CiCS Annual Report 2009 - cics.dept.shef.ac.ukcics.dept.shef.ac.uk/reports/cics-annual-report-2009.pdfWelcome to the 2009 CiCS Annual Report. I hope you ﬁnd it both interesting and

CorporateInformation &ComputingServices.

CiCSAnnualReport2009.

47145-CIC-CICS Annual Report 2009 Version 4:Layout 1 23/3/10 10:31 Page 2

Welcome to the 2009 CiCS AnnualReport. I hope you find it bothinteresting and informative. I wouldbe happy to receive any commentson it.

This year’s report has a differentformat, and reports on our activitiesacross seven different service areas,rather than by structural unit. Theseseven areas have been chosen to helpus introduce improved servicemanagement, and to help our usersbetter understand and access all ofthe services we provide. The areasare:

• Learning and Teaching

• Research

• Communication and Collaboration

• Help and Support

• Infrastructure

• Corporate Information

• Business Activity

Under each heading we have set outour objectives for the last year andhighlighted our achievements andprogress in reaching them.

Over the year, as part of ourimplementation of improved servicemanagement, we have formalised anumber of our internal processes:

problem management, incidentmanagement, change managementand test management. These,hopefully, are invisible to you the user,but greatly improve our ability toimprove services and respond toissues. We have also completed acycle of strategic liaison meetings with each of the Faculties. These haveenabled us to share information andplans, and to better understand andrespond to common themes as well as the particular needs of each faculty.

It has been another busy year, andanother year of dealing with changingcircumstances. Technology continuesto develop apace, with new systemsand services appearing all the time. Inaddition, there are financialconstraints on the sector and wecontinue to look at new ways ofmaking processes more efficient. Thisyear saw the first major outsourcingproject, resulting in our student emailservice being hosted by Google. Overthe next few years we may have tolook at more ways of releasing stafffrom providing commodity services sothat we can concentrate on providingcore services with added value.

This year also sees the completion ofmy first year as chair of UCISA, and Iwould like to thank my colleagues,especially the Assistant Directors, who

have supported me and covered forme when I have been away from theUniversity on UCISA business.

I would also like to thank all CiCSstaff for their work during this lastyear. It has been a difficult one, notleast because of the impact of thevoluntary severance scheme. In total20 colleagues left us under thescheme, and we wish all of them welland thank them for their time withus. The leavers were not spreadevenly across the department, withsome teams losing significantnumbers. This has led to somereorganisation, and in some areasservice levels have had to change.

Managing effectively in times ofuncertainty is one of the University’skey challenges – and althoughreduced resources is a fairly certainfeature of the next few years, muchelse remains uncertain. One thing iscertain though: CiCS staff can berelied on to rise to any challenge withprofessionalism and commitment.

Christine Sexton

Director’sReport



Teaching SpacesTo ensure that our lecture theatresand teaching rooms provide the bestenvironment we replaced thelecturer’s computer in 120 teachingrooms with the fastest models,refurbished the computer room inPortobello with state of the art PCsand AV equipment and refurbished 60other pool and departmental teachingrooms.

We also help departments get thebest out of teaching rooms via ournew teaching space manager who willwork with departments to allocaterooms, schedule teaching and plan forlong term needs.

Systems and ServicesLearning is not restricted to officehours and through MOLE, our virtuallearning environment, it is supported24/7. MOLE is a formidable systemrunning across 14 servers, hosting5,700 courses with 2,200 concurrentusers. During the year we undertook acomplex upgrade to the latest versionand moved the whole system ontovirtual servers. As a result thereliability of MOLE is greatly improved.

We also initiated a new project toreview the underlying system thatdelivers MOLE. This project willconsult widely across the Universityto gather user requirements as wellas looking at the technical solutionsavailable. We plan to pilot a newversion of MOLE in September 2010.

This year we launched the myEchoservice, which makes it easy forlecturers to record teachingmaterial for students. It includesboth a video of the lecture and anyaccompanying material (PowerPointslides, photographs etc.) thatstudents can subsequently viewthrough the web on a computer or amobile device.

