Director of IT's Blog

Town Meeting - to discuss the UK Strategy for a Research Computing Ecosystem and the future of e-Science

2011-07-08T15:34:00.004+01:00

A remarkable Town Meeting has been held at UCL, at which a draft Strategic Plan for the UK Research Computing Ecosystem was discussed. For years we have been trying to find the best way to build on the successes of the UK e-Science programme.

The timing of the Town Meeting proved to be inspired as in a recent development the Strategic Plan and associated documentation will be considered by David Willetts / BIS and circulated to university Vice Chancellors next Wednesday (13 July).

The Strategic Plan will be crucially important in the development of a coherent framework for the UK’s research computing ecosystem. The draft received strong support from attendees at the Town Meeting.

Steve Butcher (head of HEFCE Shared Services) spoke at the Town Meeting and offered to work with the community to develop the Strategic Plan further.

Please leave comments on the draft Strategic Plan referenced above.

Government Information Assurance Event, 28/29 June 2011

2011-06-29T14:41:00.002+01:00

The eleventh Information Assurance event was held in London.

In Autumn 2010 the National Security Strategy identified cyber attacks on national infrastructure among “Tier 1” Security threats. Reflecting the severity of this threat, the UK government plans to spend £650 million over four years on a National Cyber Security Programme (NCSP), to reinforce the nation’s defenses against cyber attack.

Last October the Prime Minister placed cyber security at the top of the national security agenda last. Recognising the importance of Information Assurance in achieving cyber security, the new National Cyber Security Strategy, incorporates the National IA Strategy.

The Government ICT Strategy released earlier this year, is focused specifically on opening up public services and delivering digital by default. The claim made is that the ICT strategy will deliver better public services for less cost through increased openness. But the openness comes with risk, and a safe and trusted environment is essential.

A strong message from all speakers is that the employee is the weakest information security point of the organisation. Education is vital.

New devices are agents of change. Users are becoming empowered in choosing devices and how the devices are used, and this leads to new threats:

Device and data loss

More than half of all users do not lock devices

5-10% of tablets and 15-25% phones lost/stolen each year

Mobile devices predicted to be new malware frontier

Google removed 50 infected Apps from MarketPlace after more than 200k down-loads

User behaviour

Average iPhone has 60 applications downloaded; users more readily download to Smartphones than to laptops.

Greater use of social media

It was stated that there is a serious disconnect between policy and reality and between policy awareness and adherence.

JISC-funded Study of Early Adopters of Cloud Computing and Shared Services

2011-06-27T11:28:00.004+01:00

The FEAST report, an overview of the adoption of shared services and cloud computing in universities, which was funded by JISC and has been published recently, is worth a read.

HE has an excellent record in shared services eg purchasing consortia, JANET, UCAS. However many in-house activities are perceived to offer competitive advantage.

The report is aimed and written for VCs, Finance directors etc.

Text copied from the JISC web-page:

Purpose

To conduct a study to identify, explore, document and analyse examples of large-scale shared services and cloud computing implementations for core administrative and related academic systems across universities and colleges in theUK and globally.

To produce models and high quality guidance materials on effective practice around shared services and cloud computing planning and implementation in further and higher education aimed at different stakeholder groups.

Description

This study collated details from more than 250 different projects across the HE sector globally to demonstrate good examples of common frameworks and mutual cooperation, shared services and cloud computing initiatives. 80+ examples relevant to the Further and Higher Education sector (UK or internationally) have been been documented in vignettes and 5 specifically interesting examples have been expanded in to detailed case studies to illustrate the lessons and pitfalls of each project.

HEFCE's Cloud services for education and research – projects and partners announced

2011-06-27T11:08:00.006+01:00

HEFCE and JISC have issued a press release giving more details of the UMF funding which was announced last February. It lists the partners involved, including Oxford's projects which will be funded under the programme.

Full text of the release is as follows:

Since announcing a £12.5 million fund in February that aims to help universities and colleges deliver better value for money by working together more effectively, HEFCE and JISC are now able to confirm the projects and partners appointed to deliver the two parts of this work: a national cloud infrastructure and supporting services.

JANET (UK) will deliver the national brokerage to aid procurement of cloud services between higher education institutions and commercial suppliers and Eduserv will provide a pilot cloud infrastructure for higher education institutions. Other partners include De Montfort, Exeter, Edinburgh, Kent, Liverpool John Moores, Oxford, Leicester, Southampton and Sunderland universities (see below).

So that colleges and universities can gain the most benefit from this new cloud-based infrastructure, four new services will be developed to drive its adoption:

• A new specialist team set up by JISC Advance to provide support for procuring and implementing administrative systems and services.
• A shared service to help universities manage the administration of their research operations, from research proposal through to project completion.
• A service to support the secure distribution of graduation documents and transcripts for the benefit of students and prospective employers.
• A service to support libraries in the administration of their electronic resources, which will include the management of their licensing and subscription of electronic journals.

David Sweeney, HEFCE Director – Research, Innovation and Skills, explains the value this suite of work will have once complete, "In the current economic climate all education organisations are looking for further ways to work together, share resources and reduce costs. This programme of work will provide data management and storage services, plus a suite of tools to help universities and colleges, researchers and administrators work more effectively across the research management lifecycle. This will reduce duplication and increase the efficiency of administrative and research processes."

David Utting JISC Director Service Relationships commented, "Cloud-based services have the potential to bring enormous efficiencies and benefits to higher education institutions and we look forward to working with them to realise these. But we acknowledge that it is vital to demonstrate to users the security and robustness of working in an education and research cloud.
"There have been a number of high-profile issues with data being stored in public clouds, which is why we are working with JANET (UK) to deliver a private higher education cloud to ensure universities can trust that their information and data will be secure."

For further information visit here.

1. This £12.5 million is part of the University Modernisation Fund. For further information see ‘Shared services in cloud computing to be funded by HEFCE’

2. Who is involved?
The University of Exeter will lead the Research Management and Administration System (RMAS) work between the universities of Exeter, Kent, and Sunderland to procure, develop and implement a cloud-based research management and administration system based on a need identified by earlier feasibility studies funded by HEFCE.

De Montfort University is developing an enterprise service bus (ESB) solution to demonstrate interoperability between local and cloud systems for shared administrative applications, starting with RMAS.

