 Alright, why don't we go ahead and get started because we have a pretty busy agenda today. So thank you again for joining us. Welcome to the second day of the CNI spring 2022 member meetings virtual moderating through the sessions as we go through the day. Just a couple of quick notes on things. We are doing this as a zoom meeting rather than a webinar which means that you can see the other people at the, who are at the session. So you can chat with them as either with direct messages or to everybody as you wish. I invite you to comment on along, ask questions in the chat as we go. We will be having a quest, we will be taking questions at the end of each presentation time permitting. So, like I did yesterday, asked a couple of folks to share some brief reflections at the end of the day. Just a few comments on things they found particularly interesting or exciting or surprising so after the closing invited session with Marissa Parham. So you can look forward to a couple of those before we end the meeting. We will be having two short breaks one at two. One at daylight time and one at 330pm Eastern daylight time between the breaks. I'll just end one session and introduce I'll end one presentation and introduce the next at the appropriate time so we'll just flow right in during the break, we will leave the session running so you don't have to log out and log back in again. And that's about all the logistical stuff I want to say. So now let me get on to to the meeting itself. It is a very great pleasure for me to introduce Heidi Frazier Krause. Heidi has a really rich and varied career in academia in the UK and I invite you to look at her full bio. She came to just in late, late 2021 from the University of Sheffield. Before that she was at York York University for quite a long time and, among other things, had responsibility for research computing and for libraries at various times during her. And she was introduced into York. She takes up office at a very critical time where there's a lot of change going on in UK higher education and UK higher education as I think she'll at least touch on is quite different than in structure than than the US but does many of the same things and faces challenges. JISC has been a important partner to CNI for a quarter of a century now. I had the privilege of working closely with JISC leadership for many years and it's a great pleasure to now be able to work with Heidi and learn from her and gain insights into good ideas that we can bring to the United States from the UK. And Heidi's going to talk for about 20 minutes I think and then hopefully we'll have a few minutes to field a couple of questions. So, over to you Heidi, thank you so much for being with us. And I look forward to carrying your remarks. Thank you very much Cliff. Hello everybody and greetings from Manchester in the United Kingdom. It's about five o'clock here so I've done part of my day. Right, and JISC, I'm going to tell you a bit about the history of JISC where it's come from and what it's doing and where it's going about 20 minutes I'll skip through some of the slides very quickly because there's detail on them but I'm very happy to answer questions at the end. So first of all, why does JISC exist? It exists because it believes in technology for the good. It believes that education and research improve lives and that technology underpin that. So, when I decided I was going to apply for the JISC job, this mission and the principles that JISC underpins or has as underpinnings was really important to me. So this vision for the UK to be world leaders in technology for education and research, really important. That's one of the reasons I joined the organization. JISC has had an interesting history. So the organization has existed for about 40 years in various different forms. It started off with the Janet Network, which is our national research and education network. And then JISC got funding from a government body to fund activities that were going on in various universities across the UK. And there was all sorts of interest came out of that. So there were people who were interested in cyber. There were people who were interested in mapping and mapping data. There were people who were interested in digital skills, technologies to support people with special needs, etc. So JISC was a scattered body across the UK higher education sector with a sort of core body that funded these things. And in 2012, there was a review done that said we need JISC to be more coherent as an organization. And so all of those different services were brought into one. And that was, as you can imagine, fairly traumatic for the organization. It hadn't existed as one organization really before, but it was formed as a charity. And the Janet Network people Janet were brought in to JISC and an organization was formed. And I think I still see ripples of that fragmentation from back in 2012. We've also merged since with a number of other organizations, some of which may not be familiar to you, but some of which I'm sure you'll know the services they provide. For example, Edgyserv gives the Open Athens Trust and Identity Service and VerifyD. And chest is something we have in the UK, which is around negotiating for big software deals. So with the likes of Microsoft, Adobe, etc. And then the other ones are much more local to the UK. So HESA is the Higher Education Statistics Agency. And we brought in the commercial side of that data organization. And we're in very advanced discussions about bringing the rest of that data organization into JISC now. And then a little bit around about the same time we also brought in an organization who provide careers advice. And something called HED. So HED is an interesting service that's provided in to the UK but also internationally it's around degree verification, so higher