Introduction

JISC exists to give the post-compulsory education sector advice and guidance that is entirely vendor neutral. As such, the emphasis of a lot of its work is in advising on and promoting the use of open standards as well as running the OSS Watch service to advise on the use of open source products (for more on this topic see the section on Open and Community Source in the Shared Services infokit). The reality of the IT market within the sector is however that (despite a history of in-house developments in universities), most institutions rely heavily on proprietary commercial products.

The resource on 'Getting more from existing investments' discusses how the application of service oriented approaches and open standards can allow institutions to derive added value from the systems they already have. One of the goals of the JISC Flexible Service Delivery (FSD) programme (2009-2011) was to begin to 'unlock' some of the inertia in the current marketplace and move towards a situation where applications are more modular and flexible. This means a move away from 'monolithic' systems, that are cumbersome and difficult to change, to a situation where it is possible to mix and match small components in order to meet the institution's particular needs more closely and to be able to respond quickly to changing requirements. The success of such approaches is, however, heavily dependent on convincing vendors of the benefits hence the need for partnership working.

This section addresses two main issues:

• It looks at the idea of modularisation of applications and the experiences of institutions working with suppliers to achieve this.

• It looks at the types of licensing and contracting arrangements that exist in the Web 2.0/Web 3.0/Cloud environment. In this regard it updates and replaces a previous infoKit (now archived) on Contract Negotiation.