University Digital Services: is an avalanche coming?

Boards (exec and non exec) should consider technology integrated with university services, not a separate concern the ‘IT department’. This is not yet the default behaviour within the HE sector.
Specific opportunities include: faster assessment & feedback, personalised tuition, and paperless administration processes. These reforms will increase University efficiency and effectiveness.
Digital is not the same as IT: the software is an evolving service more than a technology product; it will be designed around user needs not centrally specified ‘functional requirements’; and there should be an incremental approach to design & build, not monolithic procurement exercises.
Digitally effective universities will have the in-house capacity to build, operate and improve digital services, as well as to commission them from suppliers.
The chances of sector disruption are rising.

For the last three years I have served on the University of Exeter governing body, the Council. Unusually for most Higher Education governing boards, independent members of Council hold a specific portfolio of responsibility alongside an Executive lead – in my case, for Digital and Technology.

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AI Ethics: send money, guns & lawyers

Photo of Westminster Abbey taken by Iulian Ursu
Photo: Iulian Ursu (cc)

My speech notes, for a talk given to the Westminster Abbey Institute on 31 May 2018

This evening I’d like to present a problem within what I believe to be the most transformative technology of our lives: artificial intelligence. I’ll suggest why I think that problem will involve some colossal rows involving money, guns, and lawyers. And as well as explaining the problem, I’d like your help to find the right way for us to respond professionally and personally, so I look forward to the discussion afterwards. Continue reading “AI Ethics: send money, guns & lawyers” →

Freetown Dispatches

What follows is a series of letters to friends and family sent while my wife and I were working with the Sierra Leone government in Freetown between April and December 2009.

27 April 2009

We’ve just finished our first full week in Freetown, and thought it was time we let you know that we’re still alive and well.

We’re in Sierra Leone for about a year working inside their Government to contribute to their policy making and delivery processes. We’re part of a small team employed by Tony Blair’s office. We’re living in relative luxury (running cold water and intermittent generator powered electricity) with three others in a team house that resembles a ramshackle Spanish villa, nestling in the hills above Freetown. All around us is a hive of activity with houses being built wherever space allows. The planning laws exist more in theory than practice, and the builders merchants across the street from us seem to be doing a roaring trade. Our house overlooks the American embassy, which is rather an isolated fortress on a hill, and in stark contrast to the UK embassy which we visited last week, which as you might expect, contains genial diplomats with a pink gin in one hand and regrets for the passing of the Empire in the other.

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Farewell Grandad Peter

It is unusual to start a blog with a farewell, but I thought I would post the eulogy that my sister and I gave for our Grandfather, who died just before Christmas.

We stand here today as the eldest of Grandad’s five grandchildren and we would like to spend a few minutes sharing Peter’s early life and adventures followed by our own memories of Grandad, which I hope will highlight just what a truly special man he was.

Peter was born in 1919, the eldest of four children, to William and Ellen Sargeant, a working class and practical family of blacksmiths. Peter’s brother Don is here today. He went to Little Baddow Primary School and was a good student. It was here, aged seven, that Peter met his future wife Jean Ager when she and her sister Betty joined the school. Jean sat at the desk in front of Peter and at that time their friendship was limited to Peter pulling her hair to get her attention; but she soon became his childhood sweetheart and a growing friendship with Jean’s brother Bernard enabled Peter to visit the family more often. In his spare time, Peter made some pocket money working on local farms plucking chickens, gathering potatoes and picking peas in addition to helping his parents with the chores; collecting water daily from the spring and getting fresh milk from Holybread Farm. His education continued at King Edward’s Grammar School and in 1936 Peter secured his first proper job at Marconi’s before being called up for military service, aged 20.

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