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We Have a Plan
5/6/2003
While some departments may have their own servers and their own instructional technology, the central IT department needs to provide those services for departments that do not, and needs to be a clearing house to enable the work done in one department to be shared with another.
The central IT department must also attempt to set standards for hardware, software and IT policies. This may not always be 100 percent successful, but having half of the university following some standard is a great leap ahead of total anarchy.
Establish Justice While we can have independent servers and departmental IT groups, the policies that determine what are acceptable and unacceptable uses of the facilities need to be centralized. Standard penalties and administrative actions also need to be established.
The central IT group must also deal with university-wide licensing and distribution of software. You don't get volume discounts when each department buys their own copy of a software package. Some licensed software needs to be distributed via key servers that limit the number of simultaneous users. This is another area for a central IT group.
Copyright enforcement and interpretation, intellectual property issues, Web accessibility policies, enforcement of FERPA, the Buckley amendment, and other IT legal issues all need to be dealt with by a central IT organization.
Insure Domestic Tranquility
IT departments offer financial applications, student systems, and other administrative
applications that need to be done centrally. The entire IT business side of
the university needs to be centrally administered.
Much of the student administration also needs to be done centrally. While individual departments might use a course management system in any way they wish, a central IT department needs to actually manage the CMS itself. At Princeton, we copy central student and course data to our CMS to put 100 percent of courses on the system at the inception of classes. Every student and every faculty member receives the same interface to all courses. This kind of thing can only be done effectively by a central IT group.
Universities also offer discounts of standard hardware to students and often to faculty and staff as well. Any place where there is a great advantage to having some standards requires a central group to develop and enforce those standards.
Provide for the Common Defense
Our networks and computer systems are under attack continuously day and night.
The attackers are quite sophisticated, requiring a high level of sophistication
and coordination to counter them. Hackers, viruses, spammers, and internal malicious
or naïve users threaten to destroy our systems and data. Putting virus detection
software on all computers is essential, as are local e-mail filters, but having
central virus detection and central e-mail filtering provides another important
layer of protection. When a threat is successful despite our best efforts—and some will be—we need a well-trained SWAT team on-call around the clock
to jump in, restore the integrity of the system, and track the baddies down.
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