Optimisation

'By allowing for changes in parts of the system without requiring changes to the whole, higher education can evolve its IT environment without undertaking the expensive, 'big-bang' and highly disruptive system replacements and upgrades that are now routine for most monolithic, complex commercial software systems'

Mellon Foundation 2007

Making the most of advances in technology doesn't always have to mean moving to new suppliers and new types of provision. A lot of recent technical developments offer opportunities to get a lot more out of systems and data that already exist. Whilst you might be developing a roadmap for moving to new technologies as existing systems come to the end of their life cycle (see the Enterprise Architecture infoKit for more on how to do this), for most institutions moving to their ideal systems architecture will be a medium term process and they will not want to replace systems ahead of their natural life cycle unless a new system will result in savings that justify the cost of the implementation or there are insurmountable problems with the existing system.

In some cases, just being able to get a little bit more out of an existing system may allow you to avoid having to purchase a new application to carry out certain additional functions. In other cases, maximising the potential of your core systems, may allow you to decommission legacy systems that consume a lot of resource in order to deliver a limited amount of functionality. In other words, you may already begin to streamline your technical architecture without moving on to new technology platforms or buying new applications.

In this section we look at some of the approaches and technologies that can enable this kind of streamlining and increased efficiency. In particular we will look at:

• The concept of SOA or Service Oriented Approaches
• The uses of ESB or Enterprise Service Bus software
• The role of technical specifications, standards and protocols such as SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), REST (REpresentational State Transfer and XCRI
• How the development of the Semantic Web through the use of Open and Linked Data can allow us to make more use of information that already exists by matching up data from different sources in various ways

This resource aims to give a general overview of these topics in order to help staff from non-technical backgrounds understand their potential uses and implications (or indeed to help technical staff explain these issues in layperson's terms). We do however point sources of technical advice and guidance within the sector and the sections on Experiences of SOA and Experiences of Linked Data look at some examples of these approaches in practice considering both the business benefits delivered and the technical aspects of the implementation.

Finally, in terms of getting more from existing investments, it would not do to underestimate the importance of improving Business Intelligence across the institution. Through more effective management and analysis of existing information, you can ensure that key decisions are founded on a much more solid evidence base. More timely, accurate and granular information will also enable you to monitor key processes and spot any variations that may be early indicators of problems requiring intervention. This can be very important in areas such as student retention.

'We have in the past been guilty of providing over-engineered and inflexible IT provision certainly at an application layer.'

Natalie Czechowski, Coventry University

'The single-purpose systems have served us poorly because they often cannot integrate with other systems. The large, complex systems have proven the most difficult and expensive to adopt and deploy in higher education. ... Agility and value can be obtained by letting each system do what it does best, while providing the communication architectures that allow every system to easily access every other system's data and services.'

Mellon Foundation 2007