I was delighted to hear over Easter that we had been invited to present at the EUNIS 2014 conference on recent developments at Jisc - read on for the abstract to our talk. For more information about the conference and EUNIS, the European University Information Systems association, please see the conference website.

Jisc is a registered charity championing the use of digital technologies in research and education, and providing a wide range of shared services for Universities and Colleges in the UK.

Notable Jisc successes have included JANET, a world leading National Research and Education Network, groundbreaking content deals with publishers under the Jisc Collections umbrella, and breakthroughs in Access and Identity Management such as the IETF standards track Moonshot project.

Jisc has also sponsored pioneering work in Open Educational Resources, Open Access and Open Data which have helped to prepare the sector for its impending transition to being "open by default".

Following an independent review, Jisc has reinvented itself to ensure that the services it offers and the developments it pursues are more tightly aligned with the needs of its stakeholders. This talk will cover the lessons learned in the process of this "reboot", recent successes, and key upcoming activity streams for Jisc as it moves from top sliced central funding to a subscription based model.

Some examples of recent Jisc initiatives that the talk will cover include standardised sector wide agreements with cloud service providers such as Google and Microsoft, initiatives to stimulate and showcase student led developments (such as Jisc's recent Summer of Student Innovation contest), and ongoing co-design work with institutions and key sector bodies such as the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education in areas like Service Design and Business Intelligence.