Gareth Edwards - Department of Engineering Sciences

Editor's Notes

• #3: Good afternoon everybody and thank you very much for the invitation to speak today. I have around 20 minutes of your time to answer this question, which I imagine you are all quite familiar with by now. I’m going to talk about what I believe the challenges are and what I would do to overcome them.
• #4: Before I get started, I want to talk briefly about my sources and my approach. I’ve used a number of sources in preparing this presentation.
• #5: I’ve taken advantage of the fact that Surrey has, and I hope I’m not speaking too far out of place here, a well-respected engineering faculty to provide some ideas of the challenges in an engineering environment in particular and how they relate to my own experiences. I work with their IT Manager frequently, both as part of Surrey’s IT Leadership Team and also through collaborations on a number of projects, ranging from research data management to designing and planning audio-visual services for the University’s new STEM building. I’ve obviously drawn upon my own experience as an IT professional working in higher education, having worked my way up from an entry level role to a leadership position. I’ve worked for a number of Universities and Research organisations supporting both hard and soft sciences. And this experience means I have a good understanding of the local and national context that Universities in the UK operate in.
• #6: I’m going to describe to you what I see the 5 main challenges being, expanding on each and citing examples from my own experience where I can. And then I’m going to propose some cross-cutting strategies to address these challenges, again giving examples of where I’ve applied these in real life and what benefit they have realised.
• #7: So what do I see the challenges as being?
• #8: Firstly, scale, by which I mean the scale of the academic endeavour. The variety of disciplines undertaken, the size of the teaching operation, and the different ways in which this manifests itself.
• #9: In physical terms, the geographical spread and variety of accommodation. In technological terms, the diverse requirements, technologies and platforms in use. And organisation terms, the number of staff, the variety of roles, how they are organised and where they are based and how this impacts on their use of IT. When you look at organisations like Engineering Sciences here at Oxford or my current responsibility, the Faculty of Health and Medical Science at Surrey, one of the notable things is the many different things going on. I currently support 400 academic and support staff based in 9 buildings on two sites, working with Animals, conducting commercial drug trials, studying nutrition and training paramedics. In addition to day-to-day personal computing facilities we support everything from viewing molecules in 3D using Oculus Rift headsets to recording Psychological Therapy sessions for course assessment.
• #10: With a large, varied environment to support you face challenges staying connected and aware of what is happening. With a distributed team supporting a spread out organisation, working together successfully becomes harder. And these factors together challenge the ability to be able to respond both effectively and rapidly enough to developing requirements.
• #11: External factors. I don’t want this to be too much of a discussion of the complex environment that Universities operate in in the UK, but some external factors are worth noting for the impact they can have on IT. Research funding is an obvious and timely one as everyone recovers from last year’s REF and begins planning for 2020. We’ve also just passed the 1st May deadline set by EPSRC for compliance with their Policy Framework on Data Management, which has seen a sizable amount of time and resources invested across Surrey with an impact that has been felt across the whole University. This is a shift that is obviously representative of changes across the UK research councils and beyond that poses technical, process and education challenges for IT. On a similar theme, where I’ve worked in support of commercially funded research activity, for example in our clinical research centre, we’ve had to support requirements around data security for drug trials far more stringent than those expected by the research councils. Supporting research activity at the bidding stage and beyond, while maintaining a baseline provision that meets basic requirements of funders is a challenge of technology, coordination and funding.
• #12: There are regulatory concerns to take into account too. Speaking generally, such as laws around data protection and freedom of information, and more specifically connected to the kind of work being undertaken. For example at Surrey, in addition to supporting our clinical research centre in their dealings with the Medical and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency who oversee the testing and distribution of medicines, we do a lot of work with the National Health Service and the Health and Social Care Information Centre supporting the access and storage of heathcare data. This requires a lot of work around data management and security policies, in addition to providing specialist network connectivity with the NHS and an ISO27001 compliant data storage solution. Indeed information Security continues to be a big focus generally – I read only last week about how Penn State’s Engineering department had been having problems with Chinese hackers attempting to steal data related to a government sponsored programme.
• #13: On the theme of external influences, we should consider teaching and the student experience. Again, the national context has some impact here, although things like fees and the deregulation of places for students with good A-Levels hasn’t impacted Oxford (numbers steady 11700) so much as it has Surrey (up 2.4%), where the pressure is definitely upwards.