One of the major service launchesthis year was uSpace – theUniversity’s own secure social weband collaboration environment.Although it has wider uses it is verymuch aimed at facilitating innovativeways of learning and teaching. Wehave developed an automatic linkbetween MOLE and uSpace tofacilitate the use of blogs and wikisin learning and teaching.

Student ComputingTo help in their studies, studentsenjoy first-rate computing facilitiesbased on the secure, robust ManagedDesktop, packed with software.Growth in the service this year hasled to some issues with start-uptimes. This has now been addressedusing a series of significant technicalchanges and start-up times havebeen improved.

CiCS continues to improve thestudent computing service. This yearsaw the following new activities:

• new exam-time arrangementswere put in place in theInformation Commons to helpensure the best possibleconditions for students to study

• focus groups were held withstudents to elicit feedback about awide range of subjects

• the ‘Quick Print’ area was launchedin the Information Commons

• induction sessions were held tointroduce new students to theInformation Commons and basicCiCS and Library services.

Learning andTeaching

CiCS aims to play its part in achieving the University’s aspiration ‘to ensure that the highest standards ofexcellence are maintained within the student learning experience’ (University Learning, Teaching and AssessmentStrategy 2005-10). We provide a diverse range of learning and teaching spaces, equipped with innovativetechnologies, computers and software, and an online virtual learning environment available 24/7.

During 2009, our objectives were: to improve the quality of teaching space and to maximise its usage; tointroduce systems and services that support innovative teaching; and to realise our commitment to provide thebest possible learning experience for students.


Advisory GroupThe Research Computing AdvisoryGroup continues to be a successfulforum for the discussion of oursupport strategy and priorities, andFaculty Directors of Research havenow been invited to attend.

A small group has been looking atcreating a business case for theacquisition of a largersupercomputer facility.

PortalsDuring the year Iceberg, our HighPerformance Computer (HPC)facility, has had a number ofreliability and resilience featuresapplied, and is now exceeding ourSLAs consistently.

A good deal of work has been doneon the evaluation of web-basedportals for the submission andsteering of computational jobs.

These have included theestablishment of the Biogrid portalfor Animal and Plant Sciences, andthe CAIMAN project for cancer imageanalysis. We have also looked at otherportal technologies that offer thepromise of easier job submission tothe High Performance computer, andto the White Rose Grid.

Investigations have also taken placeinto the use of Sun Global Desktop asa simple way of deliveringapplications to the local usercommunity.

Support and TrainingThis year we have assisted with anumber of challenging problems inSolar Physics and Aerodynamics withthe use of the National Grid Service.

We continue to provide ResearchTraining programme modules, andthese are well attended.

Research

CiCS is committed to supporting research in all disciplines and strengthening relationships with all Universityresearchers by facilitating collaboration, providing research computing facilities, supporting researchapplications, and helping departments with research costing management.

During 2009, our objectives were: to increase support for researchers; to facilitate improved collaboration; and toincrease our support for both technical and non-technical researchers.

CollaborationThe introduction of uSpace, ourcollaboration environment, hasenabled us to provide a flexible wayfor researchers to work with otherresearchers and partners within andoutside the University.

StrategyA draft research support strategy hasbeen written, and further discussionsabout financing for the strategy arenow taking place.


uSpace LaunchedThe CLEX report1 on ‘HigherEducation in a Web 2.0 World’ urgeduniversities to embrace the socialweb world in which students spendso much time. To ensure that theUniversity of Sheffield is at theforefront, we implemented uSpace;the University’s own secure socialweb and collaboration environment.

uSpace offers a collection of socialweb tools for communication andcollaboration amongst students andstaff, with a flexible collaborationenvironment for research, breakinggeographical barriers in learning, andimproving communication withindepartments.

In addition to implementing our ownsocial web environment, we led theUniversity in the adoption of Twitteras a communication channel betweenthe Department and our customers.

New Email ServicePrompted by surveys and feedbackfrom students we implemented anew email service, for all taughtstudents. Powered by Google, theservice is web-based, compatiblewith mobile phones and otherportable devices, and has been verywell received.

Alongside the new email service,students have received a newcalendaring system and we areworking with departments to helppopulate student calendars with theirindividual teaching timetables.

