Bill Oliver Jisc 2006-20089 strategy

The Jisc mission statement is ‘To provide world-class leadership in innovative use of ICT to support education and research’

Bill explained that the fundamental idea behind enterprise architecture is that it seeks to align organisational structure and functions with ICT structure and functions.

He then explained that the Jisc saw innovation occurring through one of two ways:
A. Bottom up technology driven
B. Top-down demand driven (current dominant model)

The basic process was outlined in 6 stages with the current dominant design being top-down (B). Bill made the argument that there needs to be a lot more bottom up (A).

1. Organisational goals
2. Organisational strategy
3. Organisational product/service
4. Organisational capabilities (including capacities)
5. Organisational practices and processes
6. technology

Bill went on to address the issue of adoption and how change can be brought about. He recognised that in the past Jisc had not worked as closely as it needs to with the different communities. The aim of this is to help those communities map their domain and then identify what are the key prioritised problem areas.

The issue of adoption of innovation was also touched upon with a sharing of the familiar early adopter model. Lastly the need for organisations scenario planning, with institutions taking the Jisc models and frameworks and interpreting the for their own institutions was highlighted as a way forward.

For me, the key issue that wasn’t addressed in this presentation was that of risk and how that feeds into the complex mix of choice and decision making at all levels from individuals through to organisations and politicians.