JISC Collections will manage the electronic resource management support service which builds on work by JISC and the Society of College National and University Libraries (SCONUL).

The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) at University of Edinburgh will develop data management tools and training capability. This will support the production and implementation of data management plans for universities and their researchers to preserve data for sharing, re-use and citation.

A consortium led by Liverpool John Moores University will develop the secure document service. (NB - we're part of this consortium)

Four projects will produce software applications which can be delivered as a service from the cloud. They will support researchers with their work and data management. These are:

• Leicester University is providing support for joint NHS and university research teams working with tissue samples and anonymised patient data.

• The University of Oxford is providing a database to a wide range of researchers in the arts, humanities and other disciplines. Oxford will also provide an integrated set of tools to manage data within Life Sciences and other similar research projects. This will make it easier to submit data for longer-term storage in an appropriate standards compliant data repository.

• The University of Southampton is providing electronic lab data management and collaborations tools.

2011-04-14T15:27:00.002+01:00

OUCS wins £1.2million for cloud project - VIDaaS[

It was announced today that OUCS has won funding of £1.2million to develop the VIDaaS Project - Virtual Infrastructure with Database as a Service. This Project will provide a local virtual infrastructure (VI) which will interface with a national Higher Education VI - or 'cloud' - to enable the sharing of services across the whole HE sector. As a result there will be substantial cost savings through economies of scale. The virtual infrastructure will host a self-service 'Database as a Service' (DaaS) system which will help improve the efficiency of UK Higher Education research. Members of the team are shown above.

2011-04-01T15:33:00.002+01:00

A revised Government IT Strategy was published on Wednesday 30 March 2011.

One quarter of the document (Part 2) is focused on 'Creating a common ICT infrastructure', within which the cloud features strongly as well as 'common technology standards' and 'interoperability enabled by open standards'. There is also a new proposed governance structure (Part 4).

Does any of this have relevance to Higher Education IT Strategy do you think?

2011-03-31T08:46:00.002+01:00

Today, JISC's Managed Research Data programme completes, as does our SUDAMIH project.

2011-03-31T08:15:00.002+01:00

I attended the UCISA conference last week. The UCISA web site has the conference information and most of the talks have their slides linked as PDFs now. The themes were:

Day One: Know your business
Day Two AM: Know your numbers
Day Two PM: Strive to be trusted/empower the team
Day Three: See over the horizon

Tweeting was rife, you can find an archive of them on twapper keeper and a summary of them on Summarizr (Powered by Eduserv). I found that the tweeting really added value.

As a taster I will mention just one thought provoking talk, Paul Golding, CEO of Wireless Wanders, on current and future trends in mobile.

Mobile is "everyware". 1.2billion mobiles sold annually. >90% of world has mobile access. In 59 countries there are more mobiles than people. 6 trillion text messages sent in a year. Each teenager sends or receives on average 3339 text messages a month. That's about 14 hours.

First internet enabled phone came out in 1999, and since then there's been a convergence of web 2.0 and Internet centric mobile devices with a 100 times increase in processing power.

The fastest growing sector in app store is business applications,especially for tablets. They are not an offshoot of a PC, but a mobile phone. There's an increasing transition from utility to experience. This will lead to escaping the PC ( when current dependence on iTunes goes). Some people may grow up without ever needing a PC, and it will change their experience of computing, especially as data moves more into the cloud. For example, they will not have concept of folder.

Virtual, augmented reality is also a trend to watch, This combines the physical world and the web world. A tipping point for virtual reality will be tablets now they have cameras. There is an increasing number of sophisticated sensors being developed, which will augment the web experience. Small body sensors can already can detect and measure 20 different things. Sensors in your car can already detect tyre pressures. This leads to the concept of the Internet of Things. Everything in our lives will be accessible via the Internet.

The enablers for this are Moore's law, and the every increasing processing power available, small bluetooth devices which will fit in a post-it note, 4G LTE networks and Web technologies. Combine all of this with the power of cloud and sensor grids and a whole new type of application becomes possible.

The right time web is almost here, giving the right information at the right time to the right person.

The World Wide Research Book is launched

2010-09-29T07:34:00.001+01:00

Last Wednesday, at a lively event at the Oxford Internet Institute, the World Wide Research book was launched, with a number of fascinating and provocative presentations.

In his closing address, Dr James Martin (who founded the James Martin 21st Century School, now rebranded as the Oxford Martin School) urged people to read the book and commented that ‘it is seminal in its field’. It was Dr Martin’s investment in the School that enabled the e-Horizons Project to be created, from which the book emerged – and William Dutton, my co-editor, and I are grateful for his invaluable support. The launch agenda lists the speakers and panel members. There are some photo highlights and more information is available about the e-Horizons Project.

See my previous blog entries for further information about the book and the launch event.

World Wide Research Book Launch 22 September

2010-09-06T09:00:00.002+01:00

Wednesday 22 September 2010 16:00 – 18:00

Location: Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, 1 St Giles Oxford

If you would like to join us: Email your name and affiliation to events@oii.ox.ac.uk or telephone +44 (0)1865 287209

This event is an occasion to mark the publication by MIT Press of World Wide Research: Reshaping the Sciences and Humanities, edited by Bill Dutton and me. This new book explores how advances in ICTs are transforming the way scholarly research is conducted across all disciplines, offering a comprehensive and accessible view of the use of these new approaches to research and their ethical, legal and institutional implications. Where has work in this area made the greatest strides, and what areas are in the greatest need of further research?

16:00 Opening and Introduction

The Editors: Bill Dutton and Paul Jeffreys

16:10-50 Keynote

David De Roure, Professor of eResearch, Oxford e-Research Centre; National Strategic Director for Digital Social Research

16:50-17:30 Panel Discussion on Directions for the Field

Graham Crow, Professor of Sociology, University of Southampton; Deputy Director of the UK’s National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM)
Jim Davies, Professor of Software Engineering, Director, Software Engineering Programme, and Fellow, Kellogg College
Eric T. Meyer, Research Fellow, OII
Ralph Schroeder, Senior Research Fellow and Director of Research at the OII

17:30-17:55 Open Discussion on World Wide Research

17:55-18:00 Closing Remarks

2010-07-02T10:22:00.005+01:00

Just published: 'World Wide Research: Reshaping the Sciences and Humanities'.

