Shared Services with University Modernisation Fund support

The University Modernisation Fund (UMF) was set up in 2010. One of its two aims was to support greater efficiency at universities and colleges and reduce costs over the medium term.

To this end we allocated £20 million through the fund for the development of shared services, collaborative procurement and other innovative ways of reducing support costs in order to sustain the quality of teaching and research

Funding allocations

The fund has been allocated as follows:

£12.5 to build on existing development work in the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and in the existing shared services programme. This includes the development of the Flexible Service Delivery programme and the development of a national approach to data centres, laying foundations for making cloud computing available across HE
£1 million to fund five shared services pilot projects identified as a result of feasibility students funded by HEFCE
£500,000 to develop benchmarking information
£6million to accelerate the adoption and embedding of e-procurement across all HEIs in two areas:
- establishment of an E-Procurement Fund. Grants worth £3,955,195 were made to 66 universities and colleges to implement an e-marketplace or to develop an existing one.
- Development of a generic e-marketplace for use by smaller universities and colleges, which do not have the resources to implement and run an institutional e-marketplace.