March 2010 Archives

You may have seen in the OIT email last week that OIT will pilot Google Calendar. Beginning next week, OIT staff may begin to take part in an OIT-specific pilot program of Google Calendar. Participation in the pilot is optional at the work-group level, and at the discretion of the group's manager.

UMCal remains the official University calendaring system at this point, and as such, still should be used to schedule conference rooms, resources, and meetings with other University faculty and staff.

Those that do participate will need to use dual calendaring during the pilot, and first schedule meetings and resources in UMCal to ensure the necessary people, rooms and equipment are available, then again set up the meeting in Google Calendar.

OIT will populate rooms and equipment (but not managed calendars) by early next week for OIT staff in: 2218, 2221, Johnston, Walter, and WBOB. Building resources will be listed in the format "Building-Room Number, Department, Optional Description". For example: "WBOB-664 OIT Conference Room".

The senior management team, the communications and advancement office and other teams in OIT will participate in the pilot program.

The project team requests feedback from pilot participants, and will provide a feedback form to gather input during the pilot period. If you are a participant in the pilot program, please use this form to provide feedback that will help us provide optimal end-user communication.

OIT and Libraries each hold significant responsibilities for the University in delivering state-of-the-art information technology and services. OIT has maintained a close working relationship with the Libraries, and partner with them on many IT initiatives and projects, including the Aleph system and the Research Cyberinfrastructure Alliance.

The core business strengths of each partner is complementary in support of the enterprise information technology and service production and delivery. So it was great to see this kudos from the Libraries about this team's support of the Aleph upgrade:

Many hours of preparation go into planning for an enterprise software upgrade, and the Aleph v20 / Oracle 11 upgrade completed successfully this past weekend was no exception. LEO, OIT, and library staff from the Twin Cities and coordinate campuses spent considerable time testing, configuring, and troubleshooting the upgrade process beginning last summer, and we overcame a lengthy set of problems along the way. The successful work this past weekend was the culmination of extensive planning and preparation, and I'm pleased to report that all phases of the upgrade were not only completed on time, but ahead of schedule. [...]

Particular appreciation goes to Janet Arth for her lead role in planning. Thanks also go to Betsy Friesen for her coordination on testing and training, and to Chris Rose for coordination, testing, and communication on circulation functions. IT staff at coordinate campuses were also instrumental to this project, particularly Darlene Morris and Micki Lubbers.

As always, we had solid support from our OIT colleagues, including the Solaris, DBA, and Security units. Our OIT database administrator, Pragati Tripathi, deserves particular credit for the difficult work she did to upgrade our environment and database to Oracle 11. Pragati was right there working all weekend with LEO staff.

Many of you were involved with this project. Thank you!

When I first started this blog, I wrote a post titled How not to use PowerPoint. In that case, the presenter either put too much text on a slide, or used distracting "clip art" images. Both are great opportunities to lose your audience's attention.

So it was wonderful for me when I sat in a presentation last week, and the presenter did everything right in her presentation. Her talk used only a few slides. In one case, she had the same slide on the screen for about 10 minutes:

The slides either showed a full image (no text), or a few bullet items. As a result, the audience stayed tuned in to her message, and didn't get distracted with the slides.

The presenter brought lots of energy to the talk. So we shared in her enthusiasm for the topic, and listened closely to what she said. Looking around me, I didn't notice anyone with a laptop open. (When is the last time you could say that at a conference?)

You may one day need to give a presentation for others. Remember the general rules to give a truly outstanding presentation:

1. Avoid distractions.
2. Use slides that are visual, not wordy.
3. Share your enthusiasm.
4. Leave room to talk around the bullet points.

From the OIT all staff meeting, I wanted to talk about a few slides that caught my interest. One slide that I thought was very informative was "Recommended Organization: Highly coordinated model." The slide included a list of bullets that spoke to how our VP/CIO (Steve Cawley) fits into the overall IT picture at the University.

Two points addressed Steve's role:

• The IT directors serve as the "Board of IT Directors" under the leadership of the VP/CIO.
• The VP/CIO is ultimately the responsible authority for IT leadership across the University.

If you have ever wondered how the VP/CIO fits in with campus IT at the University of Minnesota, this slide should have helped to answer those questions.

The Harvard Business Review recently had a piece about collaborative environments that I thought fits OIT very well here. According to HBR, a highly collaborative employee is "T" shaped. The employee needs to have a deep understanding of their vertical areas (systems administration, database administration, job scheduling, monitoring, storage, backup, etc.) and that gives them the edge needed to bring value to the organization. That's the "|" part of the "T". But a truly collaborative employee will work across organizations, to work together, to add value to the process.

Now extend that "employee" analogy to OIT as a whole. I view OIT as being "T" shaped, with the VP/CIO helping to bridge campus IT and central IT. That's a large part of Steve's role here, helping the University to collaborate, and to be highly coordinated.

One of the slides from the OIT all staff meeting listed some of OIT's principles going forward. A few of them:

• Transparency.
• Highly coordinated deployment of IT across the University system.
• Agreed upon targets and associated metrics developed through annual IT compact process, ongoing engagement with units, and appropriate incentives to meet targets.
• Decisions driven by data-rich analytics.
• Alliances for shared infrastructure; facilitate inter-institutional collaboration.
• Use "above campus" viable commercial services whenever and wherever possible.

I've pared down that list to help focus on those that affect our teams most directly. What items call themselves out to you?

