Photograph (C) Andrew Hewson http://t.co/6g3ENKP
The higher and further education sectors in the UK are fortunate to employ talented and dedicated software developers. Without them, many kinds of technical innovation would be significantly more difficult, more expensive or even impossible. While the patterns of employment of ‘local’ (locally employed) developers varies considerably between higher/further education institutions, it is rare for such institutions to invest strategically in their local development capacity.
Recognising this, the JISC-funded DevCSI project (managed by UKOLN) was introduced to work with local developers, to understand better their potential as an under-utilised resource and to create opportunities for them to network together, sharing resources, ideas, code and solutions. With the network that DevCSI has successfully pioneered, an institution which employs a handful of developers locally gains the benefit of a sector-wide network of peers bringing different perspectives and experiences to bear in a shared context. Beyond the immediate sector, DevCSI has worked with open-source and commercial suppliers who recognise the value in the networked pool of development talent and expertise.
JISC has been consistent in maintaining that the sector needs to continue to innovate if it is to be able to meet the long-term challenges of a radically changing environment. Institutions must be careful to maintain the capacity for technical innovation – indeed a recession is the right time to invest in change and innovation in order to emerge ready to exploit the opportunities of better economic times. In the difficult period ahead, one predictable response will be to outsource some software services, seeking the cost-savings and efficiencies promised by service-delivery paradigms such as Software as a Service. But there are risks associated with outsourcing services entirely, such as the associated reduction in local understanding and expertise, and the loss of capability to adapt to meet particular local requirements.
In the DevCSI project, we are working to establish an understanding of the changing role of the local developer in this likely new landscape with its greater dependency on remote, shared services. While recognising that they have some common requirements, we should not forget that our institutions have their individual ‘flavours’ too (this is surely part of what makes higher education in the UK so attractive internationally). For shared, remote services to be truly effective in a local context, they must be tailored to the needs of the users in that context.
DevCSI is steadily gaining traction in the UK – we have worked with related organisations such as OSSWatch and The Software Sustainability Institute and have organised events at many higher and further education institutions. Our work is even being recognised internationally, and we have been recently invited to help establish a similar initiative in Australia.
Where next for DevCSI? We’ve established a nascent community of developers in the UK and can already point to evidence of the value of this, some of which (such as peer-peer training) is even measurable in pounds, shillings and pence! While maintaining and growing this, we are now considering where best to focus our resources at a sector-wide level. One issue we have identified in the sector is the lack of career options for successful developers – other than to move into less technical management roles. Many of our best developers simply move out of the sector entirely in order to progress in their careers. An idea we are starting to explore is the possible development of a new role in the sector – the Strategic Developer – a developer who has both technical and domain experience, and who can contribute to strategic planning and decision making. Establishing such a role may take time but, as technology is undoubtedly going to play an increasingly important role in the future of further and higher education, so must we ensure that the people who understand the technology stick around long enough to be able to contribute at this level.
For more information, go to the DevCSI blog. Please do email me (p.walk@ukoln.ac.uk) if you have questions about this work. My UKOLN colleague, Mahendra Mahey and I also presented on this work at the JISC Conference, 2011 (slides).
Photograph (C) Andrew Hewson http://t.co/6g3ENKP
Interesting post, thanks Paul.
The idea of strategic developers struck me because in my world (learning and teaching development and strategy) there are similar patterns to be discerned. The lack of career progression for developers (in our case educational developers, staff developers or more recently organisational developers) is as much of an issue as it is in your more technically related world, it seems. The idea of strategic developers has been mooted in my field as well, but has been superseded by that of organisational developers. I’ll come back to that.
I guess what I’ve noticed is that new roles don’t develop because the people who would be ready for such a role can see the opportunity and the need for it, they develop instead because the organisation needs such a role. It then helps a great deal if the community of professionals ready for making that next step is ready with a good working solution like you suggest, but creating it from the bottom up is going to be a hard slog. Or it certainly was in our experience.
This is also where the role of organisational developers is interesting. By and large (there are different types) these roles occur when an organisation decides at some point to undergo substantial change. Often it starts with big restructuring or a new direction for the institution altogether. What the senior, central team then needs is people who can be allocated and trusted to sort out the operational implementation and specifically, develop staff and processes for adjustment. In essence they help develop staff and systems for effectiveness in the new organisational structure or direction. Fascinating jobs and the content of the organisational change they support, can differ tremendously between ‘projects’.
Oddly though, these jobs tend to be at a similar level as educational, staff or indeed technical developers.
I guess it is still the case that if you move into a role where you’re taking a lead on change (whether it is people, technical or organisational), you are effectively becoming a manager. Maybe it just says something about our concepts of what it is that managers do in the UK HE sector, that we tend not to think of it that way….
Here’s a challenge for you:Counting the nubmer or proportion of full text items (or equivalent) in ANY repository.It’s something people keep on asking for, but the software providers have tended not to provide the necessary tools for generating or harvesting the statistics. OAI-PMH cannot be relied on for this information either. (I can’t comment on ORE.) We therefore ideally need a tool or application that is independent of both.Those pesky metadata-only repositories skew the profile of open access resources, so this tool would a great help in advocacy and in prioritising harvesting operations.Entries could be judged on speed (how many repositories they can gather statistics for in a set period, or how long it takes to process a given sample collection), and on accuracy (assuming we can find a list of repositories with known data).It may not seem very sexy, but it would be damned useful.Peter