Just when you thought it was safe to go back into your email, the administrative shark returns

For those of us in IT functions (and I came over form the dark side to be a geek), these tips mirror what we mostly want too: "First, I want to provide each piece of data only once" - good. We only want to hold a piece of data in one place, to give a better maintainable and more reliable single point of truth, free from anomaly. "Second, throw out any spreadsheet..." - actually, just get rid of the rest of that paragraph. Excel is evil, because it mostly allows people to decant data, away from single points of truth and mess around with it in ways which creates problems, creating unsynchronised and potentially damagingly inaccurate copies. And yes, I do mean damaging, because the effects could affect people, financially and otherwise. The promulgation of conflicting datasets, poked around with by Excel is possibly the great admin evil of them all. "Third, impose a total ban on forms based on Word or PDF files" - and while we're there, have anyone who suggests using them summarily executed, "pour encourager les autres" "Finally, consider if you really need to ask the question." - and perhaps consider if you want to be liable for the fines if theres'a GDPR incident around the data you collect from asking it. There's way too much unnecessary data collected, seemingly just because we can. One of the horrors of having to deal with these processes is the plaintive cries of people who, in a tragic display of adverse attachment, like their awful spreadsheets, and don't want to change how they work, because "we've always done it this way". We didn't before spreadsheets, and they've only really been around for around 25 years or so, but no matter. All of this is easier said than done, of course. There are huge amounts of data to store and shift, and it's also a minefield controlling who should see who should see which things, and when. This places huge demands on IT series which may not be adequately resourced to sod all of this in timely fashion. Fact is, such functions are sometimes only valued by the noticing of their absence. It says something about how IT strategy should be much more at the centre of thinking, given how much it underpins so much of the work that now needs to be done.

Absolutely, and while we are at it, can we ban people from assuming that we are Luddites every time we question the validity of a spurious university IT process? I too have been a geek so it can hardly be said I don’t have expertise. Yet the amount of times I am patronised by colleagues who weren’t yet born when I was successfully running an IT department is incredible. And if anyone wants to join me in getting my moral panic nemesis Turnitin and its evil wing man Moodle removed from the planet, I would be delighted. We are being slowly colonised through the medium of generic US IT systems. Colleagues, we can do much better than this! We must raise our aspirations!

Maybe I have an advantage, as I was working professionally in computing before I slithered into a university! I agree with the measures suggested above... and the entire computer science department here shakes its collective head at some of the badly-designed systems we are confronted with. Unfortunately our administrative colleagues don't seem to have realised the expertise in creating effective systems that resides in their own academic computer specialists and persist in creating substandard systems that are inefficient even when they do achieve the intended purpose, and often don't!

Unfortunately I have the unenviable task of picking up systems designed by academic computer specialists which are invariably written for individual use, in inappropriate languages, with no ongoing support or maintenance provision or consideration for security or integration implications. Collaboration is the key not maverick development.

John, this is clearly the problem that ServiceNow is trying to solve for Higher Education... freeing up the academic community to focus on what you're employed to do - teach students and engage in research rather than pushing paper. We've partnered with a number of Universities globally to automate manual processes across the campus, to get rid of an over reliance on email and spreadsheets, and provide a simple modern and intuitive experience for cross-departmental and cross-faculty workflow, including a course and curriculum lifecycle management solution, and many other process improvements across Teaching and Learning, Research, and broader University services. For more info, refer to https://www.servicenow.com/solutions/industry/higher-education.html