On behalf of the Chief Information Officer and Director of Estates, I have been acting as institutional lead on technologies around Smart Buildings and the Intelligent Campus. In July I gave a keynote address to the UCISA Support Services Conference and subsequently followed in the footsteps of Galileo and Copernicus to present to an audience of Italian HEIs at The University of Padua earlier this month, then offering a further presentation at the Hull Tech Expo.
Developing approach in this area is requiring close collaboration with colleagues in Estates and Facilities, making sure we have appropriate staffing to deliver (within IT Operations I’ve agreed a cost model to cover the team), integrating staff to ensure project to BAU handshakes are amicable and that the service transition is permanent. There’s also been some getting heads around the tech and introducing convergence as an inescapable gravitational force that is already shaping how we deliver tech and will continue to do so in future. Getting senior governance buy-in and cascading through the teams has also been vital and has made forward progress much easier.
It’s not just been about talking the talk, it’s also been manifest as real world delivered tech. The opening of the Durham University Teaching and Learning centre has really allowed us to take a significant step forwards in the Smart Buildings space with the largest AV over IP network (AMX SVSI) installation in Higher Education in Europe and some clever workflow integrations within the building’s Siemens Building Management System. Both deployments build on the successes in other facilities such as the Calman Learning Centre (also SVSI) – see case study.
As we plan the next stages of new-build construction and refurbishment as part of the Estates Masterplan there is significant consideration of how we can build on existing infrastructure foundations and ensure that our delivered fabric is
- Networked for the future
- Agile by design
- Designed based on data
- Connected and secure
- Better understood, better supported
For more information in this area check out the Jisc Intelligent Campus project – Using data to make smarter use of your university or college estate – https://bit.ly/2oTmhC9
They have published a guide for universities and colleges who are interested in venturing into the Intelligent Campus space – https://bit.ly/2IdzYDK
For regular updates on the project and what is happening in the Intelligent Campus space then visit the project blog – https://bit.ly/2zocA6E
Jisc have started the process of defining the data standards and structures for estate and other campus data from those use cases – https://bit.ly/326YnG8
Follow the hashtag #intelligentcampus on Twitter.
Cris Bloomfield's Professional Blog 