Tuesday 5 February 2013

Money, it's a gas...

Started yesterday walking my short journey to work listening to Pink Floyd. Our CFO and me are doing a double act at the UCISA Management Conference in March giving our own perspectives on what a Finance Department wants from an IT department, and what they get or should expect. As there is a connection between our CFO and Pink Floyd, there's some lyrics we might try and weave in. "Money" for example....

Yesterday afternoon the VC came to see us - spent well over an hour chatting with the Executive Team about a whole variety of issues - what we perceive our role to be, how we're supporting the University, what our vision and aspirations are, and what could be done differently to make a difference. A great chat, lots of support for our ideas and lots to take forward.

Later in the afternoon we had a bit of a brainstorm about what our vision of a future Student System is.  Might be a new one, might be development of the one we've got, but we need a vision to sit above the functionality we're looking for. You have to be a bit careful that it doesn't look like a game of buzzword bingo, but we came up with a number of key words which will get woven into a vision statement - student centric, mobile, flexible, user friendly, integrated with other systems (including social media), enabling.

One of the best things about today was a demonstration of some ideas for our new portal to me and the rest of the Exec. All good stuff and quite exciting that we seem to be getting somewhere. Now we need to work on further consultation, and timescales to get something to replace our existing portal by the start of the new academic session.

In other news, filercam is still showing an orange light, Yoda  put in an appearance last week to see if he could help, but couldn't.


And, you might have read about twitter accounts being hacked over the weekend, 250,000 of them. I thought at first that it was more than that, as myself and quite a few friends had been affected, but apparently it targeted early users who'd signed up in 2007.  Anyway, twitter was full of tweets from people like me who had to change their password - so how did the Sunday Telegraph find and pick mine?





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