Open letter from the Director of IT
22 Oct 2013
Service disruptions during initial weeks of term
Dear colleagues and students
I am writing to you regarding the various service disruptions that have happened over the initial weeks of term.
The outages must have been extremely frustrating and will have impacted upon you individually – be that through your studies, your teaching or your personal time. As the recently appointed Director of IT Services at the University, I agree that this situation has been unacceptable and would like to take this opportunity to apologise and explain.
The issues experienced were focussed around two of our key systems – the Central Authentication System and Blackboard.
The Central Authentication System verifies your details when logging into other applications and services (such as My Manchester, Blackboard, Timetabling and the online Knowledge Base). This is why these systems were not accessible to you whilst the problems were occurring, which were due to an unexpected increase in the number of connections to these services. We are continuing to investigate how this may be avoided in the future.
Regrettably, the Blackboard system itself also encountered some issues shortly after this. These were separate issues which arose after routine maintenance caused an aspect of Blackboard to fail. This has since been fixed.
As I was appointed here during the Summer I am still establishing where the University is in its use of IT and how IT Services operates. Service Improvement is high on my agenda.
Jan Wilkinson, the University Librarian, has made me aware that a number of IT issues have also affected customers using the University Library this semester. Many of these resulted from switching to a new Library Management System in July 2013 which operated properly during testing, but fell far short of expectations once semester had started. Unfortunately, similar issues are also affecting other UK universities who moved to the same system.
With apologies from Jan that this has happened, she has asked me to reassure you that Library staff are in daily contact with the supplier to make sure that all issues are resolved as soon as possible.
Jan and I are always open to receiving comment and feedback on any aspects of our services and you can contact IT Services informally at any time, via our Talk to us channel or, for the University Library, email uml.director@manchester.ac.uk
Gerry Pennell OBE
Director of IT