Jisc Reviews

Thanks for getting in touch with your thoughts on Jisc. I notice your comment is mostly about culture. To some extent, I agree with you – we need to keep working hard to align our culture with the changes that have been made to the organisation (and that are still being made). However, I have full faith in my leadership team and my experience of working with them is that they want to work closely together and make change. I fully acknowledge that decision-making can be held up by our current work and processes we’ve already gone some way to creating a culture where everyone is empowered to make decisions at pace, rather than leaving all decisions to be made by the leadership team. Our HR function (known internally as ‘people services’) was established one year ago when the core team were recruited. Since Jisc was established in its current format it has grown tremendously from 100 staff to our current 550. As part of the development of our organisation we are delivering a range of projects to transform our organisation and achieve our vision to make the UK the most digitally advanced education and research nation in the world. This is a challenging time for all areas of Jisc, including our HR team, who are often at the forefront of these change programmes and supported by interim staff to provide additional resource for peaks in activity. We are also at the same time reviewing the structure of the people services function, including recruiting a head of talent development and engagement, to ensure that we have the required capacity to deliver projects at the pace that the organisation wants in line with our values. This does mean that a range of interim staff will be brought in for defined periods to assist the core team to manage volume or specific aspects of projects. Our forthcoming projects include the launch of our people plan in the New Year focussing on culture, behaviours and embedding our values and a whole range of measures to ensure that we can develop our people to be the best that they can be. I appreciate your concern for Jisc’s future, but I’m confident that Jisc will face any future changes to subscriptions.