Debunking ICT strategies – the Government ICT strategy and the UMF programme

There has been a tendency to use complicated, even pretentious, language in the development of ICT strategies and plans in recent years. That’s something the UMF programme and the Janet Brokerage have sought to avoid. Instead we have tried to highlight why we think a move to shared infrastructure is a cost effective plan, what we intend to do to help make it happen and how that might be accomplished in a sustainable fashion.

So it’s been particularly interesting to see the publishing of the government ICT strategy at http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/content/government-ict-strategy  and more recently the related implementation plan at:

http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/content/government-ict-strategy-strategic-implementation-plan

It now uses very similar language and makes very similar proposals to those advocated by the UMF programme for HE and FE.

The rationale behind the UMF programme may be worth rehearsing:

1. Universities need to take advantage of virtualisation and cloud technology to gain efficiencies in the use of hardware and data centre premises and thus lower costs.
2. Engaging with major service providers who can access economies of scale is a good way to do this as is sharing existing spare capacity within the sector.
3. Research Data Management is a growing problem and needs to be tackled systematically. So exploiting the skills of the Data Curation Centre to provide institutions and their researchers with tools and skills to tackle this problem will position them to use shared infrastructure effectively
4. We can also develop shared applications delivered from the shared infrastructure to support researchers in their work and thus further encourage them off expensive local servers into a cost effective shared infrastructure. The ViDaaS  (http://vidaas.oucs.ox.ac.uk/) , Dataflow (http://www.dataflow.ox.ac.uk/) , SRF (http://www.mylabnotebook.ac.uk/) and BRISSkit  (http://www.le.ac.uk/brisskit ) projects are intended to be  set of pathfinders for this approach.
5. The infrastructure created in support of research can easily be exploited in learning and teaching and administration systems as well and there will be projects in support of this aim too.

From now into early 2012 the Janet Brokerage will be making available flexible framework agreements to give institutions the opportunity to buy cost effective data centre and Cloud services, High Performance Computing and Storage. Please get in touch if you need to upgrade or refurbish a data centre or need help with consolidation (virtualisation) of the server estate.

John Milner
Brokerage Advisor