JISC

Professor Sir Timothy O'Shea

Over the past year JISC has been part of an ongoing conversation with UK vice chancellors and senior managers, government officials and technology experts who are all asking urgent questions about the future of higher education. 

We debated scenarios for the shape and structure of that future at the JISC-sponsored Future of Higher Education summit run by the Guardian in early March.  There, Malcolm Read, JISC’s executive secretary, called for further consideration of the benefits of cloud computing and technology for sharing research. 

 JISC and the Leadership Foundation brought together university leaders and managers to share expertise on fostering and harnessing innovation, creativity and technology at the 2010 Higher Education Summit in February.  Meanwhile, the Guardian round table debate in April looked at how universities maintain their competitiveness while finding new ways to collaborate using technology.

We have also carried out our first ever full review of the value and impact the HE and FE community gains from our work, identifying all those things that have been made possible by you working with JISC. Some highlights are that we:

• Invested in 200 institutions in last 10 years – building a collaborative innovation engine
• Ran Advisory services delivering savings of £12 per £1 invested
• Managed content licensing and purchasing saving c £43m per year
• Ran an unparalleled network with 18 million users
• Unlocked resources – 6.5million hard to access items
• Improved the student experience with sign-and-go through federated access management

Looking to the future, we are facing an uncertain funding climate which means we will have to prioritise – based on value and impact of our work for the HE and FE community. It is essential for JISC to respond to the sector’s challenges, despite a potential tightening of its own budget. I am confident that JISC will be effective in addressing these challenges.

Tim O'Shea at the JISC conference 2010

(Duration 11.03)