We are developing our Digital Strategy, which will support the changes needed to enable the University’s Strategic Vision, Birmingham 2026. Our current Technology Strategy was produced in 2010 and refreshed in 2016. Whilst it has delivered a number of significant advancements including a new data centre and effective service management, further strategic advancements have been hindered by resource and priority strains on IT Services.
With the New Core programme nearing completion, now is the appropriate time to re-evaluate the direction of the current strategy and to revisit its technology choices, priority and strategic alignment.
Since 2010, we have seen huge developments in digital technology and an ever increasing reliance on it both in terms of the individual and organisations. We have also seen a growing trend towards technology as a service. The Cloud has become the standard utility model for many technology vendors and the University already has around a third of services hosted in the cloud in one form or another.
This will continue over the next few years to a point where we envisage delivering most of our systems this way. However, we must invest in setting up these platforms and creating the right support structures around them to ensure the greatest impact at the lowest ongoing cost.
It is also important to consider that in an ever competitive Higher Education market, keeping our digital ecosystem current and offering high quality reliable digital services is an increasingly important part of attracting and retaining students and staff to the University.
Our technology vision is to deliver:
- ·Secure, available, resilient applications, services, data and infrastructure, accessible to all users whenever needed, whether on campus or off, whether in the UK or in different geographies or time zones.
- Easy to use technologies that work seamlessly together, presented through an easy to access and easy to navigate single access point.
- Flexibility for users, allowing them to access the services they need, in the way that suits them best, whether this is in person, or via their choice of varying technology platforms.
Some of this work is already underway, the Office 365 pilot for example, provides insight into how we best allow staff and students to collaborate more easily and we are also about to start implementing a new more flexible telephony system. The StaRs programme is delivering an update to our current student record system and beyond that we will retire the last of our in-house bespoke elements, including BIRMS, and move our student systems to the cloud.
Looking forward we must also change our approach to the way we do things. Moving most of our systems to the Cloud will mean that we will have to change the way we manage our operational costs as we move from a model of periodic investment to a model of continuous expenditure. We will look to buy solutions not build, ensuring that costumer experience is at the forefront of everything we do. And we’ll also work in partnership with the business to deliver systems that are not only agile and process driven but that deliver genuine business benefits for the University.
There’s plenty of work to do to finalise our Digital Strategy. Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll provide updates, information, and ideas on how you can get involved. In the meantime, if you have any questions or suggestions, please have a chat with your line manager.
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