Building the business case for flexible service delivery adoption and agreeing the institutional strategy and priorities.

With the current global economic crisis, and the future financial forecast for universities and colleges, Vice Chancellors, Principals and their senior management teams have some difficult decisions to make, balancing:

• Cutting costs at the same time as minimising the effects on the institution's sustainability
• Continued, sustainable, growth

Many universities have recently initiated process management initiatives in order to reduce costs. A few have begun projects to investigate SOA technologies, and many have begun making use of cloud computing, outsourcing, Software as a Service (SaaS) and other new models of IT service provision.

A business case for flexible service delivery must be compelling, quickly show value, and have a different scope at different institutions depending upon their starting point.

The capability to explore the practicalities of new models of IT provision, service-enabling legacy systems so that information across the systems can be managed, linked and exploited in a more flexible way.

These include:

A service-oriented approach (soa) and implementing a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA): Rather than using bespoke software to join different applications and data sources together - the 'spaghetti' of integration - data and applications are linked by a service layer and IT solutions are decomposed into distinct services, choreographed to serve defined processes. The suite of services might comprise solutions from a number of suppliers or be developed in-house. This approach enables existing applications to become open to combination and allows for re-use of common date and software in different ways at much lower costs and with the flexibility to meet new business requirements without the need to acquire bespoke packages. SOA also allows for a 'best of breed' selection of solutions and facilitates shared services based on open or recognised standards.

Software as a Service: In which institutions out-source all or part of an IT solution to a remote third-party supplier.

Establishing and modelling cost for the status quo and candidate future scenarios, so that it is possible to assess where the cost savings and process improvements can be made.

Flexible service delivery rests on the assumption that a modular approach (as service oriented architecture) to IT service delivery is more beneficial in the long term, and in particular can offer better value for money than existing models of IT provision. It is therefore essential that institutions can already cost their existing services, or planned services, (including the costs of supporting the systems and processes) with sufficient confidence to make such a comparison. Unfortunately, total cost of ownership (TCO) data and readily comprehensible and widely applicable model for obtaining such data, is not currently or easily available for adoption by universities and colleges across the UK.

Disaggregating and modularising systems.

Flexible service delivery also rests on the assumption that the current market inertia of single supplier solutions will be unlocked. So rather than institutions procuring a large, monolithic product from a single supplier, hosting it locally, provisioning it as the core or only solution to support a complex set of processes, and maintaining it (frequently with significant costs for support and licensing), suppliers will have available to the sector:

• Modular products that have been disaggregated into defined units of functionality, which can be sold as discrete interoperable services, based on open or recognised (or proprietary and publically available) interface standards.
• Business models that support flexible and shared service arrangements so that institutions can choose to switch between supplier offerings to meet changing institutional needs and priorities (i.e. best of breed).