Fahri Zihni

Information technology is doing funny things to us. Take information overload ­ is everything going in one eye and out the other, short circuiting the brain? Perhaps the human brain just can’t keep up with the information age; maybe it needs its own “defrag”, “delete temporary files” and “delete archive” facilities.

Then again, perhaps the brain’s analogue “fade-away” or “liven-up” capabilities are more special than digital technology can manage. After all, I might have expected to forget crushingly boring fragments of information about such things as the Local Government Miscellaneous Provisions Act 1976. And that would be a shame, as I have recently found myself in need of that information.

This act basically states that local authorities can make use of spare capacity on their computers to sell products and services to other organisations, with computers being defined as “any device for storing and processing information”.
With such a broad definition, this act has been widely seen by local authorities as a charter to make a few pennies on the side. When I worked at Wolverhampton Council, our showcase product was printing Jaguar Cars’ user guide. It was a great topic of conversation, if nothing else.

So how is it that a very public social layer such as local government can use spare capacity to sell into external commercial organisations, but a semi-commercial sector such as higher education cannot?

The shared services agenda has been around since the Gershon Efficiency Review era of the early 2000s. The university sector, which is playing catch-up, recently commissioned a number of studies, notably some excellent work from Duke & Jordan, KPMG and others, which contemplate what should or should not work.

For example, sharing datacentres between universities could provide significant economies of scale, and is now much more viable with virtualisation of applications and the ability to host applications off-site using the Janet broadband network.

This would ease machine-room headaches for IT directors, be a significant step towards even greater levels of collaboration and make a contribution to reducing carbon emissions.

As Tim Marshall, Janet’s chief executive, says: “It is becoming increasingly important for the higher education sector to consider the benefit of aggregated data storage solutions. This is not only being driven by cost benefit, but also other factors such as power provision and cooling within the context of a more rigorous delivery of the carbon footprint regime.”

Unfortunately, there are some absurd obstacles to this most practicable proposition, such as the issue of what is deemed to be “state aid”. Capacity may not be used for anything other than educational purposes for which universities receive
government funding. Even spare capacity cannot be used, so it is being wasted.

Even sillier is the VAT issue, where a group of universities would each be exempt from VAT, but become liable if they operate as a joint venture company.

Ucisa, the universities’ professional organisation, has identified many current areas of joint working, and is fully supportive of the datacentres initiative, but concerted action needs to be taken by the Higher Education Funding Council for England to address the big issues.

In the aftermath of the credit crunch, the whole issue of what counts as “state aid” should be reviewed to allow higher education to use processing and communications capacity for supporting wider social priorities. There is an opportunity for the universities to help create new businesses and new jobs but, sadly, it is an opportunity being missed.

Fahri Zihni is director of ICT at Aston University and a past president of public sector user group Socitm

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