Procuring efficient new information and communications technology systems
Universities and colleges need to procure ICT systems to run every aspect of their business. Rapidly changing demands require systems to be flexible and adaptable; today’s severe budget constraints demand they are the very best value for money.
Efficient ICT systems create high performing institutions which are well-placed to compete nationally and internationally for students and staff. Balancing the continual pressure to upgrade systems with the need for economy is a challenge.
We’re supporting institutions to meet this challenge by developing best practice for ICT systems procurement, working with suppliers to increase system flexibility, and promoting the development and use of open standards to enable different systems to work together.
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Procureweb will guide you through the evolving (and often confusing) legal, financial, cultural and technical issues involved in all stages of the procurement process. (See Impact below for how Procureweb can help you save money). The Higher Education Library - Procurement and Further Education Library - Procurement provide information on procurement strategy, best procurement practice, tendering and legal issues.
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When replacing IT systems, you will want to define what you need, initiate procurement and evaluate suppliers. Our Selecting technologies infoKit covers all these stages.
- Major suppliers sometimes offer products that do not interact with existing institutional systems. Consequently, institutions can find themselves ‘locked into’ a particular supplier. Our work with institutions and suppliers has concluded that there are no technical reasons why large administrative systems could not be broken into smaller components and offered as services via the cloud. Our infoKit, Working with commercial suppliers, outlines the experiences of several institutions when working with major vendors. Cloud computing is changing the way ICT systems are purchased and licensed. The infoKit’s section on establishing a contract outlines the issues you will need to consider.
- It’s often difficult, if not impossible, to predict which technologies will stand the test of time. Our Technology trends infoKit provides some pointers to help with the strategic management and governance of your future technology portfolio.
- Through JISC CETIS we promote the development and use of open standards so that different systems can operate together. See our briefing paper on how to make the business case for open standards.
- Our advisory service, OSSWatch, provides advice and guidance on the procurement of open source software.
What does the future hold?
We are planning a shared services procurement support service. We are also setting up a framework agreement for a Research Management and Administration System (RMAS) which will interface with a university`s existing finance and administration systems.
Support from JISC Services
Our impact
Through our collective procurement bodies, such as JANET and JISC Collections, we already provide economies of scale for institutions: for every £1 funding given to JISC Collections the value returned is £34.
Specific examples:
- Through Procureweb's provision (PDF) of web based procurement resources we save institutions an estimated £1.35m per year
- Originally developed from a JISC funded project in 2005, XCRi (eXchanging Course-Related information) is now is a community-based standards organisation which makes transferring course information between UK education institutions much more efficient. To date it has generated estimated financial benefits of £6m per annum (PDF) The Information Standards Board (ISB) approved XCRI as the UK eProspectus standard in 2009 and it is also recognised as an EU standard by CEN (European Committee for Standardisation)
- From 2004 JISC Collections has developed NESLi2, a national initiative for the procurement of online journals for UK research communities. Financial savings on the content purchased amounted to £13.5 million in 2010 and it's estimated that NESLi2 has saved the community over £40 million since its inception in 2004
- OSSWatch offers both a range of free publications and consultation to institutions interested in investigating open source systems as part of their procurement processes
- We also help save money by exploring new technologies and advising institutions when not to invest in new systems. For example through an investigation in 1999, we identified that deploying smart card technology (PDF) in higher education would be ineffective, expensive and insecure, enabling institutions to avoid costly investment into an immature technology
