JISC

Vision

JISC’s vision is one of easy and widespread access to information and resources, anytime, anywhere; a vision with technology and information management at the heart of research and education.

JISC strategic objectives

JISC’s strategic objectives are to:

• Provide cost-effective and sustainable shared national services and resources
• Help institutions to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their corporate and business systems
• Help institutions to improve the quality of learning and teaching and the student experience
• Help institutions to improve the quality, impact and productivity of academic research
• Be a responsive, reflective and learning organisation that demonstrates value for money

JISC values

JISC values the diversity and open-mindedness of its personnel and seeks to be a transparent and accountable organisation, working in cooperation and collaboration as appropriate. JISC maintains its position as a leadership organisation that adopts technology innovation to deliver practical solutions by being:

• Innovative
• Risk taking
• Proactive
• Investigative and explorative
• Knowledgeable
• Focused
• Respected
• Authoritative

What this means for institutions and other stakeholders

JISC plays a key role as a listening body to universities and colleges and to funders. It balances the requirements of the ICT and information experts and practitioners in universities and colleges, with the strategic concerns of senior managers and policy makers.

JISC will seek to continue seeding capability and collaborative working in the sector whilst at the same time enable students, researchers and teachers to thrive and excel in a digitally enabled world and equip universities and colleges with new ways of working faster and better than the competition.

JISC will use its resources, wherever possible in partnership with others, to identify how ICT can help the sector save money and operate more efficiently and open up new opportunities and possibilities for the way research is undertaken, learning and teaching is delivered to enhance the student experience, and institutional engagement with business and the wider community is facilitated.

Generic themes

There are a number of generic themes that are important to JISC and the work it does, which deserve to be separately articulated.

JISC is a strong supporter of the open environment. This is more than supporting open source software (commercial or otherwise) and working with publishers and others to open access to resources; although these are important. It is about a commitment to sharing pre-competitive ideas and innovation as part of a worldwide community. This is the most effective way to support knowledge transfer and ensure that universities and colleges can play a leading role in stimulating the knowledge economy.

JISC will seek to ensure that such new models provide opportunities for greater efficiency and address long-term sustainability in the networked environment.

Another generic theme that will underpin JISC’s work in the next few years is to increase the skills base in the sector for students, teachers, researchers and managers. The Melville enquiry, the Google generation report and Sir Ron Cooke’s submission to the HE Framework (Higher Ambitions) consultation all identify the need to improve information literacy skills, by which is meant the ability to search and exploit internet resources more effectively. Google is a very fast and impressive search engine but also very unsophisticated: it does not identify the context of a search or know anything about a user’s requirements. More sophisticated search tools are available but are not used by the majority of students (or staff). It is important, therefore, that more is done in improving searching skills and the necessary critical skills to analyse the results of such searches. This is recognised in Becta’s Harnessing Technology strategy as a significant requirement in schools but it remains, and will remain, an issue for further and higher education.

The universal adoption of Virtual Learning Environments has greatly helped improve ICT skills in the teaching profession along with the wealth of resources available on the internet. None the less, there remains a requirement to provide comprehensive training to many teachers and lecturers who wish to use ICT and internet resources in more advanced ways. This is an area where JISC will work with the Higher Education Academy and other appropriate organisations and seek to integrate technology into teacher training courses.

The use of ICT across all research disciplines is increasingly important, but in some disciplines (eg in some areas of the humanities and social sciences) there is not always ready access to suitable training. JISC has, over the years, done much to provide training, especially relating to e-Science, through appropriate agencies and organisations. A dialogue with the Research Councils and learned societies is necessary to identify where there remains a need to address training requirements and cascade new innovation into the graduate schools and doctoral training, for example on the need to tag research data to improve accessibility and ensure understanding of what research data should be preserved and what can be discarded.

Sir Ron Cooke in his HE Framework submission suggested that many institutions were not using technology in imaginative and innovative ways to improve their management processes and that further development of leadership and management of ICT is required. New administrative applications are often installed and tailored around conventional processes that may date back many decades. Innovative ways of exploiting ICT usually require changes, often quite radical, to business processes. JISC will work with the Leadership Foundation and others to promote a debate among senior management to identify new, imaginative, business processes to improve the efficiency of the institution, enhance the student experience and increase the quality and productivity of research. 

Encouraging the use of flexible and shared services where this will improve effectiveness, agility and reduce costs, is a further generic theme in the strategy. There are several models of provision applicable to the sector: sharing of services within an institution; between a small number of institutions, or at the national level – and the service provider can either be an institution or third-party provider. JISC Services are clear examples of national shared services but there remains potential to do more within the sector. This includes areas such as procurement, help-desk services, shared applications, virtualisation, data management (both in the sense of research data and management information) and large-scale computing facilities. JISC will continue working with the funding bodies and others to promote shared services where clear benefits can be identified.

Green computing is another generic theme – both reducing the environmental impact and energy cost of ICT provision, and exploiting ICT as an enabler to make energy and cost savings through the intelligent use of technology. Whilst the potential of cloud computing to deliver meaningful efficiencies is still to be proved, other shared services and greater use of outsourcing may play a part in reducing the carbon footprint of ICT. Other measures include improving the energy efficiency of desktop computing through automated powerdown, reducing the energy demands in data centres, developing more intelligent buildings, and enabling new ways of working for staff and students both in the workplace and at home.

Finally, there is mobile computing (and with this mobile users). Laptops and small devices are increasingly used by researchers, students and staff; who in turn require access to the internet at remote sites and while on the move. Supporting and exploiting mobile computing requires sophisticated access and identity management tools as well as applications designed to provide information on less powerful and smaller devices using lower bandwidth than is normally the case in an office environment.