In the coming year we will beinvestigating a replacement for thestaff email and calendar service.

The start of 2009 saw an increase inthe amount of spam and phishingemail reaching the University. It wasalso getting more sophisticated andmore of it was getting through ourexisting defences. In response, weintroduced a new email securitysystem called IronPort, which is nowsuccessfully identifying and rejecting97.9% of all incoming messages as spam.

Website Visits to the University of Sheffieldwebsite have doubled over the last 8years, and last year numberedapproximately 25 million. To meet thisdemand and improve the resilience ofthe University website we havereplaced the server running the webservice, and upgraded the servicerunning departmental web pages.Upgrade of the Content Managementsystem, used by web editors across theUniversity, will take place early in 2010.

Telephony ServiceThe telephony system was upgradedin 2008 to provide us with greaterresilience, and the flexibility to meetthe demands of the University’schanging estate. The English LanguageTeaching Centre recently moved tonew premises on Hoyle Street and isthe first site within the University tomove to a telephone service deliveredvia the Internet.

We are now working towards unifiedcommunications in which yourcomputer could also serve as yourphone, and your email software wouldbe able to list your voicemailmessages.

Communicationand Collaboration

Communication and collaboration are vital functions of University life. CiCS provides a wide range of tools andservices to facilitate collaboration, communication and co-operation, from essential email and telephone servicesto more specialised tools such as myCalendar, myChat and uSpace.

During 2009, our objectives were: to improve the resilience of the communication infrastructure; and to introducenew technology and services to ensure that staff and students had access to the widest range of cutting edgecollaboration and communication tools.

1. Committee of Inquiry into the Changing LearnerExperience, "Higher Education in a Web 2.0World", www.jisc.ac.uk/heweb2



Self ServiceThe CiCS Helpdesk is a very popularservice receiving 120 to 150telephone calls and up to 50 emailsevery day. To maximise the availabilityof helpdesk expertise we haveintroduced a self-service helpdesk.This is available 24/7 and allows staffand students to perform naturallanguage searches of over 200knowledgebase articles. If thesolution is not found in the list ofsuitable answers the query can beposted to the helpdesk forresolution. This is already proving tobe a popular service and the numberof knowledgebase articles isgradually increasing.

We have also integrated the CiCSservice status web page with thehelpdesk software so it isautomatically updated as ‘hot issues’and known (planned) outagesbecome known. This information isused to update the CiCS Twitterfeed, which gives us a vitalcommunication channel for when ourown services are unavailable.

Remote AssistanceSome IT problems cannot be fixedover the phone and it is oftenimpractical or time consuming tosend some one out or for a user tobring the computer into theComputing Centre. So during theyear we introduced a remoteassistance service. This serviceallows a helpdesk analyst to takecontrol of the user’s computerremotely (after obtaining theirapproval!) and then either fixing theproblem or showing the user how toperform a task. This coming year weplan to make this service availablethrough MUSE.

LiaisonDuring the year we have continued tobuild on our strategic liaison service,strengthening relationships with keystaff within the faculties.

Through operational liaison we areworking closely with faculty anddepartmental IT Support staff onday-to-day support issues. We hopeto extend the usage of the helpdesk

software to gather information onthe demands on the services inindividual departments and planfuture developments accordingly.

TrainingThis year over 140 CICS courses haverun for staff and postgraduateresearch students. A new coursecatalogue has been created andbooking details are available throughthe CiCS web site. Courses rangefrom introductory Office applicationsto specialist sessions on HighPerformance Computing. The CICStraining room, K17 in the HicksBuilding, has been refurbished with15 workstations available for on-lineclasses.

Help andSupport

In addition to the 1-1 support available from the helpdesk, CiCS performs maintenance on IT equipment, workswith staff to ensure they have access to the required systems, produces policies for everybody’s security andliaises with faculties to plan for long term needs.

During 2009, our objectives were: to improve access to our help and support by providing self-service and remoteaccess facilities; to work more closely with those who provide IT support within the faculties; and to better targetour training offering.


