This came up in Richard Katz talk – defined by Doubletounged as:

“money said to be insignificant when compared to other (planned) expenditures”

which I liked.

Another definition I came across recently was McPee in the Guardian:

“Using the toilet of a restaurant/hotel without eating there.”

I don’t know how I’ve managed to date without a word to describe this…

This is being presented by Brian Gilmore.

The JISC Support for Research Committee – fills gap between research councils – can provide service required to support research, which is not research in itself.

Currently Research is often done in ‘research council silos’ – and at insitutional level usually also done in silos. Often money is spent by the ‘principal investigator’ – without any reference to others.

Some research has too much infrastructure for a research council, and too much research for JISC.
Much of the time research funding results in the principal investigator, or department, investing in ‘local’ (rather than institutional) solutions (typified by running research infrastructure on a PC underneath your desk).

So – JSRC started working on the concept of ‘E-Infrastructure’ – the first element was the ‘VRE’ – Virtual Research Environment. In 2004, HEFCE GAVE £10M IN ‘CAPITAL’ MONEY TO THE JISC FOR:

ID Management (UK Federation)
VREs

In 05/06 JISC was awarded a further £81m (by HEFCE and HEFCW) for:
Super Janet5
Digitisation
E-Learning
(plus others …)

At the same time the OSI (Office of Science and Innvoation) – published report Science and Innovation INvestment – including a national e-infrastructure for report. This will advise the JISC, and Research Councils on forward planning (there are 6 sub-groups, with some reports on the NESC website

JISC now in phase 2 of VRE – 4 bids have been funded

VRE phase 1 – was technology focussed, experimental
VRE phase 2 – is more user and practice focused, looking to move towards ‘service’

Looking for Collaboration, Supporting small and large-scale research.

I can’t help thinking about this JISC approach compared to the North Carolina Virtual Computing lab described by the previous speaker. To some extent it feels like JISC when challenged to help develop e-infrastructure to support research does it by funding doing Silos on a large scale. This is probably a bit unfair – but where JISC has a real impact on my day-to-day work is where it produces a service, not where is funds projects. In the long term, I know these projects inform my work – but isn’t this ‘research’? Overall, I feel that JISC is in the situation of both being a service provider, and a funding body – and I don’t see why we try to squeeze both roles into a single organisation…

Some interesting stuff on Grid Services and Tools – National Grid Service – which sounds like a real step forward – this does feel much more like a real rationalisation of resource to support research.

Finally some stuff on the Identity Project, in which RHUL is a partner.

HAERVI is a project about access to e-resources for visitors in HE institutions.

If you work in your own institution, then accessing resources is relatively straightforward. However, as soon as you go to another institution, then you have problems – how do you get on to the network, and how do you access e-resources? There are legal, technical and administrative issues to overcome.

What has HAERVI achieved so far?
Interviews with IS and library staff at a range of institutions, a consultation event with a variety of people.

They found that UK Libraries+ and SCONUL Research Extra have widened visitor access to paper based resources in libraries – and these (esp. SRX) have had good take up.

However, a recent survey showed that fewer than 33% allowed visitor walk-in access to electronic resources. Ironically, for visitors, electronic resources have lead to a restriction of access.

However – there is a huge variation between institutions how they deal with walk-in access. This starts with ‘how do you get online’? Can you get a guest username? Is there a web kiosk? Will someone login for you?

Where many ‘content’ licenses allow walk-in access, you may not be able to get online due to network security and JANET AUP.

There is a lot of uncertainty in this area, which has led to ad hoc approaches, and this variation in practice.

The consultation event led to the idea that there should be a ‘one stop shop’ for visitors (haven’t heard ‘one stop shop’ in a while…). However, the needs of visitors can be a low priority (this rings a bell – we discussed implementing Eduroam recently, and certainly although seen as ‘desirable’ it was seen as extremely low priority)

At the moment there is no single definitive guide which clarifies which licenses permit walk-in use – HAERVI is working with JISC Collections to improve this for JISC Model Licence materials. Paul Salotti (the speaker) has said that this leads to librarians needing to go back to licenses and contracts to check – which is time-consuming – but for me, this just demonstrates what a poor job we are doing of managing this information at the moment – we should know the answers to this ‘up front’, and it should be clearly recorded in our systems – why on earth should it be a problem to know this information.

HAERVI has seen some partial solutions suggested – Visitor Portal and a Visitor Proxy – I didn’t quite follow how this would work, but it sounded like this would be a (national?) service, with local implementations…

HAERVI is putting together a Toolkit – should be useful.

This morning’s session is from Gina Poole, Vice President, Innovation and University Relations at IBM.

