October 2011 Archives

ECAR (the research area at Educause) has just published a new report on the ever-evolving role of the CIO. The CIO role in higher education continues to inspire, and sometimes perplex, those who examine it. ECAR studied information technology leaders in colleges and universities, examining the CIO role: past, present, and emergent. The report also integrates findings from the 2010 ECAR survey of IT staff and leadership, the EDUCAUSE Core Data Service, the EDUCAUSE Current Issues Survey, and interviews with sitting CIOs from research universities, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges.

You'll need an Educause login to download the report: The Higher Education CIO: Portrait of Today, Landscape of Tomorrow, 2011 Report. Below is a summary of the report's findings:

• 113 senior-most IT leaders plan to leave that position within 6 years; 420 individuals aspire to fill those roles.
• 36% of people aspiring to be a CIO have a mentor, and they are more satisfied with their development opportunities by a factor of 2 to 1 over those who do not.
• 100% of survey respondents rate communication skills as important for CIO success. 31% rate technical proficiency as important for CIO success.
• 45% of leaders responsible for their institution's primary IT organization have the title of "CIO"; 70% of primary IT leaders in doctoral institutions have that title.
• 80% of current CIOs have an advanced degree; 25% have a PhD, most commonly at doctoral institutions.

The study gathered quantitative and qualitative data from 3,400 IT professionals at 1,053 institutions of higher education.

Technology changes at a rapid pace. Not too long ago, we all stored our data on floppy disks. How many of us still have unused 3.5" floppies in our desk drawers or file cabinets? These floppies stored 1.44MB of files. At the time, that was a lot of WordPerfect or Lotus1-2-3 files.

To put that in today's terms: it would take about 3 of these floppy disks to store 1 song from iTunes.

But technology moved on. Many of our students have never seen a floppy disk. Instead, they likely use USB flash drives to transport their data. I have a 16GB USB flash drive in my laptop bag, yet I rarely use it. Today, even a 16GB drive is almost obsolete, when you can put all your files "in the Cloud" and access them anywhere. What will be our storage options in another 5 years? Or 10 years? Where will we keep our data?

That's why we always need to look forward to what's next, to think about how to adapt new technology for the campus. We recently started an IT Working Group to do just that, and I am excited to see how we interpret the changing landscape ahead.

I'll leave you with one other example of how technology has changed:

If you are of a certain age, you know why a cassette tape and a pencil go together. But I'll bet many of today's students have never seen a cassette tape, much less know why you sometimes need a pencil. How long until future students no longer recognize the wood pencil in the picture?

In 2008, the University of Minnesota Morris concluded a report to guide future campus IT planning. As we start a new IT Working Group, I thought it would be interesting to take a look back at a snapshot of the 2008 Technology Report. The full report is 29 pages, but a summary is listed below:

The following themes emerged from the report:

1. Instructional technology management
2. Autonomy versus centralization
3. Professional training and training
4. Funding for technology, technology support personnel and professional development for the campus community
5. Security
6. Policies and governance
7. Technology and the curriculum
8. Services
9. Technology for external audiences

The report also identified issues of technology utilization at UMM:

Section One: Current realities and considerations

• Peer comparisons
• Tension between local autonomy and centralized technology management

Section Two: Teaching and Research Support

• Classrooms
• Faculty office workstations and equipment
• New Faculty set-up
• Faculty research support
• Faculty Center for Learning and Teaching
• Discipline specific and general computer labs

Section Three : Instructional Software, Hardware and Equipment

• Adaptive technology
• Learning Management software

Section Four : Student support needs

• Res-Net
• Open Computer labs
• Central data storage / Net Files
• Student Affairs
• Comments from the student perspective

Section Five: Administrative Technology Needs

Section Six: Technology Intensive Units / Technology Providing Units

• Computing Services
• Media Services
• Library

Section Seven: Technology Policies and Procedures

Section Eight: Funding Concerns

Section Nine: Infrastructure and relationship with Campus Master Plan

• Networks
• Environmental support for infrastructure
• Wireless
• Security safeguards
• Telecommunications and Telephony
• Campus wide voice mail system

We sometimes forget the origins of modern computer systems. In the very early days, computers were room-sized behemoths, where operators would input data using switches. Computers finally become a tool for everyday use when you could "talk" to the system using a more typical process: typing commands. Sure, eventually we moved to graphical interfaces with a mouse or touchscreen, but in the beginning was the command line.

Neal Stephenson wrote about this in his 1999 book: In the Beginning was the Command Line. It's a great read. If you'd like to borrow the book, let me know, it's on my office bookshelf. But now Neal has released his book for free via the web, in plain text format, so you can load it into a variety of e-book readers.

