 OK, on to our next two speakers, then, who are both from within the academic sector, so we're kind of changing, slightly changing direction now, and our first speaker is Christine Sexton, who has got quite a long job title, Director of Corporate Information and Computing Services. I'd like to just say Director of Computing Services, to be honest, at the University of Sheffield. She's also currently Chair of UCISR, which is kind of the club for computer centre directors. Again, that's not exactly what it stands for, but you get the general idea. And I think that positions are very well to speak from a sort of corporate IT services position on the role of mobile and the potential future impact of mobile, so over to Christine. The size of AND described as a club, that's really good. So I think Paul did a fantastic job of setting the scene there, and had a very big picture and a very forward-looking view, and I'm afraid I'm going to probably bring you all back down to earth a bit now, because what I'm going to talk about, although the title says the role of University of Computing Services, I think what I'm going to talk about more are the issues facing University of Computing Services with this advent of mobile technology. I apologize at the beginning. I'm probably going to come up with a lot more questions than answers, so if you think I'm going to actually tell you how to do things, you're probably wrong. And I will talk a little bit about some of the stuff we've done in Sheffield. I'm telling you that because it's right and I think that's the right way to go. I'm just using it as a bit of an example of some of the things we've done. So I'm going to give you a little bit of background about some of the strategies we have in Sheffield and then move on to what I see the issues are facing the sector with this advancing mobile technology. So AND said, I had a long job title, Corporate Information and Computing Services. It's shortened in Sheffield to kicks. That's mainly because we get a good kicking when anything goes wrong. And the title's been with us for 15 years and it seems to fit and we just call ourselves kicks. We cover all of CNIT technology, including telephony, which I think is really important. And if any of you are out there looking after IT departments that don't manage telephony, I would say this is the time you need to go and make a grab for it for whoever's managing it at the moment. We've had a technical strategy for years that's been web-based based on supporting multiple platforms and browsers using open standards wherever we can. We recently revised the IT strategy and wrote a new one where we put it much more to look at the needs of the user, to meet the needs of the user rather than the needs of the IT department. So just because things were easy to do for us didn't mean to say we ought to do them. We ought to do things that made things easier for the user because we know users are choosing how, when and where they access services and on what device. So we wanted to make the user experience seamless by having common interfaces into everything and all that complex stuff underneath that goes on at the technical level we wanted to be hidden. Carrying on our view of using open standards and evaluating open source wherever possible and we really wanted to take advantage of new technologies. I perhaps ought to say at this point Paul introduced himself by saying he wasn't an educationalist, I'm not a technologist. I haven't any IT background other than working as an IT director for 15 years. So the technology is not quite beyond me, but I'm more interested in the services that we offer rather than the technology that delivers them. The sort of strap line to my talk was we don't support that. And there was a reason for that because I think that was something we used to be able to say. No, we don't support that. We provided the hardware, we provided the applications, the software and we said what people could and couldn't use. I remember when I first came and sat at my desk somebody said to me, we don't support Max in this department. And I think my comment at that time was, I think you'll find you do now. Mobile phones, we tended to have one recommended device. We didn't have any issues with browsers because there was only one really. So we used to be able to say we don't support that. Things have changed. Things have got a lot fuzzier and things are slightly more out of control. We don't own the hardware anymore. We certainly don't own the students' hardware. We tend not to own the staff's hardware either. We don't own the software and we don't control access to software. And when I say stuff can go anywhere, if you're a lecturer and you've got a video, you want to make a video, you don't need to hire our television studio to do it anymore. You get a little flip camera out in the pocket and do it. And you don't have to go through a very complex procedure of putting it onto our video media streaming service. You put it on YouTube. So stuff can go anywhere. And we are having to deal with multiple browsers, multiple operating systems and multiple devices. I just want to show you a quote. Some of you may remember this report. It came out last year. I thought it was an excellent report. It was Higher Education, a web 2.0 world, a committee of inquiry into the changing learner experience. And in one of their conclusions, now this was talking about the social web, but I think it could apply to anything. They actually said as their conclusion, the means of access in the future will be multimedia, mobile and pocket-sized. And I think that's true. And we have a generation of students. They've been called all sorts of things. They were called digital natives. They were called the net generation. I don't think it matters what you call them. But they have grown up with the internet. They have grown up with always being connected. They say you can tell one of these students because they don't use the word digital. They have a camera. They don't have a digital camera. And you could ever try to explain the concept of what I think of as an ordinary camera to them. It's a bit like, you remember that smash advert when you have those aliens who used to fall about laughing and you peel the potatoes and they laugh. You try telling somebody that you have to open the back of a camera and put a film in it and then send it away to be developed and you can only take 26 pictures. We reckon that at the University of Sheffield we've got about 98% mobile ownership of which 30% are smartphones. 