Corporate Information & Computing...

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Corporate Information & Computing Services. CiCS Annual Report 2011.

Transcript of Corporate Information & Computing...

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Corporate Information & Computing Services.

CiCSAnnualReport2011.

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Welcome to this year’s CiCS Annual Report. I hope you find it interesting, and I would be happy to receive any comments you have on it.

This has been another busy year, and I am very pleased that we have achieved so much, especially as demands on us are increasing. With the consumerisation of IT and the increasingly mobile, always connected population, we have seen a rise in expectations of our ever more discerning customers in terms of availability, ease of use and delivery to a wide range of devices. We have tried to meet these needs as far as possible, and outsourcing some of our services to Google has helped enormously with this.

I am particularly proud of our customer service record, and this year we received a satisfaction rating of 96.2% by students for computing support in the Student Barometer survey, which made us the most highly rated in the country. This was a fantastic recognition of the efforts and commitment of all the staff in CiCS as well as IT staff throughout the University. We aim to provide the best possible student IT and learning technology experiences and are committed to finding new and exciting ways of providing them.

Also during this year the University scored highly in a survey on the use of Social Media in US and UK universities. We were one of only two UK universities in the top ten, and scored the most highly for receptiveness. I am really pleased with the way the University, and particularly CiCS, have embraced social media and we will continue to adapt our services to keep up the pace of this fast changing environment. We are extending free Wi-Fi across campus and in residences so staff and students can stay connected in all areas, we’re adding social media interaction to our web pages and to our existing help and support channels, and have built a suite of creative media rooms in which students can create, edit and upload their own interactive content. We hope this will help us build upon the success of this survey and allow us to lead the way for other higher education institutions.

Introduction

CiCS Annual Report 2011

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This has been a highly successful year for learning and teaching support in CiCS. We’ve been joined by the e-Learning and Digital Media Support Team from LeTS to form a larger team of staff dedicated to improve and enhance our support for learning and teaching, we’ve made good progress towards our goal of modernising all University teaching spaces and we’ve launched several new services that enrich the learning and teaching experience at the University.

Learning Technologies TeamCiCS support for learning and teaching has been greatly enhanced in 2011 by the creation of the new Learning Technologies Team, comprising existing CiCS staff and colleagues who have joined us from LeTS. This has enabled us to strengthen links with learning technologists in departments to work collaboratively and offer a more joined up service. We have been liaising with Faculty Directors of Learning and Teaching to help us align our services with faculty requirements. All members of the team are working towards CMALT (Certified Membership Association for Learning Technology) accreditation in order to offer a consistent professional approach.

Room RefurbishmentsOver a three year period the University aims to spend around £5 million bringing all teaching rooms up to an excellent standard. Rooms will incorporate new teaching styles and encourage innovation. This year we completed phase one of the teaching room refurbishment programme, spending £1.8 million on rooms in Hicks and Portobello.

The Information Commons embarked upon an extensive programme of building maintenance, improvements and refurbishment. A new Reservations for Collection facility has been set up in which students are able to pick up books they have reserved and this has enabled CiCS staff and Library staff to work more closely to deliver a joined up Learner Support Service on Level 1.

Learning TechnologiesGreat improvements have been made to our learning technologies provision. We’ve had a successful implementation of our new Virtual Learning Environment, MOLE 2, with half of all departments having their courses migrated to MOLE 2 for the start of the 2011 academic year, with the remaining half being migrated for academic year 2012. Once all departments have migrated we will be working with technologists to help them use the new features of the virtual learning environment more deeply and richly than ever before.

We’ve also strengthened our support for new media. A new media streaming service allows audio, video and other digital learning objects to be stored securely and shared more easily. All University media is now held in one place allowing us to decommission old servers and withdraw from external subscription services. We’ve worked with academic staff to promote the lecture recording system, myEcho, and have seen it’s usage increase significantly and it being used in new innovative ways. We’ve also made it easy for students to create audio and video materials for their assignments by setting up the creative media suite, which is hugely successful, being booked all the time, and has now been expanded to include five new media editing stations.

CiCS Annual Report 2011

Learning and Teaching

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Higher Education Achievement ReportDuring 2011 we received JISC funding to implement the Higher Education Achievement Report (HEAR). This will provide a record of the academic and extra-curricular achievements of each student during their studies at Sheffield. This report will complement their formal degree certificate and will be stored in a digital archive. The HEAR will deliver added value to the Sheffield student experience and will become available for students during 2012. Together with a small number of other universities who also received funding, we will again be ahead of the curve.

