Hi Ray, These are good points and I think that the approach should be items or services that we in Physics wouldn't miss too much. Clearly the medics (say) may miss them terribly. Given that the SLA is long and covers an awful lot of material would it be possible for somebody from ICT to summarise it in a spreadsheet? I know that Dan Moore did this for Maths but that the way he divided it up was criticised and so it would be good to if somebody from ICT were to divide it up as they see fit. If this seems like too much work I will use Dan's division and put into a google form. It would also be useful to have a rough idea how much is paid in each area (just an indication) and this would be far easier if the division was made by somebody in ICT. Regarding your point that many groups would do things themselves if they had to pay for them. I suspect that far fewer groups have the expertise that they had 5 years ago - or rather the expertise is 5 years out of date and so it might be difficult for them to do this. All the best, david Raymond Beuselinck wrote:

Hi Dave,

On Mon, 12 Apr 2010, David Colling wrote:

...

- In a time of cuts what service do we value least from ICT? The full ICT SLA can be found linked from http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/ict/aboutict/ictslaandkpis The last time I asked this I didn't get particularly sensible answers (at least from the replies I got from people within HEP). However, this really is quite serious and I would be grateful for any feedback that we can in turn feedback to ICT.

I don't remember if I commented on this before, if so it was probably one of the less sensible comments. I have had a look through the very long SLA document to see if I could come up with a sensible suggestion. My first comment is that it is far from obvious what to cut. The SLA seems to cover everything that you could possibly think of that could come under the heading of ICT.

Given the assumptions imposed by the previous rector (ICT does everything - you lot be grateful for what is provided) what is the consequence of cutting something from ICT? a) we cannot have X at all or b) we provide X ourselves if we want it. The answer to that question has a bearing on what people might want to cut. It is presumably X-dependent.

It is difficult to gauge the impact of cutting something without the information on how much each service is actually used and what are the cost savings of cutting it. There are things on the list that I have no idea if anybody outside ICT values as a provided service, e.g. support for research databases and shared departmental storage. Does anybody in physics use this? It strikes me that groups would probably look at the charges for, e.g. the departmental storage or backup services and decided it is more cost effective to do it themselves. So this would be one area that I might suggest we don't care about and could vote for cutting. On the other hand I have no idea how much that would save as a fraction of the overall costs of ICT.

Given the above caveats I think top of my list to cut support for as a useless luxury that probably only benefits a tiny fraction of users is support for mobile computing (specifically Blackberrys, iPhones and PDAs). I have no evidence, but would hazard a guess that this select group of users probably generates an inordinate amount of service desk enquiries.

Are you intending that Simon should come to these meetings? I assume he is not currently on the mailing list.

Ray