• #14: Where student numbers are rising the challenge is how to maintain and improve teaching facilities – even more so in a financially challenging period as many Universities are facing and at a time when student expectations continue to be high. And a more recent challenge comes as a result of changes to how teaching is delivered and how the consumerisation of IT equipment now means most students come to University with a computer of their own – how do we enable access to IT resources from outside of our network in a secure manner, for example, from a college?
• #15: Next is the pace of academic change. What do I mean by that? We’re talking about cutting edge science here, so by its nature it’s difficult to predict with any accuracy how the IT requirement may change over time. None of this is a bad thing generally, but it presents a challenge for IT. I’ve seen a number of requests from left-field over the years, some easily supported, others less so, from helping live stream a horse autopsy to adapting an inkjet printer to print drugs onto special paper. And as the science progresses, obviously the curriculum follows.
• #16: Academic staff drive these changes, in addition to having other duties. I found a 2012 comparison of how engineering academics spend their time worldwide and found that in the UK the average working week is around 45 hours. The challenge for IT in this in finding the right balance between making IT invisible – i.e. it just works, when to make it visible but responsive and when to make it proactive and forward looking without being burdensome.
• #17: And finally, there’s the pace of change in IT. There is obviously a strong need to keep knowledge and skills up to date. And this isn’t just a question of keeping up to date with technology – the “what” of IT, if you like – but also the “how”, the methodology behind how IT is run and how services are delivered which is just as active an area of development as hardware and software.
• #18: Fitting this in around doing the work we’re employed to do is the obvious challenge, but it’s important because in the same way a cutting edge academic focus benefits the University and ultimately the wider world, up to date IT skills and knowledge benefit a cutting edge organisation.
• #19: I’ve spoken about the challenges of scale, the impact of external factors, the importance of the student experience and the challenges of the rates of both academic and technological change.
• #21: Rather than focus on responding to each of these individually I’d like to present 3 connected, cross-cutting approaches that address aspects of each in different ways: Communication, Organisation and Improvement.
• #23: There are three types of communication I’m going to discuss, starting with communication with colleagues, by which I mean academic and support staff. I prefer to say colleagues, and use this term actively at Surrey, because I know some people take offence at the term user or customer. My feeling is that we’re all part of a team with one goal, so it’s a suitable word. Communication with colleagues operates at different levels, formal and informal. Formal communication is structured, organised and documented. For example, the job description for this role mentions an IT Strategy and Advisory Committee. It’s counterpart at Surrey would be the Faculty IT Forum, which is made up of staff and students of different levels and academic disciplines who advise on how things are going, set development priorities and the like. In addition to this core governance group it would be important to develop and maintain links with other appropriate committees or groups across the organisation, including those representing students. I would look to establish working relationships with key stakeholders, not just important people hierarchically, but key users of technology and local decision makers. Informal communication is unstructured, at least in appearance. Not necessarily becoming friends with, but certainly having a broader network of acquaintances across the organisation, which helps give a sense of the mood, highlights any IT issues that might only be griped about rather than reported and can give a heads-up about any major changes on the way. As academic staff have begun turning to social media more I’ve found it an invaluable channel for keeping up to date with how things are going across the Faculty. And less critically, but no less usefully, this kind of communication helps humanise the people on both sides of the working relationship and helps gain engagement in academic activities. Around half of my time at Surrey is spent in this way, working with different stakeholders, staff and groups. It provides a lot of the variety that makes my job enjoyable, while giving me a good understanding of what is happening across the Faculty and it makes IT a visible part of the team, meaning we are more frequently invited to participate in things like research funding applications and curriculum changes, rather than having to respond to surprises.
• #24: The point of this breadth of contact is that it is the only way to cope with the scale of academic IT requirements and it is the best way to stay aware of changing academic interests, focuses, curricula etc. enabling IT to adapt and proactively contribute.
• #25: Liaison and external. Liaison, in an Oxford context, means working with colleagues in other departments, at a divisional level and with other parts of the University. IT Services being an obvious example. At Surrey I work a lot with my counterparts in the other faculties, as well as group leaders in the central IT and Technology Enhanced Learning groups, to make sure that the academic needs of the Faculty can be met. The aim in this liaison work serves two purposes, collaboration on new and ongoing projects and a broader awareness of what’s going on across IT in the University, allowing me to identify future opportunities that may be beneficial to the colleagues I support.
• #26: External communications is largely about answering those challenges I’ve described which come as a result of external influences. So one obvious example would be the EPSRC (acknowledging that they aren’t the only non-commercial source for research funding) where being plugged into what they are doing has been vital to Surrey’s Research Data Management programme. Establishing relationships with commercial partners will be equally valuable, particularly where there is a long-term relationship to support. And working with sector bodies like UCISA, the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association, is invaluable for contact with other HE providers, keeping up to date with sector trends, sharing ideas and finding opportunities to collaborate.
