JISC

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Flexible services are those that can be adapted quickly and easily to meet changing demands. Flexible Service Delivery is about UK colleges and universities being better prepared for new service delivery options, such as shared services and cloud computing, as a means of making efficiency savings and improving institutional flexibility and responsiveness to change

This briefing is for vice-chancellors and pro vice-chancellors, finance directors, directors of information services and systems, heads of academic and service departments, directors and managers of business change, including business analysts and enterprise architects.

The Context

Colleges and universities need to be much lighter on their feet. Rapid changes in funding, student expectations, competition and government requirements demand more efficient, effective and flexible institutions.

The Rewards

Efficiency: reducing the operating costs across a range of administrative and operational areas.

Effectiveness: business process and service quality improvement, delivering better services to meet rising student expectations.

Agility: ability to respond quickly to new opportunities and adapt to future funding models and changing business requirements.

What We Know Already

A strategy built around flexibility will benefit everything from learning and teaching to administration. The ability to respond quickly to identified needs makes an offer more attractive to students with, for example, the latest and tailor-made teaching methods and facilities, and to prospective partners in research collaboration and other activities. Services which can change rapidly to meet changing needs mean less waste in both what you deliver and the services you buy in.

There are various approaches and technologies that institutional managers can invest is as solutions to efficiency and flexibility. The following interventions do not have to be done in a specific order, nor do you have to do them all to see benefits. What you need to do will depend on the culture and strategic maturity of your organisation.

Good process design

Operational and administrative costs can be reduced and efficiency increased by streamlining processes, removing those that are redundant or duplicated, as well as using technology to automate processes.

Failure to understand the importance of good process design is the main reason why so many shared service initiatives fail to deliver the expected benefits. The experience of North Hertfordshire College, which managed to reduce the costs of its finance processes by 30% in a six-month period, demonstrates the success that good process design can bring.

Read more about their experience at http://bit.ly/ve45Be

There is more detail about what you need to do at each stage of the project in the new ‘Process Review’ infoKit.

Get better cost data

Better data will allow you to quantify value for money and calculate the full costs and returns of investments in new services, systems and infrastructure. Making a business case is particularly difficult if you do not have a good grasp of the cost of existing services, how much they are used, and a clear evaluation of the benefits they deliver.

The use of various costing principles and models can help shift the focus from knee-jerk budgeting (‘doing more for less’) to changing things in order to deliver benefits for the institution.

The ‘Costing technologies and services’ infoKit has more information on approaches and tools for costing and making the business case for strategically aligned change.

Go green New IT systems and facilities can play an important role in reducing energy costs and lowering carbon emissions, with energy savings from more efficient IT solutions. You can read more about greening your ICT in another guide in this series, ‘Using IT to Go Green’.

Move from a systems- to a service-based approach

Culturally, this means changing from thinking about IT to thinking about services, so you restructure your business around key services rather than specific systems and technologies.

This change is enabled technically by deriving added value from your existing systems, by investing in approaches and technologies which allow smaller systems ‘pieces’ loosely coupled through:

• IT ‘architectural’ approaches such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) software which emphasise communication between separate software modules
• Public, open technical specifications, standards and protocols and Open and Linked Data that allow communication with and between different software and data sources

Institutions cannot afford to replace old with new. A system based on a Service Oriented Architecture can increase flexibility by improving interoperability. It presents different functions as a suite of services that can be used within multiple, separate systems from several parts of the institution. It also defines how to integrate different applications for a web-based environment and uses a range of implementation platforms.

Find out more about system optimisation from the ‘Getting more from Existing Investments’ infoKit.

Modularise services

Splitting up a large monolithic system into smaller modules responsible for different areas of service is one way of making a service more flexible and responsive to changing business needs.

Institutions also no longer have the budget to replace monolithic systems or to support duplicated system functionality and processes, and they no longer want to be locked into a single supplier. Instead, institutions want to be able to use their reduced revenue to buy only what they need as discrete, interoperable service solutions.

