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How To Help With a University ICT Strategy?
An anonymous reader writes "I have been asked to contribute to my university's revised ICT (Information and Communication Technology) strategy and I am curious what fellow Slashdot members consider to be the main advice in this context. What are the major mistakes that organizations like universities make? Given the complexity of the different participants in a university, how does one have a coherent strategy that fulfills the needs of such a wide audience? How does one promote open source in a managerial culture? How does one deal with the curse of the virtual learning environment?"
I'm complaining about IT overreach in power. As it stands now, one over-zealous IT guy at the top is preventing the librarians from taking any steps toward rectifying misuse of technology. For example, it would help us out tremendously to switch the computers that are in unsupervised corners of the library to authenticated log-in use only (like WiFi) and allow free public access in areas that can be surveyed by library workers at all times. We want to protect the safety of our real patrons while still welcoming the general public to surf safely on the web for free. The idealistic jerk at the top is preventing us from changing anything.
Give OSS as an option. At my university, most of the public computers run Windows, and have MS software as the only options. If I'm lucky, I get to use Firefox instead of IE. A lot of people are used to using this stuff, so fine by me if the University wants to have it there for them. But it doesn't cost anything to install some open source stuff alongside the Microsoft programs. The problem you'll have, I would guess, is persuading people that this isn't going to involve lots of support costs in terms of training IT staff. Yeah, I know, but people are funny like that. They assume that anything open source will be arcane, virus-ridden, and completely impossible for the average user to understand.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
Yes, zero tolerance on those specifications (or, really, anything not otherwise illegal) would be a mistake since that would make the university non-interoperable with students, faculty, other researchers, industry, government, and the rest of the world. University IT departments (really, all IT departments) should have at least the purpose and goal of enabling the organization to meet its business objectives (efficient output of high quality teaching, research, advocacy, other products) through the effective management and provision of ICT tools. IT departments, like accounting departments and the loading dock, are means to informing and fulfilling other broader strategic objectives, and should rarely be ends unto themselves. More sophisticated IT departments should certainly form strategy around their own operations and aspire to become more than a supporting department, but not at the expense of achieving the organization's regular business objectives.
At one university in which I participate, the CIO decided that nightly six-hour backups of 13 different legacy mainframe systems was inefficient, and increasingly costly as upkeep and replacement parts became increasingly expensive. However, the systems had co-evolved with the business operating procedures of the entire 40-year-old institution, providing great efficiencies at the human business administrator level, such that processing was swift, accurate, and responsive to the needs of the students, faculties and other customers. Everyone on campus had two credentials: the library card and the IT (AIX) login. IT signed with [that system that Oracle bought] on the understanding that the business logic and VT interfaces from all of the legacy systems would be ported over to the new web-based system in two years, such that the data would be seamlessly carried through and users would require minimal retraining on business processes. The vendor-supplied consultants, it was thought, would be able to magically absorb decades of institutional knowledge about the university's documented business processes, without any consideration for the many more legitimate but undocumented exceptions. They did no meaningful consulting with the users of the proposed new system. Oddly at the time, the management faculty applied enough pressure to largely not participate in this migration on the grounds that their system (which replicated the functions of the central system on recent platforms) would not be made more efficient by this plan.
Three years after, data from two of the silos were ported, the interfaces and business logic were completely new, and average administrative processing time in many customer-facing units rose from hours to weeks. Some of the more experienced administrators left in frustration, taking valuable intra- and extra-institutional knowledge with them. Others stayed and became "[platform] translators" who would take old paper forms completed by faculty, staff and students, and manually key them into the various parts of the new system (the system also assigned new terminology to things like "semester", "term", "quarter", "credit hour", etc. which had different meanings elsewhere in hardcopy and departmental regulations). IT deployed a new helpdesk specific to the new platform, and customer-facing staffing for faculty and students (and the queuing area at the registrar's office) had to be more than doubled to deal with the increased volume of exception handling required. This $35 million migration was already $10 million over budget, and perhaps 15 per cent complete. At this time, elsewhere in IT, people were implementing different SSO systems for students, faculty and administrative staff, and yet a different system for wireless access.
Over the next five years, they migrated the remaining silos, disappearing probably over $50 million in various kinds of internal accounts in the process, including federal funding, some of the smaller endowed chairs, etc. (For three years, our relatively small research group couldn't access around $2 million in f
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
Why is it the job of the University to provide free public internet access? Isn't that what public libraries are for?
At our library, we have a few (25) terminals running IE 7 only, and yes, the general public can walk up & use them without logging in, but only for a few services on the campus network (eg, the Library catalogue). If they try to go anywhere else, a NoCat server kicks in and prompts them for a campus computing ID. We provide time-limited guest IDs for community users that will allow them to get past the NoCat wall, but only if they show us an appropriate photo ID and agree to follow our campus computing policies.
The rest of our public computing (120 full-featured workstations) requires a login up front. No campus computing ID, no access. And the guest IDs don't work on those either. Not our mandate to provide free word processing to members of the general public, when we have students lined up around the block (see point about public libraries, above).
What I'm getting at is that it's possible to provide a balance between security and information access. Providing anonymous access to everyone who enters the facility is just asking for trouble. We used to do that, and we used to get hate mail regularly traced back to our IPs. Not so much anymore.