IBM focus on 4 key areas in working with Universities:

Joint research
Creating skills required by IBM, business partners, clients etc.
Recruiting
Providing solutions for teaching, research and running Universities

This morning Gina is going to talk about 4 areas:

Key Driving Forces
Market Environment
Key Technologies
Innovation in Education

Key Driving Forces

Apparently we are now in an ‘innovation’ era – this is driven by

Network Ubiquity (more than a billion internet users)
Open Standards
New Business designs (driven by the other two)

At the moment performance of IT systems still growing, while costs drop. But this brings complexity as well.

A shift in where people are employed from agriculture towards services (via manufacturing) – in the US and UK, around 60% of jobs are in the service industry (which includes education of course). In services, the value is not by goods, but by the interaction between the service provider and client/customer/consumer.

China currently has the vast majority of jobs in agriculture – so, presumably we can expect this to change? There is a deliberate attempt by the Chinese government (Gina says) to move a large proportion of workers from manufacturing to ‘knowledge’ sector.

Gina suggests that we are entering a period where we will face shortfalls of professional skills (due to the baby boomer generation reaching retirement and the growth of demand for professional skills)

‘Services Science Management and Engineering’ (SSME) – “the marketplace requires innovation that combines people technology, value and clients”. Gina is saying that typically in a University, academic departments work as silos – with their own processes, and systems. There is pressure to move much more towards an inter-disciplinary approach.

Key Technologies

Gina is covering some of the key technologies affecting us – the headlines are
Computer Assisted Business Systems – transforming industries and the institutions of society – ‘Service Oriented Architecture’ – a framework of incorporating web services across and between enterprises. This is a concept that is talked about a lot by the likes of IBM, but I’m yet to see good practical examples – certainly in UK HE.

Social Networks, Highly Visual, Interfactive Interfaces
Usual suspects – Web 2.0, Online Multiplayer games (World of Warcraft, Guildwars), Second Life …

Gina mentions that her son has started to get involved in the ‘teen’ Second Life – and a drive to start a business led him to develop scripting skills. This is quite interesting, as one of things that I have occaisionally bemoaned is the lack of programming being done by teenagers – when I was at school I got into programming BBC Basic, and many others of my age group had the same experience – but this seems to be lacking now – perhaps we will start to see practical, real world, applications driving these skills in the future?

Information Integration and Analysis – unfortunately Gina leaves us hanging on this one – just saying that there is lots of unstructured information – how do we work with this?

Innovation in education

IBM believes in open standards – e.g. contributing to Sakai project
NC (North Carolina) Computing Lab – creating a virtual computing environment for a University – any member of the university can book, or use, a virtual environment at any time. This is being Open Sourced – now being taken up by other Universities, government, schools, etc. etc.

Periodically UCISA compiles a list of ‘top concerns’ from IT directors in the HE sector. Previous years are available on the UCISA website, and so are the results of the 2007 survey.

Interestingly in terms of most resource first of all it’s ‘business systems’ at the top, but ‘e-learning’ is number 2 – i find this quite suprising. Also quite suprising is that ‘web systems’ is low in the resource list (number 10). However, this may be misleading, as it covers a wide area – and much of e-learning may be ‘web systems’…

Probably the most interesting thing is the emergence of ‘green computing’ as a concern – which has never been raised before, but clearly topical (and see notes on the data storage talk). There is a session dedicated to green computing later in the conference.

This section is titled ‘New directions: students and technology’, but I’m afraid that from the titles, the talks don’t bear out this promise.

However, the first one, on Trends in data storage by Richard Barga from Microsoft, should be interesting, as large portable storage is one of the really fast moving aspects of technology at the moment.

Although the presentation turned out to have no comment on students and technology at all, the issues being tackled here are really of topical interest, as data storage is tied into power usage – and thus global warming. Some of the figures Richard quotes are shocking – e.g. up to 50% of power in a data centre is used to convert current from a/c to d/c and back again (either side of a UPS).

This first thing to say is that our ability to store is growing incredibly (outpacing Moore’s law), and demand for storage is also growing incredibly.

What’s driving storage demand?
Google, Yahoo, etc – all collecting massive amounts of user generated content – who clicked on what etc.
Scientific community – huge datasets

Although increase in disk density is slowing, it is still growing. However, alongside rotating magnetic storage is flash storage. You can now get 16Gb flash drives. This is being driven from the ground up – use in phones, camera,

By 2012 a 1 or 2 Terabyte disk for $400 – not only cheap, but also low energy use (he has already mentioned the fact that if we keep growing traditional storage at current rates, we won’t be able to power it!)

Storage is now cheap (1 terabyte about 1000 dollars). However, the cost of maintaining storage is very expensive (can be $100k per Tb per year).

So – need to look at tiered storage – use cheaper drives to store less important data (for example, may be storing email on expensive storage, where documents in email are often multiple copies – if this can be moved to cheaper storage, you’ve got a saving)

By introducing appropriate technologies you can make significant savings.

