Over the last few years I have been looking at collaboration and sharing. Though my experience in this area goes back decades.

In 2001 I was employed as Director of the Western Colleges Consortium, this was a collaboration of seven FE colleges in what was originally the county of Avon. This consortium shared a common VLE, and my role was to run the shared service and where possible expand what we could do.

The original concept behind the consortium was in the main to shared lessons about using a VLE, but also to save money.

As the colleges’ experience with the VLE concept expanded there was a demand to expand what each college wanted to do with the VLE, and unsurprisingly branding was one of the key requirements. They weren’t wiling to compromise in their use of a shared environment and as a result they went down their own path. There wasn’t anything wrong with this decision (well apart from the fact that my role became somewhat redundant), we knew when the consortium was setup that whatever we did would have to be a compromise, we would need to sacrifice some key features and requirements, in order to take advantage of the affordances of a shared environment (in the main affordability).

In later roles when looking at procuring services through outsourcing it was clear that whatever was on offer was never going to be perfect, what we would get would be a compromise. Of course, if we decided to go down the road of doing it ourselves, then we wouldn’t need to compromise, but we would need to factor in the (real) costs of doing it by ourselves.

We now live in an environment where financial sustainability is very likely the item on the top of the agenda within higher education, and looking to where savings could be made. The use of shared services is often touted as a potential way to save costs, as outlined recently in reports I have been involved in from Jisc, KPMG, and UUK. Thought when discussing shared services with representatives from the sector, it becomes apparent that some are not willing to compromise on the service within the institution. The reality is that sometimes what you want isn’t affordable and you have to compromise somewhere along the way. Collaboration is a compromise, but a comprise that is affordable in the current financial climate.