A meeting of the Colleges' ICT Committee was held at 2.15 pm on Tuesday 25th January 2011 at OUCS. Dr Jo Ashbourn, the Chair of the Colleges' ICT Committee, chaired the meeting and the following members were present:
Stuart Lee reported that the proposals to accept the principle of a contribution of £8,700 for OUCS IT services per college which had been supported at the last CICTC meeting had subsequently been passed to the Estates Bursars' Committee (EBC) for consideration. EBC raised a number of objections including that colleges already contribute to central University services via the SSE agreement (Support Services Element of the JRAM) and that this could be seen as the first in an incremental series of service charges e.g. for Library services, administrative support etc. There is also apparently a decade-old agreement that colleges would not be expected to contribute to University infrastructure funding.
These issues will be discussed at the next EBC in 5th Week and the Vice-Chairman of the Conference of Colleges will be discussing the matter with the Vice-Chancellor shortly.
It was pointed out that OUCS receives no funding via the SSE which is used to support central research areas (not administration), but it was suggested that the scope of the agreement could be expanded to include OUCS.
Jonathan Marks and Ian Wild gave a presentation on the function and structure of BSP and specific areas of interest to and interaction with colleges. These include:
One possible future project could be an interface to the Business Insights Group Education Relationship software used by a number of colleges.
Following the decision by Oracle to phase out support for OSS by 2013, supplier documentation has been sent to two shortlisted companies and demonstration/testing is planned to be done in March. The two packages concerned are SITS and Agresso, both of which are already in use in the HE sector.
Jonathan Ashton reported that the Information Security documents have been approved by PICT so the next task will be to develop specific policies for areas covered by the overall policy document. These documents relate to the handling of University data; colleges may wish to implement local policies to govern management of their own college-specific data although they will still need to abide by University standards for all University data.
The relationship between the University and the colleges was discussed at length, particularly the requirement for colleges to enforce the University Information Security policy with their own non-University staff.
Simon Thomson gave an update on progress since the discussions at the last CICTC meeting. In the absence of hard data on the potential costs of moving to VoIP, a survey template has been produced which will be circulated to all colleges shortly and which should allow the -collation of more detailed information on the potential total costs of installing a duplicate network infrastructure to support the proposed OUTN VoIP implementation.
The equivalent VoIP rollout at Cambridge used existing network infrastructure without any major problems, however use of this method might lead to upgrade costs to existing network equipment in some colleges at Oxford. In those cases the move to VoIP could be considered as a business case for a network upgrade programme.
There was also some discussion on the potential future direction of telecommunications technologies with respect to the possible decline in dedicated telephone equipment and future universal provision of wireless.