ResilienceWe continue to improve our ability toensure that services can continueworking even if a component fails.Our services are steadily beingmoved to clusters of computers intwo separate machine rooms. Afailure in one component or locationresults in services being diverted to asafe part of the cluster.

We have also connected theUniversity via two separate links toJANET (The Joint Academic Network– and thereby our connection to theinternet), and improved the reliabilityof some of the core network systemsthat underpin our user-facingservices.

Data StorageThe default general and email filestorage quotas for staff have eachbeen increased to 500MB and mostfiles and data have now been movedto our central storage system. Inaddition we are improving andmodernizing backups to cope withincreasing data volumes, so thatservices can be restored morequickly in the event of data loss.

Environmental Management Consolidation of computers andnetworked storage has enabled us tosave physical space and to decreasethe heat generated by ourcomputers. This in turn leads to alower energy bill for the University.

Infrastructure

The majority of the infrastructure work carried out in CiCS is invisible to our users. Hardware upgrades, datastorage and backup, server configuration, increasing performance and increasing resilience of services all takeplace in the background while the University carries out its business.

During 2009, our objectives were: to improve the resilience of key services; to increase data storage capacity; andto improve environmental management.

However, despite all theconsolidation of machinery, servicesstill depend on physical computers,which need to be cooled. Changingthe position of servers relative toeach other and relative to the airconditioning units has already had adramatic effect on the heat flowwithin our main machine room andfurther efficiency gains are plannedin this area.


New ServicesWe have commissioned andimplemented a new service for theiPhone, which delivers a range ofpersonalised University informationto student mobile phones. Theservice draws information from theLibrary, our course information, andour directories, as well as providingother feeds of information from theUniversity and the Students’ Union,and presents it in an attractive andsimple way on the iPhone. DuringApril 2010, this service will be madeavailable to a range of different smartphones.

We have also provided technicalsupport for the rollout of theeRecruitment service, whichstreamlines the job applicationprocess at the University for bothapplicants and for those involved inselection.

External RequirementsWe responded to changes in externalrequirements for Universityinformation in a number of ways. Asa result of the points basedimmigration system we had tointroduce a new interim solution tomeet the legal requirements at veryshort notice, pending a full solutionin February 2010. We also introduceda Research Publications Database,for use as part of the ResearchExcellence Framework, and theStudent Loan Company introduced anew Change of Circumstance form,which we integrated within SAP forelectronic data transfer.

ReportingWorking closely with Planning andGovernance Services, CiCS hasdeveloped MI View to provide up-to-date performance indicators tosenior managers. In addition, theperformance of uReports has beensignificantly improved to assist theseveral hundred users who rely onthe system.

CorporateInformation

CiCS aims to extend the reach of information to all members of the University community regardless of theirlocation and the technology they are using. This requires integration work between different services and the‘exposure’ of data and information in different ways.

During 2009, our objectives were: to make information available to new devices and in new formats; and tochange existing systems to meet external requirements and to comply with legislation, as we do each year.



Project ManagementCiCS has a wide portfolio of projects,with the Programme and Project Unithelping to support and co-ordinatethem. Three projects haveintroduced key new services in 2009:the uSpace service; the new studentemail and Calendar service; and theeRecruitment system.

CiCS promotes good projectmanagement practice within theUniversity by helping departmentsdevelop their approach to projects.Our extensive project managementwebsite, providing advice andresources, is used by otheruniversities as well as internally.

Recommendations from theEnvironmental Printing ReviewProject have resulted in:

• the formation of the UniversityPrint Management Team whichsupports best practice and aims toreduce the cost and environmentalimpact of printing;

• the photocopier contract beingmanaged by CiCS and theProcurement Office;

• the selection of preferred suppliersfor outsourced printing, managedby the University Print Service.

University RecordsThe Records Centre, established lastyear at North Campus, is now overhalf full and holds records from over30 academic and professional servicedepartments.

Business UnitsThe University Print Service hasinstalled the latest high volume Monoand Colour Digital Printingequipment. This will improve qualityand reduce costs of in-house work.

