT Working Environment
- 1. Servicing 'Core' and'Chore': A framework for understanding a Modern IT Working Environment Joe Nicholls and David Harrison Cardiff University
- 2. Key themes andissues Services External versus Internal Perspectives Personal versus Organisational Work tasks Service Design and Management Technology in context Holistic service provision Enablement Education and Requirements External Third-party Services Governance ... more questions than answers!
- 3. The Modern WorkingEnvironment The Modern Working Environment University
- 4. The Modern WorkingEnvironment central services University
- 5. The Modern WorkingEnvironment Salaries Networked Desktop University central services Automated signatories recruitment Total projected activity (TPA) construction & core post approval electronic year planner Interdepartmental transfer note and other internal finance tasks procurement human resources staff handbook finance email service procedures file storage policies Estates
- 6. The Modern WorkingEnvironment ‘ Utilities’ - potentially commodity services? Types of services: Content: data/information Tools: technology, equipment People: knowledge, expertise, skills Activities: business processes Salaries Networked Desktop University central services Automated signatories recruitment Total projected activity (TPA) construction & core post approval electronic year planner Interdepartmental transfer note and other internal finance tasks procurement human resources staff handbook finance email service procedures file storage policies Estates
- 7. Managed Research EnvironmentManaged Learning Environment The Modern Working Environment central services University
- 8. MRE MLE centralservices Timetabling Enquirer-to-student process Online student application process Placement application process New course process Improving communication with students Improving the student’s Day 1 experience Supporting students on placements Legal Advisors Research Administrators Managing post-graduate researchers Researcher Profiles Commercial & Spinout Ethical approval Financial Costing Forms Stock control Policies & Procedures Project Management
- 9. Virtual Research EnvironmentVirtual Learning Environment The Modern Working Environment Managed Research Environment central services Managed Learning Environment University
- 10. VRE MRE MLEVLE central services Discussion lists Question & Test Content repositories Learning objects Wikis Blogs Bookmarking Collaborative workspaces Collaborative workspaces Electronic journals Blogs Wikis IRC Instant Messaging Desktop videoconferencing Bookmarking Content repositories Discussion lists Electronic journals Learning Technologists Question Banks ePortfolio Text Messaging High Performance Computing
- 11. Managed Research EnvironmentVirtual Research Environment central services Virtual Learning Environment Managed Learning Environment The Modern Working Environment ↑ Opportunity ↑ Capability Emerging external services: ↑ vast volumes of content (data/information) ↑ considerably more and greater variety of tools ↑ worldwide communities of people ↑ multitude of potentially useful business processes World Wide University
- 12. The Modern WorkingEnvironment central services MLE VLE World Wide Personal Learning Environment University
- 13. The Modern WorkingEnvironment central services MLE VLE World Wide University Personal Teaching Environment
- 14. The Modern WorkingEnvironment World Wide central services MRE VRE Personal Research Environment University
- 15. The Modern WorkingEnvironment central services MRE VRE Principal Investigator Research Fellow PhD Student World Wide University
- 16. chore central servicesWorld Wide University My Working Environment
- 17. core central servicesWorld Wide University My Working Environment
- 18. External third-party servicesCentral services Virtual Research Environment Managed Research Environment My Working Environment University Finance management SSO & Shibboleth Room booking Staff recruitment Procurement Payroll Policies & Procedures Staff development Staff sickness & absence Internal Transfers Electronic signatures BO reports Grant applications Publishing e-Prints Research Assessment Exercise Directory of Expertise Information About PhD students Project Management Research skills resources Internal Peer review Library catalogue e-journals Grant proposal archive Fixed-term renewal Social Networking Tools Collaborative authoring Research data management Blogs Collaborative workspace Shared Bookmarks Access to IP restricted resources High Performance Computing Alerts News & Events Cardiff Mail (email & calendaring Presence Awareness & Instant Messaging Discussion lists My Files Wikis Profiles
