We Have a Plan
Terry Calhoun, Commentator
Society for College and University
Planning (SCUP)
University of Michigan
In this issue of IT Trends, Princeton Internet Guru Howard Strauss shares with
us his observations based on a 216-year-old information technology plan—the
U.S. Constitution.
A Guest Opinion by Howard Strauss
Given that more departments have found it valuable to hire their own educational
technology support staff, larger centralized servers are being retired, and
given that the proliferation of student-owned computers has reversed the trend
of software delivered by servers, what role is left for a central IT organization?
Insight on the answer to this question may be found in the preamble of the
Constitution of the United States (Sept. 17, 1787). It established some of the
functions that a central government must provide, which are similar to the functions
that a central IT group must continue to provide, even in the face of a secessionist
movement on the part of university departments that IT groups traditionally
supported. Here's the preamble and a quick look at its implications to central
IT departments.
The Preamble
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more
perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the
common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty
to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for
the United States of America.
Form a More Perfect Union Departments may be as independent as they want, but
they need to all be connected to each other and to the outside world. Central
IT still needs to build and run the overall network plan, creating the high-speed
backbone, the redundant ISP connections, and the wiring to at least each building,
if not to each computer within each building. The network also needs to include
wireless networking, remote dial up facilities, and VPNs.
Another network that requires the control of the central IT organization is
the telephone network, which increasingly has a great deal in common with computer
networks. The potential integration of voice mail and e-mail, the movement toward
voice over IP, and the increase in digital services and controls on the phone
network make it a utility that requires central IT support.
The network has become so critical to the operation of a university that a
central disaster recovery plan that includes the network and key services on
the network must also be coordinated—if not controlled—by central IT.
If CNN says there has been an explosion at Euphoric State, you can be sure that
concerned parents will be calling the university. Many others will be checking
the university's Web site. Both of these must remain operational—or get operational
quickly—in the event of foreseeable disasters.
While every department might have its own Web site and even its own Web server,
the central IT organization must provide a university presence on the Internet
with a central Web site. IT must also provide network redundancies to ensure
that at least one ISP remains connected to the university network and that there
are alternate network paths to each building. The same is true of the internal
telephone network. A disaster recovery plan must be centrally administered that
plans for unavailability of phone network elements.
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.
If we try to do security department by department, the nasty folks who would
like to destroy our systems will have a much easier job.
Secure the Blessings of Liberty
We don't get the advantage of all the
things that IT can offer if we can't get help when we need it. A central IT
help desk or user services group is essential for making sure we can actually
use all the IT offerings. We'd use the help desk much less if good IT training
was available on-site or online. A central IT group can also fill that critical
task.
The development of enterprise portals is the biggest change to the way we use
the Web and develop systems for it. It also holds the promise of making all
of our users much more effective and efficient and of cutting administrative
costs in every university department. Every university needs an enterprise Web
portal and they need just one and only one of them to get the maximum benefit
from portals. Only a central IT group—with the cooperation of every university
department who owns data—can build the single portal a university needs.
Some group needs to carry the news of IT to individual departments. No matter
how big an IT group a department builds, it will not be aware of all the ways
that IT can help it and all of the IT facilities that are in place in the university.
It is never enough to build some new IT facility; it needs to be marketed to
potential users—by the central IT group of course.
Finally, a central group needs to look to the future in a deliberate, planned
way. To adapt to inevitable change and to take advantage of future IT developments
there must be a central advanced technology group that is poised to turn the
next development into the blessings of IT liberty for the future.
Signed By
All in all, there is a great deal of work to run a central government and a
central IT group. But we should remember that the Constitution was signed by
all the members after these words: "Done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent
of the States present …"
It was clear to the framers of the constitution that no central government
was possible without the unanimous consent of the States. If the central government
could not offer the States advantages that they needed and at the same time
give them the freedom they wanted, then the central government had no chance
of survival. The survival of central IT groups will depend upon the same kind
of agreement with the independent university departments. Without such an agreement
there will IT anarchy much to the detriment of the entire university community.
Guest Opinion by Howard Strauss ([email protected]), Manager of Technology
Strategy and Outreach at Princeton University
Terry Calhoun, IT Trends Commentator ([email protected]), is Director of Communications
and Publications for the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP)
www.scup.org.