March 2011

This is a follow-up to my talk at the UCISA 2011 management conference about the Google Apps experience at Loughborough University. For a quick overview of our project to implement Google Apps, please see the “Loughborough Goes Google” Case Study.

In this post I’ll look at using a tool called the Value Stream Map (see Rother and Shook's excellent book, "Learning to See") to help you analyze where and how much your existing business processes add value. I've chosen a scenario that illustrates the benefits of the move to Google quite nicely:


















In this post I'll pick up on and amplify a few of the themes from the talk that Parmjit Dhugga and I did about the JISC Strategic ICT Toolkit at the recent JISC 2011 conference in Liverpool.  But first, a cheezy video that I made to introduce the toolkit... :-)


The Strategic ICT Toolkit is a new resource from JISC, developed by the University of Nottingham Graduate School in partnership with the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education. It follows on from a report by Duke and Jordan that identified significant variation on institutional approaches to IT strategy. Fundamentally the toolkit is an aide to reflective thinking about IT strategy, with a wealth of background material and case studies, and a self-analysis component that you can use to "rate your IT strategy".