Lofty thoughts

I was pointed towards this article from a non-traditional source - retail banking. I think there are some lessons to be learnt from it, foremost amongst those being "have a little courage".

Quite a while ago I posted my first blogpost on what was being called then "disruptive technologies". I didn't like that term then, and I still don't. I said at the time that there was no way one was going to get Web 2.0 technologies adopted in any organisation - if you called them disruptive. I used the term Information Services 2.0 to describe the type of changes that I felt need to occur within a central IT Services organisation if it was going to be able to "consume" web 2.0 apps into its service offering. Since then we have seen Library 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 emerge as terms describing very similar ideas. I refer you to Brian Kelly's really excellent blog for further discussion on these and other web-related matters.

 However in James Gardiner's blogpost he makes it clear that giving employees unexpected freedom to express themeselves can have unexpected and to be welcomed consequences. He says ...

 "Unsurprisingly, a year on, none of the doomsday scenarios hypothesised when we made it possible for staff to create their own internal communities have come to pass. Of course, such a fortuitous outcome would largely be expected by everyone who participates in broad web based communities externally. It was not, however, to long term traditionalist used to iron control, but they have largely been mollified by the lack of significant negative consequences.

But now we are beginning to see a new phenomenon. I call it the Emergent Enterprise: staff are not only having their say, they are actually changing the way things work in material ways.

You see, along with social media, we gave our people the ability to create rudimentary business process and publish those as well. The idea was that workgroups would be able to automate things they did on a day to day basis easily, and without any input from the central IT function."

Now you can see that this has a distinct hint of "lean thinking" in it, so yet again a concordance between the lean and the emergent enterprise as typified by our MWE programme. James goes on to say ...

"My real interest in this "emergence", however, does have to do with the strategic questions which face us going forward. As innovators, we know the biggest long-term threats to institutions rarely come from large, established competitors. No, it is the start-up crowd, with their nimbleness in responding to boutique opportunities and niche segments which are the competitive issue here. The problem is there are so many of them that a strategic level response is neither possible nor appropriate.

But an "emergent" response, forming and norming by itself is just what is needed. Then, when a competitor becomes strategic, our own response will have grown to the point where it can be strategic as well."

... and this strikes a real chord with me. The Emergent University in a post credit crunch world will be a nimble university, one that has enabled its staff to effect change and one that is fully equipped (and that means educated and trained staff) to make full use of its strategic technological investment. James' closing comments are these ...

"What I don't doubt, though, is that emergent behaviours in enterprises – especially banks – will be one of the most powerful competitive weapons we'll have in the future. You see, everyone always says that "people are the most important resource" and that "the war for talent" will be one of the great competitive battlegrounds in the coming years. The thing about the Emergent Enterprise is that it allows all that great resource to actually make a difference."

And I say amen to that too!

I was approached today and asked why my twitter avatar was black again. The answer I gave was that I felt that fundamental rights were being challenged by the European Parliament and that the citizen (and indeed higher educational institutions) should be expressing our feelings strongly on the matter. I was asked to frame a response that the University might consider to send to the local MEPs. This is what I wrote (please note I have no knowledge of whether this will actually be sent so in this form so I have blanked out relevant parts) ...

< ... > welcomes the outcome of the Strasborg debate on the 21^st April in the ITRE committee on Amendment 138 (now renumbered amendment 46) where by a majority of 40-4 members of this committee of the European Parliament demonstrated that they can resist pressure and stand for the rights and freedoms of citizens.

We would ask you in particular to align yourself with all the European citizens who have requested commitment to “applying the principle that no restriction may be imposed on the fundamental rights and freedoms of end-users, without a prior ruling by the judicial authorities, notably in accordance with Article 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union on freedom of expression and information, save when public security is threatened in which case the ruling may be subsequent.”

We would wish to ask you to forcefully continue to resist any changes that the European Parliament might propose that will adversely affect open access to research and scholarship within the European Union.

Staff and students use an unfettered and unfiltered feed to the Internet everyday from their place of study on campus. It would be extremely unfortunate if they were not able to experience the same degree of freedom when accessing the internet from their home, or their place of residence, where the internet feed might be provided by a commercial internet service provider who could be subjected to the draconian restrictions placed upon providers if the original proposals limiting access are not defeated.

