Speaker abstracts
Liberally paraphrasing the great American war general, Dwight Eisenhower, in war, planning is everything; in battle, plans go out the window. Effective crisis communications demand significant planning. Once you’re in a crisis event, instinctive reaction and reliance on experience take over.
On 16 April 2007, mass murder and horror descended on Virginia Tech, a large university in a small friendly town in rural Virginia. This presentation looks at the Virginia Tech’s crisis communications response to a tragedy for which no one can prepare. See how the Virginia Tech communications office handled a media storm of nearly 1,000 journalists. Understand how crisis communications becomes integral to crisis management and institutional response. This talk touches on the important interface between offices of information technology with those in public relations. See how Virginia Tech communicators made web communications central to its information distribution.
The Virginia Tech tragedy changed expectations about notifications to a university community. Indeed, an entirely new industry of emergency communication systems and devices sprang from April 2007. Hear and understand the portfolio of communications tools, most of which rely on IT, that have been implemented at Virginia Tech since the shootings.
Finally, this talk posits important questions for about emergency notification systems and their role or utility in a crisis.
The learning cloud: performance and productivity matter!
The economic downturn has caused many organisation take a harder line when negotiating with suppliers. In some cases, this involves negotiating new contracts. In others, it involves re-negotiating existing contracts. Still, taking a firm negotiating stance can be risky. In this presentation, we will explore the negotiation tactics that organizations are using to get through the challenging economic times.
Gartner analysts discussed with participants the following topics:
When is the right time to consider hardball negotiation tactics?
What are the potential risks and rewards?
How can organizations use firm negotiation techniques to their advantage, without harming themselves in the long run?
Information Services and Systems (ISS) at King’s College London has recognised that, in order to deliver the College’s Connected Campus programme in a fast paced and leading edge manner, it is critical for the traditional approach to delivering IT services in house to be modernised. Delivering the programme requires a massive change agenda and large scale refresh of the College’s IT infrastructure, and King’s faces a number of business continuity and resilience challenges in the provision of IT services, which will be familiar to a number of institutions in the sector. With the improvement of network quality and speeds, and an increasing maturity in IT hosting models, the current marketplace offers a variety of sourcing and IT delivery frameworks. This presentation highlights King’s experiences of entering into arrangements with third parties to deliver services using alternative, partner based models to deliver e-communications and thin client, virtualised desktop services via the JANET network.
With recovery yet to gain traction, public finances in a critical state and an election looming, there are real challenges in leading and managing organisations which are wholly or partially dependent on public funding. In January 2010, David Lammy, Minister for Higher Education and Intellectual Property, writing in Policy Review magazine, said: “I suspect that it will be a good few years before universities can expect to see any really significant upturn in their income from the public purse.” He continued that the Government had sought to encourage universities “to find ways of relying less on the taxpayer as a hedge against any future tightening of the public purse strings”. With so much political thinking currently focused on the short term, there is the risk that strategic action can be delayed, resulting in destruction of existing value and undermining opportunity for the future. In the research and education sectors, such short termism can be even more devastating if critical infrastructure both at national and institutional level is compromised, it being the very lifeblood of innovation and recovery. Like King Canute, we have little power to hold back the powerful forces that will strike us in the next few years, so it is essential to face up to the issues with honesty and open thinking. What are these issues, what are the risks and how as leaders should we respond, will form the core of this presentation? Tim will draw on his experience, in both the public and private sectors, to suggest how we might make the seemingly impossible possible. The biggest question may be, are we as individuals willing to change ourselves before we seek to bring about change in others and our organisations?
You walk into a new job as CIO in a new and unfamiliar sector. What do you expect to find and what do you do when you don’t find it?
As practiced CIOs coming in to HE from other sectors, one from the private sector, and one from a major charity, Ajay and Andrew talk about their early experience in HE. What state was the service they inherited in? What questions did they ask and evidence did they look for? How different was the IT service in their HEI’s from the services in the sectors they had come from? What was working and how did they start making changes to what wasn’t?
Ajay will talk about the let’s start again from scratch approach she took to transforming the IT function and service, including core processes, structure and services, covering what has worked as well as what still needs improvement. Andrew will talk about the transformation he has made to project and programme governance including culling the pipeline of IT projects from over 60 to just 16, an approach which Ajay is also now adopting to make further improvements.
The session will close with an overview of the difficulties and problems that are still unresolved and a view of whether being in the HE sector makes any real difference to delivering a professional IT service.
The Future Leaders Programme aims to develop leaders who are confident, agile, enquiring, passionate, reflective and self aware. The drive is on for universities to find new ways of working and to achieve more for less. Effective leadership is, more than ever, at a premium. In order to be more efficient, we have to work together more effectively. Institutions need leaders who have the passion to see a better future and have the vision to see the role that technology can play in changing our work lives for the better. It is the presenters’ belief that the time is now for Information Service leaders to take centre stage. So what are the skills and qualities that IS leaders need to lead with confidence and creativity? How can IS leaders work collaboratively whilst being potentially disruptive? And how do they balance this with business as usual activities? This presentation aims to stimulate a discussion on the challenges and opportunities of a partnership approach to change. In doing so we will present and illustrate different scenarios for collaborative relationships, focusing on the approach taken by City University London in the development of its new strategic learning environment. The tools and techniques explored in the Future Leaders Programme will be featured throughout the presentation.
