November 2011 Archives

Adam Hartung writes in CIO that it's time to stop focusing on "The Web" and to invest in "mobile":

"About 15 years ago, every company realized it needed an Internet presence. The emerging World Wide Web was good for far more than email. Companies that developed websites allowing customers to perform transactions, download information and ask questions were winning more sales, increasing customer satisfaction and lowering business costs. [...] But a lot of business isn't done on the PC-centric Internet any longer. Business has gone mobile, and a lot of traditional Web investment isn't paying off the way it used to."

Morris was the first campus in the University of Minnesota system to have a mobile-enabled front page on our web site. Users with smartphones, tablets, etc, were delivered a lightweight web page that was tuned for handheld devices. Our web focus needs to remain on making more content mobile-enabled. We know more students are using smartphones or tablets, the web pages they visit should display correctly on these devices. That means being smarter about how we design web pages.

Hartung concludes his article with a salient point: "It's as unrealistic to think today that you won't develop mobile apps, as it was to think in 1995 that you wouldn't develop web sites. The trend toward mobility won't be reversed - it's time to act."

You don't always get the time you want (or need) to give your full presentation. If you've ever been asked to speak at a committee or a conference, you know that sometimes you just don't have the time that you expected. What to do when you don't have enough time?

A common mistake by many presenters is to run through all the slides, all the talking points, in the shorter time. They reason that the presentation was structured in a particular way, so they need to go over everything. But in most cases, the audience is left with a fast-paced presentation, a jumble of thoughts that teaches nothing. That is the wrong way to manage time for a presentation.

A better way to give a presentation in less time is to omit content. What's critical to your presentation, versus merely important? Find ways to reduce the number of slides. Maybe that means skipping slides, only touching on the most important points. Or maybe that means ending the presentation early at a convenient stopping point, abandoning the rest of the presentation. It depends on your presentation, and your audience.

For example, see this classic training video from IBM, starring Kermit the Frog:

Kermit is menaced by an impatient blue monster, so chooses to skip over most of his 97 "stepping stones to success." Instead of 97 points, Kermit enumerates only the key points from his presentation: #1, #47, #97.

When you give your next presentation, be mindful of your critical talking points, in case you run short of time.

Jim Bruce (one of my mentors in the IT Leaders program) sends out a "Weekly Reading" email to the ITLP graduates. A few years ago, Jim pointed me to a great article in BusinessWeek Online, Good to Great Expectations, featuring an interview with Jim Collins on "getting to the next level". In the interview, Collins translates some of his popular concepts to today's workplace. Collins has 7 thoughts that hold a lot of value:

1. Create your own "personal board of directors" for insight when wrestling with tough questions.
2. Make the choice to have a work-life balance.
3. Manage your time, not your work.
4. Build into your calendar time to think.
5. Create a climate where truth is heard.
6. If you produce exceptional work, your ability for influence is very high.
7. Find a way to have younger people in your face all the time and learn from them.

Take some time and think about how you might put one or two of these into practice!

I especially loved this quote:

You've got to admit, though, that technology has made it [life-work balance] harder today.

Collins: "I don't think it's obviously harder today at all. Technology helps, not hurts, as long as you have the discipline to turn these things off. You don't report to your BlackBerry."

"You don't report to your BlackBerry" is a great quote to keep in mind. It applies equally well to any method of accessing email: on your phone, your iPad, your laptop, whatever. Too often, IT folks continue to do work email late into the evening, when we've gone home. We need to manage our email, not let our email manage us. When you aren't at work, unplug from email. Maintain your life-work balance, and you'll feel refreshed when you come back to work.

This Thanksgiving holiday, take advantage of the break. If you must be on-call, then it's ok to keep your pager or cell phone nearby, and to check your email occasionally. But your focus should be on your family and in unplugging from your workday stresses. Relax the mind, and you'll be in better shape come Monday.

It's too easy to think the "web" is just for those who can see. On a personal note, my father-in-law has diminished vision, and is legally blind. To use the computer, he uses special software to "zoom" the entire screen, and invert the colors to "white on black". Browsing the web can be difficult for those web sites that aren't designed with accessibility in mind.