About twenty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, came up with the very strange idea of selling information processing machines for use in the home. The business took off, and its founders made a lot of money and received the credit they deserved for being daring visionaries. But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems. This was much weirder than the idea of Jobs and Wozniak. A computer at least had some sort of physical reality to it. It came in a box, you could open it up and plug it in and watch lights blink. An operating system had no tangible incarnation at all. It arrived on a disk, of course, but the disk was, in effect, nothing more than the box that the OS came in. The product itself was a very long string of ones and zeroes that, when properly installed and coddled, gave you the ability to manipulate other very long strings of ones and zeroes. Even those few who actually understood what a computer operating system was were apt to think of it as a fantastically arcane engineering prodigy, like a breeder reactor or a U-2 spy plane, and not something that could ever be (in the parlance of high-tech) "productized."

We are about to begin our own technology planning initiative, which will update the campus IT strategy from several years ago. The IT masterplan needs to respond to how students use technology to learn, and how faculty want to leverage technology for instruction. Very apropos, ECAR has just released The National Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2011. The report sheds light on how information technology affects the college experience. Because of the widespread interest in and importance of this topic, ECAR has made this report publicly accessible upon release. It's an interesting read.

The ECAR study of undergraduate students and information technology sheds lights on how information technology affects the college experience. ECAR has conducted this annual study since 2004, and though students' ownership and utilization of technology changes from year to year, students consistently rely upon their instructors and institutions to meet their technology expectations and needs. The 2011 study differs from past studies in that the questionnaire was reengineered and responses were gathered from a nationally representative sample of 3,000 students in 1,179 colleges and universities.

Among the findings:

• Students are drawn to hot technologies, but they rely on more traditional devices
• Students report technology delivers major academic benefits
• Students report uneven perceptions of institutions' and instructors' use of technology
• 65% of students have taken a course entirely online

The ECAR report provides these immediate recommendations:

• Investigate your students' technology needs and preferences and create an action plan to better integrate technology into courses and information systems.
• Provide professional development opportunities and incentives so instructors can better use the technology they have.
• Expand or enhance students' involvement in technology planning and decision making.
• Meet students' expectations for anytime, everywhere, Wi-Fi access on the devices they prefer to use.
• Nail the basics. Help faculty and administrators support students' use of core productivity software for academic work.

The report provides lots of other detail. This infographic has an interesting encapsulation of key points, including:

• Top software used by students: word processing, library web site, presentation software, spreadsheets, course/learning management system.
• Macs are growing in popularity with students less than 25 years old; Windows shrinks from 77% to 57%, while Mac grew from 13% to 31%
• Almost all students use: email, txt messaging, Facebook.
• Technology considered "essential" by today's students: laptop, wi-fi, printer, flash drive, desktop computer.

And in general, the report shows a sharp increase in smartphone use on campus. As I've said before: smartphones and tablets aren't "coming soon", they are already here. We need to support them as we position our campus IT.

You can no longer say "Cloud" is the next revolution in computing. Cloud is already here. At the University of Minnesota, many of our core tools are running in the Cloud. Gmail and other Google Apps are the obvious example. But really, any software running as "Software as a Service" ("SaaS") via a vendor can be considered "cloud". At Morris, the new Zimride ride-sharing system is a Cloud application. And more campus technology is moving to the Cloud.

Campus Technology highlights several of these Cloud classroom tools in Hiding in the Cloud: Great Classroom Tools by Jennifer Skelly.

Among the favorites:

• ShowMe is a free iPad app that facilitates whiteboard-style demonstrations. The topic can be shared in class or watched at home, and can also be published to the ShowMe Community site.
• SlideRocket allows educators and students to build and deliver presentations online, offline, and via mobile devices.
• SideVibe lets teachers build interactive lectures directly on top of existing web pages. Students can engage in online discussion, while teachers can collect and assess student work instantaneously.
• Screencast-O-Matic allows users to record video directly from their browser and embed it into a lecture or presentation. They simply draw a box around what they want to capture and click "start recording." Because it's cloud-based, there is no software installation necessary.
• With JetJaw, educators can perform real-time formative assessments: Students text a code from their mobile phones and can immediately participate in a survey or quiz. The results are instantaneously recorded and can even be displayed on-screen as they come in.
• iCyte is used to capture web pages and pdfs and save them directly to the cloud. The tool archives pages just as they looked when they were saved, even if the site itself is updated or removed.

