UCISA Shared Services Manager’s Forum in Birmingham today – & curiously apt timing given HEFCE’s Shared services in cloud computing funding announcement yesterday – http://www.hefce.ac.uk/news/hefce/2011/cloud.htm.
HEFCE announcement now lets the cat out of the bag about a lot of stuff that the JISC Flexible Services Delivery Programme Steering Group – & others – have been discussing for some time but not out in the open. Mostly what was expected – Data Centres & HE Cloud with JANET & Eduserv, Research Data Management, procurement services for admin apps – but good to see the Digital Curation Centre in there. Also good that secure electronic documents/the Higher Education Achievement Record (HEAR) has made it in.
So looks like a very positive move, although introduces a bit of a planning conundrum for institutions – if, say, you were planning on developing the HEAR in-house, do the plans now change? Should you wait for a shared service offering? Who, what, how, when, where? Needs a bit more detail, & needs it now – hopefully this will all become clearer soon…
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