Building Effective Relationships Between Central and Decentralized IT Units on

Campus

Format for the Panel

• Introduction of participants

• Frame the central/distributed IT discussion

• Cases from Iowa, Montana, & Syracuse

• Panel Questions from Audience and Moderator

Panel Participants• University of Iowa

– Steve Fleagle - CIO – Maggie Jesse – Instructional Services Manager

(formerly IT Director, Tippie College of Business)

• University of Montana– Ray Ford – CIO– Shawn Clouse – IT Director, School of Business

Administration

• Syracuse University– Paul Gandel, CIO– Andy Covell, IT Director, Martin J. Whitman School of

Management

Where did this topic come from?

• Technology in Business School’s (TBS) Roundtable

• Group that looks at the unique IT challenges faced by AACSB-accredited business schools and colleges.

• Central IT Relations Working Group

Definitions

Centralization• Helps control cost• Capitalizes on economies

of scale• Increases security• Helps with

standardization• Safety net services for

departments with little or no IT staff.

Decentralization• Encourages creativity &

innovation• Faster to respond to

change• Closer to end users• Quick response time• Customize solutions for

specific needs of academic discipline or unit.

Central vs. Decentralized Literature

• A Gartner Group study found that 60% of IT spending was from outside the central IT organization (Hess, 1996)

• Nichol (2004) found that central IT organizations cannot offer a high level of service to research groups with above average support needs.

• Malone (2004) described decentralization as the trend for businesses competing in the knowledge and innovation-based economy.

Miller (2002) Information Resources Model

• Higher education IT that includes services for 1) information access, 2) desktop support, 3) shared applications, 4) servers, and 5) networks.

• Information access services were more often decentralized.

• Network services were generally centralized at the universities surveyed.

• Some higher education institutions have moved away from separate academic and administrative IT organizations and have adopted more hybrid structures to work with the centralized/decentralized issues.

University of Iowa

• Central, Local and Hybrid Services– What’s the right central/local balance?– Interdependent relationships and services– Drivers toward local service

• Flexibility, rapid change, customization, limited potential for campus growth

– Drivers toward central service• Economies of scale, utility-like, consistency,

specialization, integration, potential risk

University of Iowa

• Our strategies for working together– Campus IT Leaders (CITL)

• Engagement on policy issues• Reliable computing project • Budget reduction GEF Task Force

– Professional development team– Campus-wide IT Review– Strategic planning process

University of Montana

CIO Perspective: 25 years as CS prof, head of IT review, asked to fill CIO job as interim, now going on 7 years)

• Chronic and severe central and unit funding has led to extreme, unhealthy, and often uncomfortable distribution of responsibility -- provided opportunities for units interested in independence and with access to other resources, but severe burden for others

• “Distributed IT” is not just academic units -- it also includes Business Services, Admissions, Foundation/Alumni, and others with IT interests and capabilities but a very different focus from academics

• In recent years “executive level disfunctionalities” have added problems -- lack of VP agreement on priorities (IT and otherwise), poor unit-VP-VP-unit communication, …

• “Progress” has been slow, and we can slow it even more by failing to understand our problem …

University of Montana

(IMHO) We often fall into the trap of thinking we can solve all technical through “enhanced communication & control”. Some observations:

- “not” EC&C can assure that an appropriately resourced project fails

- EC&C cannot assure that an under-resourced project succeeds

- EC&C can help participants feel better, independent of outcome

- Being under resourced limits the quality of C&C

- EC&C is often a critical factor in getting buy-in for distributed commitment of resources, so it is clearly important

- BUT if the sum of all our available resources is grossly insufficient to solve the technical problem, then better C&C will only make us feel better about failing

Conclusion: EC&C cannot be separated from resource availability -- if we think C&C is “the problem” or “the solution” we miss the real point.

Areas of Responsibilities

Central ITDistributed

IT

Areas of Cooperation/Conflict

What Distributed UM IT Needs

• Communication on IT changes that effect the delivery of our service.

• Ability to be participate in discussions on new technologies that impact our units.

• High availability of utility (telecommunications), academic (CMS) & other services (Authentication/ERP) from Central IT.