- 19. Third party tools& services Central services Virtual Research Environment Managed Research Environment My Working Environment University Social Networking Tools Collaborative authoring Research data management Blogs Collaborative workspace Shared Bookmarks Access to IP restricted resources High Performance Computing Alerts News & Events Cardiff Mail (email & calendaring Presence Awareness & Instant Messaging Discussion lists My Files Wikis Profiles Room booking Staff recruitment Procurement Payroll Policies & Procedures Staff development Staff sickness & absence Internal Transfers Electronic signatures BO reports Grant applications Publishing e-Prints Research Assessment Exercise Directory of Expertise Information About PhD students Project Management Research skills resources Internal Peer review Library catalogue e-journals Grant proposal archive Fixed-term renewal
- 20. Third party tools& services Central services Virtual Research Environment Managed Research Environment My Working Environment University Room booking Staff recruitment Procurement Payroll Policies & Procedures Staff development Staff sickness & absence Internal Transfers Electronic signatures BO reports Grant applications Publishing e-Prints Research Assessment Exercise Directory of Expertise Information About PhD students Project Management Research skills resources Internal Peer review Library catalogue e-journals Grant proposal archive Fixed-term renewal Social Networking Tools Collaborative authoring Research data management Blogs Collaborative workspace Shared Bookmarks Access to IP restricted resources High Performance Computing Alerts News & Events Cardiff Mail (email & calendaring Presence Awareness & Instant Messaging Discussion lists My Files Wikis Profiles Development
- 21. Third party tools& services Central services Virtual Research Environment Managed Research Environment My Working Environment University Room booking Staff recruitment Procurement Payroll Policies & Procedures Staff development Staff sickness & absence Internal Transfers Electronic signatures BO reports Grant applications Publishing e-Prints Research Assessment Exercise Directory of Expertise Information About PhD students Project Management Research skills resources Internal Peer review Library catalogue e-journals Grant proposal archive Fixed-term renewal Social Networking Tools Collaborative authoring Research data management Blogs Collaborative workspace Shared Bookmarks Access to IP restricted resources High Performance Computing Alerts News & Events Cardiff Mail (email & calendaring Presence Awareness & Instant Messaging Discussion lists My Files Wikis Profiles Education
- 22. Are we gettingthe balance right?
- 23. The Modern WorkingEnvironment central services MRE VRE My Working Environment World Wide University
- 24. Basic data /information related activities Exchanging / Communicating Seeking Retrieving Managing Manipulating Creating Disseminating
- 25.
- 26. Mapping work activitiesto services e.g., First task in grant application process: Identifying Funding Opportunities Data / Information Activities Seeking Retrieving Management Manipulation Creation Dissemination Exchange/ Communication Services Content Tools People Activities Documents detailing funding initiatives Locate and use a search engine Consult Research Support officer Research Support officer performs search Funding opportunity PDF documents and forms Use Adobe Acrobat to display Consult IT Help Desk Documents Printed by secretary Use Content Management System to store documents Research Assistant collates and organises X X X X X X Use guidelines and advice Use Word processor Contact and consult collaborators Paper detailing candidate opportunities Use Email to Send to collaborators X Secretary prints & posts documents Feedback as email Use online collaborative workspace Discuss with Research team X X
- 27. Enablement through PartnershipACTIVITY Service provider ACTIVITY Learner, Teacher, Researcher Services Education Requirements
- 28. My Working EnvironmentUniversity Researcher central services
- 29. My Working EnvironmentUniversity Researcher VRE MRE central services
- 30. My Working EnvironmentUniversity Researcher VRE MRE central services World Wide External Third-party Services
- 31. Researcher My WorkingEnvironment University VRE MRE central services Enablement: Education? Requirements? World Wide External Third-party Services
- 32. Researcher My WorkingEnvironment University VRE MRE central services Enablement: Education? Requirements? World Wide External Third-party Services
- 33. Researcher My WorkingEnvironment University VRE MRE central services governance ?
- 34. University Researcher Businesschange Business Change VRE MRE central services My Working Environment
- 35.