The changes in the law that the European Parliament proposed would permit a broadband provider to offer a limited, restricted or conditional service. Our concern is that such changes will kill the life of the Internet as we know it, and could have serious, detrimental economic impact on Europe’s reputation as being a scholarly and open learning community.

We are writing to ask you, as our representatives in the European Parliament, to vote to protect our right to have unfettered and unfiltered access to information made available on the Internet. We acknowledge that for reasons of national security or for legal reason, some information should not be onward transmitted but we would argue most forcefully that as we live in a democratic society, we need to openly debate the issues  of appropriateness or not and establish the principles for the Internet society.

< ... > asks you to support amendments which safeguard the rights of our staff and students to access and distribute content, services and applications subject to existing legal frameworks, and furthermore requests that you reject any text which talks about ‘lawful content’ or about placing limitations, restrictions or conditions on the access to the Internet that our staff and students might be subjected to. In particular, we would like you to guarantee our rights to freely use the Internet, and ensure that all websites and services are accessible to all users.

... as I said - this is what I wrote. I have no knowledge of whether this will actually be sent in this form from the university.

[btw - the previous time my twitter avatar went black was when something similar was threatened in New Zealand. That attempt, less draconinan than is being proposed in Europe, failed. Lets hope this one goes the same way. I don't like my black avatar.]

[UPDATE] It appears that the EU Parliament has come to a compromise agreement with the Council, who were desperate to get agreement on the wider Telecommunications Package, where this will go is still open to question but it would appear that some protections for the citizen's rights to free access of the Internet have been protected. I quote ... the European Parliament

This post is of course ... unnecessary. In universities we don't ever have to challenge the right to have internet access. We accept it as an absolutely normal and essential part of our working life. But that's not the picture everywhere - particularly if you work for a large corporate, government or the NHS. It's worth reflecting upon this "privilege" just to make sure we don't inadvertently abuse it!

This post is in fact the result of picking up a tweet from @andypiper - someone who I follow on twitter. He'd referenced a blog post that I thought was worth sharing with you - Blocking never works. Not because I want to challenge our practice, but mainly to re-enforce just how important it is for us, having got the freedom to use the internet from our place of work, to realise that it's a privilege, not a right and hence be careful not to abuse the privilege by adhering to our Acceptable Use Policy.

In addition to the AUP we have Guidance on the Personal Use of IT systems and have recently published some guidelines on Communicating Online. We're not short of guidance therefore - we DO want to make users of our systems aware of their responsibilities. We don't want ever to be in the position of arguing for the "unblocking" of our access to the internet from corporate systems. Education rather than regulation.

Just returned from the RUGIT away-day in Edinburgh. Apart from being able to meet up with load of old-chums and colleagues - other Directors of IT/IS - I also benefited from participating in some very good discussion sessions.

Principal amongst these was a presentation from Steve Chapman (Edinburgh) who presented a "Financial overview for Universities" which my colleague Christine Sexton has already blogged about here. He summarised all the financial pressures that universities would be facing over the next few years, the steps they would need to consider taking to continue operating successfully, and touched most provocatively upon the need to look quite critically at how Russell Group Universities approach Learning & Teaching, especially in respect of their collective bad ratings in the National Student Survey.

We also enjoyed a presentation from John Murphy (Trinity College, Dublin) on their "Google outsourcing experiences" which Chris again blogged about here. What was interesting to me was that they had different solutions for staff and students, they had only outsourced the student and alumni mail to Google, but staff mail was not likely to be going the same way. However points of note were that the Helpdesk for the student mail service was provided by Google - something a lot of my colleagues were surprised about, and also that all {SPAM handling had been outsourced as well, to the point where {SPAM} was no longer an issue. TCD is ranked 13th in Europe and 49th in the world, so they obviously don't believe {SPAM} handling to be "core business".