The Drama Studio continued its driveto maintain its reputation withfurther developments andimprovements. This year saw newadditions to our range of theatrelights; the complete replacement ofour stock of scenery; step units andextra shapes to add to the stagingbought last year; and the installationof a video monitoring system to relaythe show to the dressing rooms.

A Work Related Driving Policy wasratified by the University Health andSafety Committee; this policyensures the University Transportoperations will remain safe and legal.

BusinessActivity

CiCS runs a number of business units, which provide specific services to the University. These include theOctagon Centre, Drama Studio, Transport Services, Room and Parking Services and the University Print Service.CiCS also provides Project Management and Records Management services to the University.

During 2009 our objectives were: to project manage the efficient introduction of new services; to review andimprove the environmental impact of printing within the University; and to invest in the business units to offer thehighest quality services in a competitive market.


Helpdesk• 48,641 phone calls, emails and visits

to CiCS Helpdesk, IT Centres, theworkshop and networking staff

Email• 10.4 million email messages

received by the University of which667,000 delivered – 93.5% rejectedas spam

Student Computing• 37 centrally provided student

computer rooms

• 1,567 computers available forstudent use

• 523 computers available 24/7 in theInformation Commons

• 150 bookable PCs in InformationCommons and 10 bookable grouprooms

• 250+ software applications onstudent computers

• £800,000 p.a. spent on softwarepurchase and licensing, increased22% from £655,000 last year.

• 400MB file store for eachundergraduate student

Printing• 7,137,033 pages printed out by

students

• 45 printers available in the IC, openaccess rooms and libraries and 31printers in departments forstudents

• 1,200 network printers on theUniversity network

Network• 2,500 new outlets added to the

network this year (10% increase insize of network over last year)

• 300 wireless access points aroundcampus (20% increase over lastyear)

• 10,000 telephone extensions

• 6,000 voicemail accounts

• 2 Gb/s University connection tothe internet, 1 Gb/s on campusand to student residences and 1 Gb/s for grid computing andscientific computing

• Key buildings, such as theInformation Commons, havededicated 2 Gb/s connections intothe core

Learning and Teaching• 160 pool teaching rooms and

various others available throughRoom Bookings

• 74,000 class sessions allocated tobookable rooms and an average of100 room enquiries daily

• 2 lecture theatres refurbishedwith new AV equipment

• 5,700 courses in MOLE (My OnlineLearning Environment)

• MOLE accessed by 2,280concurrent MOLE users during theday time, running on 14 servers

• 320 ECDL tests were taken with295 passes, 183 staff currentlyregistered for final season

Administration• 14 servers and 18 databases used for

SAP

• 1,400 reports in the uReports system,in which staff can now create theirown reports from central data

Business Units• 50 vehicles operated within the

University on a permanent basis andbetween 200 and 300 daily rentalvehicles hired in each month

• 42 tonnes of paper photocopied atUniversity Print Service

• In excess of 11 million pages printed intotal by the University Print Service

• 5,800 Thesis bound each year

• 2,635 estimates produced forcustomers by the University PrintService

• Approx 1,650 parking spaces available,of which over 1/3 are at theresidences, so just over 1,000 in allcategories around the campus andparking permits managed by Roomand Parking Services

• Parking operations turnover is approx£370,000 of which £40,000 providesthe subsidy for staff monthly bustickets. The annual surplus, usually£30,000 - £60,000 provides fundingfor other travel and environmentalinitiatives as planned by theUniversity Transport Policy Group

• The Octagon Centre had a turnoverof £160,000 in 2008-2009. About60% was from external bookings and40% from internal bookings

• The Octagon Centre was occupied on279 days last year

Facts andFigures 2009



“We will be an innovative andinfluential department, respectedby the University and recognised as aleader in the sector, deliveringexcellent customer-focusedservices.”


Corporate Information & Computing ServicesThe University of Sheffield285 Glossop RoadSheffield S10 2HBUnited Kingdom

T: 0114 222 1111

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Documents

CiCS Annual Report 2009 - cics.dept.shef.ac.ukcics.dept.shef.ac.uk/reports/cics-annual-report-2009.pdfWelcome to the 2009 CiCS Annual Report. I hope you ﬁnd it both interesting and