Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences Dean's Office IT Corner

It was a big day for the IT community at Stanford today with the inaugural IT unconference.  All the information and notes from today are available here:  http://itunconference.stanford.edu

Among the notable items of the day (there were many), the sheer presence our the H&S IT team from the H&S Dean’s Office was impressive.  From our little five-person group, we had 100% participation including Christine Jacinto emcee’ing the event, Sean Brandt assisting with event activities, contributing participation from David Hart and Ellen Ha, and I also led a successful session in the afternoon.  Beyond the IT team, Patty Castaneda (from our administrative team in the Dean’s Office) joined in helping to run various aspects of the conference.  I am not easily impressed, and I am sure our team feels some of that from time-t0-time, but in this case … IMPRESSED!

If you were at the unconference, you know that much of the value is derived from the user-generated content throughout the day, and then likely from the ongoing interest/follow-through with the topics that were discussed.  Really check the website for the event and especially look to the video (I think the whole thing was recorded) when it made available on the site.  In addition to the user-driven content, the morning keynotes from Bill Clebsch, President Hennessy and Clarence So from SalesForce.com.

Especially though, I want to come back to our H&S Dean’s Office IT team … taking this leadership stance in the IT community at Stanford brings value back to H&S as our understanding of the IT landscape, ability to find partners for projects and influence on technology direction for Stanford all have direct, positive effects on our ability to deliver a quality IT experience within H&S.

-Matt

One of the things I have done consistently throughout the years is attend the Educause annual conference (this year in Philadelphia http://www.educause.edu/E2011) and be supportive of this community centered around higher education IT topics/issues.  This year the conference themes included the environments that technology efforts create for students to use in ways we do not imagine, the value of our institutional data/preservation of it and the possibilities created when distributed and central IT units work to understand each other and build common goals.

GOOD STUFF

So what did I pick up, as sort of this leader of a distributed IT unit at Stanford … for one, I have finally found some traction in linking up with others in ‘like’ positions.  For example, I spent some time with Fred Thomsen of Johns Hopkins http://www.jhu.edu/kasper/ and Ron Loveless of Michigan http://www.lsa.umich.edu/lsait/, among others.  These folks are in many of the same discussions and movements in IT thinking that I am at Stanford.  IT Governance (strategy and decision-making for the largest IT projects/initiatives on campus), and the part that a distributed IT leader will play, is probably the #1 piece that we share.  One of the more interesting sessions at the conference was a share by Michigan around its new IT governance structure:

… which was recently used to help the institution decide on Google for e-mail and collaboration – a choice Stanford has ~nearly~ made as well.

Other good stuff at the conference included a panel of CIOs, moderated by Brad Wheeler of Indiana University, debating where to invest in IT for the future; cloud, collaboration or contracts … the answer as a group was that equal investments in each make sense.  This makes a difference when you consider that the collaboration piece, assuming our Stanford ITS folks are on the same page with this, involves even more partnering with distributed IT organizations on campus.  The group also mentioned the need for institutions to ‘hang together’ for the purpose of using this higher education IT group as a whole to bring down vendor pricing and reduce risk variability among our institutions.

This is really just the tip of the iceberg for what Educause provides both in the annual conference and throughout the year for an IT leader in higher education – and the information becomes that much more useful over time and with experience.  -Matt

I haven’t posted in awhile and was giving myself some room around that due to a conference in Chicago (actually, check out the topics from http://www.morassociates.com ) and a pretty long family vacation in Yellowstone.

Upon return in mid-July, I have felt a bit swamped. Let’s take a look at some projects in H&S IT right now:

Websites: We have been working about six different projects with Departments and Programs in the School this summer. Recent ‘go-lives’ have been Psychology and Chemistry. Later this month, the Center for Latin American Studies and Political Science sites will also come online. Beyond that, we have been looking into new work with various groups in H&S. Our internal force behind this is David Hart, who really leads these projects on the H&S side. From ITS, we have been getting a lot of recent help from Jim Knox and his team.

HandSOn: With some great, positive leadership and solid work, Sean Brandt and Ellen Ha have been working with our internal users in the HSDO to make some significant progress with this tool in the Dean’s Office. We have successfully implemented new process around development and change requests, and have moved this important application into a regular release cycle.

H&S Moves: We have been working with our Facilities team to smoothly provide networking, phones and computer take-downs, setups for a number of moves around H&S this summer.

