Making power while the sun shines

It's no secret that I'm keen on self generated energy, energy prices that only go one way and my environmental footprint are things that concern me. However, environmental measures need to make financial sense as well as being something that can be painlessly incorporated into my lifestyle for them to be worthwhile. This puts me between the two camps of the "green" (some of whom are fond of telling me that I should adopt green technologies on ethical grounds without considering any ROI), and the "capitalists" who are only interested in the bottom line. I suspect that most people would be willing to consider greener technologies if my two criteria are met, without the lectures on ethics.

Managing complexity

The University has grown organically since its foundation in 1209. Organisationaly it consists of a complex federated set of entities. We use shorthand terms such as "big U" and "little U" to differentiate when we are talking about 'the University' as a central organisation with centralised administration, departments and libraries, from the broader University which includes the Colleges (31 legally separate entities) and many research institutes than have an orthogonal (and often very longstanding) relationship with some parts of "small U" which may or may not have some formal footing.

Building Consensus

This year I have been chair of a major University committee, the Board of Scrutiny. All members are drawn from the University's governing body, the Regent House, and elected in a ballot of all Regents (a constituency of about 4,000 academic and academic related staff). The Board acts as the University's internal watchdog body. It has wide ranging powers and generally meets in camera with senior figures such as the Vice-Chancellor and the Registrary to question them on a variety of subjects. Operationally is very much like a Parliamentary select committee.

ITIL Foundation Course

It was back to school this week as I spent three days following the ITIL Foundation Course. My Department is evaluating whether ITIL is the right approach for our newly merged IT organisation, so I and 13 other middle managers had the opportunity to dip our toes into the world of ITIL.

My primary motivation for doing the course was to gain a better understanding of the language of ITIL. Increasingly this is being used at work, and it has become clear that the semantics are highly specialised. Indeed at the start of the course we were implored to "forget the meaning of terms you think you know". At the end of 3 days I feel I have a better understanding of what our slowly increasing band of ITIL-speakers are saying, some idea of how to talk the same language and an inkling of how this might improve the day to day running of our organisation.
So what was the course like?