September 2015

 Work

The last month has seen lots of projects all coming together, a sort of collision of some starting and some finishing at the same time…a little dangerous but in the end when is there a better time to do it?

This is all coupled with students returning and I’m reminded yet again what a great place UAL is. Its wonderful to work in such a large arts institution, UAL has over 19k undergraduate students, about 3k post graduate students and 25k short course participants, spread over 14 sites, its certainly big enough to keep me occupied for a few years.

 

UAL Kings Cross Site

This coming year is going to be transformative for ‘the digital’ at UAL, I need to bring many disparate ‘silo’ groups together and get them to work together. I advocate the use of something called participation – reification which is from Wenger. The description is;

‘The Participation-Reification duality is concerned with meaning. Meaning is created through participation and active involvement in some practice. Reification is a way of making an abstract and concise representation of what is often a complex and frequently messy practice, thus making it easier to share within the community’

 Its all about building commonality within communities of practice, that’s all, sounds simple but difficult to do and this will be my biggest challenge of the coming year.

There is a clear necessity for the role I carry out at UAL to become much more than just looking after IT. I see my role as primarily enabling the use of Digital Technology throughout the University, this of course extends into Learning & Teaching. I do firmly believe that this is the role I need to perform for the University, its key to move beyond the narrow structures and processes that encumber IT in a University setting and be a key enable of all activities within the University.

My Slide for Change

We are bringing to an end some of the long running university wide programs over the next couple of months, namely, desktop refresh which will go business as usual (BAU), universal printing (BAU), polices and encryption, new Wi-Fi and MS 365. We have also released stage 1 of a University app, to date we have seen around 1500 downloads and the word is getting out about the app.

 

UAL Student App

Some new programs are starting the biggest one and one I’m co-sponsoring is the Online Estate Program(OEP) which will take some years to finish but at least we have the first Million pounds of funding to get things up and running this year and complete some of the easier small projects along the way.  Essentially the OEP will look at all processes and try to move those processes into a more digital and streamlined configuration. We will also be adding new services as we go along. I’m also working on the digital strategy which is coming along slowly but we are making some progress.

We have just managed to get University agreement to move one of the data centres off-site which needed allot of persuasion but we got there in the end. Unfortunately the project is now about 6 weeks late but we will try to catch up and hopefully around December we will be able to move the kit over to the hosted Data Centre.

I also attended a sub-board for the Olympicoplis Programme namely the Operations, Facilities & Digital sub-board. It was really useful to meet the other partners coming together get the programme off the ground. I still can’t quite envision our building at the Olympic site being completed in five years time but we are assured that this will be the case. One statistic that struck me was the Westfield shopping center at the Olympic site had 50 million visits last year and the Park itself had 3.5 million visits a years…that’s allot of visits!

Roughly the UAL LCF Site

Over Boston

This month I attended a 4-day conference in Boston for the National Conference of Arts Administrators. Some very good presentations at the NCAA, allot to think about indeed some of the impressions I came away with…. that art & Design in some areas doesn’t seem to have moved on that much during the last 7 or so years, I was surprised that there was an almost total lack of discourse about the digital and the impact that’s having on all our students lives.

Home

I’ve been happy to have kept up swimming in the Royal Victoria Docks and I’m somewhat disappointed that the open water season is slowly drawing to an end, my last swim at the Royal Dock will probably occur in the next week or so, I may well transfer back to Brockwell lido until the weather gets too cold and the clocks change for the winter.

Royal Victoria Docks

I enjoyed running in the parks around Charles River in Boston, Boston is a city of runners and it was really encouraging to see so many younger people running, perhaps the students have twigged that mind & body are intertwined. I had a great customer experience at the Boston marathon shop, really good advice and even let me run up and down the street to see how some running shoes felt. Hopefully the recommended shoes will stop me from having so many foot & ankle problems.

My Corner of the Studio

The studio work is going OK, I need to focus on some changes and cotinine to build the portfolio of work, finding the time to consistently work in the studio is difficult but perhaps I need to adjust my time in the studio and find more time to work!

I was amazed that a house that needed allot of work opposite us went on sale for 600k and I was even more amazed that it sold in less than a week!...it did make us stop and think but I’m for staying put for another 3-5 years.

I’ve also been pleased that Norwich’s return to the premier league hasn’t (so far) been an utter disaster, they’ve done really well in the first few matches they just need to get 30+ points to ensure they stay up which will be a major achievement considering the squad they have.