Karine Joly writes in University Business about this issue. Her article Web Accessiblity: Required, Not Optional reviews several important points. She writes:

Web accessibility isn't a nice thing to have. It's the right thing to do to provide equal access to all. It's the legal thing to do to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. It's the smart thing to do to assure that your web content will be found by search engines. Google is the ultimate disabled user: It doesn't see, it doesn't hear, and it can't use a mouse. Yet, along with the other search engines and the social web platforms powered by algorithms, it will increasingly function as your eyes and your ears in the search for relevant information. Making an institution's web content accessible to all users will soon be a mere prerequisite to becoming findable in the overflowing stream of data, and ultimately visible on the web.

If you maintain web sites, I urge you keep accessibility in mind. Can your web site be easily read by a screen-reader? Are images optional to the navigation and presentation of your site? Do you use high-visibility colors (black on white, etc.)?

Looking for a resource? Purdue University has posted their web accessibility rules online.

I wanted to share this interesting article from CIO Magazine, about how employees are increasingly rejecting clunky enterprise software. It seems an extension of BYOT ("Bring your own technology"), the preference to use personal devices (iPads, smartphones .. even netbooks) rather than the often-outdated workstations and laptops issued by central IT.

In his article, Adam Hartung reviews an industry survey of 281 managers of manufacturing companies. A brief review of the results:

1. Managers tend to bypass the big enterprise systems if the interface is hard to use. 75% admit to using other open source tools, spreadsheets, and cloud-based applications instead of the clunky enterprise software.
2. Managers are less likely to take a job if they can't use cloud-based applications, or use their personal devices to access enterprise systems.
3. 66% of managers say they are likely to change jobs if their employer's corporate software is too difficult to use.
4. Today's managers often work non-traditional hours, or during vacation (although I would encourage an appropriate work-life balance) and expect to be able to access their work remotely through personal devices.
5. These trends increase with younger managers.

The most telling is this conclusion from the article: In the old days, central IT would keep these managers in line. A simple call up the chain to the CIO, and the rogue manager would be brought back into doing things the way IT intended them to be done. But today that defector is just as likely to be the CIO, COO, CFO or CEO.

BYOT is changing the way we need to approach IT management. And as this article indicates, we need to look beyond just the device, and consider the whole IT landscape.

CIO Magazine hosted a webinar in October, about the "Consumerization of IT". This is a topic that has gotten a lot of press lately. The CIO webinar covers these:

1. Why consumerization is a major wave of change, not a fad
2. The benefits of embracing and supporting consumerization
3. The benefits of supporting a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy
4. The role of desktop virtualization in helping IT gain control while users keep their independence
5. Best practices for rolling out a BYOD initiative

At issue with "Consumerization" is that concept of "BYOD", where faculty and staff prefer not to use the institution's laptops and computers, but would rather bring their own. This idea tends to be more popular the younger you are, and is most evident with tablet computing (the iPad) and smartphones.

For example:

• I have my own iPad, and I love it as a portable email device. I'll take it to meetings when I travel to the Twin Cities campus, and use it during "downtime" to read and respond to email. I don't really use it for games, but I have a few of those installed too.
• If I'm sharing a ride with someone else, I may use my Android phone to check email from the passenger seat. It may be somewhat challenging to write a long reply to someone using the tiny keyboard, but it's great to stay up-to-date with my email during that 3 hour trip to/from the Twin Cities campus.

Neither device belongs to the University, but I use them for work. This is an example of "BYOD".

While BYOD has worked out great for me, it's a topic that often keeps CIOs and IT Directors up at night. If the University doesn't control that device, how can we guarantee adherence to standards or controls?

A friend and I discussed this "loss of control", that the IT industry went through the same agony when organizations moved from the mainframe to the PC. They even used the same rhetoric at the time: "Consumerization of IT".

