Martin Hartley – Data, Digital and IT Infrastructure Programme Director – ‘My main aim is to make sure the university is fit for the future.’

What is your role?

I joined in November 2023 and the programme has been running for just over a year. If you think about all the change in the university and society at the moment such as cost of living, funding drops, the changing expectations of staff and students, ever increasing cyber risks, new tools and technologies and the fact that we’re only scratching the surface of the potential uses of our data – all these things means we can’t continue to do the things we’ve always done in the way we’ve always done them. This programme is trying to solve those problems and take advantage of the opportunities.  

What is DDI and how will the project work? 

DDI is Digital Data and IT Infrastructure. To explain it properly I need to split it into three categories: 

Digital – this is using all available tools and techniques to deliver good outcomes for everyone across the university. We want to make our ways of working more efficient, more effective, more collaborative, and more productive. 

Data – we want to give everyone access to the data that will help them do their job better. That data needs to be accurate, timely and trusted. We want to be able to find hidden stories in that data that we wouldn’t have seen, whether it is operational, student or external data. It’s about bringing all the data from different sources together to establish the truth. We want to make the data as clear, robust, and easy to use as possible for people who aren’t data experts. 

IT Infrastructure – this is about modernising and simplifying the IT environment – quicker, better, simpler, cheaper, and safer. Lots of the focus is on our existing systems, modernising the ones we want to keep and switching off the ones we don’t. 

How will it improve things for staff/students? 

Again, I’ll take each area individually: 

Digital – you might have heard of the SEATS attendance monitoring software that we introduced last year and rolled out to Level 5 students recently – this helps us support student wellbeing by highlighting if a student isn’t attending their lectures. If they aren’t, it might suggest that something is wrong, and we can address that early. So, this one piece of software can help us support student wellbeing, highlight if there are any problems that we can help them with if they’re not attending their lectures, reduce the risk of a student withdrawing from their course and help us to retain fee income. 

Data – we want to improve the user experience – to provide the tools to do complex data analysis and visualisation in a more user-friendly way, to automate key data processes and reduce the need for people to manually deal with data, reducing the risk of errors and freeing people up to do creative, productive things with that data and make evidence-led decisions!  

IT Infrastructure – in simple terms, if things aren’t being used then we are turning them off! We have saved the university £1.3 million over the next three years just be getting rid of tools that we don’t use and that’s just the start! We are also making sure we maximise the use of the tools we have got. Lots of us automatically still use MS Office tools such as Word, Excel and Outlook, but what if I was to tell you that Excel was released in the same year as ‘Back to the future’ and Outlook was released when the Spice Girls were at number 1 in the charts  - I bet they seem very old and dated all of a sudden?! I love to help people see that tools can help them change their way of working for the better. We have some good collaboration tools such as Teams, Sharepoint and One Note, that can make our working lives so much simpler. I want colleagues and students to get more value from the tools they already have. 

Tell us a fascinating fact about yourself? 

I am related to Michael Foale - the only astronaut who went to both the International Space Station and the Mir Space Station. He is my Grandma’s cousin’s son so I think my second cousin. At weekends I can often be found running across the fells of the Yorkshire Dales, and, since working at the university, I’ve discovered that when I grow up I’d like to do a Sports Science degree!