Although there are hurdles to overcome, including convincing vendors to alter their strategy of locking customers into a proprietary product suite, Project Cumulus (see box) has shown that working closely with commercial systems suppliers, breaking down big systems in a modular way, and offering them as ‘services’ in the cloud can work. Using open standards means interaction with systems from other suppliers across a range of institutions is possible.

You can read relevant experiences of working towards applications that are modular and agile, and guidance on establishing contractural arrangements with vendors for purchasing software applications as services in the cloud, in the new ‘Working With Commercial Suppliers’ infoKit.

Consider new service delivery models: sharing and cloud

Increased flexibility is possible through new models of IT-related service delivery, for example through moving applications or data to the cloud, and/or as part of a managed and shared service.

There are risks involved in sharing managed services, including the cultural and organisational differences between institutions. But there are many potential benefits, including:

• Continuity and resilience of service
• Better quality and more flexibile, scalable services
• Lower cost and sustainable efficiencies through sharing economies of scale
• Ability to offer otherwise unsustainable services
• Addressing growing demand for collaborative learning and teaching, research and knowledge exchange

Cloud computing allows you to purchase ‘services’ that can offer more flexibility and agility than traditional application licensing. Cloud computing can enable convenient, on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources such as networks, servers, data storage, applications and services that can be quickly deployed with little effort.

The ‘Improving Organisational Efficiency’ infoKit has more information on the types of cloud service and deployment models and advice on assessing the benefits, risks and costs.

Increase the maturity of IT strategy

Creating a flexible service delivery programme is a major change for any organisation. It requires new ICT strategies aligned with overall organisational and business strategy.

“Enterprise Architecture is simply a way of making the things work together effectively – better, quicker, more flexible, saving money.”
 
John Townsend, Deputy director of corporate information systems at Liverpool John Moores University

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a holistic approach that offers a set of tools and a framework for this sort of strategic ICT change management. It is a high-level, strategic technique that is about people and processes as much as it is about technology. It is designed to help senior managers achieve business and organisational change. It can help you identify and fix existing problems, reduce duplication and inefficiency, cut costs, make better decisions and plan for the future by being able to effectively model the impact of change.

These benefits come at a cost. EA is not a simple undertaking; it requires a considerable investment of time and skills development, pilot projects and related activities.

JISC outline a more pragmatic way of approaching EA that is grounded in the practices of the sector. See the new ‘Enterprise Architecture’ infoKit.

Before embarking on an EA approach, you may want to undertake some kind of analysis of your institutional readiness for such an approach and current state of play with regard to the strategic use of ICT.

Getting Started

Things to consider:

Senior management buy-in. It is vital to present a sound business case for change to service delivery models. Before investing in a flexible service delivery programme, which you may roll out across many areas of your college or university, it must chime with strategic priorities and have measurable, predictable, benefits.

Business intelligence. Up to date information about your business processes will help you identify areas that would benefit from a flexible service delivery model. Read through the ‘Business Intelligence’ guide in this series.

Costs. How much does it cost to run your current systems and processes? What will it cost to change? When you know how much things cost, you can identify cost savings and process improvements possible from implementing any type of change involving IT.

Use our ‘Impact Calculator’ to help you measure costs.

Overall organisational strategy. How would changes to service delivery support it? How can they be aligned with your organisational strategy? Read ‘Enterprise Architecture: An Introduction’ (version 2).

The future. How could decisions you make now stand up to unforeseen changes? Try to limit this risk by scenario planning. Read ‘Successful Scenario Planning’ as a brief introduction to the subject.

Suggest a pilot first. See a new model of service delivery working in a smaller area before applying it more widely. Propose a pilot for a new flexible service delivery option for a discrete area, as with the Project Cumulus example.

Use our Impact Calculator to help quantify savings made by a change, how much a change might have cost, and the return on investment.