Kenneth Macdonald BA (Accg & Fin), MSc (Inf Mgt)

Room 103
Tel: +44 114 222 3350
Fax: +44 114 222 3348

email : k.macdonald@sheffield.ac.uk

Information Manager: Management School and Economics
IT Leader, Faculty of Social Sciences

Kenneth is the School's Information Manager with responsibilty for:

• Project Management
• Leading and Mentoring IT Staff across the Faculty of Social Sciences
• Managing the provision of support related to Information and Communications Technology (ICT)
• Managing the School's Strategic Management Information Systems (MIS)
• Managing the School's Procurement and Administration of ICT equipment
• Managing the School's web presence in conjunction with the School's Marketing Manager
• Liaising with Central Service Departments with respect to ICT and MIS issues
• Delivering or Acquiring appropriate training for staff and students
• Providing input to University-wide ICT Projects

Kenneth was an undergraduate student in this department and a postgraduate student in the Department of Information Studies, giving him excellent insight into the needs of staff and students in the University of Sheffield. Before joining the university, Kenneth worked on a major IT project for Midland Bank and as a database consultant for the National Association of Councils for Voluntary Service.

Kenneth is also an annual speaker to the local branch of the Chartered Management Institute and an organiser of the Sheffield Café Scientifique.

Impact

The broad range of relationship capital I established ensured that the Management School was selected from the whole University as Europe´s biggest the pilot for WebCTEnterprise. This involved successful liaison with a complex set of internal clients as well as the WebCT Liaison team from USA.

Engagement in many projects throughout the University, bringing experience and an ability to solicit and understand the needs of a diverse internal client community. Examples include the introduction of a user portal, the Collaboration Improvement Project and the CRM Project.

Faculty Review of Management Information provision, having begun to establish the MI needs as perceived by admin staff in the departments, to this end I have begun to understand the systems and solutions offered centrally, with a view to helping departments move from locally managed databases to centrally managed systems

In response to School´s need to improve its Alumni relations , I proposed, specified and created a Social network for alumni, setting policies and procedures and engendering client confidence and trust. This I achieved a year before the School appointed its first Assoc Dean for Alumni Relations

Membership of the School´s project team for the move to new premises, is recognition of my broad knowledge of the way the School works and an understanding of how the School needs to position itself for future growth and development.

Membership of the School´s emergency response team (after pandemic flu), demonstrates ability to think creatively.

Design, management and maintenance of the School´s Workload Allocation Database, which was designed to be able to report the School´s human resource deployment varied levels of detail, having borne in mind the needs of the School to report to various audiences, internally to the School, internally to the Faculty and externally to professional bodies. This business-focussed understanding of the management issues made me an obvious choice to support administrators in the roll-out of WAF in other parts of the Faculty.

Ensure the successful operation of the unit within budget. I Manage budgets for Data Subscriptions (including DataStream), Software, Hardware and maintenance agreements for a unit that supports 2500 users.