The recent internal NoticeBoard message "Become a Facebook Fan of Cardiff University" raises a couple of issues that I thought worth airing. First and most importantly remember the Stay Safe Online campaign that INSRV ran with the Students' Union last year. It's amazing just how much information that people are willing to literally give away about themselves now - I do, but I think I do it knowingly and carefully. To that end, one page on Protecting your identity in Facebook should be required reading for anyone considering using this social networking tool.

This however leads me to another and very current issue which Facebook users should be made aware of. Facebook recently decided to change it's terms and conditions of use. The furore that caused, in effect they were saying they held an interest in your personal information - even after you'd closed your account with them - led them to withdraw them and re-consider. The text from the take-down message is included below ...

Terms of Use Update

Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.

If you want to share your thoughts on what should be in the new terms, check out our group Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.

The lessons to be learnt from this are

1. Be doubly careful about giving your identity away. I've blogged on this subject several times (in another place)
2. Read the Terms of Use or Conditions of Use very carefully, don't just tick the box and assume that who you're dealing with is reasonable and is looking after your interests. They won't be, they'll be selling information about you for marketing purposes at the very best, or could be passing the information on to third parties that you have no connection with.
3. Consider where the information is being stored. Should you care about this? Well you might at least want to think about it! Some countries don't have as strict data protection legislation as the UK has, and data stored in a data centre off-shore might just not be as safe as it would be in the UK.
   
4. Finally, don't always assume that a message that's posted on our internal NoticeBoard is necessarily a "good idea" to follow, without at least first applying rules 1 and 2 above.
   

Quite a while ago now, Joe Nicholls - a colleague of mine - and I started looking at emerging Web 2.0 Technologies and what there adoption might mean for university Information Services departments - we coined the unremarkable phrase Information Services 2.0 to describe the nature of the department that would need to develop - a topic that was picked-up by Brian Kelly in a presentation he made to the UCISA Management Conference in March 2008. [The use of the term IT Services 2.0 had previously been used by Mark Sampson from Edinburgh University in March 2007 and this was referenced in Brian's bog-post "IT Services Reinventing Themselves".] The UCISA talk generated some reflection on the topic and a dialogue with Cardiff-based Professor of Educational Technology at the OU - Martin Weller.

As an indication of Cardiff and INSRV's early consideration of these issues I've resurrected the original internal blogpost on the subject for the record (below). We had written a paper on "Disruptive technology and its implications for University Information Services" and I presented it at a UKOLN Workshop on "Exploiting the potential of blogs and social networks" in November 2007.

The presentation explored the phenomenon of 'disruptive technology' and the implications it had for University Information Services. The nature of technology initiated disruption was explored, identifying some of its causes and effects and implications for service provision. It was suggested that a modified approach to service provision and management must be adopted in order to alleviate disruptive consequences of technology and capitalise upon its benefits. Fundamental to achieving this would be adopting a philosophy of enablement through partnership at all levels of the organisation to harness better ways of staying abreast of and responsive to the potential value of emerging technologies. Central to achieving this would be adopting news ways of communicating and working with staff, students and the wider organisation, with the aim being that the University should be confident about the degree of control, ownership and responsibility that was in place.

We asked the questions:

• What threats and opportunities does 'disruptive technology' hold for Higher Education and Information Services?
• What can/should Information Services do to better manage the disruption caused and take advantage of the opportunities new technology presents?

Onwards and upwards - we then turned our attention to "core" and "chore", of which more later.

Let's get started with the CU blogging platform!

Soon to be released as a fully-supported component of MWE v1.2, CU will have the ability to provide blogs for all university staff members that request the facility through insrvConnect. Initially this will appeal to people who already have experience of commercial blogging platforms such as blogger, typepad or wordpress and it will provide them with a capability of publishing professional and work-related blogposts from a Cardiff University domain, ie from 'cf.ac.uk'.

We don't expect rapid take-up in the immediate future, but since 'blogs.cf.ac.uk' will allow external contributors to comment/author as well as internal joint authorship/administration of blogs (team, or group blogs), we see this as a valuable addition to the tools available to staff for collaboration.

We look forward to seeing how the CardiffBlog platform develops This is much more a service that people will come to, take-up and then by word of mouth spread the message and it can be therapeutic sometimes!

And for those of you who know me, you'll remember my favourite film is ... "Field of Dreams".