TimetablingOn a related note we have taken part in a LEAN analysis of University processes around regulations and will be streamlining regulations to make the process clearer and improve the efficiency of timetabling. It will make things much clearer for academics and students and will make it much easier to register for modules online.

CiCS Annual Report 2011

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During 2011 we have completed a major upgrade of the High Performance Computing (HPC) Facility, Iceberg, and have been working with departments to develop systems to curate research data and manage an electronic archive of University research publications. We have continued to improve the effectiveness of our support for researchers and for research applications.

Research ComputingThe procurement of the latest upgrade of Iceberg was completed in Autumn of 2011 and the system was commissioned and went live in January 2012. The new facility has a high speed interconnect both for parallel processing and high speed filestore, which will provide large amounts of temporary disc space whilst jobs are running. It has 600 intel westmere cores and eight graphical processing units (GPUs), each the equivalent of a further 48 cores, plus 48 TB of storage. The new GPUs have produced a 170 fold performance improvement for some applications and earned the University Centre of Excellence status for GPU related research.

The upgrade provides both faster disk storage and much greater capability for parallel processing, for which demand has been increasing in recent years. The facility is being promoted as a ‘Campus Compute Cloud’ with the option for groups to purchase dedicated capacity on the cluster.

The University of Sheffield is part of the N8 Research Partnership comprising the 8 research intensive universities in the North of England. Our N8 partners are Durham, Lancaster, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle and York. Together we won a bid to the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for a £2.5 million Tier 2 High Performance Compute facility. This facility will be hosted at Leeds University as the N8 Centre for Higher Performance Computing and operated as a shared service. Resource sharing and access arrangements are still being determined, but all member institutions are contributing towards the running costs. Installation of the facility was

completed in March 2012 and now provides a regional HPC to complement our local provision and national facilities.

CiCS is in the process of refreshing our storage infrastructure. Not only will a new storage solution address our current requirements but it will also present potential technical solutions to the issues around Research Data Management.

Research ApplicationsMuch of the support for research applications continues to be the provision of user support, training courses and software maintenance and upgrades. In the last financial year CiCS provided approximately £200,000 of research software licences alone. We also contributed courses to the Doctoral Development Programme as well as training in specific packages. A number of additional courses are planned to cover the new facilities provided by the Iceberg upgrade.

Licence management remains an issue, given the diverse range of supported applications and unpredictable demand. We have consolidated a number of departmental licenses into the central pool, which has proved to be cost effective and increased the available licenses. For some specific packages such as Matlab we have also introduced a system whereby teaching licenses can be reserved as part of the room booking system.

A server based installation of the statistics package Nvivo has been trialled with the Department of Psychology as an alternative to running it on managed and unmanaged desktops.

CiCS Annual Report 2011

Research and Innovation

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Support for ResearchCiCS provides advice and consultancy to research groups and also undertakes chargeable work where appropriate. Collaborative project bids and work have been successful in generating extra income, which has allowed us to employ additional staff to directly support those projects.

Examples include the EPSRC funded Solar Physics and Space Plasma Research Centre project using GPUs to model solar flares, to which CiCS contribute 0.2 FTE. We have also undertaken some work with ScHARR to examine the feasibility of running large spreadsheet computations in a server based environment rather than on desktops, and the CiCS Programme and Projects Unit has provided Project Management training for the Kroto Institute for their international ADVOCATE Marie Curie European funded research project.

The management of services within CiCS has been re-organised, and a Research and Innovation Service Manager has been designated with an over-arching view of our research support provision. A Research and Innovation Service Advisory Group has been established with cross-faculty membership to advise on the development of the service and prioritisation. This has both raised the profile of research support within CiCS and allowed a more consistent approach to the prioritisation of activity.

Research AdministrationThe University Research Management System is the University’s web based costing tool for research related projects, used to obtain costing approvals and post award administration. We have continued to enhance and develop URMS in line both with changing internal and external requirements, particularly those required by funding agencies, and in line with the requirements of the Research Excellence Framework. We have also enhanced the system to capture information on large computing projects at the bid stage.

myPublications is the University’s system for collecting and reporting on research outputs for academic staff and since the beginning of the year it has been rolled out to departments. A range of help guides is available to download and it is hoped to integrate myPublications data with staff profiles via CMS in the future.

