JISC

This publication has now been updated - See the 2007 version

Background paper

Professor Sir Ron Cooke, JISC Chair  

JISC is an extraordinary organisation, not unusual in Britain, which in an almost magical way has grown to serve its community successfully, with very little publicity.

It is an organisation whose effectiveness is almost inversely proportional to its visibility – much of what JISC does is not obvious to its users. All the while Super JANET  works, hardly any of its 6 million users think of JISC. Most of the 3 million users of ATHENS (the authentication service) are not aware that it is a JISC service. 

What JISC does is both hugely extensive and complex, and it is difficult for the individual fully to evaluate. This difficulty in part relates to its impenetrability, which is well-illustrated by what I call the tyranny of acronyms – there are literally hundreds of them in the world of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) which are understood by the cognoscenti, but which are barriers to understanding for the rest of us. 

Another issue concerns JISC’s responsibility to institutions, groups within institutions, individual practitioners and partners. Until recently, JISC was effectively a doorstep delivery service: institutions plugged into the networks, libraries picked up content and passed it on, and computer services dealt with the middleware. Although JISC programmes and services involve directly hundreds of practitioners, we now see it as part of our mission to engage more with individual practitioners. 

Equally, JISC is constantly being asked to extend its brief and to collaborate with new partners. Often such partnerships can be highly productive (such as our links with the British Library), but there is a danger of dissipating our energies and losing our focus. We are clear that the needs of teachers, learners, researchers and administrators in higher education (HE) and further education (FE) are our primary focus, and the funds we receive from the funding councils must continue to be used exclusively for this purpose. 

Thus, we have recently developed strategies for increasing JISC’s visibility, reducing its impenetrability, reaching out more effectively to our practitioners and our partners, and embedding through, for example:

• The appointment of a Head of Communications and Marketing and a Partnership Manager
• A communications and marketing strategy (including for example, a revamped web site, JISC inform and press  releases)
• Improved training programmes
• An ‘embedding strategy’ which develops links with individuals electronically, through regional centres, and involvement in staff development programmes and the HE Academy

I have discovered that JISC is almost universally respected – all our user surveys show a high degree of satisfaction. The only problem, it seems to me, is that not enough people know about JISC’s full range of services. Indeed, there is good evidence that JISC is a world leader in some areas (see below: Section 12), and is a significant contributor to the excellence of UK higher and further education. If we didn’t have it, we would probably have to invent it, or something similar. 

One crucial reason why JISC is widely respected is that it is still collegial: its work is still very largely directed and carried out by practitioners within higher and further education.