How CIO Simon Harrison is positioning Kingston University as the place to be for tech-savvy students
Kingston CIO Harrison has turned to VDI, analytics and a fresh approach to funding to keep up with growing demands from students
A recent VMware study found that one-fifth of university CIOs believe they don't think their institution is meeting student demands on IT, but one CIO who believes this couldn't be further from the truth - at least where he works - is Kingston University's Simon Harrison.
He was shocked to find that a fairly significant number of IT leaders felt their institutions weren't meeting the needs of IT. "[Nowadays] you typically get students who are very IT savvy, and if you don't meet their basic expectations you are on the back-foot to start with," he says.
But this hasn't always been the case at the university.
Since becoming CIO 18 months ago, he says, "I have been allowed to set my stall out and ensure that IT is used a lot more strategically within the organisation, and we are now growing as a valued partner".
Much of this change in the way the IT department is now perceived was the result of a major restructuring programme, where all aspects of IT were pulled into the IT department.
"Previously, 60 per cent was housed in the IT department, and 40 per cent was housed in various other departments. Now it has all been pulled into my organisational unit. That's key as it has enabled us to get control from a business-continuity point of view, but also ensures that the most technical people in our organisation understand how they impact everything we do," says Harrison.
The main aim, he adds, is a culture shift from thinking about managing users to providing a service to users.
Changes had been put in place before Harrison became CIO at the University. It realised that it was falling behind in IT and, three years ago, the vice chancellor backed IT department plans to refresh its infrastructure. This included a new wide-area network from Alcatel, which involved rolling out 3,500 wireless access points with 10 gigabit (Gb) internet connectivity to enable Wi-Fi access across all campuses. Laptops, PCs and tablets were also refreshed, as were the University's audio-visual tools.
Virtual foundations
This was the foundation on which Harrison was able to build on. One of the key things he wanted to do was to reduce the number of vendors the university was engaged with and work with a smaller number of 'strategic vendors'.
One of the vendors it chose to work with was VMware, which it selected ahead of rival Citrix. "We looked at Citrix as a strategic vendor but VMware was more aligned with us and where we wanted to go with the desktop. [We wanted a] hybrid model and VMware had a very good story to tell in that space. Citrix had great technology, but is focused on the virtual desktop - not really focused on the physical desktop environment," Harrison explains.
Kingston University uses VMware in its data centre.
"We had a lot of physical servers previously, and we were also using a number of hypervisors and, effectively, we are moving from most of our physical to virtual environment of VMware - indeed we were consolidating on to VMware for all of our hypervisors," says Harrison.
The university is using two core technologies from VMware Horizon. One of which is Mirage, which has been deployed across 7,000 desktops, supported by Atlantis Computing's storage acceleration software, and the other is VMware view for virtual desktops.
Previously, the organisation had used Quest Software's (now owned by Dell) vWorkspace to enable users to access specialist apps, but the software struggled to access hi-tech graphic applications, such as SolidWorks, Rhino and other CAD applications crucial for students in design-oriented disciplines. Instead, the IT department had to dedicate specific PCs for these specialist apps.
Now, using VMware view, the university can deploy a VDI environment not just for apps like Microsoft Office, but also for 600 other teaching apps.
"They can access everything from 3D apps to virtual learning environments specific to their university course from any device and in any location," says Harrison.
Retaining students using analytics
Kingston University is one of many universities that is ramping up its use of analytics, and one of the main ways it uses insight it gleans from data is to retain students.
Harrison explains that because students who drop out of courses cause universities to lose out on fees, they are trying to find new ways to ensure students stay on the course.
"It's about intervening early enough to help them solve any problems before it becomes so much of a problem that they have to leave. So a lot of that is being driven out of analytics - and there are simple [datasets that could be analysed] such as turning up to lectures, all the way to more complicated [datasets] such as what systems they log on to and what they actually do - and being able to spot trends on whether they are engaging in an appropriate level or whether they are drifting away from the University," says Harrison.
But as the University of Derby's IT director, Neil Williams, told Computing earlier this year, analytics is creating a host of new issues for universities as they attempt to balance the need to understand their students better, with their students' privacy.
Harrison agrees. "There are all sorts of ethical issues, let alone legal issues on how you look at this information, and it is really important to ensure that anyone who does this [analysis] has all of this in mind," he states.
University challenge
Eighty-nine per cent of the 100 IT leaders and 50 department heads in UK universities said that they needed more investment in IT infrastructure. To Harrison, this is no surprise. It is typical for CIOs across all industries to want more money and resources, he says.
But in universities, he adds, there are no long-term funding plans, as funding is usually only planned on an annual basis. "This brings with it certain challenges in terms of how you're able to plan and maintain infrastructure or indeed anything else," he says.
Harrison agrees with Williams but says that universities are now changing the way they work.
He is keen to work with Kingston University's new chief financial officer to get funding for IT to be put on a long-term basis, such as a five-year cycle - similar to what Williams had been given at the University of Derby.
Harrison believes universities are becoming more customer focused, particularly as students are paying significantly more to attend university than ever before. "They are putting different demands on us and asking for lots of things: quality of teaching, the physical estate, and the quality of IT."
This has led finance departments to brainstorm new ways of freeing money to the organisation and sharing it out appropriately.
"There are a lot of debates [in universities] and this is breaking down the traditional ways of funding, and multi-year funding programmes are starting to become more prevalent," says Harrison.
He adds that universities have only a finite amount of money invested in educational resources, salaries, building upgrades and IT, among many other things.
"Some of the investment is obvious when things break or don't work, but when you want to include new [technologies] and opportunities, that's where you need to put more of a strategic case forward to get people excited about what you want to do and show them the arts of the possible," he states.