My intention was never to introduce a new definition into the sector’s IT vocabulary and consciousness. My initial brief from the JISC Exec 18 months ago was to set up a programme that helped lay the foundations for making new IT service delivery options, including cloud based shared services, available across higher and further education, in a bid to deliver a return on JISC’s investment and save the sector money. Practically, this meant bringing together the various areas of innovation that JISC had been funding around well known terms and approaches such as SOA/soa, Enterprise Architecture, Shared Services, Cloud Computing, and Business Process Modelling. All of which were managed separately across various innovation teams. During this planning phase the programme needed a name, and hence the definition of Flexible Service Delivery, or FSD, was initiated. Focusing the name on certain service delivery models, such as cloud based shared services, may be well received today, but this would not have been the case 18 months ago. A much more open-ended definition that focused on the benefits around agility and flexibility seemed a much safer bet! FSD, like any new acronym, especially one with a sizable budget attached to it, has not been without its critics, and despite the desire of not wanting to introduce another acronym that requires ongoing explanation; this is where I have found myself today, needing to define what I mean by FSD. This is especially important right now because the term FSD, and terms such as “FSD principles” are beginning to be used in conversations across IT and business communities in the sector, by both vendors and consumers alike. The term has even found itself on the agenda of various events including the upcoming UCISA CISG conference. Who knows, it may even make it into Wikipedia one day!
So its time, I feel, to begin an online discussion about what we, the community of early adopters who are leading this change initiative, collectively mean by the term FSD. To kick this off, here is my first public attempt at offering a definition.
To me, FSD is about universities and colleges working collaboratively, as early adopters, and navigating the steps needed to become better prepared overall – both technically and culturally – to exploit new and improved business models for the delivery of their IT services. There are a range of drivers that motivate stakeholders within universities and colleges (Institutional senior managers including PVCs and FDs; Chief Information Officers; IT staff; heads of student services) to want to improve the quality of their IT services. But there are 3 common ones that I think unite the current FSD project community: Efficiency (cost and time savings), Effectiveness (enhancing the student and staff experience) and Enablement (improving agility and responsiveness to changing priorities). These have usefully been described as the 3 E’s, which forms the basis of the new FSD logo. They also provide a useful set of criteria in which to assess impact and benefit.
In my view, an IT Service is made up from a combination of people, processes and technology, where the use of IT (which the service is based) supports the student and staff business processes. With this definition in mind, Enterprise Architecture presents itself as a useful method, or framework, to help institutional stakeholders understand how these three principles – people, process and technology – interrelate. Reassuringly many of the FSD projects who are tasked with improving their business processes and better understanding their architectures and ICT governance structures across a range of functional areas are also seeing EA as a key enabler to help them plan for and deliver change across their institution so that their IT services work together properly and enable the organisation’s vision. It is only from this starting point – with a clear vision of what the IT service landscape could look like and the savings that could be made from delivering various options, and a roadmap of how to get there – (i.e. the business case) can various service delivery options, options that enable greater modularity and flexibility in service delivery, be accurately considered and planned for. There are various baselining and forecasting tools available which help to assess the risk, cost and environmental impact of delivering changes to your IT service provision. So far these have been recognised to include the JISC infoNet Impact Calculator, BIILS and the Sust-IT Toolkit. Dr Stuart Lee from the University of Oxford will soon be delivering on a project that has produced its own IT Service Costing Tool for calculating the total cost of ownership of any given IT service. This will be shared with you in the next week or so; after which I will be keen to support other projects that wish to road test this tool.
FSD does not stop at institutions defining the steps in the roadmap and forecasting the anticipated benefits. FSD is also about institutions and consortia delivering the benefits – centered on the 3 Es – brought about by taking the steps and making the use of the available tools and resources needed to improve business processes and delivering cloud based shared service implementations across various areas of administrative and corporate information functions. There are many choices of modelling languages and tools available: Richard McKenna from Nottingham University has helpfully summarized a few of them in his recent project blog, and CETIS have produced the first release of Archi – an open source authoring tool for modelling in ArchiMate. I’ve recently learnt that St Andrews University has developed a ‘Cloud Migration Toolkit’. I will be investigating this further and I hope to share this with you shortly. All projects, bar one, are still live, and are all making great progress as per their workplans. One project led by North Herts College has concluded however, which has demonstrated some significant benefits in terms of cost savings. By reviewing and re-engineering the business process that support their finance function, they have managed to make efficiency savings in excess of £1M, demonstrating a huge return on investment. Furthermore, the college is now in the position to realise even more cost and time savings by operating certain aspects of their finance function as a shared service through an implementation project with two other partner colleges. This implementation phase would not have been possible if they had not conducted a baseline and or managed to get a through understanding of their “as is” and “to be” business processes.
It is probably of no surprise that the FSD programme design reflects my understanding of what FSD means to me. Essentially it has been designed to allow its projects to:
- Document their journeys, and assess its benefit and impact – through the project case studies – so that others who follow can learn on the obstacles to avoid and the benefits to exploit
- Share their experiences with other like minded peers across the sector (the STG and its subgroup EA PG…)
- Have tools and resources available to help institutions achieve each of the required steps (made available through the village pump)
- Take on a culture of reflective learning, where an acknowledgement of the project benefits and impact are at the forefront of the project teams minds
Through the support and synthesis project, and from the new but ongoing focused effort from JISC Legal, professional advice and guidance material for institutions on the effective practice around flexible service delivery options will be a key output from the programme.
My thoughts about FSD, and what it means to me, will continue to evolve and mature, as the FSD programme progresses through its second year of funding. Whilst I initially saw this as a barrier to communication, I now think that this is a barrier worth managing if it means we take an iterative and evolving approach to a change initiative that is ever expanding as the community of early adopters grow.
Now over to the experts, you, the projects! If you could spare a moment and put some consideration into how you would define FSD, described from your particular perspective, and share it with the rest of the programme community through your blog, it would be gratefully appreciated.
Let the discussion begin 
Bye for now
Alex