Microsoft experimented on the reliability of cheap disks – and found that cheap sata disks are much more reliable than the literature suggests. So, MS, Google, etc. are using large arrays of cheap disks rather than spending twice as much on SCSI drives. Where there are errors, with proper backups and multiple disks, you can simply replaced failed disks, still cheaper.

Now Roger is moving on to some issues close to my heart – the cost of power and cooling in data centers with large amount of storage. Gartner have said that Power and cooling will be a top 3 issue for CIOs in the near future.

It can take as much power to cool a system as to power the system in the first place. Examples of people installing SANs and finding they cannot get enough power to run it (that is, the grid can’t supply them with sufficient power).

One thing that can be done is to use Storage virtualisation – but we are in very early days. But in the above example, they managed to acheive a server consolidation of 30:1 (although 20:1 is more typical)

Coming back to Flash – example of being able to drop power from 500W to 1W by using Flash in place of spinning media.

Racks can’t cool more than 10Kw per rack using forced air cooling alone – water is 3500 times more effective than air by volume – you can also get water-cooled racks (e.g. SprayCool)

So – performance and power demands will continue to grow.
In this context data center thermal capacity is the challenge.
No ‘magic bullet’ – but new Service Oriented Architectures will emerge, and become accepted (e.g. Amazon S3).

With Climate change being a huge global issue, data centres are going to come under increasing scrutiny. Storage management staff skills will need to evolve, educational programmes need to emerge…

This section is titled ‘New directions: students and technology’, but I’m afraid that from the titles, the talks don’t bear out this promise.

However, the first one, on Trends in data storage by Richard Barga from Microsoft, should be interesting, as large portable storage is one of the really fast moving aspects of technology at the moment.

Although the presentation turned out to have no comment on students and technology at all, the issues being tackled here are really of topical interest, as data storage is tied into power usage – and thus global warming. Some of the figures Richard quotes are shocking – e.g. up to 50% of power in a data centre is used to convert current from a/c to d/c and back again (either side of a UPS).

This first thing to say is that our ability to store is growing incredibly (outpacing Moore’s law), and demand for storage is also growing incredibly.

What’s driving storage demand?
Google, Yahoo, etc – all collecting massive amounts of user generated content – who clicked on what etc.
Scientific community – huge datasets

Although increase in disk density is slowing, it is still growing. However, alongside rotating magnetic storage is flash storage. You can now get 16Gb flash drives. This is being driven from the ground up – use in phones, camera,

By 2012 a 1 or 2 Terabyte disk for $400 – not only cheap, but also low energy use (he has already mentioned the fact that if we keep growing traditional storage at current rates, we won’t be able to power it!)

Storage is now cheap (1 terabyte about 1000 dollars). However, the cost of maintaining storage is very expensive (can be $100k per Tb per year).

So – need to look at tiered storage – use cheaper drives to store less important data (for example, may be storing email on expensive storage, where documents in email are often multiple copies – if this can be moved to cheaper storage, you’ve got a saving)

By introducing appropriate technologies you can make significant savings.

Microsoft experimented on the reliability of cheap disks – and found that cheap sata disks are much more reliable than the literature suggests. So, MS, Google, etc. are using large arrays of cheap disks rather than spending twice as much on SCSI drives. Where there are errors, with proper backups and multiple disks, you can simply replaced failed disks, still cheaper.

Now Roger is moving on to some issues close to my heart – the cost of power and cooling in data centers with large amount of storage. Gartner have said that Power and cooling will be a top 3 issue for CIOs in the near future.

It can take as much power to cool a system as to power the system in the first place. Examples of people installing SANs and finding they cannot get enough power to run it (that is, the grid can’t supply them with sufficient power).

One thing that can be done is to use Storage virtualisation – but we are in very early days. But in the above example, they managed to acheive a server consolidation of 30:1 (although 20:1 is more typical)

Coming back to Flash – example of being able to drop power from 500W to 1W by using Flash in place of spinning media.

Racks can’t cool more than 10Kw per rack using forced air cooling alone – water is 3500 times more effective than air by volume – you can also get water-cooled racks (e.g. SprayCool)

So – performance and power demands will continue to grow.
In this context data center thermal capacity is the challenge.
No ‘magic bullet’ – but new Service Oriented Architectures will emerge, and become accepted (e.g. Amazon S3).

With Climate change being a huge global issue, data centres are going to come under increasing scrutiny. Storage management staff skills will need to evolve, educational programmes need to emerge…

This talk by David Eastwood, Chief Executive of HEFCE…

He starts out by showing the increase in participation of older students in Higher Education – showing how the proportion of older students participating has increased over the last 40 years. There is a noticeably steep rise in the 1990’s. He is relating this to the overall growth in the sector.

