Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

We have a lot going on in case you have not noticed… We have had groups looking at the topics listed in the title for quite some time, some of them longer than the others. Where exactly are we on these projects? Are these interconnected? Why is it taking us a long time to reach conclusions? When I attend meetings, others are interested in knowing what we are up to and I mention these and other projects we have been working on. Two things that come up – what is taking so long? how exactly do these relate to what I do?

So I decided to ask these question myself… Here are my observations.

Why are these taking this long?

• Each of the topic by itself is complicated. If you take content management, between ITS and library, the members of the group identified over 10 areas to cover, from special collections to the consolidation of storage spaces.
• Many of these initiatives are interconnected. Wikis can be used as the way to maintain websites, and blogging software is typically used as a way to publish and maintain podcasts, and content management software can also be used to maintain websites.
• The project design and implementation is not just a technical task (if so, we would be far ahead), but also involves many other connected issues such as policy and user experience. For example, podcasting – we need academic affairs to define the access controls and oversight on the intellectual property issues on podcasting classroom lectures; we may have learned to work with Dokuwiki, but do we really think it will work for the end users? perhaps not… so we need to look at a few choices.
• In a few cases, the solutions are very expensive – initial estimates for the content management systems that have been shortlisted runs between $70K upwards in initial cost and another 20% in annual maintenance. So, we don’t want to rush to implement them without a clear plan.

How should we go about making some progress and bring things to a closure. Here is my recipe.

• Simplify these apparently unconnected, and at times seemingly opposing, activities by clearly stating what the end goal of what we are trying to do. In my mind, we are trying to simplify the technical infrastructure and provide easy to use tools for the end users so they can manage both their own personal content as well as the institutional content more efficiently. We believe that if carefully done, this wil lresult in administrative efficiency also.
• Therefore, rather than going into details about these individual projects, present a coherent view of what we are trying to accomplish in words that an end user can understand and provide a future view of the user experience as compared to what they have now.
• We can look at this this in three layers – core infrastructure, middleware, end user.
• Whichever way we look at this problem, we need a ton of disk space. We have taken that first step to acquire a large disk system. This is the core infrastructre layer.
• The middleware layer is the most complicated one that we are working in parallel to resolve. One approach to this (Mike and I brainstormed this) to consider this as a layer of toolset – wikis, blogs, web publishing software, calendar, rss channels etc. – all of which can work in conjunction with the content management software. More on this later.
• End user layer can be arranged either by functional needs – students, faculty and staff; or based on the level of expertise (and therefore the potential to use different tools) – advanced, intermediate and beginner.

Here are additional things relevant to what we are trying to do.

• Today, there are too many content stores that one needs to worry about – their own personal computer, dragon, condor for personal webspace, courses webspace, blackboard, fileshare and departmental websites on www.
• We would like the content store to be a single space. The user should not have to worry about where to go to do what task. The user will go to a single space to manage ALL their content – be it a personal document, personal webspace, class notes, media for use in a class, a program or data file that the user wants to share with a collaborator in some other institution, and reuse documents in multiple websites without having to copy them.
• And most importantly, the user will also control who gets access to what documents or folders and perhaps when.
• By designing the middleware level in such a way that everything is managed through the content management software, we bring consistency to the system. A user goes to the same interface to set permissions and other access controls regardless of whether the content is a wiki or a blog or a web space. This poses a technical challenge and this is where all of these come together in my mind. It is my belief that if we put all our heads together, we can make this happen. This also requires a level of discipline amongst our users – that everyone agrees to work within this consolidated system. In other words, we cannot continue to support multitude of access methods, controlling access outside this system etc. etc.
• If we cannot agree on some of these, we will still have a confusing system that is harder to maintain.
• Each of us will use our own personal experiences to question “BTW how many users are going to use any of this? Are we building this for the benefit of a few users?”. That in some sense is a million dollar question(s)… We know based on informal data gathering that this is indeed an issue on the academic aide… May be if we simplify our infrastructure, more users will use it!!!