Comparison with 2008/9 survey 

In 2008/9 the overall results of the UCISA Top Concerns survey were as follows:

The top concern Funding and sustainable resourcing of IT remains the same although added emphasis was placed on the future funding in the 2010/11 survey through the addition of the word Ongoing to the concern. The two concerns that have dropped out of the top ten are “Environmentally friendly” computing/energy efficiency (The carbon agenda/Green IT being the 2010/11 equivalent) and Data centres. In the past two years, many institutions have made significant progress in reducing the carbon footprint of IT within their institutions. This has included virtualisation of both servers and the desktop, automated power down/power up on demand services for PCs and more efficient data centre design. IT departments continue to take the lead in reducing energy consumption through projects to power down components of equipment when not in use, to reduce the volume of printing and through the use of video conferencing. Although the Funding Councils continue to drive for carbon reduction strategies it is perhaps the fact that the lead for developing these strategies is elsewhere allied with the progress IT departments have already made that has led to the carbon agenda being less of an issue.

The implementation of server virtualisation in institutions may also have led to Data centres becoming less of a concern over the past two years. The concern featured only once in the top ten, ranking tenth in the list of concerns consuming the most resource, largely because the research based universities rated this concern highly.

There are a number of new highly ranked concerns in the 2010/11 listing. Two of these were introduced this year to identify other areas where the impact of the current financial situation might be felt by IT departments. Whilst the ongoing funding of IT continues to be an issue, there is growing demand on IT departments to do more with less and this is reflected in the concern Delivering services under severe financial constraint being ranked second. There was less pressure to cost services, to benchmark and to demonstrate value for money two years ago so this did not feature as a candidate concern in 2008/9 but is ranked joint 8^th this year. Finally current trends are reflected in the 2010 survey with mobile computing and cloud, managed services and alternative delivery models both ranked in the top ten.