Executive summary 

The opening line of the Executive Summary of the 2008/9 Top Concerns survey was “Given the current economic climate, it perhaps comes as little surprise that Funding and sustainable resourcing of IT comes out as the top concern”. If that was the case two years ago it is more so now as the impact of the country’s deficit and the consequent spending cuts are felt by the sector.

Since 2008 the country has gone through recession, seen a change of Government and massive public sector spending cuts. The 2010 Higher Education Act has progressed through Parliament setting a maximum £9000 fee for undergraduate students in England from 2012; the administrations in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are considering their options for the future funding of higher education. It is not clear what the impact of higher fees will be on the number of applicants or whether the new regime will result in increased competition between institutions. In this climate the need to secure appropriate levels of funding for IT has never been more pressing; Ongoing funding and sustainable resourcing of IT remains the top concern of IT Directors.

IT departments are already under pressure to deliver more with less. This has been the case for some years with capital investment in new projects and technology rarely being backed up with recurrent funding to provide ongoing support but has been exacerbated in the last two years by declining budgets and falling staff headcount. Consequently the challenges of Delivering services under severe financial constraint are ranked second in the top twelve overall concerns.

In 2008 a significant proportion (typically around 90%) of the IT department’s budget was spent on maintaining services with the remainder being allocated to developing new services. The pressure on budgets has meant that the sum spent on the regular operation of services has had to decline if departments are to continue to be innovative and contribute to enhancing the student experience. IT directors have had to identify new ways of delivering their services. In the light of this the continued trend to outsourcing components of the services provided by IT departments is not surprising. The most common solution has been to migrate student email and storage services to Microsoft or Google but increasingly institutions are considering staff email and related services too. This has had a dual benefit – it has removed the overhead of support of these services allowing staff time to be reinvested in other projects and has delivered new and improved services (such as increased storage space, collaboration services) which institutions could not have provided as cost effectively in their own environments. The evidence is that the trend towards using cloud or managed services will continue and is reflected in Cloud, managed services and alternative delivery models being ranked equal tenth in the overall top twelve concerns as well as featuring prominently in the rankings of both issues important to resolve for an institution’s strategic success and issues expected to become more critical in the next 12 – 18 months. It is interesting to note that whilst cloud computing and managed services feature in the top twelve list, shared services still do not appear to be on IT Directors’ agendas, only featuring at tenth on the list of emerging concerns.

Whilst IT directors have taken steps to move aspects of their services to external providers, there remains continued pressure to demonstrate that the service is delivering value for money. This has led to a need to accurately cost services in order to be able to benchmark against other institutions and other sectors but also to ensure that informed and accurate comparisons are made between alternative providers when considering outsourcing services. This is reflected in a new concern Benchmarking, costing and value for money appearing in the top twelve, ranking joint eighth. It is anticipated that this will continue to be an issue as the concern ranks third in the emerging concerns list.

The top twelve is not all about financial matters. The need to provide a quality and resilient infrastructure and quality services is recognised with both Providing a quality, resilient service and IT/IS service quality featuring in the top twelve at third and seventh respectively. Further the challenge to support a plethora of mobile devices and move to anytime, anywhere computing is a growing concern and one that is new to the top twelve (after appearing in the emerging concerns list in the previous survey). Finally, although the use of virtual learning environments is now embedded in teaching and learning, there remains concern about the use of new technology and cloud services such as YouTube in teaching. Typically this is reflected in the blend of centrally provided and cloud media sites in use in teaching and institutions’ attempts to define appropriate policies on the use of social networking by academic staff.

In these challenging financial times with rapid technological change, it is vital that institutions have appropriate mechanisms to ensure effective IT strategies and plans are in place and are aligned with institutional aims, and that the decisions on those plans and strategies are informed by an effective governance model. Both IT strategy and planning and Governance of IT have featured in the overall top ten for the previous two surveys and are included in the top twelve this year.

It is also informative to consider the items that dropped out of the rankings and those that did not feature at all. It would appear that access and identity management, disaster recovery and business continuity and extended hours (or 24/7) support are no longer concerns and are probably regarded as part of the regular service offering. This may not be entirely true for access and identity management which has featured as a concern or emerging concern in previous surveys; further development may just have been placed on the back burner as other projects take priority. Of the new concerns Business and community engagement did not rank in the top ten from any perspective suggesting that this activity is regarded as part of the normal business of the IT/IS department. Data centres also dropped out of the overall top twelve as a concern and did not feature in the top ten from any of the four perspectives. It is interesting to note however that data centres featured strongly as an area where significant resource was being spent in both the Russell and 1994 Groups of universities. This is possibly because of greater use of local high performance computing for research in these institutions.

The need for IT/IS departments to demonstrate value for money has been highlighted by the presence of the Benchmarking, costing and value for money concern in the overall top twelve. It is equally important for IT/IS departments to ensure that their suppliers and vendors also deliver value for money. It is surprising therefore that neither Vendor/supplier management nor Effective procurement were regarded as a concern from any perspective in the survey.

Looking ahead the uncertain times will mean that financial issues will continue to be the IT director’s major concern for at least the next two years and possibly beyond that. It is likely that the same twelve concerns will form the overall top twelve when the survey is carried out next in 2012/13. By then some impact of the new fee regimes will be evident as the first cohort of students paying the higher rate will have begun their courses but it will probably be too early to determine whether the level of competition between institutions will increase. IT will continue to be integral to an institution’s operation. It is likely that more aspects of an institution’s IT/IS service will be delivered by external providers. It is not clear though how many will be delivered through shared services. Processes in institutions are similar but not standardised; standardisation must be a prerequisite to sharing. If processes become standardised across the sector then there is potential for some institutions to become providers of services for others. However, if there is increased competition between institutions, then many may decide not to share services in order to maintain a competitive advantage.