Editor's Notes
- #2 The world is changing faster than universities. Saying this, will come as no surprise to anyone involved with technology or web related services. But there are many throughout the university – and at all levels of the organisation - who don’t have that same level of appreciation – Because of this, they’re not well placed to consider what these advances mean for the management and delivery of future services – and ultimately, business change for the university. For several years ago now, Cardiff has been engaged in an ambitious programme to realise the ‘Modern IT Working Environment’. What I’m going to talk through here is a model and a presentation we’ve developed to explore key issues that have emerged during our journey.
- #3 Here are some of the main themes and issues we’ve tried to surface and get people to consider. To begin with we needed some way to show how external services are impacting on those we provide internally – I’ll take you through a visual model we’ve developed to show this. We also wanted a way to represent the view of individual learners, teachers and researchers in relation to the organisation – so the model will show both perspectives allowing us to frame questions from each position. We have also been trying to promote quite a significant shift in thinking about how services are provided in the university. By encouraging managers to focus their service provision on work tasks and the activities people perform – as opposed to the more widespread commodity and consumer based approaches Such a shift requires that we put technology in context - and recognise it as being only one type of service that people need to do their work. More often than not people require other kinds of services in order to make good use of technology – but this isn’t always in the minds of those who manage technology services. We believe the idea of ‘enablement’ to be fundamental to the successful provision of future services – this emphasises the important role that education and requirements gathering and management play. Only when these issues have been addressed can we put ourselves in a better position to address the impact of external third-party services on the university.
- #4 What you see here is a representation of services within the university as it stands today. This bounded space encompasses all the various kinds of services owned and delivered within the organisation. From an IT perspective, software applications and online services are controlled and made available mainly through the campus based networked desktop. This is likely to be the case for the foreseeable future. But, as we are all aware, more and more services are being accessed through web clients and portal-like interfaces, on a whole range of personal and mobile devices. This is basis of the Modern IT Working Environment And now I’ll take you through it’s key components… ->
- #5 At the heart of the organisation are its central services. These are services that are of common value, such as corporate business processes and systems. They are used by most, if not all, members of the University. In some way or other the working lives of everyone within the organisation is dependent on these running effectively and efficiently. The optimisation of these services is of primary concern in delivering the Modern IT Working Environment at Cardiff. ->
- #6 Examples, of these centralised services are those that deal with things like… Financial tasks - such as payroll and procurement; Human resource related - recruitment, induction and health & safety, Estates related and…IT services - like email, file storage and archiving, for example. Many are of these can be characterised as corporate business processes – involving highly structured and systematic workflows. For the most part, these are pretty well understood, if not all defined in detail. Many of these services are capable of being automated as t hey are less dependent on human intervention and ad hoc decision making. The kinds of tasks that characterise these work activities involve form filling, database input/output, report generation, etc. But they also require making use of other kinds of services, such as accessing documents that detail policies, procedures, guidelines, handbooks, official forms, etc. There is also the knowledge and expertise provided by specialists who work in the central administrative directorates and divisions. They provide information, advice and help to enable and support the work of others. These people may also do the work on behalf of someone – and this can also be thought of as a separate service to that of just providing advice and information.
- #7 The majority of these can be considered ‘utilities’ or ‘commodity’ services - that effectively all educational institutions provide for their staff and students – they are pretty much provisioned in the same way and for the same reasons throughout FE and HE. This is of fundamental concern to the programme at Cardiff University – much of the justification for its funding was based on the need to improve central administrative and management processes. The vast majority of educational organisations are still of the position that these central business processes can best be delivered by buying the latest IT tools and making them available to staff and students. They meet service needs by procuring heavyweight information systems and through establishing partnerships with leading vendors, such as IBM, Oracle, SAP, and Tribal Arguably, it doesn’t make sense for every University and College in the UK to replicate these services. It is in this area where the prime candidates will be identified for adopting and engineering an SOA approach – and for promoting shared services – which indeed is what the JISC e-Framework is all about. -> Just to be clear about my use of the term ‘services’ - which I’m sure some of you will find different from what you’re used to - I’m using this term to refer to anything that someone does for someone else, or gives to someone else, in order to help meet a need – in order to help someone perform a work task. It is proposed that everything a person uses to help them do their work can be assigned to one of four categories of service: People will access and use... Content – which is any physical or virtual media artefact that conveys data or information Tools – this includes physical tools, equipment and infrastructure, and also virtual software, applications, operating systems, etc. People – as providers of information, knowledge, expertise, as well as specialist skills and attributes – these are most likely to be defined in the form of roles and responsibilities Activities – this refers to any kind of work done on behalf of someone else, often described in the form of workflows and business processes So, throughout every service area of the university, these are the basic types of things we provide and do for our learners, teachers and researchers.
