Sitting in hotel room before the conference tomorrow and thought I'd make a few notes before attending.
The subject of saving money in HE is a hot topic at the moment obviously wi the cuts expected over the next few years likely to make the "tight budgets" of the last few years seem like we've all been wallowing in money. Figures like 25% cuts in government funding in HE have been banded about, and while government money is not the only source of income for (most?) HEIs, it is a very large part and cuts of that depth will not be possible with minor changes to working practice or even reorganisation/mergers.
From my point of view supporting the use of IT I know there is huge scope for IT to be used more effectively to streamline business processes - although translating such efficiencies to cost savings would be another matter that is much more complicated and not technical.
The keynote starting the day tomorrow is "How to save money - best practice in contract management, asset management and procurement" by Gartner UK Ltd. Since UoP is currently looking to renew it's fleet of leased PCs this should be interesting.
The next session "Smarter, cheaper, Greener" is perhaps a statement of the trinity looked for with IT, where each is follows from the former. Since UoP gained the top spot in the recent People an Planet green league table I clearly think we're doing pretty well on the green front already, but there is still huge scope for improvement (eg we have yet to master the power management of the fleet to allow us to realise the extra power/cost/environmental impact savings we had aimed for - with vPro being a little too new in the fleet we took on and needing a lot of kinks ironing out) and there is certainly much scope for working smarter.
Next is a session looking at outsourcing e-mail. I've seen presentations on this before at JISC/UCISA events over the last few years and I've been sold on it as probably the right solution for at least a year and I'm glad that this has now been approved to move ahead with in UoP recently - again, it should be interesting and timely.
"Printing your own money" looks to be about the savings possible by better printing management - which is another hot topic at UoP, and one that has historically caused much debate. I recently visited Cornwall College to see how they had implemented their lean print strategy (using Canon's Uniflow solution), and in particularly how they had "solved" the resistance from the grass roots to having small local printers removed. Unfortunately, the main answer to that question seemed to be that they started with a very flaky old unreliable fleet of small local devices such that users were generally happy to have larger consolidated devices as they worked! Since we're not in that position at UoP I'm not sure we can translate their experience usefully, but the product itself does look very useful. I look forward to seeing if this session introduces any new approaches we'll be able to learn from.
The final session is "Redefine your technology strategy" - I'm not sure of the details of this right now (I didn't copy the outline to the iPhone to check while writing this on the iPad), but I can see that an IT strategy needs to be focusing on delivering real business efficiencies and cost savings ahead of developments of new services.
Edit: checking the programme, it appears this last session has been dropped and the earlier sessions given more time - with one session less, the cost/benefit of attending this conference so far from Plymouth is looking even less clear! :(
(photo is taken from the hotel window as sun set over the city - "enhanced" using a few apps on the iPad...not very subtly :)
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