I am delighted to announce the publication of 'World Wide Research: Reshaping the Sciences and Humanities'. A collaboration, formed through the e-Horizons Project, with Professor William Dutton (Director of the Oxford Internet Institute). The book will be launched on Wednesday 22 September 2010 in Oxford.

Book details:

W.H.Dutton and P.Jeffreys (eds) World Wide Research: Reshaping the Sciences and Humanities. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press and Amazon.

Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access

2010-05-06T15:24:00.001+01:00

A Digital Preservation and Access report has been launched at a conference at the Wellcome Collection Centre today. The report has been well received by many, including the British Library, and addresses three important questions relating to digital content:

What do we preserve?
Who is responsible for it?
Who pays?

It follows a 2 year international study (with strong US focus, in particular NSF), with leading economists participating, to build an economic model for, and to make proposals relating to, digital preservation. It focused on 4 domain areas: scholarly discourse, research data, commercially owned cultural content, collectively used web content.

The full report is available.

JISC Conference 2010

2010-04-14T14:02:00.002+01:00

In my view - the 2010 JISC Conference was the best so far.

A virtual goody bag of free digital resources was made available.

In a thought-provoking opening speech, Martin Bean said that the digital divide was no longer about haves and have nots in terms of access to IT and ownership of devices."In my mind now the digital divide is much more about those that actually understand how to use and apply technology in their lives and their work as a necessity, rather than simply getting access to the technology per se."

According to Bean the issue leads directly into the need to educate people for new types of work. He told delegates that learning in the workplace needs to become integral."The only way we dig our way out of this economic crisis and recession... is if we recognise that we have got to embed learning for life in the workplace."

Another major challenge is being able to transform information into meaningful knowledge, Bean argued."The day that Google became a verb, and teachers in primary and secondary schools starting looking at Wikipedia as a trusted source of information, we should all have started to think deeply about the notion of how we longer teach people of all ages where to find information and talked instead about how to make sense of that information."

He predicted that trust in content will be one of the big issues in the future. "Our libraries collectively… need to be spending as much time thinking about sense making of information as they do about simple retrieval of information".

The session I found most interesting was Research Data, Cost, benefits, Impact and Planning.

Interesting SharePoint in Higher Education document

2010-04-07T14:06:00.003+01:00

An interesting report entitled: Investigation into the use of Microsoft SharePoint in Higher Education Institutions has been published as part of a project funded by Eduserv. It describes two types of SharePoint implementations: 'Organic' and 'Corporate'. It also considers drivers, critical success factors and SharePoint as a VLE.

Do take a look at the 2-page Executive Summary -
http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/static/5007/SPfinal.pdf - and please leave a comment on the Blog!

Workshop: Institutional Policy and Guidance for Research Data

2010-04-07T13:50:00.005+01:00

The second EIDCSR Workshop took place on 29th of March at Rewley House in Oxford. Following policy development work undertaken at the University as part of the project, the event focused on issues around the development and implementation of institutional policy and guidance for research data:
* data management and sharing policy at different levels, such as research council, HEI institutions and research departments;
* in what ways research records and data management policy and guidance can be useful to researchers, and how to involve researchers in their development;
* how to encourage the implementation of institutional policy at a local or departmental level;
* how to encourage across the institution the sharing of best practice in research records and data management.

Details available at: http://eidcsr.oucs.ox.ac.uk/policy_workshop.xml

A particularly interesting contribution was the set of presentations from Melbourne University.

New Warden at Keble College

2009-10-13T12:22:00.001+01:00

The new Warden of Keble College, Oxford, who will succeed Professor Dame Averil Cameron in Michaelmas Term 2010 is Sir Jonathan Phillips KCB, currently Permanent Secretary to the Northern Ireland Executive.

Future of Higher Education debate

2009-07-10T17:49:00.001+01:00

This blog entry is a response to the Future of Higher Education Debate. I have developed the following document with Stephen Coller from Microsoft. Background to the government debate is available.

Response to Ron Cook Report
The Debate on the future of Higher Education

i. Introduction

This is a joint submission to the debate on the future of higher education from a member of the University of Oxford and a member of staff from the Microsoft Corporation. Sir Ron Cooke was asked to provide the Government with advice and recommendations on how the country can be one of the leading – if not the leading – centres of higher education learning in the world. The focus of this response is chapter 3 of the report, “On-line Innovation in Higher Education’.

ii. Response

Approach

• Sir Ron Cooke was asked to provide a contribution on becoming a world leader in e-learning. In order to respond to this request, he defined a broad context [1.3] that encompassed: research and innovation, national e-Infrastructure, management and administration, integrated information strategies, and issues of scale. In our opinion it was essential to consider the higher education landscape [2.2] in the way he did; research and education are inextricably linked, e-Infrastructure [2.4] underpins research and education, and management of information is a unifying theme.

• We support his approach, endorse his recommendations, but believe that it is possible to be more specific in defining a way ahead for the next fifteen years. Our response, therefore, is to build on the foundation laid down in Sir Ron Cooke’s contribution and elaborate plans further.

Personalized learning

• Every student must be given access [3.4] to a world of relevant, personalized learning and strengthened educational opportunity. Today’s students come to education from diverse backgrounds, at different levels of preparation and with different learning styles. Diversity will increase over the next fifteen years.

• Within traditional teaching settings such as Oxford and Cambridge, there is increasing emphasis on preparing students before they arrive at University. This will enable all students to arrive with the necessary skills, but also build relationships in advance of their arrival.

• Complementing this there is a need to provide individualized learning experiences at low cost, wherever and whenever needed.

• Teachers will need to be adequately skilled to deliver [3.6], and adequately resourced [3.7].

• Through a potent combination of shrinking hardware costs, broadband connectivity, and a growing repository of digital education resources, it will be possible to prepare students before they arrive and to provide individualized learning. Through social networking and collaboration tools, as well as rich-media authoring software, students can create and pursue engaged, relevant learning that brings their lifestyle and classroom “learning style” together.

• Providing the infrastructure required for world-class teaching over the coming years will require private public partnerships.