- #8 Building upon these central services are collections of other services that are dedicated to supporting work in each specific domain – either research, learning or teaching These have historically been referred to as the Managed Learning Environment (MLE) and the Managed Research Environment (MRE) The concept of a ‘Managed Research Environment’ has been around for some time – and similar in function and purpose to that of the ‘Managed Learning Environment’ – but for research It embraces all services concerned with enabling and supporting the administrative and management tasks associated with research work - and similarly, the MLE for learning and teaching. The dotted lines indicate that there’s a blurring between central university services and those that are more directly applicable to a community. Think of this more as a continuum rather than separate, discrete layers.
- #9 Examples of services which are relevant to each domain include things like… People in research support units, providing documentation and expertise Systems and processes in administrative divisions which are used to enable things like grant applications and manage research projects And things like …‘e-Prints’, digital preservation systems, High Performance and Grid computing systems, dedicated backup and data archiving facilities There are many services that we dedicate to enabling and supporting learning and teaching practices, in most cases these are difficult to re-purpose for research. Such as those concerned with student recruitment, registration, enrolment, assessment, and placements.
- #10 The next layer of services builds on the previous. Once again there’s really no clear separation, as has been illustrated by common interchangeable reference to MLE and VLE as. Ideally, there would be a seamless blending and integration in the way that these applications, services and resources are used. The ‘Virtual Research Environment’ and ‘Virtual Learning Environment’ include content, tools, people and business processes that are more geared to doing the real job of work - the core activities associated with the job role – for example the things that a researcher uses to help them do their studies and experiments
- #11 The idea of a VLE has been around much longer than that of a VRE, but the purpose is pretty much the same, to provide services tailored to support the specific requirements of the work being done. And although there’s a historical distinction between a VRE and a VLE, in practice there is considerable overlap. Which raises questions over how much we are providing within our institutions that can be repurposed for the other community. Although considerable content, tools, expertise and business processes are needed to cater for specialist requirements. Each community makes use of tools like discussion lists, blogs, wikis, collaborative spaces, etc. but you also get bespoke services like data repositories and High Performance Computing for researchers, and assessment tools and question banks for teachers
- #12 So… I’ve described all the various areas of service within a university that we’re already familiar with. And then… ...there’s everything else outside in the big wide world. The stark reality is that outside things are evolving much faster than within the University. Exposing far more capability and opportunity - the scale and variety of which cannot be matched by universities - and we cannot ignore what’s happening. On all fronts, the amount of content, the variety of tools, the increasing access to knowledge and expertise, and the numerous ways in which work can be off-loaded - is putting into stark contrast our capability within the university to be agile and responsive – to recognise and seize these opportunities from a service point-of-view We have to help our service managers and senior decision makers understand and respond to what’s happening. We must not only become aware of what our staff and students are being exposed to, but enable them to capitalise quickly on these opportunities. ----- Traditionally, universities have tried to provide all that’s needed in-house for staff and students. In most institutions there is next to no support for enabling people to use external services - And little thought has been given to how they will interface, compliment or replace those we provide internally. The tension is increasing between the rigid, highly structured, corporate centric model and the more open, flexible mix-and-match approach that individuals are increasingly finding out for themselves.
