JISC Flexible Service Delivery programme

Who is participating?

Through the Strategic Technologies Group 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.

This is a £2 million change programme running from July 2009 to May 2011. Its principal aim is to support universities and colleges deliver efficiency savings, improve their responsiveness to change and enhance the student and staff experience in the use and exploitation of ICT by:

• increasing their overall preparedness for the exploitation of new flexible modes of service delivery in a mixed economy, where retained in-house systems integrate with off-campus service-based provision (whether through Shared services amongst institutions, a trusted single partner, or in 'the Cloud')
• improving business process understanding
• adopting cost effective means of 'service enabling' disparate and disaggregated administrative information systems and integrating them with service-based offerings

The programme is currently helping over 30 colleges and universities achieve the following:

1. Understanding and testing approaches on how to cost and model an institutions' baseline ICT service provision and calculate their return on investment in delivering change involving integrated, shared or external ICT solutions.
2. Identifying efficiency savings through process review and re-design
3. Embedding Enterprise Architecture as an approach to managing change and delivering integrated ICT and business solutions
4. Enhancing Business Intelligence (BI) practice to support institutional decision-making for senior managers and enable institutions to meet changing reporting requirements of government and funding bodies
5. Improving service delivery mechanisms for student services through the delivery of integrated and service-oriented in-house system solutions
6. Building institutional capacity and skills through training and establishment of common good practice in process modelling and SOA
7. Developing a working open prototype of a web-based application system that demonstrates how SOA and ESB middleware technologies can be used to gather information from multiple applications across two universities, irrespective of the vendor and versions
8. Exploring the practicability of operating the core finance function as a Shared Service across a small consortium of FE colleges
9. Exploitation by web services of a vendor provided student record system product, which is opening up a way to interoperability and services re-use in a loosely coupled software environment
10. Identifying and defining requirements for common services, and where appropriate, exploring the practicalities of operating certain activities and functions such as Shared services, or provisioning through external means, such as Cloud computing