Functional areas

ICT comprises six Functional areas and five Product lines.

Each Functional area and Product line works in a coordinated and integrated way, offering the best possible customer experience.

Our strategy reflects this business integration with technology being an enabler for significant elements, allowing ICT to interlock and build the skills essential for future College need.

Functions

Technology Office

  • Responsible for the strategy and technology governance across ICT. The strategy is drafted collaboratively with stakeholders across ICT, signed off by the CIO and sponsored by the Technical Design Authority (TDA). 
  • Support all aspects of ICT and provide leadership across security, integration and data domains whilst providing enterprise support across all product lines in the form of Technology Product Specialists and Product Technology Specialists.  
  • Works in conjunction with product lines and domain specialisms to deliver blueprints, patterns and designs whilst owning and managing strategy, standards, and principles.

Contac the Head of Technology if you have further questions.

See the the Technology Strategy for the Technology Office's strategic objectives.

Infrastructure & Shared Services

  • Shared services provide support for four main functional areas. This includes Data, Integration, Cloud, and Identity and Trust. This area operates in conjunction with Infrastructure Technology and is commonly known as “Infrastructure and Shared Services”. 
  • The purpose of the shared services function is to provide subject matter experts or specialists who understand each domain and its associated technologies intimately. The specialists work across all functional areas and product lines to enable, configure, and evolve these technologies in alignment with the technology office.
  • Infrastructure Technology aligns with shared services to provide the enabling platforms and technology which underpin all College systems and services. 
  • This includes data centre provision and management, digital workplace for end user services, networks including wired and wireless services, as well as ensuring security for users consuming College services. Infrastructure technology also provide and manage tooling for management, monitoring, provisioning, and discovery across all services.

See the roadmap for strategic objectives.

Service Operations

  • Service Operations aligns with three main functional areas. These include 1st Line Support, Service Management and the Service & Security Experience Centre (SSXC)  
  • Service Operations is staffed by a 1st Line Support team consisting of 28 staff, supporting all college systems and users, via its service desk, resolving approximately 7500 incidents per month, which equates to 70% of all tickets logged. The Service Management team of 10 looks after all ITIL processes covering, change, release, service onboarding, asset management and service catalogue as well as our DR/BC capability, the Service and Security Experience Centre consists of a team of 5 analysts who monitor our environment. 
  • Service Operations leverages a range of technologies to visualise college incidents and events delivered using a range of service and security monitoring tools provided by infrastructure technology. The SSXC team, is an evolving capability which will bring this information together under a single pain of glass, allowing us to keep the college safe and compliant whilst using reporting, problem source identification and continual service improvement to drive down demand volumes.

Business Operations

  • Business Operations provide administrative, commercial, learning & development, communications, financial, HR, governance, compliance, and quality management functions in support of all other ICT functional areas. 
  • Business Operations support business functions across all functional areas to leverage core business capabilities.  
  • These include purchasing processes, collaboration and communications platforms, recruitment services, learning and development services, among others, to ensure smooth running of business functions. 
  • Builds improved and automated processes to help improve collective use of all business functions across ICT functions.  

Speak to the Head of Business Operations if you have any enquiries about ICT Governance or processes.

Research Computing Services

  • Research Computing Services (RCS) responsible for the oversight and management of our research capabilities across College.  
  • This includes stakeholder management, demand management, oversight of the Research Computing Services and associated High Performance Computing platforms, Research Data Store and the Research Software Engineering teams.  
  • The RCS service has been in existence since 2005 and is used by more than 4000 members of our research community offering mainly, batch/ noninteractive compute for non-personally-identifiable data, Interactive compute – terminal, Jupyter and Rstudio and also is “Free-at-the-point of use” with expedited access (facility charge-back). RCS is funded by the college and has secured 15M of funded between 2021-2025 to expand capacity locally.

See the Roadmap for The RCS strategic objectives.



Products

  • The product lines are a delivery function which ensure that critical business services are maintained and delivered across the college.
  • The purpose of the product lines is to ensure that business priorities are managed accordingly, strategic initiatives are aligned with priorities and that regulatory compliance occurs and is met for all College services in relation to the services offered by ICT. The product lines work with and are dependent on other ICT functional areas to deliver an effective service. This also includes wider stakeholder engagement / management across faculties and departments.  
  • The product portfolio includes an overview and description of both current and future products, as well as a product roadmap for change deliveries within the domain. The Product Lines each have a single product owner with a supportive team that consists of delivery managers, architects, testers, PSO support and a business relationship manager (BRM).

Product lines strategic objectives

Each Product Line will develop joint Business and ICT Roadmaps to deliver the needs of the organisation. This ensures that work is understood and prioritised and can be communicated across College.

The Product lines are:

Student Lifecycle
  • The Student Lifecycle delivers teaching capabilities to approximately 20,000 Undergraduate, Taught Post-Graduate and Post-Graduate Research Students with more than 64% of students coming from outside the UK.
  • Teaching is delivered by almost 8,000 staff and we also support more than 210,000 Alumni within the college.
  • ICT work in partnership with the business, providing consultancy and technical expertise to deliver technology solutions and functional process improvements.
Estates, Campus and Commercial
  • Estates, Campus and Commercial covers all technology products related to the running of the College estate, security, space management, accommodation, retail (including food and beverage), sports, conferencing and events, and commercial activities. 
  • The Estates department made up of Operations – managing the building and facilities maintenance, minor works, permits to work and fire safety; and Projects managing building projects, space management, CCTV and planning future developments.
Cross Functional 
  • The cross functional product line caters for systems which service the entire college and cut across multiple product lines. This includes business functions for service management, reporting and analytics, content management services, customer relationship management platforms and a range of other capabilities.  
  • This product line services the business areas and enables many of the functions delivered across other product lines within ICT whilst working in conjunction with many other departments such as digital and the college website migration project. 
Finance and HR 
  • The HR & Finance product line is supported by a range of technologies. A number of these key functions are delivered using technologies such as Talentlink and HEAT for recruitment and at the core of HR, Finance and Research Admin is a vendor ERP platform.  
  • This has resulted in the business decoupling components within the ERP platform including recruitment and learning. Absence management has been devolved to Teamseer making the management of multiple platforms more difficult. 

Talk to our Product Owners if you have new requirements or if you think you need new or replacement technology for an existing system.