Paul Walk from UKOLN introduced us to the idea of the strategic developer and the work of the DevCSI project to foster innovation through local developers in order to create an environment in which strategic developers can emerge to benefit the sector.
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Walk: “Successful companies innovate in a down market” #iwmw11 #p8 |
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The Cost of Innovation
Paul began his presentation by questioning the costs of the current trend towards outsourcing development and IT expertise in HE institutions, highlighting the lost capacity of innovate that can result from the practice…
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Walk: Discussing the temptation for universities to cut away the ability to innovate #iwmw11 #p8 |
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Walk: Asks whether local IT expertise a sunk cost? Outsourcing IT capacity has a cost, including loss of tacit knowledge #iwmw11 #p8 |
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Walk: Innovation happens in a local context – it needs to be driven by user demands and needs #iwmw11 #p8 |
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DevCSI
Within this context, Paul introduced the work of the JISC-funded DevCSI project, which seeks to foster innovation by supporting local developer.
He outlined the results of their research into the general standing of local developers within the institution, and described the training and community building opportunities that the project has facilitated, particularly through their Dev8D event.
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Walk: The #devcsi stakeholder survey showed widespread agreement that local developers understand local context better #iwmw11 #p8 |
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Walk: 70% of those surveyed by #devcsi felt that local developers were undervalued #iwmw11 #p8 |
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Walk: #dev8d saw the building of an interactive whiteboard out of a nintendo wii and a sheet of tracing paper #iwmw11 #p8 |
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Walk: We think we delivered £85k worth of training at one 2-day event using peer-to-peer training #iwmw11 #p8 |
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Walk: A well connected community of developers is greater than the sum of its parts. You haven’t just got one or two guys #iwmw11 #p8 |
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Strategic Roles
Paul concluded by describing the lack of career progression for local developers and the clear need for strategic leads as technology becomes increasingly important to universities.
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Walk: The strategic role is missing – the technical guide #iwmw11 #p8 |
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Walk: Good management of URLs is going to become very important – this is the new currency for institutions #iwmw11 #p8 |
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Walk: Key information sets will become a big deal over the next few years, whether we like it or not #iwmw11 #p8 |
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Reactions
The web managers had the following comments to make about Paul’s presentation…
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RT @iwmwlive Can web managers and developers work well together? #iwmw11 #p8 <– Definitely especially if they can talk the same language |
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Can highly recommend #dev8d! #iwmw11 #p8 |
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@iwmwlive Don’t be afraid to enter the testosterone den of the developers’ office! #iwmw11 #p8 |
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Further Information
Paul’s slides from this presentation are available in PDF form at the IWMW webpage for his talk.
More information about the work of the DevCSI project in this area, including the case studies Paul cited during his talk, can be found at the DevCSI Local Dev Impact page.
You can view Paul’s talk in full on Vimeo.
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