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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 saw askslashdot in the tag line and thought it answered this question.
I am almost finished with my undergrad at a large public university. I worked in several of the branch libraries during my years here, including a full-time stint this summer. The computers in our library allow anyone to use one application: IE7. We have no time limit on computer usage or have any web filtering. The problems that arise from misuse of these computers from non-university community members are astounding. In just one branch library here this year alone, several incidents have been reported of non-university people masturbating to Internet porn. All incidents were reported to staff by young female co-eds, who were visibly traumatized by the experience. These kinds of folks have also brought along other problems for us to deal with: drug use and selling, theft of personal property, theft of library materials (including computer peripherals), etc etc.
With incidents like these in mind, don't let idealism confound your tech policies. Think of the people who are going to interact with the public that are using university technology. It is maddening to have your hands tied by some lofty IT person's idealistic vision of free data access for all when you're trying to deal with serious breaches of public safety.
How does one promote open source in a managerial culture?
By using it only when it's the best solution. Don't push it if it's not the best tool for the job.
Niggers! Spics! Kikes!
Snickers! Pies! Kites!
There, fixed that for ya.
Just outsource all the work to Google and sneak out for a round of golf!
You're being very vague. University IT policies have many many stakeholders (Provosts, Regents, President, Deans, department heads, just to name a few) and a lot of interdepartmental politicking needs to be taken into account. Is this a 30k+ student body with hundreds of staff in the IT department or is it student body of 1,000 with only 20 IT people? Is the IT department merged with the library system or is it independent? Does IT bill the other departments for services or do they operate with a predefined budget? Is the reason for getting your input to provide direction for overhauling the IT department's network and services, or is the goal to change the general technology culture of the staff and student body? Should IT be involved more directly with students or are they just a necessary service like janitorial and maintenance? Does IT set policies, or is that handed down by decree from on high? Is the head of IT respected at the same level as the dean of a specific school or is he fighting for attention? Do departments/schools manage their own IT resources does everything have to be centralized?
Perhaps if you were a bit more specific as to WHY the University is asking for your specific input, and WHAT kind of input they expect from you, /. readers could provide you with appropriate responses. The open/closed source debate should only be one tiny aspect of an overall IT strategy, especially in an organization with differing needs as complex as a university. For example, CS/CE departments will certainly need and want a lot of open source tools and systems, but Fine Arts is better left alone with OSX and Adobe CS.
As your question is phrased now, I think your respsonses are going to be mostly of the variety "use/avoid product X" or "push for open source" and not really of much help in providing specific input towards the strategy you are mentioning.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Certainly you must determine their needs, but don't let them get involved in the solution. You will have a History professor who's a computer hobbyist (and whom the other liberal arts faculty consider an expert) offering you helpful suggestions based on a James Martin book he read a decade ago, some guy from Electrical Engineering pushing for end-to-end quantum crypto, deans trying to preserve their schools' autonomy, etc., with the end result looking like it was designed by a committee of monkeys.
Give us (research groups) the freedom to set things up so they work for us, but offer help in achieving that. All research groups are different, and we all need different things. Often we know (almost) enough to do things ourselves, but a bit of central infrastructure is always helpful. We run a mixture of Windows, Linux and Solaris - I think this is quite common. What would be really useful would be a few webpages describing how to configure things (services like LDAP or SAMBA) so they work with the central university structure. And please, Windows only solutions don't work for some of us. I have known several people who keep two computers on their desk because of this. But most of all, don't lock it down unless you really need to.
By using it only when it's the best solution. Don't push it if it's not the best tool for the job.
While that is very valid view to take - choosing the best tool for the job - I don't quite agree with it here. Or well, I do agree but I think that "open source" is a very valid criteria in choosing the best tool.
No, tools aren't automatically superior in security, features or such because they are open source. In fact, deciding to prefer open source harms this because it leaves some of the competition out.
Depending on your political views, how you view Universities in the society might vary. However, if you think that they are supposed to promote freedom of information, openness, be as independent from corporate control as possible, embrace ethical choices, etc. etc... Choosing open source is part of it.
Some people don't believe that those are the reason we need to have universities or that open source helps in those things... I am sure we can all argue about that for dozens of posts and get nowhere. :)
Figure out what their real needs are and meet them.
Learn who can be ignored and who can't.
In general, if they feel you are listening and understanding them,
you will get along ok.
My university was laying a bunch of new cable underground, and wanted to know what kind of cable to install that would be useful for the longest time. They asked the networking professor, probably one of the most knowledgeable people in the area on such matters. He told them that the cable type didn't matter, as long as it was installed with some sort of pull-through mechanism so that new cable could be easily installed at any time in the future without digging up the cables.
They ignored his suggestion, and installed whatever was good at the time despite his protests. I think they'll be due to re-trench a couple thousand yards in the not-too-distant future.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
Not only that, but remember about a year ago there was a /. article about a university course discussing strategy as played through Starcraft? Now you need to make exceptions for the rules.
Or my university had a multimedia programming/game development track within the CS department. You bet your ass they need unrestricted access to online resources that would otherwise be seen as non-academic.
The IT department cannot be responsible for determining what is or isn't academically relevant or else they'll end up in a never ending escalation of blocking/bypassing wars that will monopolize time and funds better spent improving the resources available to students and staff.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
When it comes to VLS (Virtual Learning Systems) please don't give into the Blackboard marketing machine. Moodle is free and equivalent in just about everyway. It drives me nuts to see colleges and universities paying for crap like Desire2Learn and Blackboard when many of them are cutting back student services and laying off people these days. What's even worse is that both Blackboard and D2L have significant bugs and really bad customer support.
Our university (around 38,000 students) pays Blackboard $600,000 a year (yes there are five zeros after that six). Please try convince your PHBs to give Moodle a look. The community is massive and helpful. You can find hundreds of great pluggins as well.
Seriously. No support needed. Start from there and make someone convince you to do anything different. Anyone who wants something different has to pay for it themselves. Tools like GMail and Skype are ever present and all around us. The analogy is to consider how Universities thought about electricity in 1900. I'll bet each University had it's own electricity generation and procurement department is its own hierarchy of management. Today they just get an electric bill from the same provider that services private homes near by. Someday soon, basic IT will be the same.
Nonsense: there's a huge difference between promoting the public interest (OSS), versus the interests of a particular corporation or individual — especially when you are working for an organisation whose mission is to advance the public interest (academic/charitable/public sector). One is a virtue, the other is verging on corruption.
Granted it would be a mistake to elevate this above the task of actually getting the job done, but I see no shame in promoting OSS as a matter of policy provided there are no overriding practical considerations.
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.
I'm at a university that had WebCT, which then morphed into Blackboard and has just recently been replaced with Moodle. Having using those systems, both as a student and in teaching roles, I have to say that Moodle is just plain better. It's cheaper (TCO), more versatile and more usable. And much less prone to inducing rage :-)
Of course, that doesn't mean that it's invulnerable to screw-ups. If you lock it down from on high with One True Way of Using The System, then you're probably not going to suit the needs of different academic departments and their different kinds of students (CompSci versus English majors, for example). On the other hand, too little structure can lead to ongoing support problems in security, maintenance and training/helpdesk services. The trick is to find a balance that works across your institution.