The storage and management of research data has become a significant issue for the University. Requirements around data management have become much more stringent and at the same time the volume of raw data has increased. There are a number of activities looking at Research Data Management at the moment, one of which is the joint RIS-Library-CiCS project funded by the Research and Innovation Committee. CiCS has taken an active part in this work and will continue to adjust its provision in line with institutional requirements as resources allow.

CiCS Annual Report 2011

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By far the biggest event in 2011 in the area of Communication and Collaboration was the highly successful implementation of Google Apps for University staff. In addition to this we introduced new technologies to increase our support for mobile computing. These include improvements to our mobile app, CampusM, a mobile web site for the University and we have introduced a small-scale text messaging notification service, which we are working to expand.

GoogleDuring 2011 we became the first UK university to complete a full implementation of Google Apps for Education for both staff and students. After a successful roll-out of email and calendar services we incrementally released more Google Apps. With the addition of Google+ the University now has an excellent desktop video conferencing solution provided by Google Hangouts. We rolled out Google Apps in collaboration with IT Support colleagues in faculties and we have continued to build on this positive working relationship.

Since its implementation, University members have created over 30,000 documents and uploaded 20,000 files into Google docs.

TelephonyCiCS has continued the migration to IP telephony. As well as providing better voice services, it also reduces the amount of cabling and the infrastructure required to support telephone traffic, resulting in major cost savings. It also allows CiCS to respond to physical changes such as departmental moves more rapidly. In 2011 almost 450 IP phones were installed with an estimated 400 – 500 more being deployed during 2012.

Other new developments have improved the University’s customer service. During the 2011 Clearing process we provided real-time monitoring of calls that allowed supervisors to plan staffing levels to deliver a better service to potential students.

Similarly, enhancements made to the CiCS Helpdesk phone lines have led to an increase in the percentage of calls answered and improved handling of calls during major IT incidents.

The introduction of Interactive Voice Recognition facilities has provided the University with an Automated Switchboard, however, the underlying technology can be used for a large range of services.

The University Mobile AppCampusM is the University’s mobile app. It is seen as increasingly important technology for delivering information and services to students. During 2011 we released new versions for Android devices and for the iPad. We are working with Student Services to deliver the Intro Week events timetable through CampusM and are hoping to develop a new bespoke mobile app specifically for prospective students attending University Open Days.

Strategically, we want to develop more mobile services and move from purely informational services to more transactional services. We are currently investigating the possibility of allowing students to book a PC, purchase print credit and find student accommodation via CampusM.

CiCS Annual Report 2011

Communication and Collaboration

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The WebThe CMS (Content Management System) used to manage the University website was upgraded during 2011 making it more intuitive and reducing the time taken to change web pages. CiCS migrated, updated or removed over 600 websites on behalf of departments and trained more than 800 members of staff on using the new system.

We are now creating a mobile-friendly view of the University website. This will allow all pages on the current website to be automatically restructured when viewed on a small-screen device such as a smartphone. This will give the viewer an optimised browsing experience on all devices whilst requiring no additional work from page editors in departments.

Text Messaging ServiceWe already use text messaging to support some specific services. In CiCS, the workshop uses text messaging to inform students when their PC or laptop is ready for collection and the Voice and Data team use it to coordinate visits to student residences. During a trial the School of Dentistry sent 4,500 text messages for a survey regarding teeth sensitivity.

A project is currently underway to provide a text messaging solution to notify staff and students of critical information in the event of a major incident.

Video ConferencingVideo conferencing encompasses a range of technologies. During 2011 we introduced Hangouts within Google+ for desktop video conferencing. We have also been looking at WebEx in a number of areas to evaluate its effectiveness.

Video conferencing has proved invaluable for the University working with colleagues at City College in Thessaloniki by reducing the need to travel to collaborate. New technologies even allow the sharing and editing of documents, including presentations, during video conferencing sessions.

Over the coming year we will develop a strategy for video conferencing to ensure we align evolving video conferencing technologies to meet changing needs in ever-changing environments.

CiCS Annual Report 2011

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During 2011 we have worked to improve the effectiveness of our support services. We are exploring new ways of working both through new technologies and by increasing collaboration through liaison and peer-support. We have campaigned to raise awareness of IT security issues and as a result have seen a steady increase of people proactively contacting us for security advice.