New Tools and Methods

• Over the next fifteen years, inspirational traditional teaching will remain and define some of the world’s leading higher education institutes and the learning experienced by their students. In other segments of post secondary education facing pressure to improve retention while accommodating material increases in student attendance it will be necessary to adopt a different approach by tapping into ICT-enhanced teaching approaches that support educators in the design of inquiry-based learning experiences which are scalable, intuitive and replicable [3.19]. There will not be a one-size fits all pedagogy, and therefore the underpinning technology must support different approaches [3.20].

• Students, therefore, will have a choice of the type of teaching and learning experience they wish to receive, but all students will have different experiences and different expectations from previous generations [3.21, 3.22].

• Teachers must recognise the new requirements that students have, and will have, and have the tools and expertise to provide an environment which is suitable for students in the 21st century including teacher-student and student-student collaboration. At the same time it is important that we recognize the unreasonableness of such an expectation absent from the provision of deep professional development support and resources.

• Teachers should be able to change their approach to assessment to take better advantage of modern data systems in order to achieve an effective balance between traditional testing and real-time insight into progress in the classroom.

• One of the traditional features of education which is in danger of being lost is the concept of learning within a community of scholars. Students benefit when they have opportunities to participate in each other’s learning. Tutorials and liberal arts courses are based on this principle, and emergent technologies have the potential to make the opportunities more widely accessible.

Systems to Manage the Student Lifecycle

• Current and future students will move from one stage of education to another, will experience different educational experiences, will need preparation before embarking on some courses, and may well leave education and return later.

• Students, their teachers, and employers need access to a digital record of educational resources, and a means of storing educational outputs and recording and accessing the student’s attainments,

• Using much of the same software that businesses use to be more efficient and productive, there is a unique opportunity to provide scalable support for enhanced learning environments, with longitudinal data stores. These will have the benefit of offering greater insight to administrators, educators, students, guardians and policymakers.

Investment

• At a policy level, some key investments would accelerate progress:

o Ensure that every school, educator and student have access to the devices, tools and connectivity they need.

o Provide teachers the support they need to adopt ICT-based teaching methods.

o Provide students with digital resources that can enrich their learning experiences and improve their workforce readiness.

o Equip education systems with the same data, technology and communications infrastructure that businesses enjoy today.

o Adopt an integrated approach to achieving education reform and a “21st-century learning environment”.

• Investment should be made through private public partnership. The sheer scale of the challenges faced by higher education to improve access and quality in conjunction, with the competing claims being made on the financial resources of the Exchequer by other segments of the economy, mean local solutions in some institutes will be limited in terms of their scope, scale and sustainability. Working together with both the for-profit and the non-profit sectors we can provide the data, resources and capabilities that will empower our educators and learners to realize their fullest potential in an ever more connected and competitive world.

Private Public Partnership

The Private Public Partnership (PPP) approach offers opportunities which can transform the use of technology to assist learning. In some higher education institutes this will have a profound effect by facilitating personalized learning . PPP will offer new tools, methods and capacity which are not available to individual universities including access to data-centre scale computational resources and collaboration platforms. One respect where PPP has the potential to make a profound affect across the board, however, will be in the provision of systems to manage the student lifecycle:-

• Provision of digital record and ePortfolio – students will be able to store their information in a secure but portable manner – using commercial networks but subject to permissions being set by the user. These records will be owned by the students and persist as they move from one place of learning to another.

• Provision of longitudinal datastore and repository – the commercial sector can host and manage learning objects and related data on progression of student learning for a fraction of the cost of it being done locally. Microsoft and Oxford are exploring the possibility of delivering learning objects and data for maternal health developed by the University to medics in the third world. Microsoft would hold the data in a secure infrastructure managed by Oxford, delivered through the Internet and mobile devices in a way that would not be possible for the University to offer alone.

Stephen Coller and Paul Jeffreys

IBM CIO Leadership Exchange, Shanghai, Feb 09

2009-02-11T00:42:00.017Z

This is a report from a IBM Conference titled, "CIO Leadership Exchange". It is the third in a series and is in Shanghai (first time held in the East).

CIOs asked IBM to run the series of Exchanges.
The title this year is: Building a Smarter Planet: The Next Leadership Agenda

--> Main theme of the meeting is to consider the CIO role in creating a 'smarter planet' - which means primarily smarter use of information, and the consequences of the current financial crisis.

... Overall - there were some interesting and challenging presentations, others were superficial.

(I) Smarter Planet - A mandate for CIO Leadership: Interesting session with relevance to HE

Sam Palmsano: Chairman, President and CEO for IBM

Leadership Exchange originated by academic institutions three years ago (Harvard), supported by IBM. Much has changed over the three years.

The central theme is that the world is smaller, flatter and smarter. Every day systems and processes are connected, instrumented, with embedded intelligence. This has profound effects for innovation. There are 2b people on the Internet, by 2010 there will be a billion transistors for every person.

The digital and physical infrastructures of the world are converging.

Challenges:

40-70% of electrical energy is lost due to inefficiencies in the grid
Healthcare systems are not systems
Financial markets spread risk but cannot track it
Consumer products and retail industries lose about $40b annually due to inefficient supply chains
A world where 820m are undernourished

A review last August by IBM found activities in many areas which are addressing the challenges. Since then $3trillion will be applied to stimulate growth and jobs. IBM advised the Obama team last autumn: broadband, healthcare, and better electrical grids.

CIOs have new challenges; need to balance cutting costs while preparing and connecting for the future. Avoid just battening down. Means bridging between technology and future business direction.

The financial crisis will last beyond 2009; CIOs have opportunities as the world is ready for change. Change in the business model, change in role in the company, change of use of embedded intelligence. The key is to come out of the crisis stronger than you went into it.

Mark Hennessy (VP and CIO): CIOs - Catalysts of Change: Leaders for a Smarter Planet

As CIO, walk tightrope. Manage legacy system <> develop new capabilities. Long term thinking <> short term execution. Have three teams:-

- Run team: smart datacentres; social networking. Datacentre: sensors manage energy consumption, virtualisation, automation simplifies provisioning. Use cloud (Tivoli)

- Transform team: business process simplification (don't automate chaos). Agile development methods. SOA flexibility and savings.

- Innovate team: IBM changing from multi-national corp. to globally integrated organisation. Global talent management: outcome-based model; high-performance culture.

