Governance

YHMAN Limited is a joint venture company owned by eight universities in the Yorkshire and Humber region and has been providing Internet services since 1998. The Board of Directors comprises representatives from each of the shareholder universities in our region. Secretariat and financial management services are currently provided by specialists from the University of Leeds.

The Directors during 2008/09 were as follows:

Mr G Bell (University of Bradford)
Mr D Speake (University of Sheffield)
Mr C Coghill (University of Leeds)
Ms S Final (University of York)
Mr B Hackett (University of Huddersfield)
Ms B Colledge (Leeds Metropolitan University)
Dr R Heseltine (University of Hull)
Mr R Lee to 05/09 and Mrs A Hayes from 05/09 (Sheffield Hallam University)

The company operates under a number of service level agreements with suppliers and customers and measures performance against agreed standards. The principal sub-contractor is the University of Leeds which provides operational management of the network through a dedicated technical team.

The company has robust risk management and disaster recovery policies approved by the Board and a Disaster Recovery Team has been appointed. The Board is confident that business continuity arrangements in the event of a major incident or disaster affecting the operational service of the regional network are appropriate and sufficient. For reassurance of the robustness of the plans, the Board appointed Marsh to run a desk-top test in April 2009 to investigate its capability against 'real world' scenarios. The business continuity plan performed well and the suggested improvements have been incorporated into the revised Plan. Technical and Business Risk Registers are reviewed by the Board on an annual basis. 2008/09 saw a successful external audit of YHMAN procurement procedures.