He states that although this growth did not depend on IT, it was the use of IT systems that allowed it to happen (not quite sure what he is getting at here, but think he means that without enterprise systems for managing students etc. we wouldn’t have been able to cope with the growth?)

I have to say, that although he speaks well, the graphics he is using to illustrate the points are difficult to read on the screen, and are representing complex data, which isn’t very easy to assimilate as part of the talk. This is leaving me a little confused!

OK – a simpler chart here – you know where you are with a Pie Chart. Essentially showing that over 94% of HEFCE funding goes out on a formula basis – leaving special funding squeezed further and further.

This means that institutions need to slice the investment required for IT Infrastructure from their teaching and research funding (not sure this is very surprising, but perhaps because this has been true since I have been working in the sector?)

So – HEFCE priorities – delivering high quality mass higher education, RAE 2008 and beyond, growing importance of 3rd stream agenda.

Drivers for change are – increasingly diverse student body (non tradiational entrants, lifelong learning, new modes of study e.g. CPD); more demanding student body, students as fee paying customers; new research approaches and an expanding information base; the internet and TI enabled tools; cost and funding pressures.

What seems strange about all this, is that he could have given this list 3 or 4 years ago. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing (at least the drivers are consistent!), but overall it feels slightly like teaching us to suck eggs – don’t we know all this? The question is how we best use IT to react to these drivers.

Just an interesting comment, that got a murmur of approval – IT systems have modernised in Unversities, but often business processes have not. This has a ring of truth, but at RHUL, certainly there are some areas where we a trying hard to modernise the business process, but struggle to acheive this – and it would be good to understand why…

Some questions from David:

What is a university when there is universal access to ‘knowledge’ – we need to rethink the role of the university.
How do students learn in the information age? – what are the appropriate technologies and pedagogies to support them?

…
missed some stuff here as I was finishing my previous post, but quite a bit of the stuff he was talking about was about where we are at the moment – libraries now hybrid, coming under pressure for resource etc. etc.

RAE 2008 will go ahead as planned – is crucial to:
provide a baseline for new system
update quality assessments unchanged since 2001
and something else I missed!

The new framework has to produce robust indicators of research quality that are internationally meaningful (this seems ambitious, if not unrealistic)
To reduce the burden associated with the RAE
To relay on quantitative indicators
To accommodate disciplinary differences within a common framework

Meeting the Shared Services challenge:
Wondered when we were going to get on to Shared Services.
Interestingly he uses JISC as a model – but I think many people would see this as a flawed model. Although there are many good things about JISC, I can’t help think that it has been pulled in too many different directions over time, and perhaps some smaller, more focussed, shared services might have produced better results, certainly in some areas. However, this is not the fault of JISC I don’t think. I currently feel there are some real issues with the competetive nature of the HE Sector and how shared services work.
UCAS as another model

He is proposing that we need to look at the platforms we use – many people in the room remember the Mac initiative (http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/events/1999/conference/price_files/TextOnly/Slide1.html) – and he is deliberately invoking this, but arguing this is not a reason not to revisit some of these issues, and how we can more effectively share services. An interesting quote here from the presentation I’ve linked to “ethos of autonomy within universities remains an enormous obstacle to change” – from where I’m sitting, I’m not convinced this has changed – or at least, not enough to make a similar initiative successful at this point…

I’d argue here that stronger standards are more to the point than joint purchasing or using the same systems.

One question that has been raised is that VAT gets in the way of shared services – I’m not at all aware of what the issue is here, but all that David has said in response is that it is a difficult issue, and the sector needs to keep raising this to the Treasury…

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.

Almost exactly a year ago, I attended the UCISA Management Conference 2006 in Blackpool. Today, I’m off to the 2007 conference in Hammersmith. I was truly inspired by the 2006 conference, and my last blog post of the conference challenged me (and others) to go back to work and ‘do something different’

I’d decided a few days ago that I ought to post a follow-up as a prelude to this years conference, and then coincidentally Brian Kelly posted a comment asking me if I’d succeeded with my challenge.

So – truth to tell, I don’t feel like I’ve succeeded. It’s been a busy year, and I certainly don’t feel like I’ve achieved nothing. However, those ideas bubbling round my head after talks by Brian, Tim Smit, Steve Heppell et al. still seem a long way off. On the otherhand, I do think that the ideas put forward at the 2006 conference have stuck with me, and I hope continue to inform my thinking – perhaps in the end this is evolution not revolution.

Well – another year, another conference – I hope that the 2007 conference will prove as inspiring as the 2006. I’m particularly looking forward to the sessions on ‘designing technology rich learning spaces’ from Gill Ferrell, and hearing Graham Whitehead speak on Friday.

As usual, I’ll be trying to catch the action via this blog, so stay tuned if you are out there, and I’ll let you know how it goes…