- #13 Layered over this representation of services is the personal working environment of the learner, teacher and researcher. This diagram is intended to show a holistic and person-centred view of work activities and service use. The slice across the organisation and extending beyond, reveals the complex way in which people are now being exposed to and using both internal and external services. It is this loop that goes outside of the organisation that is most interesting. It’s where people are making increasing use of what’s on offer outside of the university - and in most cases this is completely bypassing internal service providers.
- #14 Teachers have their personal working environment. And we ask ourselves, what are the implications of these external services for the work of our lecturers?
- #15 And researchers also have their environment which drawing on services tailored for their work. We’ll look at the researcher’s environment in more detail – and ask ourselves what will the future university contribute? How will we manage the mix services for our researchers? A rationale approach would suggest that we should focus our efforts on central services, because that is where the greatest gains for overall productivity within the organisation are likely to be achieved. What I hope to show is that when a researcher does their work they use services from across all of these different functional areas. They do not work in a compartmentalised way when they access services – their main concern, and what drives them, is their work task. Service providers must be careful not to adopt a blinkered view. A service that is focused solely on the design, development and delivery of technologies – without managing and coordinating this in concert with other non-technology services - will result in poor technology use. We end up focusing our efforts on just making the tool available and NOT on how and why they’re needed. For example, when a researcher does a grant application – which we’ll take a closer look at in a moment – it involves them making use of services from every area.
- #16 We can extend this view of the individual to illustrate the overlapping nature of personal working environments. This happens when we work in teams and collaborate with others – which is pretty much the rule for researchers. Within a team there will be some overlap in roles and responsibilities. Consequently, they will use some of the same services – this is more likely where university services are concerned, probably less so at the moment with external – but that could well change! Certain services will be used by some individuals more than others – but what’s important is that the team are aware of, and understand, the dependencies between their work tasks – and therefore the most appropriate services to enable them to work collaboratively, efficiently and effectively. From a service provider’s point-of-view it’s important to understand how such teams and groups work together – so that the services can be coordinated to enable and support work activities that are devolved and managed across many people. Again this highlights the need to adopt a holistic view of service management and provision across the university.
- #17 We all perform many different kinds of work activities: These vary from the ‘frequent and mundane’ – to the ‘occasional and important’ One thing that is often mentioned by staff is their desire to minimise work that is considered to be a ‘chore’. These are mainly tasks associated with the administration and management of their primary work role. On the whole, central university services are intended to try and reduce the time and effort spent doing chore type tasks. Again, a rationale approach would suggest focusing effort on these services because this is where the greatest gains can be achieved for the overall productivity within the organisation.
- #18 In contrast, the ‘core’ work activities are what we would like to spend all our time doing. This is what someone would consider to be mainstream and most important to their work. Their primary concern is to maximise their time and effort to achieve this work. In practice, of course, both kinds of tasks have to be performed - but there is a difference in motivation and interest on the part of the person to perform them.
- #19 This is just to give some examples of the types of services in each area. Central services – provide things like finance, HR, polices, procedures The Managed Research Environment provides services to enable the effective administration and management of research work for all researchers in the institution The Virtual Research Environment is where services are used that directly enable practices associated the specific types of research work – these will include data and information management tools, and services that enable communication and collaboration And finally, there are the external third-party services – which will increasing provide equivalents to those provided by the university, and much more besides
- #20 What the university needs to address is making its boundary between internal and external services more permeable – and move towards creating the ‘edgeless university’ so that we have better flows of data and information so that internal and external services can interoperate and be coordinated in a way that makes for seamless use. Of course this raises many complex issues concerning security, privacy and identity – it’s a mine-field At Cardiff we are currently addressing concerns over the creation of ‘walled gardens’ – online social spaces within the university that are closed off from activity and work elsewhere – and we’re questioning whether this healthy thing to be doing Ultimately, staff and students should be provided with the best of both worlds, and in such as way that it meets the needs of their work tasks. What is the role of services providers within the university to make this a reality?
