Strategy 10-12: Partners
JISC maximises its investment by working through partnership and collaboration. This includes working with key organisations in the UK, in Europe and elsewhere to leverage influence on policy and standards agendas, and develop shared strategic approaches and mutually beneficial investment strategies. JISC also works through less formal partnerships and collaboration with key community organisations and with subject communities as appropriate.
JISC will continue to promote advantageous partnerships with organisations in the UK and abroad that promote the world-class effectiveness of UK education and research, through the practical, innovative and inspiring use of digital technologies. In managing its growing portfolio of partnerships, JISC will prioritise those partnerships that:
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Leverage JISC influence over important issues such as standards and policy at national, international and global levels
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Support effective delivery of the JISC strategy
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Join up activities of the multiple organisations and agencies working towards world-class effectiveness of UK education and research
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Promote good practice and understanding across all of education and research
JISC currently has partnerships with the following organisations:
| Organisation |
Partnership and collaboration |
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To build an effective research infrastructure, including the creation and use of research data and working with individual Research Councils on appropriate innovation programmes and training requirements |
Mission groups and sector representative organisations |
Such as Universities UK, Guild HE, Association of Colleges, Universities Scotland, Association of Scotland’s Colleges and Colleges Wales – to recognise and respond to strategically important areas for the senior management in different types of institutions |
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To promote strategic approaches to the institutional management of ICT, and the development of a senior management cadre to lead this work |
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To improve the effectiveness of ICT to support learning and teaching and to broaden JISC’s outreach and encourage take-up through the Academy subject centres |
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Collaboration in respect of extending relevant activities more widely in education in particular, interoperability standards, student progression, online content, access management and regional services across the education sector |
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Co-creation of nationally important and sustainable online resources, support for the library community and rights issues |
Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA) |
Helping institutions to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and quality of their use of ICT and alignment with wider institutional strategies |
The Society for College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL) |
Exploring the changing library systems landscape (‘a road map for strategic development of UK library systems’) |
The Association for Learning Technology (ALT) |
Dialogue and active sharing of information to help broaden expertise and knowledge across academic and learning technology communities |
The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) |
Working together in discussion with vendors to influence the strategic development of admissions and broader systems to meet the emerging needs of the sector |
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Helping to reduce the technical, political and policy barriers that inhibit the flow of authoritative online content across the internet for the benefit of learning, knowledge and research (working in partnership with the BBC, the NHS, Becta, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), the British Library and other public sector bodies) |
The National Health Service (NHS) |
To ensure all institutions are able to work with their counterparts in the NHS in a seamless and effective manner |
International bilateral partnerships |
To ensure developments and services in the UK are in step with the rest of the world (eg the SURFfoundation in the Netherlands, and the National Endowment for Humanities and the National Science Foundation in the USA) and through membership of international organisations (eg Educause and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) in the USA) |
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An international collaboration with the German Research Foundation (DFG), Denmark’s electronic research library (DEFF) and the SURFfoundation to help develop ‘a layer of scholarly content openly available on the internet’ through international working groups on issues such as interoperability of digital repositories, libraries in the digital age, licensing, Open Access, primary research data and virtual research environments |
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Which aims to facilitate technical interoperability within and across education and research through improved strategic planning and implementation processes (working in partnership with the Australian and New Zealand governments) |
JISC will actively engage with the IT industry on behalf of the sector and seek collaborations with the commercial sector, but will not enter into partnership with any particular supplier that would compromise its reputation for objective advice and impartiality. Partnerships with commercial associations, introducing commercial interests to JISC and vice versa, will be explored in order to increase common understanding, act as a collective to represent the needs of institutional stakeholders to suppliers, and foster potential joint activities.
In managing its partnership portfolio, JISC will seek to reach an equitable sharing of costs, benefits and risks with its partners. Benefits to JISC will be evaluated with reference to principles established and will be continually refined in the light of experience. The aims and outcomes of JISC’s partnership activities remain essentially unchanged however: to maximise the benefits accruing to institutional stakeholders through engaging with the widest possible range of partner experience and best practice; and to maximise the influence that good partnership working is able to deploy on policy development at regional, national and international levels on behalf of UK education and research as a whole.