Dec
20
There goes another one …
December 20, 2007 |
Well thats 2007 all done and dusted work-wise. Sometimes it seems hard to look back and see what has been acheived, but maybe I am still too close to it. The year seems personally to have revolved around HR issues, some sensible and some mad (like the University of Bristol farago on a new ‘harmonised pay scale’ - more about squeezing people into the top of scales offering no chance for growth but containing the University’s salary bill… urgh), none of which really figure on my ‘exciting-things-to-do-in-a-year’ list
I guess that for me, and perhaps the rest of the team, a big issue has been how we started to adopt some of the Web 2.0 issues (surely now an outdated term and sooo last year) - kicking off the JISC blog and wiki platforms, launching the series of JISC podcasts - over 20 publiched in 5 months and with over 1200 downloads in November) and helping (and learning from) colleagues build these techniques into their communication work - a huge debt of thanks here goes to Matt Jukes, Ben Whitehouse, Kerry Down and the ever-enthusiastic Hector Peebles who between them made this stuff happen
The unsung (well almost) heros award goes to to Sara Hassen, Dicky Maidment Otlet as well as Alice Gugan and Judy Redfearn who have managed, contained and delivered on the swathe of communications plans and activities from across the always expanding JISC horizon. As well as producing some excellent work along the way (what to choose? just too much to single anything out …) they have all had to cheerfully soak up the grief and problems thown at them
Under pinning much of this work has been the team of Greg Clemett, Grace Porter, Amy Butterworth and Georgia Hall who deliver high quality publications, events and materials throughout the year (see the Annual Review, JISC Inform, JISC Conference to name a few). It is hard to remember that only three or four years ago it would have been inconceivable to produce either the quantitiy or quality of work now generated in-house
The new Market Research team of Charles Hutchings and Malcolm Batchelor have in less than a year already helped reform the way JISC looks at research and produced some notable studies (not least the Student Expectations work and the heavily revised Librarians Survey) No doubt we will rely ever moreon this valuable in-house expertise
Oh dear this sounding a bit like an Oscar speech (’Thank you to my make-up artist, dog walker and housemaid..’), still too late to stop now.
Philip Pothen has continued quietly to extend our press and public relations profile and reputation (hoorah for the JISC Award at the THES Awards event, the recent TES supplement on the RSC network and producing a digestible version of the OSI report)
Louisa Dale and Jo Smedley have two of the least enviable roles - pushing on our partnership work and relationship. Louisa’s tireless work with the Knowledge Exchange to name but one area has resulted in real progress in the difficult arena of international collaboration and Jo with her HEA ‘mate’ Sharon Waller have a similarly daunting task of pulling JISC and HEA closer together
Oh well, actually now I come to think about it, we did do a shed load of work this year. Does JISC realise how fortunate it is to have a team of such able, professional and enthusiatic comms chappies? I hope so
The challenge for next year will centre around pushing the branding policy through ( a no-brainer that will of course upset all sorts of odd people for heaven knows what reasons) and the plans to promote JISC work around campaign platforms (such a good idea and its going to be such a pain…), oh and trialling out more strange new technology stuff - Twitter, Bitter, Flatter, micro-blogging, macro-blogging … I am barely getting to grips with blogs let alone all this stuff. Still its progress they say …
