The JISC Flexible Service Delivery programme engaged over 40 institutions and focused on three main themes:
- Efficiency - cost and time saving
- Effectiveness - business process and service quality improvement (enhancing the student and staff experience of administration)
- Enablement - improved agility, flexibility and ability to respond to new opportunities
Flexible Service Delivery
With the reduction in sector funding, as well as the changing demands of government and funding bodies, there is an increasing requirement for universities and colleges to become more cost effective and agile. Flexible service delivery is gaining momentum as a way to help universities and colleges deliver and sustain transformational change and improvement, including real efficiency savings as well as other measurable strategic and educational value, through the streamlined and flexible provision of administrative and student services.
These pages provide an introduction to flexible service delivery and offer a route into ongoing JISC innovation activity in this area through the JISC Flexible Service Delivery programme. As they become available, outputs from the programme will be built into a resource library accessible from these pages.
A Change Initiative
Flexible Service Delivery is a change initiative that comprises a mixture of enabling approaches and technologies that help universities and colleges deliver transformational change and improvement involving people, process and technology. Measurable benefits include:
JISC Briefing Paper (February 2010)
Click on the image to view or download a PDF version here.
- Efficiency in terms of cost and time savings;
- Enhancing institutional agility and responsiveness to change
- Improving the student and staff experience of administrative processes
- Improving access to and exploitation of corporate and student data across their information systems
- Improving the means by which institutions manage and provision their administrative and student services
Enterprise Architecture is a key component of flexible service delivery because it provides an overall framework to help understand how people, processes and technology relate together, and is therefore essential in making informed decisions about a range of enabling technologies and approaches. These include Business Process Management, finance management (baselining and cost-benefits analysis), Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), product disaggregation, standards and interface development, supplier partnering, Shared services, and Cloud computing.
To facilitate this initiative, JISC are running the Flexible Service Delivery programme which will be of interest to universities and colleges who wish to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their corporate and business systems, as well as their academic and research related information systems. This includes the integration and provisioning of service offerings for core administrative systems beyond institutional boundaries as a part of a Shared service arrangement of through an externally hosted provision, including cloud based services or applications.