- #21 The current situation is that most emphasis is placed on developing central services – the heavyweight corporate centric business processing systems – this focuses mainly on alleviating the ‘chore’ administrative and management work tasks. The aim is to systematise and automate as much as possible. Work activities which make use of these services are generally well defined and highly structured procedures. It requires business process modelling, data integration and automation, designing and building workflows, interfacing between information systems, etc. These are juggernaut projects – they’re big beasts to get going, difficult to steer and once started next to impossible to stop. As we move out the periphery of the organisation there is less and less development and more out-of-the-box configuration and ‘what you see is what you get’
- #22 In comparison, the need for education grows in the opposite direction. Very little education, may be some training, is needed in order to use central services. But considerably more education is need in order to get the most out of the services towards the periphery and external to the organisation. Appropriate use is context specific. People need to understand the relevance and value of these services for their ‘core’ work activities. In the future, it is likely that external services will be used increasingly to do ‘chore’ work as well. The bottom-line is that our staff and students will not realise the opportunities these third-party services offer if we don’t educate them to use them appropriately. Is it the role of service providers within the University to design, develop and provide this education? I would argue that it is - and that the future university depends on us doing so.
- #23 So...the question is… ‘Are we getting the balance right? I would suggest that we are still locked into a mode of technology procurement, development and internal provision. As service providers we do not bring the same level of resource, rigour and emphasis to education – that will be essential to enabling people to use technology. And this is something that will be increasingly necessary if we are to take advantage of external services - and put ourselves in a position to quickly grasp emergent opportunities – because they will undoubtedly occur outside before they do so within The future university needs to put itself in a position where it is able to recognise these opportunities and it is agile and responsive enough to enable their staff and students to grasp them – Those that do, will be institutions that evolve beyond the rest. What I’d like to explore in a little more detail is the nature of work activities - and use this to illustrate why the service provider’s educational role will become increasingly important.
- #24 The focus here is on the activities that people perform when doing their work – it is through our understanding of THIS which will enable us to improve future services Many work tasks are complex – we break them down into activities and then select and employ services to help us perform them. The current picture is one where services are often fragmented and uncoordinated because they are provisioned from silos. Researchers complain that there are just too many people, too many documents, systems, polices and procedures to follow - and they don’t know how they can quickly locate and apply them all to their task. If you take the example of a grant application performed by a researcher – the component activities involve using services from across the whole university and beyond The flow of work shifts to and fro across all these services areas. The challenge for providers is how to best enable performance of the overall work task – and this requires a holistic view of service provision – It is challenging of existing governance structures and processes within universities – especially when people want to make use of external services and when the institution currently takes no responsibility for this.
- #25 If we were to take a closer look at any task we would find that it breaks down into a fairly well defined set of basic activities which involve interacting with data or information in specific ways It is the performance of these activities that we can map against the different types of services I introduced earlier – if you remember…they are content, tools, people and other work activities So, the proposal here is that all work can be broken down into performing a number of these basic data/information activities I think there is also potential here for thinking about the relevance of ‘literacies’ ; information literacies, media literacies, social lieteracies, and such like – and the relevance of these generic and transferable knowledge and skills At each step in doing a grant application we can break the task down into doing one of these types of activity. They are concerned with… Seeking data and information – so searching for it, browsing and discovering it Retrieving data and information – obtaining it in a format that is usable for the task Managing data and information – storing, sorting, organising and looking after it Manipulating data and information – transforming it, restructuring, reconfiguring it Creating data and information – production, authoring, and generating it Disseminating data and information – publishing and distributing it, making it available to others Exchanging and Communicating using data and information – this is essentially targeted delivery of content with intent to inform or communicate, which may be reciprocated leading to dialogue and discussion So, all these things we do, when we do our work – and it is at the point of doing these basic activities that we make use services.