• #27: Finally on communication, internally within IT, where the focus is on collaboration and direction. Direction means ensuring that the collective purpose, direction and principles of operation are understood, allowing distributed staff to have a clear context and decision making framework in which to operate without much day-to-day direction. This is very much the way I operate at Surrey and my team responds very well to a hands-off management style. I ensure they have the guidance they need to make decisions themselves and it is very rare that I have to step in to give anything more than a subtle course correction. This empowering approach is also excellent from a professional development point of view. With collaboration I’m looking to capitalise on the idea that a team can be more than the sum of its parts. Through sharing information across the team, be it day-to-day activities, insight gained while working on a particular task, supporting a colleague who has asked for assistance, together we can deliver more and offer a more joined up, responsive service.
• #28: With good communication will come a lot of information and the purpose of being organised is to realise the value of this information, turning information into knowledge and that knowledge into action, with a service approach – structuring our thinking around what we actually deliver to staff and students, rather than the technology behind it.
• #29: How does organisation present itself? In a number of ways. By establishing consistent ways of working, common processes and good knowledge sharing we can make sure that across a large organisation IT is responding in the best way it can to, doing what it can to anticipate service needs and gathering knowledge in a way that best benefits the whole team. A project management framework means, basically, that we know what we’re doing. My preference is to maintain a lightweight approach to project management. The aim is to help with prioritisation and decision making, nothing is set in stone allowing us to remain agile enough to respond to short-notice but important requirements. Proper service planning is there to make sure that all current and planned services remain up to scratch. All IT services would have regular reviews to make sure they are delivering the quality of service needed and to help us anticipate replacement cycles and the like.
• #30: Organisation would also establish certain standards of operation and service design. I’ve mentioned how service planning would establish reviews, the aim would be to institutionalise (if you like) feedback, enabling it and encouraging it part of business as usual. I would also look to ensure that service design would take into account subjects like security, resilience and remote use at the design stage, doing what we can to best accommodate current and future use cases. I have all of these approaches in place at Surrey, with the exception of Project Management where the University has a detailed and rigorous approach to project governance. To allow my staff to maintain a more flexible approach to project management I take on what I can of the administration.
• #31: Lastly improvement, and just to tack a word on the end there, Innovation. IT can’t stand still. Any organisation not improving is stagnant at best, but more likely is on its way out. The intention is that by combining good communication with organisation a basic improvement programme will effectively create itself, but I would intend to go beyond this, actively encouraging and enabling innovation both within IT and across the organisation as a whole.
• #32: Encouraging feedback and innovation has been a big theme for me at Surrey. At the end of 2013 we launched a very successful internal innovation programme in the IT Department which we have rolled out further afield in the University and I would look to capitalise on this experience to address aspects of all 5 of the challenges I’ve described. Students are a particularly insightful group to approach both for feedback and suggestions. They are notorious for being honest as anyone who has read free text comments from the National Student Survey can confirm. Culturally I would encourage new ideas, new ways of working, new strategies from both inside and outside of IT, all as part of facilitating that communication between IT and the organisation it is there to support. I’d do what I could to facilitate experimentation with these ideas, establishing proof of concept exercises and pilots to confirm the possible value and utility of new ideas, while being clear that failure is an acceptable outcome. That we learn as much from failed experiments as we do successes.
• #33: Supporting professional development is vital to improvement. And to quote the apocryphal discussion between a company CEO and CFO – what if we invest in developing in our people and they leave, to which the response is What if we don’t invest and they stay? Delivered training has a part to play in this, but from experience I put a lot of value in conferences and networking as a method of keeping up to date and inspiring new ideas. One last thing I would do, again to encourage new ideas and new thinking, would be to celebrate successes. I’m a vocal advocate of trumpeting our successes at Surrey, going to conferences and sharing our stories with colleagues, entering national competitions organised by the likes of the Times Higher, UCISA, BCS and Service Desk Institute – anything that reinforces the value of forward thinking.
• #34: To summarise, I’ve spoken today about the challenges of scale, external factors, the student experience and the rate of change in academic focus and technology. And I’ve described how I would try and address these through 3 connected areas of work starting with communication, to ensure we’re working well with our varied stakeholders and partners, as well as internally. Then how I would realise the value of these relationships through effective organisation. And finally how I would underpin this and develop IT’s contribution further through a culture of enabling and encouraging innovation and improvement.
• #35: Thank you very much for your time.