JISC

The success of the UK economy depends more than ever on its skills base as international competitive pressures increase. This demands an excellent higher and further education provision and a world class research base. An essential element in achieving this is an ICT infrastructure of the highest quality and a programme of innovation to exploit the full potential of ICT. JISC is responsible for providing innovation and leadership in the use of ICT and the infrastructure to support the research and further and higher education communities.

The focus of JISC activities remains supporting colleges and universities by providing infrastructure, services and leadership to help them maximise the potential of ICT. Our 2007 – 2009 Strategy defines our priorities and is designed to help institutions by: 

• Providing world class infrastructure (JANET, Access Management, Content) 
• A wide range of advisory services including support on accessibility and inclusion, legal questions, strategic planning, internet training skills, plagiarism and digital imaging issues 
• Support across all activities in an institution - research quality enhancement, management of research, effective learning and teaching 
• Stimulating innovation 
• Joining up infrastructure and services across all of education where appropriate.

To meet our new strategic objectives we will:

• Discuss with the community whether current structures and skills within institutions will continue to meet future needs for exploiting ICT
• Increase awareness and take up of our existing services across the community
• Engage more fully with e-administration and wider community activities in institutions 
• Work with partners to extend the benefits of ICT across all of education and research 
• Provide information and content resources necessary for UK education and research to meet the challenges of globalisation 
• Continue to work in collaboration with national and international partners 
• Play a full role in advancing the DTi e-infrastructure initiative

JISC remains committed to working in partnership with other national and international organisations. We consider this to be a fundamental requisite in the increasingly complex and fast moving world of ICT.

JISC has six new strategic objectives:

1. Innovative and sustainable ICT infrastructure, services and practice that support institutions in meeting their mission 
2. Promoting the development, uptake and effective use of ICT to support learning 
3. Promoting the development, uptake and effective use of ICT to support research 
4. Promoting the development, uptake and effective use of ICT to support the management of institutions 
5. Developing and implementing a programme to support institutions’ engagement with the wider community 
6. Continuing to improve its own working practices

We have determined the following priorities within our range of activities: 

• Infrastructure To work towards dedicated bandwidth on demand and effective access management for a wide range of institutional resources and activities 
• Content To increase take-up and widen access to content. Also to improve negotiation work concerning strategic content and establish longer term sustainability of access to content 
• Learning and Teaching Concentrate on where benefits can most clearly be found such as widening participation through flexible learning options and encouraging improved use of available resources 
• Support for Research Concentrate on deploying techniques and advancing developments through e-science, the semantic grid and virtual research environments and to embed these more broadly across the research process 
• Support for Institutions Developing new programmes to support the management and administration of institutions and explore with institutions how ICT can assist in their work with industry and the community 
• Skills Development Consider whether the existing information management expertise and structure within institutions is adequate or appropriate to meet new opportunities presented by ICT and the internet 
• Changing Content Environment Explore the role of open standards, open access, integrated repositories, and intellectual property rights to the vision of a content layer of scholarly and academic resources that are freely available, well structured and searchable.

JISC’s longer term vision can be summarised as the creation and management of a layer of scholarly and academic resources readily available to all who can exploit it. Within this environment JISC will focus on the needs of universities, colleges and research institutions against their remits in education, research and outreach, including the support of knowledge transfer and community engagement.

The internet has enabled increasingly ubiquitous access to a growing range of content and other resources, through, for example, high performance capacity, videoconferencing, scientific instrumentation and simulation. However, both the tools and policy needed to exploit such developments fully have not kept up with this evolution.

This 2007 – 2009 JISC Strategy should therefore be read within the context of JISC’s working with others to create an international internet environment that: provides universal access; is secure, with convenient access management tools and procedures; enables appropriate content to be easily found and accessed; protects content owners’ rights without limiting proper and legal use; promotes advanced communication tools; and is sustainable and affordable.

For every £1 spent by JISC...
...from its services budget, the education and research community receives £9 of demonstrable value
...on the provision of e-resources, the return to the community in value of time saved in information gathering is at least in the order of £18
...on e-resources the saving to the community is more than £26

Read the full JISC Strategy 2007-2009

You can download a PDF or rich text format version of this summary below