Yet again, we had a fantastic year where many projects were completed or begun, and all the systems worked well. We were able to do them all despite the difficulties arising from the financial crisis. We could not have done this without the dedication and hard work of all the ITS staff members. I will soon request the help of the Directors to collect items for the ITS Annual report, which provides an excellent opportunity for us to centrally collect and reflect on all of our achievements while letting the community know about them.

Another summer activity that is extremely important for us to do is to set the goals for the upcoming year. I have asked the Directors to send me suggestions. Except for a week in August that I have planned to take off, my vacation days for the rest of the summer is unplanned. I will begin taking a few days here and there based mostly on weather – either to take some short trips or to play Golf. As many of you already know, one of our dear friends, who has been my golf buddy for the past 4 years will be moving to North Carolina this week. So I need to find someone else to play with. The game continues to frustrate me, but it is a humbling experience from which I learn continuously.

The new Financial system roll-out is going to be a nerve wracking experience for many involved, but I am really thankful to the team  who have done a fantastic job in moving the project forward. Changes are never easy, so there will be a period of time when we all have to learn to do things differently, but I am pretty confident that, after a few weeks the most basic financial functions will flow smoothly. We will then take the necessary time to build on this foundation the additional functionality.

I have managed to keep up on several developments on technology front that I will begin writing about. MiFi from Verizon, Amazon Kindle Pilot Project being done in a few Universities from Sustainability perspective,  Twitter in the Classroom, and my wait for Google Voice.

Enjoy the Summer and let us hope that the rain moves to areas of the world which need the rains the most!

As I was reading these, I was reminded of conversations that I have had with some of my colleagues about Technology collaborations (or the lack of it) and wanted to write about it here.

I am all for collaboration! The advantages of collaboration are obvious and I won’t go into them. It is also the case that the very nature of what we do in ITS requires that we collaborate with others in almost everything we do.

We do a great job collaborating with others on campus and I can’t think of many projects that we are engaged in that is not collaborative. However, I feel that there are many opportunities for inter or trans-institutional technology collaborations that are not being capitalized on for various reasons, primarily because institutions are unwilling to compromise. Merely having discussions on listserves does not necessarily constitute collaboration in my mind. There are so many other areas in which we can collaborate, thereby reducing duplication of efforts, and learning from each other to do things differently and better.

You will find many references on the web that tell you about the recipe for a successful collaboration. Almost all of them will specify some core ingredients (in no particular order):

• Trust and Respect – If the team members do not trust each other and respect each other, the collaboration will not be smooth sailing. Trust and Respect cannot be forced on the team members. It is a process that can some time. In several instances, the collaborators may be working together for the first time, so they need time to develop the trust. When the lack of respect comes in the way, a good project leader will detect it and resolve it in a timely manner. The success of the collaboration depends on minimizing time spent on resolving such differences.
• Strong Communication – Very clear, polite and respectful communications between the team members is absolutely essential for a collaboration to succeed. The exact amount and quality of communication depends so much on the members of the team. Disagreements are natural to collaboration, but these should be communicated in a polite and civil manner.
• Ownership and timeline – Project ownership and timelines should be clearly defined early on in the process. When it comes to IT collaborations, we typically request those who request the projects to play an important role in managing the projects because unless they “own” the project, it is unlikely to succeed. The project requestors have a deeper understanding of the project from both the functional and business process aspect as well as a much better understanding of their clientele than the technologists (there are always exceptions to these generalizations).
• Conflict Resolution – Compromise is the name of the game in Collaboration. Not everyone is going to get everything they want. However, when conflicts arise and it appears that the team is unable to resolve them, escalate it to your supervisor in a timely manner. Letting it sit for too long is a bad idea!
• Share the glory – Sharing the accomplishments of every team member when the project is complete is key to a successful collaboration. Everyone who contributed should be acknowledged so that they feel a sense of accomplishment. Of course, when the project does not go well (this does not happen around here, does it?), that responsibility also should be shared and fingerpointing will only lead to bitterness and animosity.