IT Support, the Helpdesk & Self-ServiceIT Support is offered to both staff and students through a number of channels; the telephone helpdesk, email requests, self-service, live support and the face to face drop-in service. We are also beginning to see an increase in the use of social media, Twitter and Facebook. We have made a great many improvements to the way we run our IT Support services over the past year, and we are confident that customers will experience a better service as a result.

In 2011 we dealt with 32,227 calls over the phone, 18,648 by email and 3,542 drop-ins. The use of self-service facilities also continues to rise: 982 queries were submitted to the helpdesk via the Self-Service facility in MUSE; there were 3,637 knowledgebase searches carried out by over 1,300 unique customers; and 1,701 queries were dealt with via our Remote Assistance facility, with 305 queries initiated by the customer via Instant Chat and 1,396 initiated by support staff in response to a customer query. Of the 808 users who rated the service via the customer survey at the end of their chat session (a 48% response rate) 668 rated it as excellent and 97 as good.

Knowledge and InformationA major improvement in 2011 was the introduction of status messages after the telephone Helpdesk standard greeting. This allowed users who were affected by an ongoing issue to get information without having to wait to speak to a Helpdesk analyst.

The messages can be used to give information about a current incident, or about planned maintenance. During an incident with email 872 people phoned the Helpdesk and 530 of these closed the call after listening to the status message, which allowed us to deal with a greater number of calls than would previously have been possible.

Working collaborativelyIn a bid to improve the overall provision of IT support across the University, staff from CiCS and the faculties have been working together to share resources and skills. Building on the collaboration established during the roll-out of Google Mail and Calendar staff directly involved in the provision of IT support have been coming together to share ideas, knowledge and solutions. This has been achieved by support staff from across the University using the same Helpdesk software, an IT support community meeting formally and also virtually in a Google Site, and staff from faculties shadowing staff in the CiCS IT Support Team and vice versa. The overall aim of these improvements is to ensure that a consistent, comprehensive and informed level of IT support is delivered across the University.

Collaboration with colleagues from across the University has already led to a number of successful developments including an improved new process for delivering UCards and computer accounts to new students to improve the student experience.

CiCS Annual Report 2011

Help and Support

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TrainingOver the past year CiCS has delivered training for the CMS conversion and the move to Google Apps, as well as continuing to provide the usual training we deliver on a daily basis. For the introduction of Google Apps we have worked with the faculties and professional services to identify key users to train, who can then in turn provide help and support to their own departments. We also held large, lecture theatre based, training sessions and invited a Google Evangelist to give demonstrations on Google Apps. University training requirements are changing and we are now delivering more focused training to smaller groups of targeted staff.

SecurityThroughout 2011 we promoted the importance of IT security in a range of University communications. As a result we have seen an increase in the number of enquiries from staff and students looking for advice on improving their working practices.

We continue to see an increase in the frequency of online fraud (phishing) and other malicious attempts to access sensitive information, such as usernames and passwords. This has been offset by improved customer awareness and our processes for monitoring and responding to security incidents.

Recent years have seen significant shifts in the way that people work and 2011 was no exception with increased mobility being supported by technologies such as tablets and cloud computing. These changes brought new security challenges such as accessing information safely on mobile devices and assuring the security of external suppliers such as Google. The application of security to these new ways of working will continue to be a focus in 2012.

CiCS Annual Report 2011

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The big events for 2011 in the area of Corporate Information was the development of a suite of new systems to manage and support the intake of new students at the start of the academic year. In addition we have completed two substantial upgrades of major systems and continued to adapt our systems to meet ever-changing legislative requirements.

Registration SystemsNew students arriving in September 2011 were able to use an Enquirers and Applicants application, which allowed them to complete many pre-registration tasks before they arrived at University.

When they arrived they were able to use an online registration system that had been specifically rewritten for new students. It is currently being extended to provide online registration for continuing students. To achieve this, CiCS worked very closely and intensively with Student Services and Admissions. Despite the complexity of the task, the new systems significantly streamlined the student registration process, reduced queues and improved the student experience.

We also developed a pilot system for online module selection. It was made available for new students in two departments for September and was highly successful and well received. This will be rolled out to additional departments for the coming student intake.

System UpgradesThe year began with the completion of the CIS Upgrade. The upgraded service itself went live in January but work continued through much of the year to improve the usability based on user feedback with the final improvements to the composite screen being signed off in September.