Richard Williams (CIO, AstraZeneca) - The CIO as a Catalyst for Change

It can take 8-12 years to develop a new drug to market (cost $800m).

AstraZenica strategy is:

Renew, but not abandon, our strategy; industrialize service in federated environment; power of one
Resolve to drive business value; sense of purpose; connect the network
Release through strategic partners; Service effect contracts (I am going to measure partner on basis of business outcome, not SLA - you have as much accountability as I do)

Very clear business objective: "new medicines for patient health"; what is our equivalent objective(s)?

Discussion (moderated by Peter Williamson - Univ of Cambridge)

Need to get CEOs involved with CIOs work on regular basis. Visibility of where CIO spending time and investment is important. How does investment translate into efficiency of organisation change, quality of product.

Social networking is growing in importance. Half of IBM uses wikis. Blogs and IM are important. These cannot be measured in terms of ROIs, but are seen as strategically important and will improve the collaboration.

AstraZenica does not have an IS strategy, it has a business strategy of which IS is a part. Then there are regular reviews to see if business value is achieved.

(II) Applying New Intelligence and Knowledge - A Systems Approach: Very company specific and not especially relevant to HE...

Gini Rometty (Senior VP, Global Sales and Distr. IBM)

Faster
Right
Predictive: remove risk in a decision

Dan Deasy (CIO, BP):

IT innovation is dramatically changing the way BP works: Instrumentation, interconnected, business intelligence.

BI is crucially important to enable them to predict customer need.

Use 185Tflops of compute power to improve seismic accuracy to predict well positions.

Agnes Mauffey (CIO, Michelin)

Collaboration tools are essential for the company. Intelligence used to give competitive advantage.

Discussion (moderator Dr Marianne Broadbent):

Clear that IBM is helping both companies is many aspects of their operation. Much of their IT is outsourced.

(III) Smarter Planet - IT for the 21st Century - interesting session

Mike Daniels (Senior VP, GTO, IBM)

The average utilisation of Intel processors is 6%.

A smarter planet needs a smarter infrastructure. There is: 54% increase in storage each year.

Eric Clementi (VP, Strategy, IBM)

Need dynamic infrastructure: virtualisation + automate + standardised.

30b embedded RFID tags by 2010
1/3 of world's population on the web by 2011
4b mobile subscribers globally at end of 2008

Cloud computing is emerging in the enterprise from the consumer Internet. It is a consumption and delivery service.

For the enterprise it will be a hybrid delivery model: private cloud and public cloud. This is followed up in the subsequent Cloud break-out session.

Frank Gens (Senior VP and Chief Analyst, IBM) - Convener of Discussion

Successful industrial clouds have well defined rules, regulations, management; and often a third party providing the service to enable separate users to have independence.

A key issue within this is Identity Management.

(IV) Breakout Session - Cloud Computing: Dr Willy Chiu, Dr Jim Comfort, Robert Rosier, Paul Lu - interesting session - led to new thoughts for Oxford

Cloud computing - a disruptive new paradigm. See Economist article. There is an interesting IBM perspective on cloud computing.

IBM has 9 Cloud centres around the world.

Grid computing (1990s), Utility computing, Software as a service, Cloud computing: so evolutionary.

Software as a service (eg Googlemail)
Platform as a service (SOA)
Infrastructure as a service (Green, virtualised and scalable - optimised for security, data integrity)

Develop in the cloud; Deploy in the cloud; Deliver services from the cloud; Overflow to another cloud

China has an cloud computing centre built by IBM, 11 more being created. Promotes s/w start-up company growth.

Moving towards: Private Cloud - Public Cloud - with single management view (can 'pull' applications from one to the other). IBM uses - C loud management tools.

Google/Amazon are not full Public Clouds as do not have security or full service quality guarantees.

iTricity Cloud Computing Centre (Netherlands) - IT as electricity. Infrastructure as a service, which is compliant (to Basel-II, SO, Healthcare). Will provide cloud computing on customer premises! if excess, then trade back resources.

(V) Breakout Session - Using New Intelligence - Real Decisions in Real Time: Mark Chapman, Jeff Jonas, Brenda Dietrich, Nina Schwenk (Mayo clinic) - really interesting and thought provoking session

How do you drive intelligence from all the data?

The Smart Planet is all about intelligent decisions. Data is both structured and unstructured. Analytics can be: descriptive, predictive, prescriptive. An example IBM has worked on is Traffic Prediction in Singapore.

Healthcare is messy; data are not clean. In the 21st century - more evidence based treatment is expected, more pressures to provide regulatory data, expectation that personalised treatment. Genomics is foundation for what healthcare can be in the future, but technologies for gathering, analysing, storing not in place. Knowledge gradient is important.

The data is the query -- More data is better and faster -- bad data is good for you (in some areas). The data must find the data ... and the relevance must find the user!

Need to extract and enhance information as data is collected.

(VI) Deepening Enterprise Capability - Intelligent, Interconnected Leadership - not very CIO focused

Harvey Koeppel

CIO Leadership: Developed competency model for CIOs. "The three top competencies for CIOs are: leadership, contribution to business strategy, and talent management. CIOs have to convert their teams as themselves so they all have new capabilities."

Dr Marianne Broadbent (Senior Partner, EWK International)

How do you invest in the downturn? Experience isn't what it used to be.

[Some case studies were considered of companies which have already refocused in view of the financial downturn.]

Some organisations have addressed the downturn, changed focus, accelerated succession, invested now for streamlined future - should the University do the same?

Joe Locanndro (Director, CLP Group)

Based on a five-year research project, Good to Great answers the question: “Can a good company become a great company, and, if so, how?” Jim Collins

Use human capital strategy balance scorecard; improvements evident.

Seek to understand, seek to be understood.

(VII) Building a Smarter Enterprise - Leading Change, Embracing Disruption - disappointing apart from summary from Sam Palmsano

Bruno Di Leo (General Manager, IBM)

IBM is committed to being number 1 IT partner.

Disruption speaks to 'driving change'.

Peter Williamson (Prof of Int. Man., Cambridge)

Best selling book: 'Dragons at your door'.

We need to move beyond 'cost cutting' to 'cost innovation'.

15% of today's market leaders used the recession to vault to the top.