I can now talk a bit about how technologists tend to feel about collaborations with others. This is based on what I hear in ITS as well as many of my friends in other Higher Ed institutions and industries. The general sense is that in many cases our contributions are marginalized. Unfortunately, this tends to be more of a perception than reality. The data will show that the contribution from technologists bring tremendous value to any collaborative project. The fact that the technology is only one aspect of the collaboration does not mean that it has been marginalized. It is like making a movie – the actors and the directors tend to get way more credit than scores of others whose contributions are equally important. The same way, the functional offices may be in the front line of many projects, but the project would not have been successful without contributions from the technology staff.

Another significant factor in technology collaboration is the leveling of playing field – many of our partners are very knowledgeable about the various technologies that are available which they learn on the web. This can become a huge issue in collaborations where the non-technology partners tend to have more of a say in terms of the choice of various technologies, user interfaces and the like. This is where the trust and respect issue comes into play. As long as you, as a technologist, have trust that the recommendations are being brought to the table after careful research and thought, you should feel fine with it. As I have said before, it always helps to ask for “data” (for eg. where did one find out that technology A is better for the intended purpose than B). I have been told in some cases that these decisions cannot be data driven – well, I am yet to be convinced of any.

On to my collaborations…

First off, in the event you have not read yet, Oracle has agreed to buy Sun Microsystems. On the surface this may not be relevant to what we do, because, we stopped purchasing Sun hardware several years ago. However, we do use MySQL, an Open Source database software, which was purchased by Sun Microsystems last year. It is too early to tell what the future of MySQL is now that Oracle has taken it over. Especially the Open Source nature of it. There are two options: 1. continue to have a less developed open source version while promoting a commercial version of it. 2. Over a period of time, get rid of it and make the users transition to Oracle. Option 1 is most likely for the short run because of the MySQL installed base. Who knows what Oracle is thinking for the long haul!

The other thing that has been occupying my mind a lot is the student-ITS interaction. Whereas we have made some strides in the past year, we have a long way to go. We are fortunate that several students are interested in collaborating. At the request of WSA, for the upcoming year, I will Co-Chair the WSA-ITS Committee and that this committee will meet more often than before. We also plan to bring in several other staff members, both from ITS and elsewhere (Registrar’s office, and the Dean’s office especially) when the agenda calls for it. I am really looking forward to this. Internally, I have also been talking to the ITS Directors about ways to work with the students better and communicate with them better. Once we have a plan, I will write about it here.

I have been very happy to see the way the web redesign has been proceeding. It is a truly collaborative effort between the University Communication and the New Media Lab. In the event you are not aware of the web redesign blog, I strongly encourage you to go to: http://webredesign.blogs.wesleyan.edu/. This is your opportunity to voice your opinions and suggestions. And while you are there, please take the survey, the link for which is found on the blog.

How many times have you driven into the parking lot listening to NPR and you are in the middle of an interesting story? Wouldn’t it be great if you can continue to listen to the story as you get out of the car and walk to your office, rather than sitting in the car and listen to it? Well, that is exactly what I have been doing last couple of days. I downloaded the Public Radio Tuner app for my iPhone which lets you listen to your favorite public radio station on your iPhone.

Secondly, CET oversees CEN, the state funded network, and various aspects such as collaboration and content sharing between K-12 schools and libraries. These are some of the highest priority items for this administration and to the country as a whole. So, eliminating CET, and thereby not having an oversight over these activities will mean disaster to a very forward thinking and serious investment. Please read on…

Statement in favor of continuing
the Commission for Education Technology
By
Ganesan Ravishanker, Associate VP for ITS, Wesleyan University
And
Chair, Network Infrastructure and Services Advisory Council for CET

My name is Ganesan Ravishanker and I am the Associate Vice President for Information Technology Services at Wesleyan University.  I also serve as Chairman of the Commission for Educational Technology’s Network Infrastructure and Services Advisory Council.

The members of Network Infrastructure and Advisory Council would like to support the continuation of the Commission for Educational Technology in the strongest possible terms. The Commission has the oversight responsibility for this council, which advises the Commission on matters relating to the Connecticut Education Network (CEN), and suggests technical services and enhancements that might benefit CEN users.