After the launch of the upgraded CIS, work immediately began on upgrading the SAP business applications; myJob, myTeam, myPurchase, and uBASE. This was a large and complicated project that has taken many months of planning and preparation. Over the past year, staff in CiCS have built a series of copies of all of the SAP systems to test the connections and interactions.

Part of the upgrade is to restructure how the SAP systems connect to each other so that they are more resilient and have an optimal performance. To increase resilience further we have virtualised the SAP infrastructure onto a new cluster of high capacity servers. In doing this, and moving from 13 physical servers to two virtual ones, we will make considerable reductions to our power consumption and reduce our carbon emissions considerably. The final upgrade was completed early in January 2012.

CiCS Annual Report 2011

Corporate Information

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Legislative RequirementsDuring 2011 we finalised and released a number of systems to support student attendance monitoring as required by the Points Based System (PBS) for immigration. Since then we have had to continue to make improvements to these systems and implement PBS changes from the UK Borders Agency, and more change requirements continue to come through.

Another major change this year was to introduce a wider range of bursary calculators to take account of the new student fees affecting the 2012 intake of students.

At the end of 2011 we successfully received JISC funding to implement systems supporting stages one and two of the Higher Education Achievement Report (HEAR). This will provide detailed information about a student’s learning and achievement to supplement the traditional degree classification. CiCS has embraced this initiative and has set up the Sheffield HEAR Implementation Project (SHIP) to run alongside HEAR. Work has begun on a system to support the data collection and the HEAR, which has to be accessible to students both when they are at the University and to employers for years to come.

Part of this project is the Digital Academic Research Exchange (DARE), which will deliver a system for the secure online delivery of degree certificates, transcripts, Higher Education Achievement Reports and other student data and documents. We are very pleased that the University of Sheffield will be one of the first universities to implement HEAR.

CiCS Annual Report 2011

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During 2011 we have seen significant milestones reached in our perpetual mission to improve resilience and reduce power consumption. However, with the emergence of cloud computing and the commoditisation of IT services, there is no shortage of new challenges to face.

Resilient ServicesWe continue to improve resilience by moving more services onto virtual servers, in which one physical computer behaves as if it were multiple (virtual) computers. If a fault develops, services can be quickly transferred onto a new virtual server. During 2011 we reached the milestone of having all our major IT services running on virtual servers, which are considerably more resistant to failures. There are still some components running on physical servers, so there is more virtualisation needed to do, but all our discrete services have been virtualised.

To help manage our virtualised services we are commissioning some new virtualisation hardware, simplifying our existing estate and evaluating whether we can migrate to more general ‘commodity’ hardware rather than the esoteric ‘specialist’ equipment we have been using to date. We are also using ‘Puppet’ management software, which can quickly build and rebuild virtualised services to easily create test environments to prepare for maintenance work and upgrades.

Resilient NetworkNetwork resilience has been improved by housing all the ‘intelligent’ and ‘powered’ networking components within robust data centres, with fire and flood protection and backup power supplies. During 2011 we completed the process of moving all such components from our vulnerable aggregation centres around campus into our two resilient data centres.

During 2011 we faced a double challenge when expanding our wireless coverage. Firstly we significantly increased the reach of the wireless network across campus, working towards full network coverage in student accommodation and student areas on campus for the 2012 intake. Secondly, we had to restructure the way in which devices are given individual ‘addresses’ on our network as the number of wireless devices has increased so much that we didn’t have enough addresses for them. We had plenty of bandwidth for the devices, but not enough unique addresses to allow the device to be recognised on the network.

Resilient FilestoreSimilarly, resilience is also improved by having data stored not on a local disc within a server but by having it mounted within an array of identical discs configured to duplicate data, so that in the event of a disc failure its data can easily be reconstructed on an identical disc. During 2011 we completed the migration of all user data held in networked personal and shared filestore (U drives and M drives) from local discs onto the resilient filers.

In 2012 we are implementing a complete storage refresh, looking not only at new technologies to provide resilient data storage for the diverse needs of the University, but also undertaking a serious assessment of which data we backup and why. This will take into account regulatory requirements, retention periods and an assessment of what we’re protecting against.

CiCS Annual Report 2011

Infrastructure

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Resilient DepartmentsWe will be pushing hard for departments to decommission their own old equipment and move their services onto our virtual servers. Our power saving measures have saved so much electricity over the past few years that we are actively looking for additional services to centralise to maximize the benefits.