95% are laptop ownership. They have a different mindset. They are used to always being connected. And the question, where do I get the internet, relates to what students were saying to us last year when they arrived, when students arrived freshers week. We send them off to get their computer account. And they used to come in and say, is this where I get my computer account? Is this where I get my email address? And they don't anymore. They walk in and say, where do I get the internet? Because that's all they need. They've got a laptop and they just need the internet or they've got a smartphone. And they have no concept of software. They use their laptop, their internet access to get everything. To email their friends, to talk to their friends, to buy things. And then we give them software when they arrive. But I have to say that doesn't always apply to staff. And I do think we have to remember that. We actually have quite a big digital divide, I think, between what our students are used to and what our staff are comfortable with. We have some very, very innovative staff who are very comfortable with these technologies. But as was mentioned earlier, it doesn't necessarily apply to all of them. And you can see why the students like that. Now, I didn't know whether to use this slide or not, because Paul talked about the internet of things. And I used this slide in a presentation a few weeks ago when I was talking to non-IT people about some of the developments in connectivity. And I was particularly taken. These are all, you can see what they are, iPads and iPhones and the Wii restaurant table in London that projects the menu onto the table and you point to what you want and the picture changes to show you what it will look like. I was particularly taken with things that you can buy now. This is a set of Wi-Fi enabled scales that you can buy of Amazon now. There's actually somebody in the audience that I know who has a set of these scales, so your task at lunchtime is to find out who it is. So these scales, you get on them and they use your Wi-Fi connection to send your weight to a server so you can track your weight on your phone. Now, it won't be long before this, which is an internet-enabled fridge that you can buy at the moment, I think. Your phone will send a message to that fridge when you try and open it. No chocolate, you can only have the lettuce. Okay, so going on to the sort of issues that I think we have in IT departments. And these are just some of the things I'm going to cover. What services do we deliver and how do we do it? Licensing infrastructure, you can see the things on there that I'm going to go through and I'm going to talk more about some than others. So how do we deliver services? Well, there are two sorts of device, or there were two sorts of device. There were laptops on the smartphones. We've now got this thing in the middle, things like the iPads and the tablets. I think if you're talking about laptops, I firmly believe the way to go is the web, internet. You have to use the web for delivering services. That's a picture of our website, by the way, 15 years ago, which I thought was very minimalist. You are talking then about things like single sign-on, things like portals and what I call exposed functionality, which is little widgets of functionality that you can do things with on a mobile device that doesn't mean you're having to log into the full application. So you might want to use your mobile phone to book some holiday. You don't necessarily want to open SAP, if any of you run SAP, you know what I mean, on your mobile phone, but you just want that little widget of functionality. You might want to use Think Client to deliver applications, particularly teaching applications, for which there is no other way of delivering them. And you want definitely to look at standards, things like SOA and WOA. And that's where I say, please don't ask me any questions about those, because I won't necessarily be able to answer them. However, you've then got phones, particularly smartphones, and you have got several different ways of delivering services to smartphones. You can use very simple technologies such as SMS. Paul mentioned how many students and people are still using text. People still do use text. And you can use SMS for alerts, for emergency notifications and things. And you can use mobile web for many, many things. You might want to think about using native apps for what I call cool stuff, stuff where you want to actually make use of the functionality inherent in that device. We've done that at Sheffield, but I'll just give you a quick run through something we've done. But you do have a trade-off there, which is a quality of experience against the breadth of the audience you reach. So a web application will reach everybody who's got an internet-enabled smartphone. If you're going to develop a native app, then it has to actually run on iPhone or Android and all the other operating systems, or you are actually only reaching a small proportion of your audience. We developed an app in conjunction with colleagues. It was developed by a company called Ombiel, who I know are here today, called Campus M. Some of you have seen it. Some of you will be doing similar stuff, where we were looking at how we could use the functionality actually of the iPhone, and particularly location-based functionality, which it is at the moment difficult to get in web apps. So you can see the menu there, the location-based functionality. We've got things like student computing rooms. You can find your nearest computer room, and you can see how many free PCs there are in each one. It'll show you where it is on a campus map. You can find your nearest one. Obviously, when I took the screenshot of that, I was in Sheffield. It would be interesting to see what it said now. And you can look at them on the campus map and in Google Maps, and you can find ways to them. We can put information from a student record system and give link it to the timetabling system and link it to the room booking system so a student can get a personalised timetable on their