Connecticut Education Network (CEN) is an enormously valuable resource for the K-12 schools, libraries and higher education institutions in the state and is the envy of many such institutions who do not enjoy the benefits of such a state sponsored network. With the leadership of Governor Rell,  this project was implemented during the early 2000’s and was a very forward thinking initiative which stated the commitment of Connecticut to Education in the 21st century in no uncertain terms.

The Commission and the Advisory council have played a very valuable role right from the beginning in assuring that the member institutions benefited from the stated goals in the most effective ways. Not having the Commission or the Advisory council will result in lack of leadership and creative use of the network which may result in us going back several steps at a time when we most need better and faster broadband access and their appropriate use in educating the leaders of tomorrow. Coincidentally, broadband access and commitment to better education are right at the top of the Obama administration priorities.

Over the past few years, the Council, with the help of CET has been instrumental in implementing the internet filters for K-12; has facilitated setting up a disaster recovery facility for the CEN members at a remote facility in Springfield, MA; recommended a reasonable way to provide high speed connectivity to charter schools; and finally, is piloting the possible reselling of unused bandwidth at night to Higher Ed members of CEN.

If the Commission were to be dissolved, it is not clear what happens to the Advisory Council.  Without a body with a clear mandate such as the Commission, it is also not clear who exactly would be responsible for the appropriate use of CEN. Both the Commission and the Council consists of very dedicated members who have volunteered valuable time for very creative and forward thinking projects that have helped the educational institutions move into the 21st century. The current oversight structure is crucial to make sure that such a valuable and strategic resource is used in more creative ways to benefit the educational community. Most importantly, the Commission and Council will ensure that the CEN remains a resource for the educational communities and not be diluted by the constant pressure from other uses of this network

Thank you for giving me the time and I sure hope that the Commission and the Council survives this discussion at a time when their missions are right in line with the future needs of Connecticut and the country.

I was also a member of the Program Committee for the annual conference and was very happy to hear that the quality of the presentations were excellent. The attendance was less than what it was last year and many (including us) cut cost by not staying in Providence, instead choosing to either drive or take the train from Boston area.

Not surprisingly, everyone is affected by the financial turmoil, but the attitude seemed to be “We are all equally affected by this and we don’t have much of a choice except to make the hard decisions that we have to”.

The conference opened with a very engaging talk by John Maeda, the president of RISD. A very young and dynamic leader, he presented really innovative ideas on how the current hierarchical structures in Higher Ed inhibit free flow of ideas and communication and that the answer is in flattening the organization by creating networks. Some of what he is tlaking about is being practiced in his organization and they are very similar to what is happening at Wesleyan. By creating more transparency and creating ways to be inclusive, our senior administration is showing definite shift in philosophy.  John is someone who understands clearly the role that the technologies can play in helping achieve these goals – for example, he began a blog and encouraged free flow of information including a fixed time every week for anonymous postings, which is so popular that now, it has become more of a community blog than “his” blog. I thoroughly enjoyed his presentation, and this kind of keynote has been a rarity in both NERCOMP and EDUCAUSE in recent years.

I also attended a presentation on cloud computing, where some schools are purchasing time on Amazon’s EC2 for compute time as S3 for storage. MIT purchases time on Amazon (at a cost of $2K-$4K a class per semester for a 9 node HPC) for use in classes that teach parallel programming as well as a couple of others that use highly parallelized compute heavy programs. In addition, other schools are using the S3 for remote backup and one school is using Enomaly as an Elastic Computing Platform.

I also attended a talk on how someone is using twitter in the classroom (nothing particulary innovative and nothing that cannot be done using other tools). That person also uses VoiceThread which is a very easy to use collaborative, multimedia slide show that accommodates, images, text, audio and video. I already wrote to you all about the web annotation tool that this peson pointed out called Diigo. I certainly think that Diigo has some potential for collaborative critiquing of web sites as we launch the web site redesign process.

