Vision and Strategy

1. We help develop strategy that understands the value of technology, products and services to the University and shapes its delivery

We are the University’s in-house source of knowledge about technology and how it can be leveraged to change how we work, teach, learn and research. Making best use of IT is crucial to all organisations and, post-pandemic, ever more important to the University. Working in partnership across the University, we will help define needs, drive requirements and lead on implementation of technology enabled products and services.

2. We organise ourselves around our customers' needs: prioritising student and staff needs by structuring our teams around strategic pillars and working in a Product-led way

Successful delivery of new products requires teams to work together across organisational boundaries, delivering improvements continuously rather than at the end of a large project. It also provides a way to make the hard decisions about prioritisation that are necessary to make best use of limited University resources. Further details on how Product-led works can be found in the full strategy document.

3. We work in an agile way, with a tight loop of design, implementation and delivery of value on an ongoing basis

At its heart, agile is nothing more than breaking large projects down into smaller and sustainable deliverables - critically ensuring that value is delivered to the end user frequently. This does not mean that no planning is done and no commitments are made to University customers. Cross-University Product teams do planning for both the short and long term, but iterate planning and execution. They are clear on deliverables, dependencies and constraints and focus on delivery. Team members are drawn from both IT Services and other areas of the University.

4. We will continuously and iteratively improve business processes, working within our existing major business systems. By aligning our processes to the product we will reduce the numbers of systems needed to support staff and students, and where new products are required to fill a capability gap we’ll use standard ones.

Key products and services must provide an excellent experience, but we know that this is not always the case right now. The University has some unique requirements, but not as many as we historically have thought. We will work with other areas of the University to improve systems and processes within our existing systems, rather than trying to do system implementation and process change at the same time, reducing variation in process and simplifying workflows.

5. We will increase consistency, efficiency and quality of the student experience via standardisation of systems and processes

Our vast number of legacy systems are a huge constraint to our vision. These exist both within IT Services owned products and services, and in faculties and professional services, driving process divergence and with a high cost both financially and in terms of efficiency.

Working with faculties and professional services teams, we will modernise our products and services in line with the needs of our students and staff and modernise the way they are designed, built, run and amended.

6. We will continuously improve our information security posture

We have made vast improvements to the security posture of the University that are a credit to everyone involved inside and outside IT Services. However, the world of security is continuously evolving and as an institution we now need to tackle complex and contentious issues to maintain our progress.

We will continue to work to mitigate the risks inherent in a higher education environment where there is justifiable legacy of variable processes and technology. We will introduce security by design: reduce the use of unmanaged devices; implement effective enforcement of security requirements in procurement, and strengthen access control and governance for all of our IT and information assets.