phone. You can turn the phone round and you can get a different view of that timetable, and you can click on one of the lectures and you can actually get detailed information about that lecture down to the fact of who's giving it and where that lecture is. You can get some quick wins doing that. That app was developed by Enbyl for us in about six weeks. It's a lot quicker than we could have developed web services to do the same thing. And you can adapt apps to do different things. For the conference, the management conference in New Sizer, we had an iPhone app that actually gave delegates information about the conference, including things like the conference guide. So that's just a few examples of how I think you can deliver services using mobile technology. There are some issues, though, licensing. By the way, these pictures, if you're wondering where I've got all these pictures, I'm getting so nervous about copyright. Certainly since we've now got a digital economy act, and I used to shamelessly take screen grabs of things, and now I've decided that, really, I only ought to use my own photos. So I have great fun trawling through them to find appropriate pictures and what better to illustrate licensing than a pub in Galway Town Centre. There are issues with licensing with applications, particularly where you have site licences that might say that you are covered to use this particular piece of software on staff machines and on student PCs on campus. And the minute you make those applications available through Think Client or through the web to a student-owned laptop, you could find you run into very serious licensing issues. So I'm merely pointing that out as something you will want to think about and talk to your software suppliers about. Now, it was interesting that the very last question to Paul was about infrastructure. Infrastructure is something we really do need to think about. Particularly wireless infrastructures. We provide space for students to sit down and open their laptops and connect to the wireless network, and we provide power sockets for them to plug their laptops into. We obviously apparently also supply cities for them to put their feet on and footstools to put their lunch on. And then you get students who walk into the building with their smartphones, which have a wireless connection in which you connect, and you might find that a building that was designed and built three years ago suddenly can't cope with a number of connections. And that's certainly something we've discovered. These photographs are taken in our information commons, which opened three years ago, and we're this summer going to completely put in a new wireless network to cope with the number of connections that we need to have. And if you are going to offer services like the app I showed earlier, the Campus M, you really need wireless coverage over your whole campus. Because although things like smartphones have got 3G, we found that 30% of the students who downloaded that iPhone app downloaded it onto iPod Touches, which rely on wireless. So think about your infrastructure. Is it good enough? This is a picture for people in the audience who like the red arrows. How mobile is mobile? We have an issue obviously with mobility of people being expected to access things in this country, and we can make things easier for them. We can, for example, run edgy-roam, the roaming network is our wireless network. I'm still amazed by how many universities don't. I really think we should be looking at that and wondering why they don't. But we've all got senior staff who jet off overseas and expect everything still to work for the same price that it's working in this country. So a member of staff who's been used to having their BlackBerry, their iPhone, accessing their emails and their calendar at the university gets on a plane, goes to some carflung place and expects exactly the same connectivity and gets worried and actually rings me normally when it doesn't work and we contact our supplier who says we have no arrangement for data in Lebanon. What happened recently? No, I'm sorry, it won't work. Or they jet off somewhere else and they use the phone exactly the same way they would have used it in the UK. And two days into their trip, their phone is disconnected because the supplier has realised they've just run up £2,000 worth of data bills because they have not realised how much data is going to actually cost when they go abroad. So these are things that you really need to think about and you need to talk to your suppliers and you need to have arrangements with them and you need to look at what arrangements you've got for packages of data and for data access overseas. 24x7 is obviously an issue. People expect to be able to get their stuff 24x7 so you've got the whole issue of user expectations. You've got staffing issues. How do we do that? How do we provide staff? Do we have staff on call? Do we pay them extra? I think wherever possible you have to build services that are resilient and robust and will last 24x7 and that affects your SLAs and obviously there are cost implications. There may be a tension between providing 24x7 services and what we're being told to do on the other hand which is reduce our energy bills and our carbon footprint. We were told by our auditors recently that we should turn all our servers off overnight if they weren't being used. Just a couple of issues about data. Data security. Data is less secure on mobile devices. You have got this information security triangle for those of you who are into information security of confidentiality, availability and integrity and you tend not to be able to get all three and the issue with mobiles is you've got massively increased availability which tends to compromise things like confidentiality and integrity. A lot of it is down to risk and you know what the risks are and managing that risk and educating your users. Many security risks with mobiles are down to poor operating practices lost due to theft, equipment failure, etc. You really do need to educate people that it might be all right to download a couple of student records onto their laptop but not the whole database. A link to that is an issue of data synchronisation. Some of the red arrows picture. They're called the synchro pair by the way. They're the two mad