CIO agenda in a value-for-money world:

Business cases for IT investment based on Cost Innovation: reduce cost of variety and customisation, roll-out products to mass market quickly.
Enabling Global Innovation: need to globalise innovation and globalise the supply change

Quality vs cost becomes value for money
High technology at high end becomes high technology to mass markets

Dr Jai Menon (Dir, Bharti Enterprises)

Bharti Artel are growing by 2.5m customers every month.

Time to evolve from 'best practices' to 'next practices'.

Conversation

Use the mobile as your PC.

The view expressed is that the CIO has to run more than a technology function and build a business function, so that no longer issue of IT being business aligned. Thus, IT staff through the department spend part of their careers working on business functions.

Sam Palmisano - Closing Remarks

CIO Leadership: began role definition, mentoring, ...
Do CIO survey every few years with benchmarking analysis.

So now need to set goal that CIOs do role beyond technology function.

Now is the time to change the Business model.

CISCO meeting: Future of the Internet

2009-01-26T14:11:00.005Z

The future of the Internet: what's keeping the CISCO engineers awake at night.

I attended this CISCO presentation to the University of Oxford today.

The first presentation was from Fred Baker (CISCO fellow and ex-IETF chair).
Talk focused on growth of INternet and current limit of number of computer addresses. The goal is to, "Continue the growth of the Internet and its businesses"; for CISCO the goal is, "Continue the growth of the Internet with maximised application options and minimalised additional cost."

RFC521 - John Curran's Internet Transition Plan for ISPs: explains transition from IPv4 to IPv6. Fred explained how the two systems would have to co-exist.

CIDR put off the need to go to IPv6 to deal with the shortage of addresses.

A particular issue is the amount of information that is needed in the routing if you put an address on everything you want to track. IPv6 routing scales better than IPv4.

There are serious IPv6 trials in enterprise services. Total traffic is still less than 1% of total traffic.

The second presentation was from Klass Wierenga (consulting engineer in the office of the CTO) entitled the Mobile Internet

Billions of new users onto the Internet, most mobile access.Tens or hundreds of billion things connecting.

Radio access: RF is a major bottleneck - does not scale.

Need to optimise airlink efficiency.
Need to make networks a lot less expensive to build and operate on a cost per bit basis.
Need to optimise routing; possibly not use tunnels, expose mobility to hgher layers and make it clear that host is moving...

Who decides who gets access to a network? Likely to require some kind of roaming agreement and technology for remote authorisation.

There are three identity spaces: SAML, OpenID and CardSpace. Trust is the foundation of any security model.

Network access: eduroam: authentication by home institution, authorisation by visited institution.

Application access: Shibboleth: UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research. Developed by Internet 2, uses SAML.

Conclusion: The issues of the Internet relate to scalability.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As go through transition, Internet industry need a lot of help from academia. Internet is an open confederation and so everyone needs to contribute to evolution.

Is it true that the Internet has done as much good as it has done bad (a statement made at the meeting)?

Email culture kills interaction between campus colleagues

2008-12-18T17:12:00.002Z

There is an interesting in the THES today which states that, "Email culture kills interaction between campus colleagues".

Do you agree?

The article starts:- "V-cs in 'state of denial' about quality of internal communications, survey reveals. John Gill reports

An overbearing "email culture" and a shortage of staffrooms and areas where people can meet and chat are being blamed for hindering internal communications in universities.

In addition, communications directors consider academic managers to be much weaker at communicating with staff than their counterparts in purely administrative roles.

The initial findings of a sector-wide research project led by the University of Leicester also suggest that the views of vice-chancellors on internal communications strategies are often far removed from those of the people employed to oversee those strategies".

CISCO08 Public Services Summit

2008-12-09T06:02:00.013Z

Have attended the CISCO Public Services Summit in Stockholm and Oslo - see http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/le21/le34/nobel/2008/index.html.

CISCO has given it a real Web 2.0 feel by encouraging delegates to blog, twitter and flickr with the results of this activity captured on http://www.cisco08.com/. It will be interesting to see how delegates respond to this initiative. The flickr entries are at: http://flickr.com/photos/tags/cisco08.

A thought provoking and challenging conference.

First Day:-

Paul Johnston - Exploring technology enabled change. Themes are: sustainability, innovation and inclusion.

Ulla Hamilton (Vice Mayor of Stockholm): 98% broadband penetration in city. Stockholm has infrastructure to enable traffic congestion to be reviewed on the web.

Simon Willis (VP Public Sector, CISCO): Recommendation - look at NASA's web sites looking at early civiliations up to 5000 years ago. All have complex distributed networks - connect, trade, specialise, using the commons of the river delta.

We face the most extraordinary challege with the climate - and we stand ready to make the wrong decsions. The credit crisis has made it even more difficult.

Carlata Perez (Unversity of Cambridge): looked at the roles of markets and states in shaping a sustainable age. Five technological revolutions in 240 years: industrial revolution; age of steam, coal and iron; age of steel and heavy engineering; age of automobile; age of ICT - half way through; and to come -> age of biotech. Each takes 40-60 years to spread, reach maturity and produce conditions for the next revolution.

In 1990s we had cheap oil and cheap Asian labour which favoured the old marketing and consumption patterns. Still struggling to move on from this. The shift to "ICT green" is possible; gradual redesign of patterns of good-life needed. Much institutional innovation is now needed for feasible sustainable global growth.The innovative power of ICT must be harnessed to facilitate this. The paradyne is not to make everyone the same, every region will bring out its identity - but have common ambitions in environmental friendliness and sustainability.

CISCO's connected sustainability book addresses many of the issues.

Government 2.0: New Directions for the Public Sector:- Interactive Panel consisting of: William Perrin (UK Government), Peter Shergold (former permanent sec. of Australian dept. of the PM), Christian Sautter (former French finance minister) and Christian Rupp (executive sec. e-Government in Austria).
What should Government 2.0 look like?

Web 2 is a fundamental democratisation - makes it easy to publish:
makes it possible to engage democratic process - e-Petition (1.7m in one petition in UK);
new types of public services and public information - netmums web site - not under governmental control;
ultra-local communities - able to empower communities but might unsettle.

