2014 was a year of change for Information Services. One significant change was the introduction of Business Relationship Managers (BRM’s). The core role of the BRM’s is to act as a conduit between Information Services and the rest of the University, helping us to understand the individual school or department’s strategy in order to ensure we are supporting with the most appropriate technology and services both now and in the future. As a result, this role operates primarily at a strategic level and each BRM represents a number of schools and professional services departments.
These schools and departments can face very different and specific challenges, for example, the music department may need more infrastructure support for the recording and mixing studios, while the mathematics department may need access to the High Performance Computer (HPC) in order to conduct statistical analysis. With the BRMs in place, Information Services learn about these needs and find the best way to fulfil them.
In addition to understanding and translating school and department strategies, the BRM’s play a critical role in helping the University to rationalise and developing efficient processes which our systems can then underpin. As a result, a critical part of the BRM’s role is to assist our stakeholders in refining and defining the business requirements, in order to develop proposals and business cases that are aligned to both IT and University strategy. One way this is achieved is through requirements gathering workshops.
We spoke to one of our BRM’s Baljit Singh, who told us about a series of workshops that he has facilitated. The workshops were run under the Increasing Research Grants Income Programme, part of City University’s work towards becoming a centre of excellence for research. The workshops were split into three types:
* Understanding the business drivers (what we are trying to achieve)
* Understanding the user perspective (how we need this to work)
* Understanding what success looks like and how we will get there.
These research workshops allowed us to identify ways to improve our processes and practices and find which policies work.
Picture: Baljit Singh*, Robert Clark, Kristen Goodrich, Gary Tonge
The BRM team consists of:
- Kristen Goodrich (Head of IT Relationships, and key contact for Student and Academic Services, Careers & Students)
- Gary Tonge (Business Relationship Manager for SMCSE, SASS, Cass Executive Education, Alumni)
- Robert Clark (Business Relationship Manager for SHS, PAF, HR & Finance)
- Will Ellis (Business Relationship Manager for Cass Business School, The City Law School)
*Since writing this article, Baljit has moved on, and Will Ellis has joined the team.
