Bull Managed and Shared Services for Higher Education

Due to the serious economic recession in the UK and abroad, along with an unprecedented change in communication and information technologies, institutions within Higher Education are looking radical and innovative new ways of reducing costs, offering additional services, and creating incremental revenue streams.

Shared Services and/or Managed Services are one of the areas than can assist institutions achieve these goals, but it does require commitment from senior management as it does necessitate organisational change.

What is Shared Service?
Shared services are normally defined as 'institutions cooperating in the development and delivery of services, sharing skills and knowledge, reducing cost, and/or generating revenue. This can be combined with commercial participation.

What is Managed Service?
Managed services are typically a defined service or services that are outsourced to third parties (service provider) to manage and run on behalf of an organisation (customer) to reduce cost and/or improve service. A University can be either a service provider or a customer, or both.

However, shared and managed services can be harder to achieve than initially expected. With best intentions, institutions' strategies and priorities can differ, HR, staff and unions need to be in agreement, and in some cases there can be reluctance to relinquish control to another party. Upfront capital investment can also be an inhibitor to any new initiatives.

Nevertheless, the potentional benefits gained from a successful venture, emerging and improving enabling technology i.e. cloud, and commercial partners like Bull who have experience and the funding available, are making institutions take a hard look at this area as a viable option.

Investing in shared services can help higher educational institutions achieve efficiency cost savings in a number of ways, such as:

Securing cost savings, avoidance, and sustainable efficiencies.
Releasing staff time for more customer-serving activities.
Gain competitive advantage.
Improved continuity and resilience of service.
Raising quality of, and adding value to, existing services.
Improving system scalability.
Ensuring improved and more up-to-date systems.
Ability to offer otherwise unsustainable services.
Levering transformation.
Avoid overlap and duplication.

Shared services can also be an enabler to Business & Community Engagement (BCE) and third stream revenue.

How can Bull help

Bull has been assisting organisations with change and transformational projects for many years. In the areas of shared and managed services, the role we play varies depending upon an organisation's needs. These are typically: -

Advisory and Facilitator.
Design and Architect.
Partner / Joint Venture.
Full outsource or managed service.

By consolidating previously disparate IT functions to a shared or managed service, Bull helps institutions harness economies of scale across groups, allowing them to provide higher service levels and greater responsiveness. We achieve this over a number of stages: -

Visioning.
Discovery, Baselining, Definition and Gap Analysis.
Planning; service to business alignment.
Governance.
Financials.
Inclusion & PR - involving interested stake holders i.e. Employees, HR, Unions.
Transformation road map and milestones.
Asset transferral and migration.
Shared / Managed Service delivery.
Management, monitoring, and reporting.

Our physiology is not about staff reduction to reduce cost, but to free up personnel to allow them work on projects that will assist the institution deliver improved or additional services, which will generate incremental revenue for the institution. Furthermore, all our service delivery, hosting, and managed services is from within the UK, primarily from our state-of-the-art DataCentre in Barnsley. This DataCentre is derived from a 10 year joint venture between Barnsley Metropolitan Council and Bull.