JISC

Services
Innovation programmes
Investment process
Lifecycle of JISC innovation programmes

Services

JISC funds a portfolio of services for access for online resources, for advice and support, and for underpinning infrastructure. These are a core facility for the use of ICT in UK research, learning and teaching, both for individual users and to support the business of institutions in the post-compulsory education sector.

JISC works through a small number of key organisations to deliver infrastructure and resources. Its major delivery partners are JANET (UK), JISC Collections, JISC Advance, the British Universities Film and Video Council (BUFVC), the Regional Support Centres and the two JISC national data centres, EDINA and Mimas at the universities of Edinburgh and Manchester. JISC will work with service providers to ensure there are continuous improvements in service delivery through a number of processes.

Governance

JISC will ensure that appropriate and effective governance arrangements are in place for all service providers and will review these from time to time to assure itself that its funding is being managed efficiently and with appropriate levels of scrutiny. All service providers will be required to have an effective Board structure, financial management systems and suitable channels for acquiring user input to inform strategic and operational planning, normally through a Stakeholder Group.

Service Quality

Services will be encouraged to adopt best practice in the delivery of services to customers, focusing specifically on the changing needs of users in response to technology advances. JISC is improving its own market intelligence gathering capacity and will work with services to develop a two-way flow of information. JISC-funded services will be comparable with the best in the world.

Technology

Services will be sufficiently flexible to take advantage of new opportunities offered by technological developments. They will use these opportunities to enhance their range of offerings and make existing services easier to use and more suited to user requirements. In particular, JISC will explore with its services opportunities to offer shared services to institutions on a national, regional or local basis.

Evidence

Service providers will be encouraged to understand the market for their services and identify where and how they are having an impact in the sector. In particular, services will be able to identify where they are delivering economies of scale, saving the sector money or increasing efficiency in operations. JISC will work with the services to explore the best and most efficient means for measurement and reporting on impact and value for money. These mechanisms will be light touch and subject to occasional audit.

Cost effectiveness

JISC will require service providers to develop plans to deliver annual improvements, cost reductions and efficiency gains wherever possible, with the aim of either reducing costs or enabling additional services or enhancements to be offered.

The service portfolio will include the following components

Network infrastructure

The delivery of a national network of world-class quality to institutions is essential to support the core business of those institutions and delivery of the JISC strategy. JISC will ensure that the JANET network, the associated network services and the UK Access Management Federation continue to meet the changing needs of stakeholders in research, education and institutional management.

JANET (UK) will be expected to develop tools to benchmark the UK network against international comparators to provide assurance to JISC and the community that JANET remains world class. It will continue to develop national and international links to ensure that it remains fully aware of and responsive to network technology developments. It will develop mechanisms to consult with institutions on a regular basis to acquire market intelligence on their needs, thus providing assurance that it is delivering an appropriate set of network services and levels of service to institutions.

The core requirement for the network is a seamless, resilient backbone, with adequate capacity to deliver the required bandwidth into an institution, and from institutions to their global partners and resources. The network will continue to evolve to take advantage of technological developments while maintaining high capacity, reliability and flexibility. JANET (UK) will extend the current contract for SuperJanet 5 for an additional two years to 2013 and will begin the process of defining the requirements for SuperJanet 6 in 2010, which will also advise on the likely capital and recurrent costs. It will be in a position to begin the procurement process for the new network no later than early 2012.

The Access Management Federation will remain responsive to members’ requirements while evolving in line with international developments and growing understanding of operation of national federations. JANET, the current operator, will respond quickly to the fast changing technological and operational environment and will encourage and provide support for institutions and service providers to exploit the potential of the new technology to its fullest extent.

JANET (UK) will continue to provide a range of high-value added network services to the community to enable secure exploitation of the network, offer delivery mechanisms to new mobile technologies and support institutions in minimising their environmental impact through video conferencing and other technologies.