- #26 So lets dive in and look at just one activity that’s part of the grant application process. This shows you a high-level overview of the various kinds of activities involved and categories of services used. - We’ll take a look at the first activity ‘Identifying funding opportunities’
- #27 I’ll use this grid to explore how these basic activities map to the services for the task of ‘Identifying Funding opportunities’ Down the left we have the activities I’ve just described Across the top, are the types of services We can use this grid to ask questions about what specific things will be needed – somewhat like a checklist for requirements gathering So, the researcher will want to seek documents detailing funding initiatives They will want to find and use search tools to be able to locate and access these documents They may have to consult an expert who’s experienced in doing this, possibly a librarian or a research support officer And it could also be the case that much of this work could be performed by someone else on behalf of the researcher And so on… for obtaining the document in a format that can be read, using an appropriate tool, getting help and advice, or the work being done through someone else. It is a complex picture, and there’s lots of detail – but the important thing is that the nature of the work activities stay relatively constant and unchanging –they’re pretty much the same whenever and wherever the researcher does their work. What does continually change, as we are well aware of, are the various services that can be used – In mapping it out in this way we are able to present alternatives and potentially substitute new services for old. It is worth noting that from a technology service perspective we historically have only been concerned with the ‘tools’ column – we haven’t gone out of our way much to coordinate with other service providers and construct a holistic and joined up picture of how collectively our services are best made available and used. In order to be able to do that, we need a unified and shared view of the work task.
- #28 Shown here - on one level we have the service provider doing their work to design, develop and deliver services for the researcher so that they, in turn, are able do their work. In an ideal world, all the component service elements in the grid will work together. But, even that is not enough. It’s not just a matter of ensuring all the necessary services are available. A researcher has to be able to understand how to use them for their particular situation – and that requires education. For technology and tools to be used appropriately their relevance and value needs to be understood in practice. To design and manage services so that that is can be achieved, means we need to understand what it is people do and require – Therefore we have to systematically gather and manage requirements – How many service providers do that? Let alone doing so throughout the university in such a way as ALL service providers can access and use them This information is essential for making informed decisions about the design and planning of future services. Education and requirements gathering and management are inter-dependent roles – at Cardiff we refer to this as ‘Enablement’ And it should be performed by the provider of the services – and is dependent on building and maintaining partnerships with staff and students.
- #29 Education and requirements management MUST be closely coupled with each area of service provision within the organisation.
- #30 Only by doing this will we be able to achieve a holistic and coordinated approach across the University We can use our common and shared understanding of the work activity to help anchor services and facilitate communication. Of course, this will require new knowledge, skills and changes in practices, as well as a requirements database linked into the service help desk and changes in governance – let alone the will to do it.
- #31 This is an essential pre-requisite condition if the university is ever going to be able to realise the benefits of external services. Without service providers taking on the enablement roles and performing education and requirements management, and without a common understanding of work tasks - there is no way we will be able to bring to bear the opportunities afforded by new technologies emerging outside of the university
- #32 At the moment the university has very little to do with developing these external services, next to no control over how they’re provided, and perhaps worst of all we have very little idea what’s out there in order to bring it to people’s attention. Just the same as for internal services, we must think about how we can educate people about what is possible with external content, tools and people and match these to the requirements that arise from our understanding of work tasks.
- #33 Because these external services will ultimately impact on ALL areas of the organisation that have up until now been traditionally served by internal directorates and departments.
- #34 Fundamental to achieving this will be appropriate and effective governance structures and processes – This is where the necessary agility and responsiveness will be achieved via rapid and reliable channels of communication throughout the organisation Without this in place we have no way of bringing to bear and managing what’s happening on the outside.
- #35 This leads into different story…for another time… But the issues I’ve talked you through here are fundamental to enabling business change. What’s happening on the outside is just as, if not more important than what’s happening inside. All the issues raised here are relevant to engineering business change for the future university and realising the Modern IT Working Environment.
- #36 This is really all about providing a wake-up call for service managers and senior decision makers. I think it is the job of those who are most aware of how technology is evolving to raise the awareness and understanding of those that are too busy managing the institution. This model and presentation has been well received by educational and business organisations across the UK and internationally – but every time it has raised more questions than answers. Ultimately, providing people with a Modern IT Working Environment is all about putting the means in place to enable business change. Changing the business is all about understanding what it is people do now and educating people as to how they can do it differently. University service providers are in a prime position to do both, but it will require a unified view in order to manage and coordinate IT and non-IT services to enable people to change the way they work for the better.