The second keynote speech was pretty disappointing and is all about how technologists should develop people skills and bridge the gap between those that are not technologically advanced and the technologists. Especially after listening to John Maeda, this was pretty bad…

During our presentaiton that followed this, Kenny Freundlich from Wellesley spoke about their iTunesU and I spoke about WesTube. As I mentioned above, there was a lot of interest in our topics. One other presenter talked about using various tools to produce multimedia heavy instructional support material and the last speaker about the use of Blackboard blogs and wikis…

Finally, I went to a talk on Moodle Collaboration by speakers from Smith College and Lafayette College. A group of NITLE schools, either 5 or 7, I am not sure, who wrote a NITLE grant to collaborate on Moodle. What was interesting was how well the collaboration was working – some schools do not have a php programmer to support advanced moodle changes, but Smith, which has an advanced PHP programmer was developing and supporting modules jointly agreed to by the participants. The decision making happens in many ways, including a “Hack Doc Fest” when everyone gets together and talks about their needs and jointly make decisions. Gradebook was cited as such an example. The speakers did point out how some of the schools like certain modules of Moodle, which have the danger of being discontinued in future releases. Members of this collaboration have “committed” to supporting some of these modules even if they were discontinued.

Obviously there are a lot of questions as to how long such commitments can last (since most of these are informal agreements) etc. But this seems to be my favorite “Just Do It” model, where they seem to have decided to go with it and have a very strong short term plan and hope that things work out in the long run – rather than spend all the time worrying about how these arrangements will work 7-8 years from now (of course, they are important, but they should not stop us from thinking and acting creatively).

We will follow up with this group and learn a lot, as we explore the Moodle avenue. There are a LOT of schools that have already moved to Moodle or are in the process.

Finally, I volunteered to be a twitter for the conference. We all used the twitter hashtags to send our tweets. To see ALL tweets of the conference, you can go to: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23nc09 or to see just what I did, go to: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23nc09+ravishan

For those who are not familiar with Jott, it is a voice to text conversion service. It used to be the case that you called your message in and they will send the equivalent text as an email with a link to listen to your voice recording. I have always been very impressed with the success of the voice to text conversion given my accent (which led Vacek Miglus from the Physics department to comment once that this was because this was an outsourced service where workers in India were listening to the voice and converted them to text!).

But based on some of th esuggestions from the users (including me), they have integrated their service in very creative ways to many other web services. I spent a Sunday to experiment with a few and sign up and this post discusses what I did.

Jott Links provides the framework to link your Jott account to many of the Web Services. Click here if you are interested to learn more. For example, you can set up a Jott link to your Google Calendar or Twitter account. Of course, you need to have an account on the web service that you are trying to link. When you are ready to link the web service to your Jott, you provide an “alias” for the web service and then provide the credentials to authenticate to the remote service. For example, I have a Jott Link to one of my Google Calendars called “Google Calendar” and I have authenticated once to my Google account from Twitter. Once this is done, every time I call Jott phone number from my cell phone, to use this Jott Link, I simply say I want to Jott “Google Calendar”. It is as simple as that.

Google Calendar – When I am driving or walking across campus, I am reminded of certain tasks. I do wear earphones while driving and I have Jott phone number as a favorite, so it is fairly easy to do without violating the cell phone laws. I Jott “Google Calendar” and follow the Google Calendar Quick Add syntax – for example “Send email about ATAC meeting to Jolee at 8:45 AM today”. This automatically adds an event in my calendar, which then sends me a reminder. How cool is that!!! I can actually have different aliases to different Google Calendars. There is also a plugin for Outlook calendar, but it requires a local plugin to be installed.

Twitter – I love this… As many of my Facebook friends know, I update status fairly often. In some instances, I have updated while stuck in traffic (by logging into Facebook from my handheld and actually typing the status). What I recently did was to start using my Twitter and linked that to my Facebook. This way, anytime I updated my Twitter, it automatically updated my Facebook. Just when I was marvelling at this integration, I discovered that now, I can call my Twitter status in through Jott!!! So, I have begun doing that. I have a Jott link and I call my status in. Jott sends the text conversion over with a link to listen to my recording, just in case they were unable to find an Indian to do the conversion right

Xpenser – We are in the midst of a new Financial system implementation and it is my hope that many of the current processes will become electronic. One of the major issues has been keeping track of expenses while traveling (especially for me who hates paper). So, I have been experimenting ways to simplify all of this. Xpenser I think is a perfect way to handle some of the issues. I sure hope that one of these days, I can simply take a picture of my receipt and send it to myself with a corresponding entry in Xpenser (all from my handheld device) and file them all electronically. Of course, with the current restrictions on travel in the University, this may be moot, but hopefully in the future this will change. So, I set up an Xpenser account and linked it to Jott. My first test “$6.33 at Taco Bell” which registered perfectly!!!

