The Institutional Innovation programme has always been unashamedly cross-domain and whilst this view of other programmes under just one team (which doesn’t even try to incorporate links to e-Learning activities) looks like the aftermath of an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider it does at least reinforce the general feeling of joiny-uppedess we’re trying to achieve.

Within this programme and across the wider work of the team we’ve been constructing a view of all our programme work according to what is being done, how it’s being done (both in terms of approaches to project design, and technologies employed), why it’s being done (really important, that one!), and who it’s being done for (essentially who owns the problem, with some related work on how best to reach them, what with, and when). This will lead nicely into the next session on comms and synthesis (with a focus on the why and for whom) but for the moment suffice to say we’re finding this very useful at the project and programme level to show us where there’s potential for linkages and indeed where there are gaps (as well as how we might combine messages when it comes to dissemination).

There’s a core commonality across all your projects of institutional change, and a commitment to learning lessons the wider sector can benefit from in whichever area you’re working in; whatever institutional problem you’re trying to solve. You know your areas and your peer projects in your clusters here, but these people are going to say something more about related work that’s ongoing outside of this programme, which you might not be fully aware of. It may be that those of you who already have benefits realisation funding are working with some of these people (and if not you might be able to factor in something that enables you to take account of their work and get in touch). Otherwise it may be that it’s in the synthesis that we’re able to bring out these links and so you may find yourself asked to share platforms with other projects as part of cross-programme level dissemination according to JISC’s higher level themes, like institutional management, shared services, or green.

The aim of this session is therefore threefold:

1. to make you more aware of the wider context of work ongoing in a variety of related areas overseen by other programme managers;
2. to give you an opportunity to ask them questions about their work and how it relates to yours;
3. and in practical terms to give some examples about how you might go about building links, for example

Rob’s got a meeting for his Greening ICT programme next month which aims to bring together a lot of JISC’s green work, including some from this programme and whilst further funding for Alex’s Flexible Services Delivery programme is currently on hold, there are already some pilots in underway which might be able to make good use of what some of your have learnt – either in the specifics of service orientation and architectures, or more generally in terms of effecting institution-wide change (as a transferable experience); he and others are also still engaging proactively with major suppliers of admin and academic systems so there’s scope to feed in there too.

Craig Wentworth