Spent much of the week working on the UUK Collaboration project with various meetings and events.

I was in London for the UUK’s The University Transformation and Efficiency Summit, where I delivered a workshop on shared services.

HE has many existing shared services. Some are so fundamental it is now hard to imagine the sector without them: e.g. the UCAS admissions service, and the Janet network. Getting a new shared service off the ground feels difficult, but with hindsight successful shared services appear obvious.  

Good shared services are built on strong relationships and trust between the parties. They require standardisation and alignment: institutions willing to adapt their ways to working to fit with the wider group. Join this session to meet others and become part of the coalition of the willing, those working together to share services, for the benefit of all. 

This session will present findings from the Jisc/KPMG report ‘Collaboration for a Sustainable Future’. It will hear case studies of institutions currently offering their services to other universities, and what they learnt through establishing them.

The workshop went down well, but on the train home I reflected if the real challenge was talking to those institutions who didn’t attend and aren’t engaged with the transformation possibilities that are being discussed as part of the work of the Transformation and Efficiency Taskforce.

As well as presenting in London I also was attending and presenting at the online HE Shared Services and Structural Collaboration Conference.

I delivered a session entitled A Roadmap for Shared Service Collaboration on Data, Digital and Technology.

• The starting point: Where does successful tech collaboration exist already in the sector and what are the priority areas for partnership?
• Where is there potential for shared procurement and system management that continues to support differentiation?
• What are the opportunities for rationalisation through shared digital services?
• How can the sector support meaningful transformation through common models, standardisation and central coordination?
• What are the next steps from Jisc and the wider sector to drive this agenda forward?

There are some real challenges in moving to an operating model that takes advantage of the potential lower costs and efficiencies in using shared services, but there are also the compromises that have to be made.