To understand the current trend, let's look at a brief history of business computing:

When businesses started to use computers to help us organize information, and process large amounts of data, everything was neatly stored on a mainframe. This "timeshare" system allowed all the data to be managed "centrally". The equipment could be easily audited, the organization could control how information was accessed. If you needed to process the data stored on the mainframe, you used a "terminal", not much more than a monitor and keyboard at your desk. But that was only a "view" into the system; the real processing always took place on the mainframe, located in an isolated server room.

In the early 1980s, IBM introduced the IBM-PC. This put individual computing within the budget of home users, or departments within an organization. With the right software, a worker could process data without having to go through the company's mainframe. Directors and managers could use the "personal computer" as a tool to solve new business problems.

But at the same time, the industry began to worry that technology was leaving IT's hands. PC's were not mainframes, and central IT did not know how to control the new computer when you could buy one at a store: the "Consumerization of the desktop". Many in IT scoffed at the PC as a "consumer" desktop, that "personal computers" were underpowered or lacked sophistication to become a suitable replacement for mainframes.

But eventually, the PC pushed aside the mainframe, and IT had to find ways to adapt to the new model, and adopt the PC as a business tool.

Fast-forward to today, 30 years later. We are hearing the same rhetoric about tablets and smartphones. Except this time, individual departments aren't bringing them to the workplace - it's the people. Central IT worries about controlling the data on these devices, when they aren't managed by the organization. Still others say the tablet and smartphone as work devices are a "fad", and will pass.

IT will ignore the impact of BYOD at its peril. Look around campus, at our students. I haven't seen many with iPads or other tablets, but they are there, and their numbers are growing. Many students look to their smartphone to check email, not a laptop or a lab computer. The era of the BYOD is already here.

As an institution, we need to embrace the concept of BYOD, and find ways to leverage it. How do we support these personal devices without putting data security at risk? Cloud computing is a good first step, because the data isn't actually stored on the device, it's in the cloud. But we need to plan ahead for where we need to be in 1 year, in 5 years. How will the IT landscape change with BYOD? We're now working on an "IT Masterplan" effort, and one of our goals is to find ways to adapt to BYOD, mobile technology, and mLearning. I welcome your input.

Computing Services has been working over the last several years to migrate away from physical hardware, onto virtual servers (where possible.) This is a general trend across the IT industry, which lowers the total cost of ownership ("TCO") for supporting large numbers of servers. We still manage these virtual servers, but they live within 1 or 2 larger servers. In our case, we use VMWare. With fewer physical boxes to manage, we can focus our time on the important things: supporting the campus through new and innovative applications.

For a little over a year, the Office of Information Technology (OIT) at the Twin Cities has provided managed virtual server hosting. This has been a boon to colleges and campuses across the University. It helps us to conserve our limited resources even further: OIT manages the virtual servers, and we support the applications. It is an opportunity to off-load the systems that require the most attention. Again, this allows us to focus more on the campus needs, and less on the "heavy lifting" of supporting servers.

In the next few years, OIT will move to a "datacenter in a box" concept, that will lower the operating costs of new servers. In turn, this consolidation may allow OIT to support more virtual servers.

This consolidation is becoming more popular across colleges and universities. Bridget McCrea wrote in Campus Technology about Taking College IT Out Of the Hardware Business. The article describes one college's effort to reduce their datacenter "footprint" by centralizing their virtual servers.

Babson College in Massachusetts has overhauled its back-end computing operations with a $1.7 million "datacenter in a box." The college considered several options, and did shop around for solutions before coming back to the group of vendors that was selling "a datacenter in a box." Key criteria for the new solution included the ability to provision quickly, address Babson College's resource management challenges, and scale up as the school grew.

The new setup has also allowed the college to go from roughly 15 racks in its datacenter (arranged in three rows of five racks) to a total of two. Two additional racks will be located offsite. That's a big win for consolidation.

And according to CIO Sam Dunn: "In the future--if it's financially beneficial and if it will result in better performance--we'll be able to slide servers out into Amazon, to Google's cloud, or wherever else we want." Clearly, Dunn is thinking not just about the next 1-2 years, but positioning IT for the next 5-10.

