A sharing approach

Monash University has spent $2 million on a range of software tools that will help the university make the transition to a shared services model, writes Beverley Head. As the name suggests, shared services in a university context refers to having a single but shared technology that runs across a range of locations. Instead of each school, faculty or administrative department running its own email system or computer help desk, this is set up centrally and offered as a shared service. There are often economies of scale to be unleashed by the approach, and also the opportunity to provide a more streamlined suite of IT services. However, it also requires fiercely autonomous faculties and schools to hand over their ICT responsibilities and budgets to a central shared services group, which can require delicate negotiation. Chris Bridge, Monash’s ICT shared services program director, says that his university – which has 55,000 student and 15,000 staff users of its computer systems – decided to move to a shared services model in order to “improve the quality of services, reduce risk, install better practices and improve efficiency”. Nine key shared service areas have been identified by the university: ICT asset management; change and release management; data centre and server management; desktop management; financial management; project and portfolio management; service desk; service level management; and vendor and contract management. Monash has a widespread ICT network with six campuses in Australia and other outposts in South Africa, Malaysia, the UK and Italy. The university is also migrating its data centre to a Fujitsu-owned, Melbourne-based data centre which it will share with RMIT and Melbourne University. Ultimately, it may be that universities, like the data centre, extend the shared service model outside their own walls. There could, for example, be economies of scale wrung from universities offering a common help desk. The idea has been explored already. Flinders and the University of South Australia, for example, engaged Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu to look into shared services opportunities – one of which was ICT – back in 2000. At this stage, however, Monash has its work cut out developing a shared services approach for just itself. The service desk function will be the first to move to the new model – it presently runs four separate help desk platforms which will now be compressed into one. BMC Software is supplying a range of tools which will help Monash make the transition. At the core of this is what BMC describes as “a fully integrated service management platform”, comprising the Atrium configuration management database; Atrium discovery and dependency mapping; Remedy IT service management suite; event and impact management; and proactive net performance management. Geoffrey Brown, director of faculty services at the University of Sydney, has spent the past four years migrating the university to a shared services model. Instead of dictating what it wanted, the university instead had Brown and his team play an evangelising role to encourage schools and faculties to make the move. At the same time, the university moved its main computing centre to a nearby data centre owned and operated by Global Switch, and has negotiated reciprocal disaster recovery services with Macquarie University. “This is a $1.4 billion a year business, but it’s not been managed at this level before,” says Brown. “We worked with those sections of the uni, such as the Faculty of Medicine, who were most ready and willing first. Those that didn’t want to do it we left to the end.” Brown notes that even the most recalcitrant have had to come to realise they never had complete autonomy with regard to ICT since they use the shared university network and centralised firewalls, among other things. Working with the early and enthusiastic adopters, Brown and his team performed analysis of the technology and support required, and in each case created a report outlining the transition. This was then presented to the department or faculty executive responsible for making the final decision on whether or not to move. Unlike some commercial organisations which have included a billing mechanism with shared services so that departments pay a fee for the service they select from the catalogue of services, the university of has instead applied an ICT levy across the university. But its not about moving everything to shared services. “We want to centralise what should be centralised, but localise what needs to be done locally – for example, service hubs,” says Brown. He is also planning to locate his team into the faculties so they can act more effectively as liaison officers between the university and the ICT group. Sydney is also embracing metrics in order to measure its performance and then publish the results, so that the university gets a clear picture of what is being delivered in terms of ICT services. And while this hasn’t been a popular move within the IT department, he believes it’s important. “We are building trust – but only where it’s justified.”