IT Services

SUMS Consulting undertakes reviews of Information Technology Services to assess performance and moves to make recommendations for improvement.

To deliver this service SUMS:

  • Completes a short diagnostic evaluation (IT Service Healthcheck); which compares the university against good practice within the SUMS' membership
  • Consults and reviews IT services to determine where they are best delivered
  • Facilitates workshops with computer officers to generate ideas for improvement and gain buy-in to change
  • Assesses service levels and helps universities adopt service management
  • Reviews organisational support structure, staff skills and role implications to support the implementation of service management
  • Shares good practice between Members through presentations and workshops.

Significant outcomes from this work are:

  • A knowledge base of good IT practices and benchmarking data
  • The IT service Healthcheck tool.

Recent IT Healthchecks include:

  • Essex; this benchmarked their IT services against ’94 group peer. The benchmark found their service to be relatively lean (Assignment number 1115)
  • Surrey; this identified some areas where they were out of line with their peers (Assignment number 1091)
  • Bath; this was extended to a review of organisational structures to help enable them to move to a more centralised support structure (Assignment number 1021).

Andrea Buttle