Important for social inclusion, quality of life - but - have to fight digital divide:
improve technology - everybody has access - fibre optic into poor housing - sponsored;
all primary schools have access - include e-Learning in home;
senior people - special programmes for these people.

Gives chance to be local and act globally if we want.

The UK has started a wiki to find the best way to use public information: www.showusabetterway.com It has a very large take-up.

Tom Steinberg brought in to UK activities to give: power of innovation, and that, "the Government should work in partnership with the best of citizens' efforts, not replicate them".
Would be like advice to choose best schools, hospitals on same basis as we take decisions on best electronic products.

Interesting student room web page for students wishing to find the best University and resources.

Fixmystreet has moved knowledge of what needs to be done from the local authority to the public.

Strategies for National Broadband Policy (afternoon day 1)

In the past: labour/resources/capital were the production factors. 'Connected knowledge' has been added. Scarcity was the common denominator of the three classical factors.

Recorded outputs of every human language: 6exabytes. In 2006 it was 15 exabytes digitally.

Richard Allan -
Broadband accelerates social and economic growth.
Need to have quality of ICT ecosystem (policy and regulations.) and extent of ICT infrastructure . Being advanced has been shown to give higher productivity..
Barack Obama, 6 December 2008, US ranked 15th in world in broadband adoption -renew information superhighway.

Key questions for a New Strategy

Policies and regulations: need to be based on IP convergence (have they shifted from telephony)
Market structure: need competitive markets, and sustainable
Bottlenecks: is balance of private and public investment right? Are incentives and the public/private balance of investment adequate?
e-Government strategy
Does lack of ICT user skills constrain use of the Internet?
Applications and tent - is the business environment conducive to take up

Sweden casestudy - Maria Hall Large public investment, 500mEuro. Project: electronic services - whenever and wherever.
Accessibility, robustness, more secure, IT-standardisation, electronic identification, openness in the networks

Lebanon casestudy - Kamal Shehadi
Need:

to start from almost scratch
separate broadband and mobile licenses;
to incorporate existing service providers (who have reserved bandwidths of the spectrum), this is a serious problem;
any new developer to meet new requirements for providing connectivity across the building - reduce costs of broadband
to bring the country back to the internal telecommunications scene through market liberalization.

An interesting recurring theme is Paul Baran's vision of a network of networks. This led to the architecture used by the Internet/web. But is a network of networks resilient to rapid growth?

The world Internet project is an interesting review of the use of the Internet across 2 countries (UCLA).

Second Day

Richard Allan (CISCO) led session with William Perrin (UK Cabinet Office) and Hannah Brogren (City of Stockholm) to discuss Power of Information.

The UK's drive is to allow citizens to specify the need and to drive the response through mash-ups. By contrast, in Stockholm the drive is from the authorities, guided by citizen needs established through blogs, polls, and interviews.

An interesting development in Stockholm is that each page has RSS feeds.

Top 5 e-Government counties are those who have started from scratch - Slovenia, Latvia etc (can start a company within a day).

Wordpress makes it possible to set up blogs easily.

Richard Allan - what needs to be done? Theyworkforyou scrapes information from various sources to provide information on MPs (run by charity - some public service money).

BBC spends £120m on websites, central Government spends £250m on their websites. The BBC websites are generally considered to be better - and they took a strategic decision to reduce their number.

Obama is very keen on making data reusable.

planningalerts.com enables you to find planning requests close to where you live.

Day two afternoon session

Jorge Sampaio - former Portugese President

Compared digital revolution with Portugese revolution in the 1970s. Better informed public improves democracy. Emerging collective intelligence. Recent presidential campaign in US used Internet heavily for the first time.

Narendra Jadhav - Ho. VC of Pune University, India

University has 650,000 students with 480 courses - all on web site.

Charles Leadbetter - UK based think-tank; author of 'we-think'

We-think a 4 minute video on Youtube -worth a look.

Web could go in many different directions. Jonathan Zittrain's views.

Funtwo - 53million hits for guitar solo. Amazing story of the Internet. Boy not having to respect authority, not have to use traditioanl means, just get on and do it yourself.

Design principle for new world is 'think with'. We have been brought up with the world doing things for you or to you. :ogic of Internet, wikipedia is working with people.Environmentally, logic of working woth people. Needs new kinds of leadership.

Professor Lawrence Lessig 'Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace'

Readonly culture- iTunes
Read-write - Wikipedia
-> Now remix - taking images and sounds and remixing
-> Sharing -> YELP.

So:

Commercial
Hybrid
Sharing

Microsoft - Community Technologies - even uses Hybrid

Hybrids comes in different types. Is there a 'just hybrid'?

Change.gov - Abama's web site gives people a sense of ownership - as citizens produce value for the Government.

Democracy must be a priority. Is democracy threatened by increased scepticism? Gore: Crisis of democracy.

Guido Jouret - VP Emerging Technologies Group, CISCO

The Art and Science of Innovation.

Innovation as a Process

Changing world: Consumerization, technology flattening the world, social networking, green consciousness
Innovation comes from interface with customer.

The Power of Disruption

Private company in 2001, Eli Lilly - Innocentive
Large companies struggle with innovation
The Innovator's Dialemma 2000
Cloud computing is disruptive from virtualisation and from pay-for-use
IP traffic will increase 6X from 2007 to 2012 - video and IP TV
Video now is like the web in the 90s -> mashing video with business case. Video puts the human element back into the equation. Moving to medianet
I-prize www.cisco.com/iprize
Simple big ideas@CISCO - telepresence
Recipe for innovation
- think big; bold vision
- try something new
- solve simple points well
- 5 phase plan
- start, lead and others will follow
- communicate, often and simply
- do it with passion

Future success requires continuing focus on innovation.

Encyclopaedia Idiotica

2008-09-01T16:11:00.001+01:00

The THES has an article this week which starts, "Wikipedia is created mostly by teenage male computer nerds, so Martin Cohen worries about its growing clout among 'scholars'

What is it about Wikipedia? It didn't exist in 2001. Not so long ago, it was just an obscure website full of biographies of sports figures and esoteric details about TV shows such as Star Trek.

But now it is big business. Wikipedia has unexpectedly become the most dominant "scholarly" source on the web. Now its aim is no less than "to become a complete record of human knowledge".

See: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=403327

... and there are interesting comments.

