INFORMATION AND TECHNOLOGY
Our priorities are to:
Provide IT and library facilities to support education, learning and teaching and to enhance the student experience.
We will ensure that all students and staff have access to high quality library and IT facilities appropriate to a leading institution. We will offer both online and traditional information resources that complement and inform faceto- face teaching, that facilitate collaborative learning and that enhance the learning experience. For example, we will enhance our ability to support the provision of effective assessment and coursework management processes. This will support timely and appropriate feedback for students, and provide a learning environment to support different learning styles and resource needs.
Provide IT and library facilities to support research activities and enhance research impact.
We will provide high quality IT facilities to support computationally- and data-intensive research, including the University’s flagship High Performance Computing facility. We will enable dynamic research communication and collaboration and support and enhance a wide variety of research methods, both through a sound technical infrastructure and through information and library services delivered to researchers wherever and however best suited to them, supporting both the prosecution and the dissemination of their research.
Support the University’s business objectives by providing efficient and effective processes enabled by welldesigned, integrated information systems.
We will develop and implement systems and processes that facilitate organisational effectiveness, efficiency and value for money at University, faculty and departmental levels. We will ensure that processes are enhanced by provision of shared systems and work flow throughout the University wherever possible. Our specific priorities will address the implementation of integrated common systems for cross-cutting processes such as purchasing; financial management and reporting; student admissions and timetabling.
Ensure that our IT Strategy is peoplefocused and that all members of the University are well supported, trained and equipped to fulfil their roles.
We will undertake a thorough analysis of IT training needs for both staff and students, in order to ensure that resources are focused on the areas of greatest need. We will also invest in training and development for professional IT staff, which is instrumental to provision of the high quality IT services needed by members of the University. We will ensure that staff and students are provided with clear, concise information on the services available and are able to access good quality support where required. We will provide access to IT facilities for members of the University wherever they are and whenever they need it, and provide tools to enable communication and collaboration between members of the University and with others with whom they work and study.
Provide excellent, responsive and resilient IT services for all members of the University.
We will provide and continue to invest in an IT infrastructure that is well-designed and managed and fit for purpose, ensuring that critical services are both robust and resilient and that business continuity plans are established, tested and kept up-to-date. We will continue to explore opportunities for sharing of investment in IT, including collaboration with other institutions at a regional and national level.
Develop sustainable approaches to the provision of IT, in order to minimise the impact of the environment.
We will give due weight to environmental impact when purchasing IT equipment and assess the impact of our existing equipment, seeking to identify potential improvements including savings in energy consumption. We will develop environmentally sustainable strategies for computer machine room environments; servers; High Performance Computing and desktop computing.
Our progress and achievements against these priorities will be measured through:
- User feedback from the National Student Survey and internal surveys.
- Monitoring of internal strategic performance indicators relating to ICT capital and recurrent expenditure, and expenditure on library and information resources provision.
Further information about our objectives, planned actions and performance indicators with regard to information technology and libraries can be found in our Information Technology Strategy and our Library and Information Resources Provision Strategy (Word 113 kb).