education degree verification. And so we've got a very broad scope of things that we do. We also have a very interesting funders and owners model. So we are owned by the higher education and the further education sector in the UK so further education I think will be community colleges, you'd call it that. There are other representative bodies from UK higher education so something called Guild HE, which tends to be universities that are more practically focused. So for example drama or catering those sorts of professional types of activities and universities UK, which is a body would I would say represents the rest of universities. They're funded by what I can only describe as a patchwork of funders, lots of government funding coming in different slices from different organizations across the UK. And we do a strangely not all bodies in the UK serve the whole of the United Kingdom so by that I mean Northern Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales. You may think, Good Lord, the UK so small how can it had all of that fragmentation but I can assure you there are lots of people who see themselves as very, very different when they're in Wales or Scotland or Northern Ireland. Okay, and we serve the whole of just we do. Sorry, we serve the whole of the UK. Lots of all state funded universities are our members, the vast majority of colleges. We also supply supply services to schools to research institutes and other national institutions so for example we work closely with people like the British Library, research, such a government research bodies diamond light source, etc. And we also work very closely the UK has a number of national sector bodies we call them. So, Advance HE is around staff developments in higher education and governance, etc. also does gender equality, etc. UCAS is our admission service into university so we have a centralized admission service in the UK. And the NCSC is the National Cyber Security Center and you can imagine we work fairly closely with them too. There's statistics there in terms of number of staff, research members, etc. And there's our income in pounds and I'll go into a little bit more detail there. So in terms of our income, as I've already mentioned we get money from UK funding bodies. We also get a lot of income from digital resources licensing, but that's mainly passed through in that we will do a deal on behalf of the sector, the higher education sector as well, for example, Elsevier materials and we will do the deal we'll pay Elsevier and the sector will pay us back for that. So just sort of overview there in terms of expenditure and infrastructure so by that we mean our national research and education network Janet and takes up the majority of our funding and that is also has a cyber offering as part of it and then you can see there's other bits and pieces. Just a few things I'll nip through around what we do the services we offer they're fairly broad. The thing we're best known for is our connectivity and the network I keep talking about Janet so that is a resilient, a very high capacity network that's used by all of higher and higher education, obviously the higher bandwidth used by the research institutions, we have about 18 million users, and lots of other statistics around that around how many pairings we have that's important to keep the UK well connected. Cyber security you won't be surprised to see on the list. We've done an awful lot of work around this space to protect the UK. We offer a number of services that come as part of our subscription, but we also offer paid for services that our members buy so for example penetration testing is something that we we offer and you can see there we've had a 40% increase in people asking us to do penetration test for them. And we've also launched something we call a managed seem so security incident event management service. And so we're moving more and more into that territory of offering services in partnership with commercial organizations. Licensing again is another area of you said just everybody would know what we were talking about here and so we do those those big negotiations around content so scholarly content, but also again moving more and more into software now customers are saying you know we're looking for you to to get involved with those big deals and one of the things that's been quite interesting recently that we've done deals on is around virtual reality packages augmented reality for teaching and learning purposes and for research to a degree but mainly for teaching purposes. And we save the sector a lot of money and by doing those deals and more or less all institutions participate in our agreements. We're heavily involved in open research. This is something that our funder research England is particularly keen on around open science. The negotiations that we've been doing more recently with Elsevier and have had an open access component to them very firmly in there and you'll see that we are fairly well ahead in the UK with open access to content when we've finished the Elsevier deal we reckon will be up around the 80% mark, which is considerably ahead of others. We're interested in not just scholarly content, but also metadata algorithms code software the whole nine yards and to support that open research agenda, which we know is very important. And we also do some work around data analytics we have a data analytics service, which we have been running in about 20 institutions we call it learning analytics. And that's a topic that's discussed over in the in the States, and this thing that Heidi plus that is actually nothing to do with me. That is actually a product that he said the higher education statistics agency offer. And that's basically it's a very interesting business business model we have in the UK. Institutions have to be members of he said, and