2008 IBM Academic Days Conference

2008-05-13T17:03:00.002+01:00

Today it is the IBM Academic Days Conference...

Ian Abbott-Donnelly, European CTO, spoke on 'Big Green Innovations'

'Big Green Innovations' refers to IBM innovations. There is a separate IBM initiative to make datacentres more efficient (not really covered in the presentation).

Similar statistics were shown as at the Gartner briefing yesterday.

IBM advertised all the environmentally friendly activities they were engaged in...

IBM claims a retro fit to a datacentre will give 30-40% improvement. Re-building from scratch would give an 80% improvement in energy efficiency.

http://www.top500.org is said to have electricity costs for different supercomputers (but I cannot find it).

A comment was made re. reducing electrical consumption. This is likely to be necessary, not just to reduce carbon, but because the infrastructure will not be able to supply enough.

Gartner Higher Education Briefing: e-Learning, Green IT

2008-05-12T12:33:00.003+01:00

An interesting meeting in Barcelona with two main topics.

The Future of e-Learning in Higher Education:

By 2001, many institutes had created established course management systems (as opposed to their teachers using a variety of management systems).

The question asked was: are we starting to see the end of the institute course management systems? Are many of the functions in the CMS being replaced with Web 2.0 services; which are supplied externally to the institute (wikis, social networks,...)?

It was agreed that the answer would be to use SOAs with well defined standards, so that it would be possible to integrate added services to a CMS framework. Cardiff is using this approach with Sakai as the underlying framework.

Many people are concerned that Blackboard acquired WebCT (and the forced migration of users of the latter) - and universities are now actively looking for Open Source alternatives (Moodle is the favourite, then Sakai).

Green IT

It is estimated that IT 's carbon contribution is 2% of the total (roughly the same scale as aviation).

But within higher education, for universities which do not run large pieces of scientific equipment, the IT share is estimated to be between 15 and 20% total.

{http://www.ghg.protocol.org enables you to do your own calculations.}

The consequence is that changes to IT can offer significant carbon savings within a university as a fraction of the whole.

The effects of ICT on environmental sustainability:

Negative: Greenhouse gas emission in manufacture. waste, hazardous substances, use of scarce resources
Positive: Travel substitution, transport optimisation, e-Business and e-Government, environmental controls systems

ICT's Global Emissions:-

Printing (6%): mainly paper and not the energy to print
LAN and Office Telecoms (7%): difficult to tackle
Mobile Telecoms (9%)
Fixed-Line Telecoms (15%)
Servers including cooling - data centre (24%)
PCs, etc (39%): focus should be here

The embodied energy for a PC (building and delivery) is estimated to be 70-80% of the total energy used by the PC (but this ratio is questioned by the manufacturers).

It is recommended to undertake an environmental assessment, and set targets for power consumption and carbon levels.

It is estimated that 2,500 PCs and laptops cost 64kEuros in electricity over a year. it is relatively easy to halve this.

Data Centres are intending to cut power by:

virtualizing
stopping over-provisioning
using power management to throttle power based on use
using a low power state or shutting servers down when not in use
smart energy management (directing cooling)

http://www.epeat.net/ is a good site to help purchasers evaluate, compare and select desktop computers, notebooks and monitors based on their environmental attributes.

Towards Low Carbon ICT conference

2008-03-19T14:30:00.004Z

The Low Carbon ICT conference, held in Oxford University, and organised by Howard Noble and his team, was most interesting. Details are at:-
http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/lowcarbonict/conferences/conf-1.htm.

There were presentations on:-

Low carbon ICT in context of Oxford University
Low carbon approach in large hospital using virtualised servers
A wonderful overview of reducing carbon in data centres
Greening the full lifecycle (from manufacture through to recycling)
Facebook meets green business
Green technologies in the pipeline

I was very taken by the talk which addressed the power loss chain as applied to data centres. Liam Newcombe, of the BCS Data Centre Specialist Group, is acknowledged and thanked for the following slide:-

Just 0.5% of the energy of the fossil fuel is actually used to deliver power for computing.

When Liam's slides become available on the above web address, take a look and send your comments.

There is considerable scope for increasing the percentage if useful power used.

The Green Grid (http://www.thegreengrid.org/home) is a very interesting site. "The Green Grid is a global consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems."

The conference agreed that the low carbon ICT area is going to grow and grow in importance.

Microsoft has offerd to buy Yahoo

2008-02-01T16:33:00.000Z

"Microsoft has offered to buy the search engine company Yahoo for $44.6bn (£22.4bn) in cash and shares...."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7222114.stm

This must be driven by the competition from Google.

USC gets Google Apps in ad-free environment

2008-01-21T08:47:00.000Z

A colleague brought to my attention a deal where the University of Southern California has agreed a deal with Google for Google Apps for Education to be installed in an ad-free environment. See:- http://www.usc.edu/uscnews/stories/14700.html.

"“Google Apps at USC is about more than e-mail,” Rhimes said. “The current generation of students study, network and socialize online. They want the freedom to work from multiple locations – including from different computers and mobile devices. Google Apps at USC offers them the flexibility that they want and need.

Because Google Apps at USC provides Web-based word processing, spreadsheet, calendar and chat programs, students can do their work anywhere they have Web access without worrying about downloading software or software compatibility. "

It is interesting to note that this is reserved just for students and not available to staff (how does it interoperate with the staff groupware provision?), and that it is ad-free.

Cambridge announces deployment of IT telephony

2008-01-18T14:05:00.000Z

A press release yesterday (http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2008/prod_010808.html) announced one of the largest IP telephony deployments in the education sector; a multi-million pound deal.

"The project will see BT, Cisco, and the University's IT Consultancy partner, PTS Consulting, deliver approximately 20,000 IP telephony handsets to the University over the next 18 months, replacing the existing system.

The University's investment will modernise the student experience, enabling students to collaborate in new and more innovative ways through the deployment of a converged voice, video and data network. Sharing information more easily will improve the quality of education and research, with students and academics using instant messaging, voice emails, streaming video and much more to share ideas in real time, from anywhere in the world."

This seems to be true convergence of communications and IT.

New to the game

2007-10-11T17:03:00.000+01:00

This is my first ever blog and first ever blog entry.