IT Services
Groups within IT Services are tasked with the delivery of the IT Services vision and strategy for IT across the University, ensuring consistency with the University vision and strategy. That vision for IT Services includes the commitment to provide the IT infrastructure and tools to enable academic excellence at the University of Bristol and the professional IT staff in the groups listed below will provide innovative, customer focused solutions to meet the needs of the University community.
Programme group
The Programme group looks after a number of areas that span IT Services including:
- Major projects, including the SPR reorganisation
- Managing our portfolio of IT services over their entire lifecycle
- Defining service level agreements
- Developing service strategy and its execution
- Developing, overseeing, supporting and improving IT service management processes, policies and standards.
R&D group
- The R&D group explores, prototypes and pilots technologies and standards to help equip IT Services for the future.
- We advise on technical and data aspects of research bids and partner with academic departments at Bristol and other universities in externally-funded projects.
- Our 'future watching' role helps facilitate the effective use of a wide range of technologies and media to enable learning, research and information management.
Advanced Computing Research Centre (ACRC)
- Designs, builds and manages the University's central facilities for computer-intensive and data-intensive research.
- Manage the major resources, the computer clusters BlueCrystal phase 1 & 2, and the petascale storage facility BluePeta.
- Provide a broad range of short courses on research computing topics, organise seminars and symposia.
- Provide consultancy and advice on general research computing issues such as help with code parallelisation and tuning or systems procurement.
Infrastructure group
The Infrastructure & Operations group provides the underlying infrastructure which keeps IT at Bristol running. A few examples of what we do:
- We run the data networks & telephone networks that connect the university to the outside world.
- We provide services such as wireless, email and ResNet.
- We provide the servers for business critical systems run by the Systems Development group, or which are used by developers in R & D.
- We build the systems to keep desktops patched and free from virus, so that the Service Delivery group can provide desktops to staff across the university.
- We work closely with ACRC on storage and high speed networking to aid the university's research.
Systems Development group
- Systems Development has the responsibility for leading the development of IT systems University-wide.
- We are a professional pool of staff, distributed across a number of teams, which could also include other staff from the IT Services division such as R&D staff and staff from Zonal IT Teams, seconded to systems projects.
- Our development and support is focussed around IT systems applications and associated middleware (databases, directory and web services), created through the use of commercial packaged solutions, open source, bespoke software development and software as a service.
- Recognising the value in taking a strategic approach to the development of IT systems services, Systems Development is actively progressing the adoption of an Enterprise Architecture approach, where business, application, data and technology requirements are aligned in a more strategic manner.
Service Delivery
Service Delivery can be described as the 'front-of-house' activity of IT Services. Teams within Service Delivery will engage most frequently with colleagues around the University through the provision of:
- Zonal IT support.
- The Service Desk.
- IT Training.
In addition, responsibility for IT Services's communications and compliance management (security, identities, licensing) sit within this area.
How we work
The work of IT service is underpinned by an IT strategy and supported by clear policies and procedures. The organisations values effective customer service, one measure of which is user feedback via our bi-annual surveys.
Administrative Resource Group
This is a virtual team providing administrative support to IT Services individual teams and across the Division and enhances the productivity of University IT Services staff by providing effective administrative support and collaborates with relevant teams across all other University support services.
Associated organisations