Trapster – Finally, a fun application, that tells you where the possible traffic traps are. On the iPhone, it even talks! This is supposed to be a true social networking application whereby those that are driving by can send in the information about traps – by specifying the exact location that one sees a police car, for example. Of course, by linking to Jott, you can call it in!

There are many more web services that can be linked to Jott this way and if you are interested, you should check this out.

I believe that these are very powerful applications and we need to look at them to see if there are ways that we can take advantage of this. For example, I hear that recording some of the support questions that we field takes time because one needs to sit down and describe it. Wouldn’t it be great if one can call it in while walking across the campus, or from the client’s office and an email gets sent to the queuing system?

I find the calendar reminders to be extremely useful for me. As soon as I remember about responding to an email or write to someone and I am not near a computer, I simply call it in.

If you are a Jott user, please share with the rest of us how you use it…

Just to remind everyone, the problem we are trying to address is better explained by the graph below:

The area of the graph in green represents traffic coming into our network. As you can see, the bandwidth is at its maximum (100Mb) from roughly 8 PM – 2 AM. This is basically attributed to the increased viewing of multimedia based material on the web. The bandwidth then goes down as everyone goes to sleep and then picks up again in the morning when faculty and staff come to work and use the network. It picks up during the day as more and more students begin using the network.

This pattern repeats itself every day with weekends being slightly different. We have worked with the students from ITS helpdesk to test various ways to manage available bandwidth as explained in my last blog on this subject. Whereas we have made a lot of progress, we felt that adding more cheap and affordable bandwidth during the night will benefit everyone.

However, we need to be realistic about how much bandwidth (like the disk space, most of the available bandwidth will be consumed!) to allocate at night times and at what cost.

As the chair of the Network Advisory Council for Connecticut Education Network, I have been working with the networking staff at CEN and UConn to devise a pilot program which we will be putting in place tonight. This involves Wesleyan managing the network for variable bandwith allocation (which, the ITS networking staff have already automated) and making sure that the bandwidth expansion takes place only between 8 PM and 6 AM everyday. CEN has agreed to test this till May 31 in collaboration with us and will then decide if this is a workable solution for the future for all its member institutions.

The basic idea here is that at night, the K-12 schools and the libraries on the network are not using internet connectivity in the night, so why not resell it at a discount to the Higher Ed institutions who are in bad need of this. The extra money collected from Higher Ed will go towards hardware replacement for K-12 and libraries (due to severe beudget crisis in the state, the hardware refresh budgets for K-12 and libraries is under severe pressure). Of course, the pricing model has to be attractive enough for the Higher Eds to want to do this.

Though I cannot reveal the exact amounts, we are basically paying 25% of the cost of regular bandwidth for the additional bandwidth. It is really cheap and we believe that with appropriate shaping of the bandwidth, the students should experience improved network performance. I also believe that this model has a chance to succeed and that CEN will offer this more widely next year.

I would therefore encourage you to start thinking about using the enormous amount of  data that exists out there or suggest collecting them to guide our decision making. It goes without saying that when it comes to data, we need to be extremely careful to respect the privacy issues. So, simply because the technology allows us to collect data should not mean that we can be careless about these issues. We need to make sure to consult with the appropriate offices if we are talking about data that involves our own community.

I can provide some simple examples of where we have successfully used the data to guide us or can potentially use the data to guide us.

