Marc Dowd
Marc Dowd (Principal, European Client Advisory)

In the latest of our interviews with IT leaders from key sectors affected by the Coronavirus pandemic, Jason Oliver from the University of Sussex in the south of England is answering the questions. Our CIO Advisory practice makes every effort to learn from the experiences of a wide range of organisations, and as you will see from Jason’s answers the Higher Education sector is rapidly adopting the latest technologies.

Who are you, what organisation do you work for and what’s your role?

My name is Jason Oliver, I joined University of Sussex in September 2018 and my ‘role’ is very varied – and becoming more so each passing day. My job title is Director of IT, however that really not a great descriptor given that, alongside being the technology lead, I am also the sustainability lead, I am in the process of introducing an Enterprise Portfolio Management Office and I am also a Director of our Facilities Management company. On top of this I am also a Governor at my children’s primary school which is giving me plenty of non-official work too recently!

Since you joined the university, what do you think the biggest change has been in terms of how the organisation views technology (up until the pandemic)

I would say that we have developed more trust in the IT team and that has had a very positive effect in many ways. More work and projects have been commissioned over the past year than in the previous five put together. This means that the perception from the wider organisation is that we are delivering more. The team doing the work has not changed significantly but we have been able to articulate our business cases more effectively and thus have been able to bring about substantial improvements and modernise.

We have also structured the team to more succinctly capture and meet the needs of the wider organisation. This means that our customers (academics, researchers and students) feel that their voice can be more often heard now and we can more effectively give them what they actually want rather than what we think they want.

What improvements are you most proud of from your time in that role?

Actually the most important improvement is a really simple one (at least to the unknowing eye!). When I first joined I was told horror stories about how student submission periods (when students submit assessments, etc) had not run smoothly for several years – this was a huge stressor for our student community and had a detrimental impact on the feedback we received. We immediately applied a project mindset to the dates and planned all technical details down to the smallest items, considering all aspects of resiliency and continuity planning. Since I started we have not had any problems across the dozen or so submission periods and if our students can submit their work seamlessly then we are doing our job well.

From a more technical sense, I am hugely proud of the massive modernisation of the pedagogy. In just over a year we have introduced (and fully integrated) a new virtual learning environment, a video management system that allows the playback of lectures and a video conferencing platform. This has allowed us from a fairly traditional face-to-face approach to teaching into an institution that has fully synchronous online teaching ability. Given the recent pandemic this was obviously an extremely good time to have enabled this jump forward because it has limited what could have been a far more detrimental experience for our students.

What do you find surprises people about your organisation and how it uses tech?

I cannot really speak for others but what surprised me the most upon joining this sector as a whole is the risk aversion for utilising modern technology. In fairness, things are changing quickly across the sector but 18 months ago there was limited use of cloud (inc SaaS), large monolithic bespoke software applications were at the heart of many universities and there was limited concept of agile delivery.

We have responded at pace and are in the process of moving all our systems using a hybrid multi-cloud approach, we have placed micro-systems at the heart of the business and we are breaking up the legacy applications bit by bit. Automation, containerisation, bots and flexible working are all now de-facto elements of our day-to-day working lives – that would have seemed inconceivable just over a year ago.

How have you responded to the remote working challenge of the pandemic?

The first few weeks were manic. In early March only around 100 staff members were able to work from home effectively and this was through a legacy remote desktop connection. By the end of March, 22,000 staff and students had the full ability to work remotely. The IT and Technology Enhanced Learning teams stepped out of their everyday roles and we literally pulled together to create an online working capacity at pace. I have already mentioned the synchronous teaching elements above, but we also worked to review and update our security, our collaboration platforms, we moved key systems around rapidly and we introduced several new systems that would enable people to do their job no matter where they were. We pulled several hundred PCs out of cluster zones (hot desk PCs for students) and rebuilt them before shipping them out to staff and students at home who had a need. As I say, it was manic!

Once things had settled down a bit, focus shifted to stability and the future. How will we return to campus? How can we provide great student experiences when not on campus? How will we retain some of the great new ways of working that we had put in place once normality is restored? These are questions we are still working through but suffice to say we now respect new things. Meeting presence does not mean physical presence; the balance between work life and personal life has never been more critical;  you do not need to be onsite to do great work. These are things that we will carry through into whatever the new normal turns out to be!

Have you furloughed many IT staff – how did you manage that and how are you keeping those staff engaged?

Our department has furloughed only a small handful of people. These were primarily staff members who operated in face-to-face roles and were not able to continue after the lockdown commenced. Almost everybody else has been able to carry out their role, albeit in an amended fashion. Keeping all staff engaged, not only those furloughed, is a prime consideration and we are always looking for ways to improve it. Regular managerial calls, Zoom drop-in sessions, daily videos and weekly bulletins have all played a part in keeping people in touch with what is happening.

Will the effect of the pandemic change your priorities as an IT organisation?

It already has. We had a 5-year plan to modernise and move towards being more flexible in our delivery methods and that has been already pushed to the fore. Our sector, like most others, will experience great change as a result of the pandemic and the key for us will be to remain responsive to our students’ needs and adapt at pace to continually deliver the best services we can. The priorities for our institution have of course changed in the past three months but our vision remains the same – ‘A better University. For a better world’. (https://www.sussex.ac.uk/strategy/)

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