Flexible Service Delivery

Flexible service delivery is about helping universities and colleges deliver new and integrated services through joining up disparate information systems such as library management, virtual learning, finance, student records, or timetabling.

By integrating and service-enabling these systems, coupled with optimising business processes, institutions can:

• Be more agile and be able to meet changing demands;
• Provide services more efficiently;
• Access business intelligence across the institution more easily, and
• Be able to share data and services within and across institutional boundaries.

To facilitate this initiative, JISC are running the Flexible Service Delivery (FSD) programme which will be of interest to universities and colleges who wish to address the challenges and inefficiencies caused by the lack in interoperability of their systems and processes, and explore the possibilities and benefits of a more flexible information environment within their institutional and across institutional consortia. This includes exploring the practicalities of universities and colleges operating certain functions and activities through a flexible and shared service solution.

Flexible service delivery means different things to different people, and so different stakeholder groups have varying requirements and expectations, from Senior Managers, IT Managers and Suppliers, to learners, teachers and researchers. More >>

Demand to deliver more for less

• Institutions are seeking greater efficiencies in a more constrained economic environment
• Students seek greater value for money,and have greater expectations with increased trends towards 'students as consumers'

Demand for sharing information internally and externally

• Opportunities to save money by running as integrated system and interoperable processes
• Improve student experience by offering a transparent and seamless student service

Demand for flexible learning

• Requires systems and processes that can continuously keep pace with changing requirements and priorities, continuously

Shared services on the political agenda

• Shared services in UK HE have attracted significant recent interest from all major political parties and is highly likely to appear in policy following a general election

Each college or university will find itself at a different starting point in the process of adopting flexible service delivery. This may range from building understanding on the benefits of flexible service delivery within the institution, to scoping projects and initial exploration, to realising early organisational benefits and ultimately to embedding and managing a set of practices. The FSD programme is designed to help support strategic and IT management in navigating the step-by-step processes of implementing flexible service delivery across an enterprise. Benchmarking progress is a critical component and recognized in the programme design; like any kind of change process, investment in flexible service delivery must be guided by strategic priorities and demonstrate a measurable impact via performance indicators.

The FSD Programme Management Team have defined four key building blocks needed in supporting flexible service delivery:

• Senior management buy-in
• Service-enabling disparate legacy systems
• Cost baselining and modelling
• Opening up the market, unlocking inertia

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This JISC Innovation programme runs from June 2009 to March 2011.

It is designed to help universities and colleges overcome some of the barriers to adoption of flexible and shared services and to progress and support them in exploring the possibilities and realising some of the benefits. There are six key elements to the programme:

• Pathfinder and Pilot projects
• Strategic Technologies Group and Explorer Members
• Enterprise Architecture Practice Group
• Suppliers Forum
• Support and Synthesis Project
• Programme Management Team

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The programme currently brings together a number of universities and colleges through its portfolio of projects - these are plotted on the map below and are listed here.