The point about making decisions based on data should sound familiar to you. I wrote about the importance of measurement very recently. Measurement and metrics help us to better manage our work. And by extension, that helps us to better support the University.

In the OIT all staff meeting, I saw a slide with a great quote about the future of IT in higher education:

"Information technology supports virtually every aspect of higher education, including finances, learning, research, security, and sustainability, and IT professionals need to understand the range of problems their institutions face so they apply IT where it brings greatest value. Creating this future will require collaboration across organizational and national boundaries, bringing together the collective intelligence of people from backgrounds including education, corporations, and government."

That quote is from an Educause publication, The Future of Higher Education: Beyond the Campus (2010). The article itself talks a bit about education in general, reminding us that higher education's purpose is to equip students for success in life, and that the "classroom" as we used to think of it no longer fits the traditional definition of 4 walls and a chalkboard.

So the purpose of campus IT really needs to focus on how to add value to education. Students rely on technology more today than ever before. I chaired a Student Advisory Board for 2 years where we heard directly from students about their technology needs. We learned new things about how students used technology in classes, in research, in learning - and we developed recommendations for how OIT and the rest of the University could better serve students through the use of technology.

It's important to remember that the ultimate customer of OIT is the student. How can we leverage technology to support the student, working from the Operations and Infrastructure teams? By serving our customers, and making wise technology decisions. Our direct customers (Registrar, Financial Aid, Library, etc.) are essentially the conduit of OIT technology and services to the student. That is how we provide value as an IT support organization.

From the OIT all staff meeting, I wanted to talk about a few slides that caught my interest. If you would like to take another look at the full presentation, you can find the slides and a link to the UMConnect video at the OIT internal wiki.

One slide that has been discussed at every OIT all staff meeting shows how OIT has changed its internal priorities since its inception in 1995:

This slide really talks about OIT becoming a more "planful" organization over the last 14 years. When OIT first started, the University IT environment was very different from today. Much of OIT and campus IT reflected industry at the time - that is during the "dot-com" boom.

As a result, OIT put most of its efforts towards immediate problems and projects. We focused on developing our own technology. At the time, this made a lot of sense - because the IT industry hadn't yet caught up to our level of innovation. For example, when I joined the University in 1998, no IT company sold a web registration product that fit into PeopleSoft. In fact, not many vendors even had "web enabled" products; it would take several years for that to happen. So, we wrote our own web registration system (then called "Whistler", later re-written as "Pillar" which we still use today.)

In recent years, of course, the IT landscape has changed considerably. Lots of vendors now sell solutions that we can use immediately. OIT has pushed for its own initiative to simplify, standardize, and automate as much as possible. Using this, rather than custom-develop a unique solution to a problem, we look to how others have solved similar problems. Where suitable products already exist, we now seek to purchase those products and integrate them.

Even before the budget contractions facing the University today, OIT had already moved to a budget model that ensures funding is in place before beginning new work. This ensures that OIT can sustain the IT environment over the long haul.

In the OIT all staff meeting last week, I made notes of several slides that I thought spoke directly to the work we do in this team. The slides have been posted to the OIT internal wiki, under "Hot items:"

https://wiki.umn.edu/viewauth/OITInternal

I plan to post a new item each day this week, talking about a different slide that was important to me.

As I look across OIT, I am reminded of the great value that we provide the University of Minnesota. But that value may be difficult to understand if it is not visible to others.

One way to make our impact more visible is to provide measurements and metrics. I prefer to mark our progress using trend graphs. This is a quick and easy way to see how things have progressed over the previous year. These trend reports also give a glimpse into the future, if we assume the trend remains relatively steady over time.

For example, I'd like to share with you three trend graphs from our hosting services:

Number of servers that we support for customers:

Number of web sites we host for customers, at each tier in central web hosting:

TB of SAN storage, and backup storage, since 2004/2006:

This method of visualizing the data into a simple chart helps others to understand the information. In the above you can see that storage and backup services continue to grow very quickly. It's not difficult to extend a line through the the data, and see when in the future we might reach our limit.

In OIT, this is how we make our purchasing decisions for the next fiscal year. As you heard in the OIT all-staff meeting last week, OIT begins its budget planning process well in advance of each fiscal year.

I ask that each of you consider the work that you do, and find ways to provide measurements that you can use, and that will help your manager to make better-informed decisions. Maybe that's the number of each version of Oracle over time, or maybe that's storage used/available on each filesystem (or drive) on a server. The "Cacti" system provides some of this for us. We are planning to purchase other tools to do this for us with the SAN and backup systems.

For those who were unable to attend last Friday's all staff meeting, the meeting can be viewed via UMConnect. You can find it on the OIT internal wiki under "Hot Items:"

https://wiki.umn.edu/viewauth/OITInternal

If you have any problems accessing the meeting, please contact Ben Neeser.

On Sunday 3/14/2010, during the regular maintenance window, the Linux systems administration team will perform the first phase of cut-overs to overhead network racking in the data center. This work will involve removing the current network cable and hooking up the new overhead connection. For those systems with SAN connections, the SAN fiber cable will also be changed over.

We expect a brief network disruption when the network cables are switched. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Patton Fast.

Just a reminder that the next all-OIT staff meeting is this Friday, March 5 from 1:00 - 2:30 p.m. in Willey Hall Room 125 (West Bank). We encourage all to attend in person, but understand that a few may have work conflicts. If you are not able to attend in person due to a work circumstance and need to join via UMConnect, please send your name to KT Cragg at kcragg@umn.edu.