The University’s Core Systems programme is developing a set of technically-oriented sub-strategies for our central business IT services. These supporting strategies cover themes that apply across multiple projects and programmes. They are intended as guides for setting overall directions and helping each projects to work consistently within an overall framework. The sub-strategies are created and […]

Last month, I attended the Festival of HE Data at the University of Huddersfield.  This one-day event had a number of speakers in the morning and an afternoon session in which various Universities (including Edinburgh) and other services demonstrated some of their projects and services. “Data” is rather a broad topic and the emphasis of […]

As I mentioned previously, my main interest in the EDUCAUSE conference this year is to learn about new technologies which may impact higher education.  The sessions I chose for the second half the conference included presentations on nudge theory, the blockchain distributed ledger, and voice control interfaces Katherine Milkman, who gave the keynote presentation on […]

My main interest this year’s EDUCAUSE conference is to learn about how new technologies may impact higher education, whether that is through providing new features for students, or by making our services more efficient and reliable.  The sessions I chose on the first day covered AI-driven learning technologies, cloud-based infrastructure, and how to make best […]

Yesterday I attended a rather good workshop on the topic of enterprise architecture and digital transformation, which was organised by the architecture group of EDUCAUSE, the American society for IT in higher education. This topic is of obvious interest to me because we are running several digital transformation initiatives at the University of Edinburgh.  The […]

Last week, we were delighted to receive a visit from Rupert Frankum of Plymouth University.  Rupert was the technical manager for Plymouth’s project to replace their old student recruitment and admissions processes with a modern system based on a CRM platform  You can see a shorter presentation that Rupert and his colleague Paul Westmore gave […]

Some high schools in Edinburgh run work experience schemes, in which their senior pupils spend a week visiting companies or other organisations to learn what working life is like.  Last week, Applications Division joined in by hosting Ted Hilton from Boroughmuir High School.  We showed Ted a range of activities that contribute to the running […]

I spent an intense two days attending Gartner’s Enterprise Architecture Summit in London.  The event covered quite a range of topics; indeed, it is only now that I am looking back over my notes that I realise just how much ground was covered.  What follows is a brief overview of some key messages and highlights.