pilots who fly out and then pass each other at several hundred miles an hour by a couple of metres. The data synchronisation is an issue. If you're accessing services and systems on multiple devices, calendars is a really good example of that. If you want to update your calendar on your mobile phone and you want somebody in the office to update the same calendar on their PC and you on yours and you do have synchronisation issues and there's also issues with the way mobile devices sync data whether they're pushing it or pulling it because that can have huge implications for cost for your data plans and for battery life. We have users accessing services where they see one view of their data and that's where I think we do have to think about cloud computing and is that really the way we want to go. There are two big suppliers pushing cloud computing at us for free for now and I think that might be something we want to consider. So in terms of support how do we support this because that's what we're in the business of is providing support and I think there are four models. A bit over the last few weeks to colleagues in Gartner the consulting company about this and there are four possible support models. The first one is very control-orientated. You own the device. The institution owns the device. It owns the apps. It specifies what people can have and it's fully supported. Here you are. Here's the blackberry. It has everything on it you want to do. Don't change anything. You can access these services and if it breaks we'll fix it for you. It might go down well with some people but not many. You've then got much more of a choice-orientated support model where the goal is much more user satisfaction and the user chooses the device. You might give them a choice. You might give them three or four to choose but they choose something. The emphasis here is on protocols and how you deliver services. There might be fewer services and they might get less support but it's much more choice-orientated. It's an innovation model where you sort of empower your users to innovate and you give them very little direct support but you advise them. You might even influence them but you basically say go out there and see if you can make things work and they might advise you as well if they can get things to work on different devices. The last one is sort of hands-off where you take as little responsibility as possible security and control as zero things might work, they might not. Now, there are four models of providing support there and what you've got to do really is get the balance right and you might say we'll choose a support model depending on job roles so students might get one support model senior staff might get another other staff might get another. I don't actually think that's right. I think it depends much more on the type of person and some members of staff would be very happy with a control model where you give them a device or anything, it'll get your email it'll get your calendar, it'll work. Some would be very unhappy with that and I think really you've got to tailor this model to individuals. I don't think we'll ever in a university have a completely homogenous environment so going back to my opening statement which was we don't support that I just don't think we can say that anymore we have to support things we can use the models I've just mentioned we can encourage self support we can set up wickeys so that people who found solutions to problems can put that information where people can find it I think we should always allow somebody to ask a question we should always allow somebody to phone our help to ask a walk in and say do you know how I can do this we might have to ration support we might have to sometimes say we'll do this on a best endeavours basis but I really don't think we can say anymore that we can't support that we'll just bring things down a little bit I think it'd be very difficult for me to go finish this talk without actually mentioning money I think it's fair to say the financial situation in higher education is not looking too bright and it may be about to get a lot worse everything I've talked about supporting multiple devices browsers etc you might actually ask the question can we afford that isn't it actually cheaper just to have one simple support model I'd be tempted to say I think the question you should be asking is can we afford not to and I think the answer is no I think if we are going to go to a really controlled model we're going to get seriously out of touch and left behind and I think we would have a loss of productivity and I really don't think it's the way to go in terms of the future this is garlic bread by the way there you go I can't think of any other picture we've talked about platform wars I think things are going to get worse and things are going to get increasingly more complex with more and controlled users and we're going to see the development of these devices and services that can bundle together Google, Nexus phone, the Android phone is already coming bundled with a lot of location based services in it so what do you need to do well I think you need to have strategies in place that cover all of these areas you ought to have them in place anyway to cover the rest of your working but you may need to think about how you encourage and support mobile working in your delivery strategy in your infrastructure strategy in your support strategy you need to build relationships with your suppliers and you need to think about security and to finish I really do think we need to carry on innovating I'm going to make a plea for this we have to carry on innovating if times are going to get hard I actually think it's going to be the only thing that gets us through it this is a quote from that report I showed you earlier young people are going to have likely a less and less trick than an HE system that cannot show itself to relate to the lives they are leading so I think we have to grasp these innovations it's a very difficult time I think there are big changes ahead and I think we in IT departments are actually well placed to help our institutions to get through them to see the ability to see change as an opportunity and not a threat so I think it's up to us to go out there and actually embrace this innovation and that's it, thank you