Quite an interesting opening talk from David Rhind, VC at City University. He makes a very strong case for how IS/IT support the business of the university. Although he is clear that the University Business has to drive the issues, IS/IT is key to delivery.

One interesting quote is that Universities don’t need a Directory of IT, but a Chief Information Officer at the highest level of management. This is a really interesting emphasis on how the expertise of IT can be harnessed for the University.

However, the message that I take away from this is how we need to embed IT into the rest of the business – this is echoed to me in David Eastwood’s talk (see next posting) when he talks about business processes not modernising at the rate of IT systems.

What is key here is how we get IT embedded into the whole operation of the university – and for me there is a real question of how much we need to get away from the idea of having specialist knowledge gathered into a single ‘IT services’ – thoughts on this are pretty vague to me at the moment, but questions like whether a ‘web team’ should sit under IT or marketing are quite common. Some institutions have merged student support with library and/or IT support – perhaps we need to look at some of these models and consider how we can take the best of these models at RHUL.