Content negotiation

JISC Collections will make a layer of scholarly content available to the sector, either free of charge or through cost-effective charging mechanisms. It will continue to procure or re-procure content through national or international agreements at the best prices possible and with the most advantageous terms of use for institutions, thus delivering value to the post-compulsory education sector. It will also investigate and apply innovative business models to ensure that content can be delivered to the widest possible number of institutions for the lowest price.

Collections will work with JISC and JISC-funded services to encourage greater utilisation of content by teachers, learners and researchers to further increase the value for money of its activities to education and research in the UK. It should both react to identified customer need and also encourage the use of available content by the community. It will form a stakeholder group to help identify customer needs, covering as many subject areas, and resource types, as possible.

JISC Collections will ensure that all resources provided through national agreements are compliant with the requirements of the UK Access Management Federation by the end of 2011.

Content delivery and expertise

JISC will use its three main content delivery providers, EDINA, Mimas and BUFVC, to maintain a range of services that acquire, add value and improve access to specialist or new types of content. This will ensure that the UK has access to a diverse portfolio of high quality resources to support education, research, knowledge discovery and scholarly communication.

The principal objective of funding these services is to lower the barriers to use of these resources in education and research. The service providers will deliver content and offer advice in order to build capacity in the sector to exploit the opportunities that new types of content offer. They will promote innovative types of research or teaching using these new resources. The providers will seek opportunities to join up individual services to offer comprehensive access to resources that may assist teaching or research activities.

The providers will configure the underlying infrastructure delivering these services to ensure scalability, robustness and resilience. They will each develop mechanisms to create and maintain links with teachers, learners and researchers, through stakeholder groups and user forums. This will enable them to create products more closely aligned to user requirements and their preferred methods of working. They will continuously develop their software applications through better location tools, customer-focused and innovative interfaces and effective support and training. Wherever possible, standards-based approaches will be adopted.

JISC will work with these providers to explore new business models for delivery of innovative applications and resources and develop further new applications for the community.

Advice and support

The new company, JISC Advance, was set up in 2009 to provide a comprehensive set of advice, guidance and training services in respect of the use of technology in education and research. JISC Advance will evolve into the main advice and guidance service for JISC, helping to implement the outputs of relevant innovation programmes.

JISC Advance will be responsive to the needs of the higher and further education community, by developing feedback mechanisms, a stakeholder group and, particularly in further education, by including the Regional Support Centres into the company during 2010. JISC will use the Regional Support Centres to help implement strategic issues in each of the four UK nations, act as a means by which good practice in one country can be communicated to others, and to serve as one of the key mechanisms by which JISC obtains understanding of further-education issues to inform its own planning and processes. JISC Advance will therefore become a major conduit for helping the sector exploit ICT through both disseminating JISC’s outputs and providing informed analysis of requirements. This will require further integration of its constituent services and increasing the breadth of its technical expertise.

JISC Advance will introduce appropriate management, staffing and operational arrangements to deliver more efficient service management operations, including greater synergy across existing service provision and greater flexibility in development and delivery of new or enhanced services, and will demonstrate economies of scale across the operation of JISC Advance as a whole.
JISC will encourage all of its other services to work in partnership with JISC Advance to enable a more integrated provision of advice and guidance to universities and colleges across the range of activity that JISC funds.

Innovation programmes

JISC funds a portfolio of programmes that are core to the innovative use of ICT in the post-compulsory education sector. JISC recognises that the sector has diverse needs and will continue to fund a range of projects of different scale and size. JISC will seek to ensure that funding is allocated to projects in further education as appropriate. JISC will look to fund collaborative projects where possible so that knowledge capital and capacity building can be shared widely and to maximise the uptake of developments.

Innovation programmes have some or all of the following components

Provide strategic investment for change in key areas of concern for the sector

A programme will often consist of a number of ‘coming soon’ or ‘on the horizon’ projects, where institutions compete for funding that will enable them to make a change to their current systems or processes. This funding allows them to demonstrate effective practice to other institutions. The programme will be supported by sophisticated evaluation activities, by investigative activities that may be more experimental, and relevant studies to support the projects. The benefits of JISC programme investments are realised through planned communications and supported take-up activities.

