The UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has announced a new programme that seeks to support colleges and universities in the innovative use of digital technologies, using shared services in cloud computing infrastructure and applications. The programme will start in March 2011 and finish in March 2012.
The £12.5 million programme is part of a suite of activities under the University Modernisation Fund (UMF), a HEFCE fund. The fund aims to help universities and colleges deliver better efficiency and value for money through the development of shared services.
The programme has two core elements. The first involves an investment of up to £10 million in cloud computing, shared IT infrastructure, support to deliver virtual servers, storage and data management applications. The second covers an investment of up to £2.5 million to establish cloud computing and shared services in central administration functions to support learning, teaching and research.
A broker will be established for institutions' procurement of shared virtual servers and data centre capacity. It will act both within the higher education (HE) sector and between the HE sector and commercial suppliers. This will be set up under the auspices of JANET (UK).
A core virtual server infrastructure (a 'cloud') will be set up to offer discounted data management and storage services to HE institutions. It will be deployed in data centres starting with a pilot at Eduserv, which will work in collaboration with the Digital Curation Centre. Up to £5.1 million will be invested in this aspect of the shared IT infrastructure programme, including funding to develop a sustainable financial model for the brokerage beyond the life of the UMF. Up to a further £4.9 million will be invested in developing HE research data management applications to be deployed in the shared services environment.
HEFCE will invest up to a further £2.5 million to develop shared services in administrative systems that support the delivery of learning and teaching and of research. They will help universities and colleges achieve efficiency savings in terms of cost, time and quality improvement. Such shared services will allow them to benefit from aggregated purchasing and reduced implementation and hosting costs, and streamlined processes.
The key components of this shared services programme will include creating a small, specialist team to support institutions in procuring administrative applications, systems and services. The services offered will be flexible to meet institutions' demands, and are likely to include establishing framework agreements for large IT systems and services; providing expertise to procurement teams and purchasing consortia; guiding institutions on interoperability solutions; and a service to support research management and administration.
This will be a modular, cloud-based service to support the management and administration of a university's research programme from before funding is awarded through to post-award. It will include information on costing, application submission, contract and project administration, monitoring and reporting.
The whole programme has been developed with strategic input from a HEFCE advisory group including members with wide IT experience from within the HE sector. The group considered the case for investment in each component of the programme, taking account of evidence of demand from institutions and the likely benefits and savings.
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