they have to give them their data to receive government funding. And what he said does is packages that up and sells it back. And so it's quite an interesting business model it's a bit like the the academic publishing model, and there. It means that universities can get data, and about all sorts of things so who's on, you know, not not down to individual level but numbers of people on courses they can benchmark against other institutions they can look at the size of the market for courses, etc. And there's a couple of other things I won't touch on for a value of time but they're around data provision of data. In the cloud, we also offer cloud services, and we offer consultancy, we have a member of the Oprah famous which is something that happens in the in the in Europe. It's a deal basically with Amazon Web Services and others and lots of institutions have taken us upon that on a saving considerable amounts of money. We are supporting members in moving things to the cloud. And that's been a slow burn in the UK maybe the pandemic will have accelerated some of that but not everybody is there on that one yet and we will be working more on that in future. We also offer services, and so open Athens I've already mentioned, and we run the UK access management federation based on shibboleth, which I'm pretty sure you'd be familiar with in in the US. And then, again, we do things on behalf of the sector. We do savings for certificates for for the internet type of security certificate piece. We do on bulk and support universities with that, and we also do you'll see there about bogus universities. We also do work around, you know, what is a university what is a valid university and help spot those who are selling on bogus degrees basically so quite an interesting and very broad range of things. I'll skip on because I know time is is is marching on. We do some work with students were mainly a B2B business but we also have some B2C things. And so we do a digital experience survey for students and digital experience insight survey. We did check this figure of 74 million views of that in in 1920. The reason it got so many views is it because it went in one of our tabloid newspapers with some of the results around that. And so it was the Daily Mail and for those of you know what that is. And that got an awful lot of views on the survey. We also have a range of tools. So building digital capability is something that is for an individual to be able to look at their digital skills, and you get a rating and then sign points signpost to resources to help you improve your digital capabilities. So that's used quite heavily across the UK. And then prospects there is a job board that we run. So we really do have a very, very broad range of things. Content and discovery just owns some content and also helps people access some content so for the librarians in the group you'll see we help people access content. So Archives Hub is another thing that we support so institutions are able to put their archive content in our hub, and it's therefore searchable by other people. So it's a sort of federated access piece. And then just along there you see FE is further education and we've been doing work around giving access to content, ebook content for our further education colleagues. So lots and lots of things in that space. And we do some value, we have to make sure we are value for money, and we do a number of value for money studies. So there's just one that I wanted to show you here, which is the University of Cardiff for those of you who don't know about the University of Cardiff it's a large research intensive university the biggest one in Wales about 30,000 students. We looked at the money that we saved them. So we looked at two particular areas, a one on this one actually, and we looked at connectivity, and how much just saved Cardiff by doing what it did and you can see there's substantial savings and cost avoidance. I don't think I've got the slide in here. No, there is a slide around how much we saved Cardiff on content as well, and it was millions of pounds over over numbers of years. So just skipping on to what my focus is over the next 12 months for JISC. So obviously the networks very important we will be and continuing to invest and re architect that, making sure that it meets the needs of the research community that we really depend on. We have a very good uptime for Janet so it's 99.97 is our uptime and people expect that they expect that level of service and resilience and we have to keep going with that one. We're also looking at other things that are coming down the track so supporting 5G and how that might help campuses with access for speeds but also looking at whether they can move from having you know a wireless infrastructure in campus to moving to 5G but all sorts of other things around that. And then as I've already mentioned managed services for members in partnership with commercial organizations. More on cyber you won't be surprised to see me saying that. One of the things I'm working with is on institutions at a more senior level with traditionally just dealt with not just dealt but with dealt with librarian and CIO. I'm going the next level up and the level above that so I'm looking at what we call chief operating officer and vice chancellor level to really get them on board around what needs to happen around cybersecurity. We've had a number of incidents in the UK around cyber and lots of the things need to be owned at executive team level board level. And so one of the things I've been doing is engaging at that level and just bringing across the importance of vice chancellor and chief operating officer ownership of that as a risk. Data I've already mentioned we're in advanced discussions with he said that won't be much to you and neither will you size and maybe, but what