• We looked at how many students were forwarding their email elsewhere and to which service and consulted with WSA and move the students to Google Apps for Education.
• We have been looking at the network usage by the students between 9 PM and 2 AM to reshape the bandwidth by tweaking per user allocation and other techniques so they can have a better experience. We have engaged our student staff in both the decision making (OK, we were late to do this, but we are doing it now) and testing. We are also trying to purchase additional bandwidth just during this period from the state (I wish they would move a little faster!!!)
• We also have other network monitors that we use to do capacity planning. But we need to do more. For example, we increased wireless access points in Park Washington and plan to do the same in High Rise. The network flow data we have should have told us that there are some issues with both the extent of coverage and overcrowding, but we started to look at them after we began receiving complaints.
• We have a plan to use our own Web logs, Link analyzers as well as Google Analytics to help us archive literally thousands of web pages on our web site. We are preparing a proposal to the Cabinet on this (as recommended by the Web Committee) so we can work with individual departments to do this “Operation Clean Start” (this is not an official name!!!)
• Using the web logs provides us some unique perspectives on the visitors to our websites – for example, we know that the predominant monitors used for viewing our website is of resolution 1024 x 768 or better. Of course, many of us probably see this in our own experience, but seeing the actual data from a diverse set of users goes a long way to help design our websites. Similarly, there are other useful data such as the types of browsers the users are using that should help guide the application development process.
• We are beginning to use our Keyserver as a source of data (this data has been collected for a while, we just have not had an opportunity to analyze it yet) to understand the public computer lab usage. After we have enough data, we will prepare a proposal (or not, depending on what the data says) on how best to reconfigure the computers in the labs to reflect the usage data. For example, can we replace some of them with thin clients? Armed with the data, we can have a more meaningful conversation with the WSA and ATAC when we make proposals. Otherwise, it will simply be incomplete data (”Whenever I walk by, I see the Science Tower Lab not full”).

Most of these examples refer to data that is collected already and we try hard not to ask questions that crosses privacy boundaries. In other words, the analyses on web usage, for example, are summaries and do not necessarily have personal identities associated with them. In the end, these summary data are much more useful for what we are trying to do than any data that has personal information associated with it.

We should also be looking at other sources of data to help understand the trends – ECAR (EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research), The Horizon Report to name a couple, which have tremendous amount of data. I also  poll our colleagues in CLAC (Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges) when I want to get a sense of what they are doing. I typically get 25-35 responses, while not a lot, very valuable because of our proximity to each others in terms of size and educational philosophy.

I am sure you are seeing how bad things are in the IT world – Microsoft laid off 1400 last week with plans to layoff another 3600 in a year; Intel laying off 5000; IBM 16000 and Google just 100 to name a few. In its short history, Microsoft has never done this before. In addition, I am sure you are hearing about the loss of several thousands of jobs in CT and possibly over $900 million budget shortfall in the state. These are astronomical numbers. Though a few states are not planning to trim their Higher Education budget by large numbers, some have no choice. Nevada Governor, for example, has proposed a 36% budget cut for the state’s university system!

I shared with you last week many of the budget reductions that ITS will experience in the coming years. It will be extremely hard for us to be able to do many of the things that we have always been able to do. However, we need to look at this relative to what is happening around us and use our creativity to operate at a level that benefits the institution.

I want to take this time to point out that we should be proud of the various projects that we recently completed or are continuing to work on as a way to keep our morale up and continue the hard work and creativity that we bring to the table. I have only picked a few to illustrate the point and if I have left other things, please add them through comments.

• We migrated all student email to GMail on Jan 19. With the exception of a few issues, this was planned and executed so well in such a short time.
• We completed one of the best semesters in terms of classroom support with fewest complaints.
• In collaboration with University Communications, we are producing a large number of multimedia content for the web, the most recent one is the Presidential Inauguration video.
• Wesleyan Financial System implementation is going according to schedule, which is a collaborative effort between ITS and the Finance and Administration.
• We will begin rolling out thin clients to the McNair lab and several administrative staff during Feb.
• Cardinal Technology Center will soon announce a program for home computing support (for a fee!) very similar to the Geek Squad.
• Our training program was resurrected and we had a very successful initial offering in January
• Academic Computing Services is planning Tech Teas and Google Apps Demo as a way to pro actively reach out to faculty and staff and talk about how some of these technologies can be used in teaching and learning or in other ways to introduce administrative efficiencies.

