JISC

Executive summary

Conducted between November 2010 and January 2011, our survey reflects the views of 367 senior managers from libraries, learning resource centres, ICT and converged services and learning and teaching functions within higher and further education institutions across the UK. In terms of further education, we have only covered mainstream further education and sixth form colleges rather than the wider FE and Skills sector. Our survey did not for example include specialist colleges, or independent providers of work based learning or adult and community learning.

Key concerns and challenges

Current concerns

Overall there are a number of broad areas of concern cropping up on many senior managers’ agendas. Looking across the board, it is clear that funding and financial challenges are most concerning our respondents within further education, followed by improving or maintaining the quality of existing service provision.

The financial challenges manifest themselves as expected in terms of funding reductions or changes, but also in terms of the need to deliver the same level of service or more for less. Intrinsic to this is the need to develop new or more efficient business processes to rise to this challenge. Funding, financial management and sustainable resourcing are also clearly the top concerns among their colleagues in higher education as shown by both the recent SCONUL and UCISA top concerns surveys.

Longer term challenges

Across higher and further education, our survey respondents believe the top two challenges facing universities and colleges in the longer term relate to student issues:

• extending online or e-learning across an institution
• meeting student needs as ‘customers’.

This is the case almost without exception, when we look at each audience group within the sectors. Interestingly every audience group in higher education place ‘meeting student demands and requirements as customers’ as the greatest challenge while everyone in further education puts ‘extending online or e-learning across a greater spectrum of institutional activity’ top of their lists.

The most noticeable differences between sectors are:

• Greater significance placed on training and development of staff in the use of technology; third in further education compared with ninth place in higher education.
• Instead higher education place sharing systems and services as their third most significant longer-term challenge, particularly among senior IT staff but also librarians. However, it is also recognised as an issue among IT managers within further education.
• Diversification of services also appears a particular challenge in further education (slightly more so than in higher education) especially amongst managers involved in learning and teaching and libraries

Needs and requirements of JISC

In terms of JISC focusing its efforts on identifying technologies which deliver cost effective solutions, our respondents would like to see us focus on:

• technologies that help free up academic time
• making existing systems more efficient and cost effective
• showing how to establish the costs associated with technology related services so that value for money can be calculated.

There was quite a difference between the rankings given by higher and further education, with the former placing more emphasis on shared services and establishing costs/value for money associated with service delivery. In contrast FE would like to see us focus efforts more on technologies that deliver staff efficiencies and making existing systems more efficient and cost effective.

We also asked what things respondents would find most helpful from JISC when implementing new or existing technologies, systems or processes in their institutions. Although demand for the new areas proposed was not very high, 98% of respondents indicated they would value at least one of the delivery channels listed. Workshops in the use of new technologies are clearly the most popular by a large margin across all audience groups (except HE ICT).

A clear message from the survey is that JISC must continue to engage and consult senior managers to align better with their needs and concerns.

Specific technologies

Following last year, we included questions on Green ICT, outsourcing and shared services.

Although we cannot be certain from our survey of the number of institutions with ‘sustainable development’ or ‘carbon reduction’ strategies, our findings do show the vast majority of these include ICT. It is evident that a great many institutions across HE and FE have implemented practical measures around greening their ICT. The most common being virtualising servers, installing PC shutdown software and reducing paper usage.

This year’s survey continues to show those not directly related to ICT services feel less informed of green ICT initiatives within their institution, and indeed appears to be decreasing. Despite this a number of departments outside ICT already have plans or activities in place to reduce the environmental impact of their ICT.

Heads and Directors of ICT services clearly play a key role in determining an institution’s requirements and policy for outsourcing. Our survey suggests the outsourcing of student email continues to be the most popular (and increasing) form of outsourcing followed by the provision of applications such as Google Docs, and data storage.

Our survey shows that despite being more commonplace within HE, sharing services across institutions is still relatively low across both sectors. The most commonly mentioned shared services by our ICT respondents were IT support, student email provision and high performance computing.

Perceptions of JISC

Our research continues to show that JISC has a strong profile across the audiences surveyed, both in terms of familiarity and favourability towards what we do. Over the last year JISC has made considerable efforts to demonstrate how it supports senior institutional managers address a range of issues concerning them; the increases we see in the proportion knowing JISC ‘very well’ may well be a result of this. Advocacy is also high, especially amongst those with a library background, but JISC must continue to build its relationships with audiences and add value to the community it supports in order to maintain and hopefully increase this.