Abstracts

Wednesday 6th July

Keeping your ITSM platform to yourself? Make the platform and practices work across the Enterprise
Mark Temple, Assistant Director for Service Management, University of Glasgow

Why should your staff and students need to know how your organisation is structured in order to request services and support from disparate service providers?

Utilising a unified Knowledgebase and Service Catalogue with audience-specific content provides your end users with a single point of contact/truth, and also empowers staff from other disciplines to help customers, rather than just saying “sorry, we don’t deal with that here – you need to go and find the ‘right’ area”.

This presentation highlights the new approach to service support and delivery taken by the University of Glasgow as it embarks on its ambitious campus expansion. 

Parallel session 11:05am - Deliberately Simple: Moving towards a single Digital Hub for Students
Ben Gill, Project Manager, Lancaster University

Between mid-2021 and mid-2022, Lancaster University have undertaken a pandemic-inspired project to transform students’ experience of and digital engagement with the University by implementing a University-wide Digital Hub. It intends to provide one single entry point for all content, information, services and contact that students might need, tailored to their status. Come along to hear more about our journey, including student-led co-design, rapid prototyping, evolution of ideas and some of the challenges involved immigrating thousands of content pages away from multiple different systems (and PDF documents!) into one single digital location.

Parallel session 11:05am - Digital Wellbeing: A Culture of connection, reflection and praise
Antonia Jones, IT Operational Lead, University of Leeds

This session will explore the ever changing relationships we have with technology and what this means for wellbeing, as our working worlds continue to be blended through virtual platforms. We'll explore the tools we are using for our wellbeing journey towards a culture of connection, reflection and praise.

Parallel session 11:05am - USW journey to Zero-Touch deployment
Ryan Olden, End User Compute Manager, University of South Wales

Cyber Security in Practice - Learning with Lego
Dr Rebecca Robinson

Based on real life security incidents and the latest research, this role play-based game puts your team in the driving of security decision making and pits you against other teams. The aim: to generate the most income for your business whilst defending it from the impending cyber security attacks.

This interactive educational game is designed to teach the principles and value of quantitative IT security risk calculation.

How university of Aberdeen leverages a service desk to enable IT, Finance and HR
Iain Cameron, User Services Manager, University of Aberdeen and Germaine Broadbent, Senior Account Executive, Freshworks

How university of Aberdeen leverages a service desk to enable IT, Finance and HR

Join this session as we speak to Iain Cameron, User Services Manager, Digital and Information Services at University of Aberdeen on how they have delivered a service desk not to just IT, but to Finance and HR too.

Parallel session 2:50pm Digital Sustainability - exploring how you can make a difference
Henrik Brogger, Head of IT Service Delivery, Queen Mary University of London

Want to understand more about sustainability in the digital context? How can I be digitally sustainable? Join me for an informative session exploring the sustainability imperative and the digital imperative, the challenges we face regarding digital sustainability and suggestions for what you can do to become more digitally sustainable.

Parallel session 2:50pm - Foster the Imposter (not the Syndrome) – Diverse Recruitment
Jake Dovey, iSolutions Incident Response Team, University of Southampton

How I stopped imposter syndrome shooting down my best candidates before they’ve even applied.

This is the story of how a 2018 UCISA talk helped me spot overlooked deficiencies in my recruitment process. Deficiencies that fostered a feeling of imposter syndrome in my candidates. As I began to overcome them, the success that followed inspired small yet impactful changes that have spread across my department and whole University helping us not only increase the diversity of our recruits but, quite unexpectedly, improve both the quantity and quality of our applicants too. Listen to lessons learnt and practical solutions and tips and be prepared to go away armed with new ideas for diverse recruitment.

Protecting the Modern University - Creating Safe Havens for Data
Simon Furber, Lead Technical Architect, Brunel University; and Simon Driscoll, Security Consultant, ITGL

With the sophistication and frequency of cyber threats increasing across the sector, this session presents an opportunity to hear about Brunel University’s move to a strategic cyber approach to address shortfalls, embrace changing learning practices and ultimately protect its data and people from attack.

Thursday 7th July

Delivering excellent customer service is a rapidly changing world!
Sally Bogg, Head of Live Services; and Telmo Torres, Service Lead for the Customer Service Function, NHS Digital

The customer service function at NHS Digital were at the heart of the organisations national response to Covid-19. In this session the team will share how they responded to the pandemic, lifting and shifting the team of 90 to remote working whilst continuing to support and onboard new services at an unprecedented pace. The criticality of the services we were supporting (including the national testing service, covid-19 dashboards and the Shielded Patient List) meant that failure was not an option. Not only did the CSF manage to survive they were also able to thrive, winning the award for Best Large Contact Centre at the National Contact Centre Awards in 2021.

Deliberately Inclusive – Using Ally to improve the digital accessibility of online resources
Gillian Fielding, Client Experience Manager, Anthology + Blackboard and Rachel Fligelstone, Head of Strategy & Communications, Lancaster University

In this presentation you will find out how UK universities and colleges are benefiting from digitally accessible VLE content from Blackboard Ally. Ally was originally designed for students with accessibility requirements, however, the data shows that Ally is for ALL students, indeed large percentages of student populations use it, e.g. 67% of Bangor’s users downloaded Alternative format files from the VLE in year one, and with just a soft launch of Ally.

Thrive not Survive
Laura Capell-Abra, Stress Matters

Covering the five areas of our Thrive approach, this workshop introduces each area and looks at how you can build more of this into your team and to the way you tackle your day. Ensuring you don’t just tread water, you live up to your own aspirations.

Maintaining Service Desk wellbeing during a pandemic
Kate Carrington, IT Service Desk Manager, Manchester Metropolitan University

Throughout all of the challenges and changes of the past 2 years, the Service Desk team at Manchester Met have worked hard to protect their wellbeing at work, with mental health being a priority. Kate Carrington, IT Service Desk Manager and qualified counsellor, is going to explore some of the ways that she and the Service Desk Team worked to achieve this and hopefully provide ideas and inspiration for other teams to use too.

Automate IT Support for Students and Staff using AI
Andrew Smith, Chief Customer Office, ICS, Calvin Reid, IS Specialist (Collaboration), Elizabeth Gordon, Head of Collaboration Services and Emily Edwards, IS Specialist (Collaboration), Durham University

With unmanageable IT Support backlogs constantly growing and support desk staff dealing with seasonal spikes, many universities understand their current processes simply can't keep up. Join ICS.AI where we will share how AI and automation can transform the way your university supports its staff and students.

What to put where and why: A Service Catalogue template for UK HE
Andrew Dixon, Head of Service Management Office, University of Oxford

Do you call your student records service SITS or Banner?  Giving services obscure names which only the initiated understand is confusing for new staff and students.  This talk describes the work undertaken by a collective of UK universities to map out a generic Service Catalogue with meaningful names.

Do as I Say, Not as I Did
Katie Langford, IT Communications Coordinator, Leeds Beckett University

A humorous overview of effective communication from someone who has gotten it wrong—a lot. In this overview of some of the key fundamentals of effective communication, Katie Langford will help illustrate the importance understanding your audience, navigating cultural differences, respectful dialogue and getting out of your own “bubble” to identify a miscommunication, through humorous anecdotes and real world examples.