IT Services Survey

What are our opportunities for sharing [IT services] and what would the advantages and disadvantages be of doing so?

This question, asked by the Arts and Sciences (A&S) Deans in Autumn 2008, kicked off an information gathering exercise aimed at understanding the range of technology support services provided by the 20+ different A&S technology support units.

Survey Goals

1. to gain a clear understanding of the discipline-specific, unique support provided;

2. to identify potential opportunities to:

amplify and extend the services provided by local IT staff,
address faculty, staff and student latent needs[1],
take advantage of IT industry economies of scale to reduce per-user costs on big-ticket items,
simplify and streamline the infrastructure to deliver faster, smoother and more reliable solutions that meet users’ needs.

Survey Facilitators

The information gathering began in December 2008 and was coordinated by D. Dagefoerde, B. Keller, T. Smith, and D. Sweasey, with input from IT managers across A&S (and their chairs, in the case of SBS).

IT Support Groups

Managers from the following IT support groups worked with the facilitators to document the support services provided by their groups.

ACCAD
Anthropology
Arts IT
ASC-Technology Services Office
Astronomy
Biological Sciences
Chemistry
CHRR
Communication
Earth Sciences
Economics
Geography
Humanities IT
Lingusitics
Mathematics
MBI
Physics
Political Science
Psychology
SBS-Administration
Sociology
Speech & Hearing
Statistics
Theater

Survey Questions/Template

Local IT managers were interviewed about the support services provided by their group. The general service areas included:

Basic Operations Support (desktop support, printers, shared files, etc.)
Infrastructure Support (servers, storage, backup, switches, firewalls, data centers, etc.)
Facilities (labs, conference rooms, classrooms, etc.)
Communication, Collaboration & Outreach (email, calendar, web, mass email, etc.)
Digital Media Production & Streaming (scanning, digitizing, editing, layout, etc.)
Special/Custom Software for Local Administrative Needs
Special/Custom Software for Local Research, Teaching/Learning Needs
Lab Instrumentation Support
Top 5 Unmet Needs for your Group (top resource challenges ranked in priority order)

Each service area included a list of more specific services related to the area. The IT managers were asked to classify each service provided by their group as:

standard
limited and sufficient
limited because of insufficient resources
ad-hoc
outsourced

The final section on "unmet needs" asked them to list their top five resource challenges in order of priority.

Here is the data gathering spreadsheet template that was used to organize the responses.

Results

Please refer to the Survey Results page for results to specific sections/questions...

Top 5 Unmet Needs

The facilitating team decided to focus its analysis on the most commonly cited unmet needs which resulted in five IT service areas:

Web Development/Hosting – web page updates, web site design, web servers
Email/Calendar – email, shared calendars, anti-SPAM
Purchasing/Upgrades –equipment replacement cycles, better purchasing deals, additional funding to replace aging infrastructure
Servers/Storage/Backup – computing power, data storage and backups for research, off-site tape storage, space/facility needs (there are 35+ data centers across A&S)
Security – proactive security monitoring, intrusion detection & prevention, disaster recovery & business continuity planning, preventing SSN exposures

Next Steps

During winter 2009, the team will work closely with the IT managers to evaluate the technical pros and cons of possible shared IT services in each of the 5 areas above.

But before any FY10 priorities are made, it is also critical to understand programmatic pros and cons which is why next steps include reaching out to the broader A&S community. During winter 2009 the team will organize focus groups with faculty, staff and students to explore unmet needs in the 5 areas above or other, related areas. Ideas for shared IT services that are generated from the focus groups will be posted to this web site for feedback.

All of the feedback will be integrated into a Common Requirements Vision that will be used to prioritize fiscal 2010 investments and implementation.

Please refer to the Roadmap & Timeline for next steps.

[1]“Latent needs are things users can’t elaborate on their own, because they don’t know what’s possible. For example, few people would’ve told researchers they wanted home-delivered DVDs. However, through careful research, the team at Netflix saw how miserable many people were with the video store experience and created a solution that would catapult their business to the head of video rental industry.” (from http://www.uie.com/events/uiconf/2007/articles/experience_vision/)

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