Strategies for working together

• Involve CIO in distributed IT advisory groups (SOBA IT Advisory Group).

• Participate in Central IT committees.• Joint Central and Distributed Task Forces (UM

Middleware Taskforce)• Participate in meetings designed to communicate central

services and priorities (Tech Partners, Sysgroup listserv)• Meet with other similar units to share ideas and find

common projects for collaboration (Academic IT Group).• Central Communication Coordinator sends out official

email or voice mail communication on problems and resolution.

Syracuse University

Central IT “…we are IT”

CIO

WALL

“Throw it over the wall…”

Business Law Engineering … A&S

Where we were:

“…we are IT”

“Who needs central IT…”

Syracuse University

• Leveraging innovation through collaboration – Middleware and Middlepeople will be the infrastructure

• Advisory Council’s are not effective vehicles for getting work done.

• SLA’s are a poor substitute for trust

Syracuse University

Where we are now:

Central IT

CIO

Business Law Engineering …. A&S

Technology Leadership Council

“We are IT”

Setting prioritiesResourcesProject ownership

Our Vision

• Establish a Robust Infrastructure

• Promote a Spirit of Cooperation

• Develop and Implement Exemplary Communication and Collaboration Technologies

Questions for the panel• Please ask questions at any time.

• We have a series of questions to go through as time allows.

Central/Distributed Relationships

Please address the effectiveness of the relationships between each of your central and local IT units.  Are the current relationships strong or completely at odds?  What are you doing to strengthen or leverage these relationships?

SecurityRodney Petersen, a policy analyst at EDUCAUSE, recently was quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education as saying the decentralized (IT) organizational structures (in higher ed) make them particular difficult to secure. Do you agree that decentralization of IT in higher education hampers and makes our collective systems less secure? If so, why? Does this mean we should centralize all of IT in order to make our systems more secure? If not, why not?

Communication, Cooperation, & Metrics

• How do you inform CIO’s about distributed priorities and how do CIO’s inform distributed leaders about central priorities?

• What strategies do you use to solve conflicts between central and distributed units?

• What strategies do you use to include central and distributed IT staff on project teams for new initiatives?

• What common metrics do central and distributed IT use to measure service level or report for self study reviews (Balanced Scorecard)?

Deploying Enterprise Application

• Have distributed units deployed enterprise applications at your institution?

• What conflicts were there with university wide enterprise solutions (i.e. Active Directory)?

• How did you work through the situation?

It is possible to draw a connection between central vs. distributed IT control, and the decision to do work in-house vs. outsource. For example, a unit could manage all parts of an application, from hardware to end user, or outsource hardware maintenance and system administration under a contract service agreement but retain application administration. To what extent does or can this play a role in centralized vs. distributed responsibility and control in an academic institution? What common academic applications fit well into this model? What applications don't fit so well?

It’s easy to say you’re “collaborating” in a new way. But how difficult is it to really get in the trenches buy-in for a much more collaborative model of IT deployment and support from across an institution’s IT community -- given the diverse IT perspectives/culture and the tensions that typically exist. What are some approaches that are helpful to achieve broad-based buy-in, support and participation? How do you gauge or measure success?

IT Spending

• A 1996 Gartner Group study found that 60% of IT spending is outside the central IT unit. 

• What are your campuses doing to capture IT expenditure data across the entire institution and how will you work in the future to make sure that IT spending is strategic, efficient and effective?

Local providers are pressured by their units to provide customized, quick-response to strategies that may be in conflict with central strategies, while central providers are pressured to provide large scale, robust, and reliable service in a utility-like function.  These support demands seem at odds with each other, yet both are critical to the success of campus constituents.  What strategies are your campuses employing to balance and coordinate these needs?   

User Complaints & Communication

• Decentralized units generally hear user complaints first when there are problems with systems controlled by central units.

• Should central units communicate about technical problems to the distributed units?

• What vulnerabilities are there with regards to competency and future attacks?

• What strategies are used to communicate problems to the distributed units?

Ability to Respond to Change

• Some might say that distributed groups move faster than central groups when adopting new technologies because they have a smaller and more homogenous user base.

• What factors in an educational setting help or hinder this?