I recently wrote about Simplify, Standardize, Automate as our model in IT. I'd like to share this article from Facebook about how they automated the administration of their servers:

• Making Facebook Self-Healing, by Pat Power (Facebook's Site Reliability team)

It's a great article, if somewhat technical. In short:

Facebook's Site Reliability team is dedicated to keeping the site up and fast and stable, responding to outages on individual servers, to large outages across the entire site. Facebook's server infrastructure was already huge, and growing too quickly to handle small repetitive outages manually. They had to find an automated way to handle these sorts of issues so that the human engineers could focus on solving and preventing the larger, more complex outages.

So, Pat started writing scripts to automate the fixes for various types of broken servers and pieces of software.

Over time, Pat developed the scripts more and more. As they got better, they saved him more time, which he used to continue improving them.

Today, the scripts are developed and maintained by two full time engineers. But according to the most recent metrics, it's doing the work of approximately 200 full time system administrators. That's a big win for automation!

The scripts now manage more than 50% of the Facebook infrastructure, and they find that services have dramatic increases in reliability when they go under automated control. This is making the site more and more reliable for end users while reducing the workload of the supporting engineers.

I'm always on the lookout for leadership advice to share on this blog, so I was pleased to discover this page on Clare's personal web site: reducing stress.

Aside from being good advice on stress reduction, this is also good practice for any upcoming leader who wants to develop good leadership skills. Clare's 5 points are:

1. If possible, don't take on any new projects that will demand a lot of your time or come due during the time of another large project.

2. Take care of as much routine work in advance of the stressful time as possible.

3. Ask yourself: Can someone else do it? Can something be delayed? Can I substitute something else? Is it essential?

4. Find a time-planning system that helps you.

5. Concentrate on the most important tasks first.

These tips discuss time management, urgent vs important, lead-manage-do, and delegation - and are essential for successful leadership. In reference to #5, I've often recommended that email is the least important priority. You need to respond to email, but not always right away, do not let it distract you from leadership.

Once in a while, I like to look at something in a different way, and pull leadership lessons from unexpected sources. Along these lines, I've discussed:

• Communicating through change, providing recommendations for Star Wars: Return of the Jedi
• Leading a small group discussion, using the (in)famous scene at the beginning of Pulp Fiction
• 5 leadership lessons from General Zod, via Superman II

These are lighthearted views into leadership lessons, from places that are not your usual sources of leadership inspiration. But it's good fun, while being educational. In that light, let me share another leadership lesson from an unexpected source: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

In episode 1.11, Winter Wrap Up, the ponies of Ponyville participate in an annual event to bring Spring to Equestria. It's an important tradition, and an involved musical number by composer Daniel Ingram concisely summarizes the Wrap Up events.

The mayor provides the vision, and lets everypony choose the tasks that are best suited to their individual strengths and interest. But without coordination, activities begin and end at different times, leading to confusion about following dependent tasks, and things quickly fall apart.

Yes, we can take a few leadership lessons from this:

1. Explaining your "end state" vision is an important start, but you must coordinate if your vision will be executed by several groups.
2. Use delegation wisely. Know when to get involved if things don't go well.
3. Take advantage of coaching opportunities to help others find their strengths.
4. Be mindful of lead-manage-do. A leader cannot be effective at the high level vision if she is too "hands on" (or "hoofs on", in this case.)
5. Identify "stretch" opportunities to develop new leaders.

The OIT planned maintenance went according to schedule this weekend. I'd like to complement everyone in OIT who participated in this work, as they hit every milestone on target, on time. Having worked through several of these maintenance windows before, I know how hard everyone worked on this.

The SystemStatus page was updated with the latest news, so those who wanted to track the progress (like me!) could do so. As of noon today, all systems were back up, exactly as planned. This was terrific work!

I'd also like to thank OIT for being so responsive to us in planning the outage. Patton Fast and Jac Campbell worked very closely with Computing Services on this, as did the OIT Linux and VMWare teams. UMM has several systems hosted at the Twin Cities, including our www.morris.umn.edu web server, and the database server that supports it. OIT made special arrangements to keep these systems running throughout the weekend - which was critical to us, especially considering this was our Homecoming weekend.

Thanks for making this a successful weekend!

I just wanted to note that I've been with the University of Minnesota for 13 years!

My first position at the University was as a production manager, with the fairly new "Web" Team. They had been around for only a few years, developing new interfaces such as a web-based grade calculator, online class schedule and course guide, and a new web site concept called "OneStop". Later, we worked on the University's web-based registration system.

Web Team had recently been added to the Office of Information Technology, and over the years I found other opportunities in OIT. My production team was moved into OIT's Central Computing Operations, where I also managed all the operating systems groups. When CCO was merged into the Operations Infrastructure & Architecture group, I was promoted to lead all the Operations and Infrastructure teams.

And more than a year ago, I accepted the position of Directory of Information Technology with the University of Minnesota Morris. It's been a great first year with Morris, and I look forward to many more.