JISC

The report aligns the different areas of JISC provision with the strategic aims that they support. Some services support more than one strategic aim. When this occurs the service is considered under the strategic aim that it is most aligned to. JISC project development is discussed separately as JISC project development as a whole covers all the strategic aims, and individual projects may be aligned to more than one aim.

The majority of the JISC services serve the first or second strategic aims – provision of services and advice. Consequently the detail of this report is heavily weighted towards those aims. Services supporting the third strategic aim – the provision and support of individual learning environments are still maturing and a Value for Money exercise for these is premature. 

The third and fourth strategic aims are concerned with collaboration and strategic advice. These strategic aims are achieved both by the works of dedicated advisory services and by the advice and support given to the community by all service providers. The work of individual services with respect to these aims is examined where possible in this document. 

Value for Money can be described in terms of economy, efficiency and effectiveness. The value for money provided by JISC can be determined by a number of approaches. In order of confidence these are:

1. Benchmarking the cost of the whole service against a similar service available on the open market.  This is possible where a comparable service exists and the costs on the open market are accessible (e.g. the cost of network provision or e-resource provision).
2. Comparing the cost of the service provided centrally with the cost if each institution had to negotiate provision.
3. Considering time or effort saved by use of the service and putting a value to that time or effort.
4. Calculating the unit cost of parts of the service (e.g. access to a database) and comparing that to the price for similar provision.
5. Assessing the impact made on the target market. This is particularly useful for services with no commercial equivalent. 
6. The converse operation to 5. is to consider the implications to the user community if the service was not available.
7. Examining customer comment and customer satisfaction assessments.
8. Exploring trends in use. Services that are well used, used repeatedly or experience continued increase in use must be considered as valuable. 

Staff time generally has been calculated at an average salary of  £24,000 and a working day of eight hours for 220 days per annum.  2004-2005 refers to the annual year running from August 2004 to July 2005. Where specialist time is involved in calculations the hourly rate recommended by the relevant professional societies is used.

The user community is presumed to be the staff and students at institutions eligible for JANET connections. These include education and research establishments.

This exercise concentrates on work funded by the JISC core budget. Capital grants, which fund network and other development work have not been considered in this report with the exception of some capital funding for the provision of SuperJANET.

Development programmes are difficult to evaluate until after the end of the programme.Often the benefits of a programme are best assessed some years after the completion. A companion document to this details the Value for Money of JISC Development activities. In addition, JISC has commissioned a study from Jon Duke and Andy Jordan to assess the impact of the e-Lib project. 

Back to contents