Cloud ComputingWe are also evaluating more cloud based solutions offering software, platforms and even infrastructure as a service. However, there can be hidden costs associated with third-party providers who need to make a profit and we need to ensure we can’t deliver the same services more cost effectively ourselves.

Identity ManagementAlso in 2012 we are addressing our identity management processes, which ensure that the right people have access to the right systems, but also that each computing service has access to the definitive copy of each person’s user details so that names and job titles are correct across all services. The technical issues are challenging but the human issues of who owns and curates the data are more so.

CiCS Annual Report 2011

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CiCS Annual Report 2011

Business Activity

Business Activity contains a number of services that support all members of the University community. These include: Print & Design, Event and Performance Space Management, Product Sales, Information and Data Compliance and University Records Management.

In 2011 our objectives were to reduce the environmental impact and cost of printing within the University, maximise the Octagon revenue generation and continue a programme of refurbishments, trial a common approach to timetabling, deliver personalised staff and student timetables and provide a basis for the provision and recording of student attendance.

Print & DesignA project to oversee the introduction of Staff Managed Print across the University has been established. The aims of the project are to reduce the cost and environmental impact of printing and to deliver an improved, shared and secure staff printing service. The project has marked out a number of stages, including a print audit on campus and a tender for hardware and service. The project understands the importance of working with faculties and departments to shape and develop the service to deliver an improved staff printing service. With this in mind, a network of Print Champions has been selected to assist with the development and roll out of the service.

During February the University Print Management Team (UPMT) organised a toner amnesty to save money and reduce wasted resources by asking departments to give up ink and toner cartridges for re-use elsewhere on campus; the Recycling Team collected just under 500 toner and ink cartridges at an estimated value of £34k.

UPMT worked with departments and services moving into the Arts Tower to radically reduce the number of printing devices in favour of a shared printing environment. Across the professional services departments printing devices were reduced by around 70%.

To reflect the new services on offer and to update their image, the University Print Service changed its name to Print and Design Solutions in May. The main priority for Print and Design Solutions is to ensure that publications and communications are of the highest standard and they achieve this by collaborating with faculties and professional services by delivering effective and innovative print and design solutions. The revamped web site is service led and reflects the CiCS style and structure, being customer focused and user friendly for the client.

Event and Performance Space ManagementThere has been an extensive programme of works in our events spaces and performance venues to upgrade and improve facilities. The Octagon Centre has a new roof, enhanced stage lighting with a management system and the bleacher seating has been renewed; Convocation Hall has additional data and phone points; the Drama Studio installed a new digital theatre sound system, new lighting for the auditorium and upgraded the rehearsal block.

Product SalesThe Varsity Gifts service has undergone a rebranding and repositioning exercise and is now managed by Print and Design Solutions; gifts are available both online and in person. The range of gifts includes a ‘Made in Sheffield’ range, which was very well received at the July 2011 Graduation. Work continues to develop the product range through collaboration and support from both the Marketing Department and Registrar and Secretary’s Office.

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Information and Data ComplianceThe Freedom of Information service received a 65% increase from the previous year with 162 requests being processed. The number of people seeking access to their own personal information has remained stable but there has been a growth in queries regarding personal data collected via the web, and data being held off-site by third parties.

University Records ManagementThe success of the Records Store continues and the store has now reached 100% capacity following the move of professional services departments into the Arts Tower. The removal of material from Brunswick led to over 1,200 boxes being removed; a significant amount of work that had taken place throughout the year. There is a waiting list of departments wishing to use the facility so further options for storage are being explored.

Project ManagementBy working with our stakeholders, we have project managed the delivery of a series of high profile and complex new services covered throughout this Annual Report.

We are moving towards a Portfolio Management approach that will result in the processes and controls currently used to manage formal CiCS projects also being used to manage our smaller developments. Each project and development will be integrated with our existing services and aligned to our departmental and institutional strategies.

We have also developed a coherent and effective methodology for Business Process Review and Improvement (BPR&I) within CiCS and beyond, including in-house training courses and BPR toolkits. We have now integrated BPR&I into our projects, with process owners (normally not from CiCS) taking the lead.

CiCS Annual Report 2011

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“We will be an innovative and influential department, respected by the University and recognised as a leader in the sector, delivering excellent customer-focused services.”

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CiCS Annual Report 2011

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Corporate Information & Computing Services The University of Sheffield 10–12 Brunswick Street Sheffield S10 2FN United Kingdom

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