we are doing with so you size or our equivalent of edge of course in the UK. We're working with them on student record systems. I'm sure you have issues without over in the States. We've got a very legacy systems in the UK, lots of problems around that and we're working with you size to understand what our members need in that and also what just can do in that space. And then looking at tackling and essay mills so the government in the UK is set to make essay mills illegal and just will play a part in blocking them. It's a it's been become a big problem, particularly of the pandemic. And AI, we're going to be working on and we see great potential in AI but we're also very keen to make sure that what we do there is ethical. Other thing UK focused lifelong learning. And so again, the UK government is putting quite a lot of money into post university education or even people who've not had so people who can do learning along the whole of their lifetime from school onward. And obviously to be able to do that you've got to be able to have you have a sort of way of managing the identity of people so what courses have they actually taken. And the UK government promised money behind that how do you track the money so we've been working on where we can play a part in that. We're also working on a project around sharing research and in a different way to doing scholarly publication. And so again, this is something that we've been encouraged to do by one of our funders is to look at that model of how research findings, or how the research process is is managed. And, and you know, at the moment you know you release an article, a journal scholarly journal, but there are other ways of doing that and we're working on a project called project octopus. Which is in its early stages. And then the last thing you won't be surprised to hear is my focus is around looking at our sustainability and our carbon. I had hoped that there would be things I could draw on already to advise members on, for example, you know, is it less carbon for us all to do video conferencing calls and travel into the office. How much embedded carbon is there in devices, you know, we send a lot of track traffic down networks we store a lot of images we store a lot of data how much is that all costing carbon. I haven't been able to find anything. I went to our research funding bodies and asked them if they'd got anything so we've commissioned some research, which I'm sure we'll pull together things that are already available but then we'll send our members around to the carbon piece. And that is it, I will stop sharing so you can ask me any questions and I can see some faces. Thank you so much for that whirlwind tour through whistle stop. I'm always astounded by how many things just is doing. And also, the way you do it across the entire higher ed sector, which is something that is, you know, aside from internet to there's not all that much that goes across the entire higher sector in the in the US. Please. Let me open this up for for questions from from those in attendance. I will note Heidi that we did have an early presentation on octopus. In our earlier meetings and our following. I think we're following we're all following that with great interest. Well the team interesting enough the team that are working on octopus are in the office I've been today they've all been had a screen up with lots of code and been going through so that the project is definitely progressing. Great. Questions for Heidi. Thank you for that one so I can tell you much more than I've already told you. Other than the project is now, you know, code has been cut. There are minimal minimum viable products being developed users are being engaged with our members are being engaged with, and I can get more information. You probably know more than me. We just put the link to the presentation from December in the in the chat for Irene. Other questions for Heidi. I guess. Well, while I'm while I'm waiting for people. I have one. I was very interested to hear about the growing commitment to cybersecurity services incident response and other kinds of things. I'm wondering if one of the challenges we have in the States is that talent in this area, especially technical talent is quite scarce and quite expensive. Are you finding this kind of service delivery model a good, a good way to help your members get some leverage on that. Yeah, so it's an interesting question. So yes, one of the reasons that we are looking at that partnership model with third parties is that skills and resource piece. But I think it's also because I think we probably accept that we're not that good at running large scale services and we need partners to help us with that. But in terms of talent, we're in the same position as you, we've had the great resignation as well, and the whole of the UK has. And everybody is struggling for people with the cyber skills. We've not done too badly in just we've just had a new round of recruitment for more junior staff and we've now got a full compliment, and we also have a grad scheme and an apprenticeship in this space so that our focus is definitely around grow your own but also keep the people that we've got. We did have a number of people get pinched by some of our suppliers actually. So yeah it's a challenge. Perhaps one more question for Heidi bamboozled you all with my slides. I think there's so much in there. I hope you'll share those slides so that we can make them available by the way. All right, well I will. I will thank you I know it's late there. I very much appreciate you joining us. I hope at some point, you can come and be with us in person. And I look forward actually to seeing you in person and catching up sometime in the not too distant future pandemic willing. Thank you very much. Enjoy the rest of your meeting. Bye bye. Thank you.