This requires a whole new way of thinking about "campus IT". It's no longer about supporting hardware. Like email before it, hardware is becoming a "commodity", easier to outsource than manage on our own. We shouldn't fear this change, but instead find new ways to leverage it.

This week, Pam and I hosted a walk-in clinic for using mobile technologies. It was a great opportunity for faculty and staff to visit, and explore mobile technologies that can enhance the learning experience. It was a great success, and we had lots of drop-in visitors.

I learned a lot, too! Among other things, I learned that you can participate in a Google Hangout on an iPad (including video!) but you have to be invited; you can't start a Hangout on the iPad.

During the clinic, Pam shared a link to her blog, with more mLearning resources. I'd like to share it with you: Mobile Learning in Higher Education. If you're interested in mLearning, this is worth a read.

Across the IT industry, open source software has been a part of major enterprise systems. At its simplest, a developer has an "itch" or a particular problem that needs to be solved, and writes a program to solve that problem. Maybe the developer thinks others have the same issue to solve, so shares the program under a special software license that allows anyone to make changes to the program to suit their particular needs. If the program is very useful, others may contribute improvements that make the program even better. The developer shares those improvements, for anyone to use, and everyone benefits.

In my own experience, I started experimenting with open source software around 1993. By 1994, I believed so strongly in the concept of open source software, that I shared my work on a new version of "DOS" with everyone on the Internet, under an open source license. FreeDOS is still used today - in embedded systems, in control systems, or just to play old DOS games. I've also written (or contributed to) dozens of other open source software projects: FreeDOS Install, FreeDOS Cats/Kitten, GNU Robots, GNU Emacs, hpCC, Freemacs, GTKpod, Atomic Tanks, Simple Senet, and others.

Open source software is part of the "DNA" of technology. It is everywhere, even if you don't see it. Many projects have gone unnoticed, largely because they live in the "backoffice" or "infrastructure" of an organization. For example, most DNS (which turns "blog.lib.umn.edu" into an address that your computer can understand) is actually running "Bind". The most popular web server today is Apache, often found running on Linux.

Sometimes, open source software makes its way into enterprise applications. Take for example, the Kuali system. The goal of Kuali is to bring the proven functionality of legacy applications to the ease and universality of online services. Among the suite of applications provided by Kuali:

• Kuali Financial Systems (KFS)
• Kuali Coeus (KC), a research administration system for higher education.
• Kuali Rice (Rice) (Software Development Simplified), a suite of middleware programs (workflow, messaging, identity management), interfaces and Web services around a service bus. With the Rice components, developers can more easily build and link applications as collections of modular, interconnected services.
• Kuali Student (KS), a student-centered web service architecture to provide students and administrators with tools to manage curriculum change and to develop individual Learning Plans.
• Kuali OLE (OLE), open library environment.
• Kuali Ready (Ready), an above-campus solution for business continuity.

Campus Technology has an interview with Lee Belarmino, the just-retired vice president of IT at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton, CA, who was a first-adopter of Kuali.

It's an interesting case study of open source software on campus. Using a community source model (the same as open source software, but among a cohort of dedicated institutions) Kuali helps reduce the total cost of ownership of this enterprise application suite.

Belarmino: "For community colleges interested in open source today, there are some really good options. In the case of colleges looking into Kuali, they can benefit from all the previous development work already done by the Kuali Foundation. New users will inherit the software: They can download it and try it out for free and pay no license fee, if they choose to implement it at their institution. And they have the option to join the Kuali Foundation membership to take full advantage of community support and to participate in and influence the future direction of KFS plus a whole suite of Kuali software."

It's sometimes interesting to look at some of the vendor email (not quite "spam") that I often receive, and identify trends. I received one this week from a service provider, with links to their whitepapers - no doubt informing me how I could save my budget by buying into their services. But the topics were interesting, and speak to what's on the mind of IT directors and CIOs today.

Here are the topics: (I'll omit the whitepaper titles)

• Mobile computing
• Optimizing your computing workload
• Cloud computing
• Business process management
• Delivering services via the cloud

Some version of "cloud" shows up twice in that list. You should also recognize mobile computing (tablets and smartphones) as a current topic on our campus.