Human Networks of ICT practitioners

A significant number of researchers, developers and managers are employed in the sector to work on JISC programmes. JISC’s programmes develop a network of innovative practitioners who work together to support effective practice in the UK post-compulsory education sector. These practitioners are brought together virtually, through online communication tools, and also through face-to-face meetings, workshops and other events. They are perceived as important change agents in the sector. They are supported by experts drawn from the sector, JISC’s Innovation Support Centres and other centres of expertise.

Collaborative strategic leadership

Strategic investment where leadership is needed in an area of key concern for the community, such as the Strategic Content Alliance and the e-Framework. Such an activity will often raise strategic issues to a national or international level of awareness, and will often require only limited financial investment but create significant impact.

Research studies

JISC invests substantially in research studies that provide the sector with information about the state of the art in key areas such as technical standards, new technologies, user needs – for example the Google Generation report (2008). Studies also provide rigorous evidence to support further investment decisions by the JISC Board and sub-committees, and other funding bodies.

Investment process

JISC’s investment process is presented in the following diagram and can be described as follows:

Together these activities deliver the following:

• Continual enhancement of national infrastructure to support the activities of institutions
• Enhanced capacity, knowledge and skills in the sector to enable positive and informed change
• Guidance to the sector on ‘best practice’ models for using technology at departmental, institutional, regional or national levels
• Strategic leadership to the sector and other bodies in specialist areas and the influencing of national and international agendas

Lifecyle of JISC innovation programmes

The innovation lifecycle

Innovation (or positive change) within the education sector operates through innovation lifecycles. Each institution takes its own approach to deciding how best to invest and at what point in its funding cycles. This may be a long process; five years of planning and investment may be required to change institutional systems and processes in order to make best use of the potential that technology has to offer.

JISC reflects this cycle of change. Its activities also operate through a lifecycle of innovation. As JISC funds both programmes and services, it is able to work with the education sector to look for trends and key influences that may affect the way that education and research are carried out, and respond to these and lead implementation through its activities. JISC will capture the most relevant trends in technology, in institutional infrastructure, in learner, teacher and researcher behaviour and requirements. This happens at a macro level, in response to a large change in research assessment for example, and at a micro level, for example to explore whether JISC-funded services should adopt Web 2.0 technologies.

JISC innovation programmes sometimes introduce new services and products, including advice and guidance. They also fund enhancements to existing services, as well as identifying needs for new services through interaction with the sector. Many of the innovation programmes that JISC delivers aim to enhance systems, processes and practices in the sector.

A distinction is also often drawn between incremental and radical innovation. Incremental innovation involves small improvements, which if engaged in continuously may result in significant changes. However, each step is characterised by low risk and small gain. Radical innovation, by contrast, usually involves a break with the past, as for example is advocated by business process reengineering. This carries higher risk, but with potentially greater gain.

JISC is in the unique position of being funded by and embedded within the sector it serves so it is more easily able to:

• Identify current and future needs of the sector
• Study the current situation in which issues and concerns arise
• Survey and study emerging technologies, filtered by sector needs
• Work iteratively with the sector through the innovation development cycle with stakeholder input and feedback
• Lead implementation, pilot outputs and address barriers to adoption

In practice these are combined in different ways and can be set out in a four quadrant matrix:

Systems/Practice/Process vs. Software/Service Innovation

In general, innovation investment has a balanced spread across this matrix. However, JISC’s emphasis is on ’taking the risks that institutions would not normally take themselves‘ due to cost or scale. Overall, JISC seeks to balance its investment portfolio largely in the three quadrants of semi-radical and radical innovation, with some activities attempting to support good practices and processes without significant change to existing software and services. Others seek to introduce innovative new services and software that fit into existing practices and processes without demanding significant change. The majority of innovation efforts, though, will require both in varying degrees.

All of these help to mitigate the risks associated with innovation. The time to invest in innovation is during a recession so as to be well placed to make the most of the upswing when it arrives. So, while the appetite for innovation in the sector may be lower at the present, within a few years it should be increasing again. This suggests that as far as possible JISC should maintain its current risk profile.