Through the Phases

The Flexible Services Delivery (FSD) ‘Birds of a Feather’ session at the UCISA conference gave projects involved with the JISC FSD Programme and the wider community an opportunity to collectively discuss what FSD really means to everyone involved. Both sessions were full of delegates and of conversation which, for me, highlights how important this topic is for the sector. Unfortunately there are no easy answers and a strong message that came out from the session was that this area is very much in its infancy (in Further and Higher Education) and while lessons are being learned it could be quite a long journey for everyone involved.

The session itself built upon two blog posts written by Alex Hawker (JISC FSD Programme Manager) and John Townsend (Director of Corporate Information Services at Liverpool John Moores University) that highlight their understanding of FSD. Something I felt strongly about which John highlighted was that institutions need to change their way of thinking.

“It’s not fundamentally about the technology. It’s about the services, not the systems”

FSD is not necessarily shared services or fundamentally about the technology. It might be better to think of it as an approach in which you critically assess your services and how you deliver them.

“We’re too focused on technology. We need to focus on business processes.”

In fact, effective process review was one of the key messages to come from the conference. Many of the FSD projects themselves are using Enterprise Architecture (EA) to help them understand the nature of their services and those processes involved. Wilbert Kraan highlighted the risk of ‘analysis paralysis’ and that anyone undergoing this kind of exercise should be wary not to get too carried away with mapping. It should almost be done on the side and John Townsend mentioned that his institution don’t carry out EA projects, they have a mandate that any information systems projects must take an EA approach. If you’re interested in EA it’s well worth reading the ‘Doing Enterprise Architecture – Enabling the agile institution‘ early adopters study or contacting the EA Practice Group for further information on the support they can offer.

The disaggregation of systems came across as another hot topic however the realisation of such an outcome seems some way off with suppliers waiting for the sector to tell them what they want while the sector is waiting for suppliers to lead the way – very much a ‘chicken and egg’ situation. That said it seemed very clear, to me at least, that the sector would like the opportunity to select specific modules from the major systems out there. Although the sum total of buying individual modules might be greater than buying the whole system itself it would allow Universities and Colleges to select modules that are more suited to their particular needs. The upshot of which is more efficient and/or streamlined business processes.

There was a great deal of discussion on the outsourcing of services but as one delegate highlighted, “Numbers never add up with regards to outsourcing apart from where it’s free e.g. email”. Another delegate spoke about the idea of outsourcing those services that don’t add any value to the institution/college of which email was the only example given. One delegate asked “if we were to outsource everything do we really need to think about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)”? Wilbert Kraan was certain we did, “if we outsourced the lot you should still consider whether they use SOA because you might want to plug and play different modules from different vendors”.

Another area of discussion was the possibility of comparing the cost of the same process across institutions (activity based costing). Why would ‘Process A’ cost 60 units in one institution and 100 units in another? Delegates were torn as to whether this would be possible, some saying institutions are too different to make like for like comparisons however some delegates mentioned the possibility of matching up with similar institutions to their own. Many do this already internally with regards to their strategy e.g. benchmarking with similar institutions with regards to student feedback.

As mentioned at the beginning of this post we’re on a journey and not fully sure what the outcome is yet. One thing we do know is that EA and a step change in thinking about services, not systems, will help you to improve as an organisation. To put it another way, if you’re interested in ‘cheaper and better’ you need to seriously consider EA!