Despite the doom and gloom around us, we are continuing to do a lot of things and constantly coming up with ideas to support our users in creative ways. I want to thank you all for all the hard work you put in to make sure that we deliver excellent services to our clients.

I wrote about Cloud Computing last October in this blog – click here to read it. I have become a fan of this concept and feel that this has a lot of potential if appropriately used. The answer to the question of whether “moving to the cloud” is outsourcing will depend a lot on the definition of each of these terms.

To me, both of them refer to identifying aspects of business processes that can be done elsewhere more efficiently and cost effectively. So far, Cloud Computing is more restrictive in that the typical services you get in the cloud are things like software as a service, and hardware cycles for compute heavy calculations. In most instances these services are provided as is. Outsourcing on the other hand provides a lot more flexibility and customization. However, the differences between the two are fuzzy and cloudy!

In terms of the the tests for efficiency and cost effectiveness – they should take into consideration all aspects of the processes and these tests by their very nature depend on the organization. We, as a higher education organization, cannot apply the same tests as a private corporation. For example, when it comes to IT related matters, the lack of standard computing environments and the importance of customer relationship building in our environment would dictate a different set of metrics and decision making than a corporation.

What follows are some random thoughts on this subject.

We already outsource some of our activities (or in some people’s eyes, “moved it to the cloud”) – for example, payroll and for recruitment. These are areas where our efficiency and cost effectiveness tests indicated that it is better to outsource it. Payroll is an extremely complex system with myriad of customizations and essentially zero tolerance for failure. Accurate paychecks need to be delivered on time to everyone, and we felt that in the overall scheme of things, this is better outsourced. Like all outsourcing, we have outsourced ONLY parts of the process – there are still staff members from HR and ITS who dedicate significant amount of time managing the payroll process.

Similarly, the Careers system helps us with recruitment and is hosted elsewhere. Building such a system in house and maintaining it would have cost us significantly more than what it costs to host it elsewhere. Again, all underlying information and the work-flow requires significant participation from everyone here including IT staff who are involved trying to integrate this system with ours to provide as seamless an experience as possible.

So, where does cloud computing fit into our future. I have some ideas, but I would like to hear from you (even if you think that we do not need it!). Some of the examples cited have to do with software evaluations. When we are ready to deploy a software, we usually scramble to find hardware to run it, test it and then size the systems. Almost always we end up using hardware that is already allocated to other services and this approach has resulted in problems several times in the past (though, with virtualization this will improve). On the other hand, the need to explore new systems all the time is a real one and is not going to go away soon.

So, why not do these evaluations on the cloud? Obviously it is easier said than done, because, many of the underlying infrastructure that we use (such as single sign on) would take a long time to implement elsewhere. But, if we structure it properly (by creating a smaller footprint of the most needed components on the cloud vendor’s system), I think this can work. It completely separates all the testing away from our production systems and it can be deployed fairly quickly without having to go through complex negotiations with others on the use of hardware.

I think the complex interconnected nature of our business (we need PeopleSoft and Active Directory for almost everything we do) would suggest that running any of our production systems on the cloud is not practical at this point. We should also thoroughly vet the data security and privacy before doing anything. In addition, we will need more network bandwidth. However, it is not inconceivable that standards emerge in the near future that enable secure communication between applications running on the cloud and some of the core “data” infrastructure on our network that will address these concerns adequately.

An even more futuristic thought is that our entire data center moves to the cloud. We certainly will be greener because we will presumably be sharing the compute cycles with many others. Obviously we will not even think about doing this unless our expectations for data security and systems availability are all guaranteed. But in a world like this, we will still have to do a lot of what we do now – we will be training the users, supporting, upgrading and maintaining various software and operating systems, writing applications etc. except, the hardware will be somewhere else and we will have a much fatter network pipe! And some of us will be spending our time on different things… Of course, first and foremost, this model needs to pass the efficiency and cost effectiveness test. We have a LONG way to go before we get there, if at all…

However, I think we should always look for opportunities in this space that will help us eventually enhance the core academic mission of the institution. In other words, if some aspects of what we do is better handled on the cloud, we should not be afraid to latch on to that opportunity and then devote our time to many other things that we can do to support the academic mission of Wesleyan.