Research/High-Performance Computing: H&S is right in this with several Departments in the School and with ITS to try and provide better, makes-sense solutions for this type of computing. More to come on this front, but activity on this is high right now.

Converged Comm: Our project lead from ITS has accepted a new position and can only help us through August. Since Christine Jacinto and I love Christina Zuffinetti’s (ITS) work with us on this project, we are trying to hard to complete all remaining converged cutovers this month – ugh!

There’s more, there is so much more – suffice to say this is one busy summer.

… did I mention the high rate of requests against the H&S computer replacement program?

More, and more coherent posts to come…

-Matt

HS Business Mtg_Admin Survey_IT_final

Last week, I had an opportunity to present our IT functional area findings from the H&S Administrative Services survey that was completed in early 2010.  Let’s let that sink in, EARLY 2010.  That’s an eternity for IT.  In a lot of ways we are a different group, operating at a different (I think higher) level than we did in 2009.

One of the observations anyone would make in attending a talk by me is that there are areas where I may ramble-on.  I realize it is annoying, and it is an area I am working on.  I do have a passion for this stuff and I like to pass on as much as I can.  Bear with me as I try to improve.

You can click through the slides from the link at the beginning of this post.  Some key points from the presentation included:

1.  In terms of the survey results, IT was right in the middle of the overall response for the Dean’s Office functional areas.. We are considered generally knowledgeable, responsive and we provide high quality services.  Our opportunities to improve include a need for better tools, collaboration in the Dean’s Office and our liaison role with central services.

2.  The survey seemed to point to IT in the Dean’s Office as improving.

3.  We shared overall goals of finding a balance in our IT efforts and those of the individual departments and programs in H&S.

4.  We see our future role with H&S as moving our IT effort more toward School priorities and mission, versus infrastructure and basic support.

… and so on (Matt rambles, and goes on some more, ugh).

If you were not at the meeting or just wish to do so, check out our slide deck and/or consider posting a comment or asking a question.  Certainly we heard some pain points in IT, mainly with web projects and the possible angst with a new e-mail and calendaring tool (Google) project that we will begin talking more seriously about in the near future.

Finally, we asked (and are asking) a question around the formation of an H&S IT focused group from our department and program admins (could possibly be delegated).  The group could really help articulate our H&S response/concerns/etc. with our team understanding and my own input with larger committees and asks for an H&S point-of-view on this, that or the other IT project/initiative.

-Matt

In the four years I have been in the Dean’s Office here at Stanford, among the most frustrating IT-related occurrences have been the occasional possible compromises of prohibited, restricted or confidential data on an individual’s computer. Most often, this occurs when a machine gets a virus and subsequently is found to have data falling into the restricted/prohibited data categories defined in Stanford policy here: http://www.stanford.edu/group/security/securecomputing/dataclass_chart.html (look in the table).

One thing that is not so obvious to our users is that as soon as a computing support staff member puts two and two together, i.e. machine may have been compromised and the machine has classified data, then that machine has to be examined by members of the Information Security Office team at Stanford. This is an exercise that puts the machine out of service for at least 72 hours, possibly more. Additionally, the outcome of such an investigation could include the need for Stanford to contact individuals (up to thousands) that their personal data may have been compromised. Obviously, this is a situation we all want to avoid.

How do we deal with this?

Fortunately, there are some tools for use here. Stanford, through ISO, provides help with this: http://www.stanford.edu/group/security/securecomputing/securecomputingbasics.html Additionally, H&S has licensed a tool, IdentityFinder http://www.identityfinder.com that can help individuals detect and secure information on their own. Check with your local desktop support through a HelpSU ticket if you think you have classified data and want to work with this tool to find/remove it.

If you are involved in a data security incident, please consult your local IT support and the Dean’s Office (myself, mlriley@stanford.edu ) for help in understanding the process to get your machine and appropriate data back up and working for you. This is not a standard support situation and our support staff are at the mercy of the ISO process to restore your machine. There may be loaner machines or other ideas that can bridge the gap for affected individuals in the meantime.

-Matt

It seems like we get these questions for our IT effort in the Dean’s Office more so than the other groups. That makes sense.. there are many ways in which IT support and services reach groups and individual in H&S, only some of which come as a direct result of our Dean’s Office IT.

Who are we? Technically, we are a team of five individuals in the Dean’s Office:  myself, Christine Jacinto, Sean Brandt, David Hart and Ellen Ha.  Most of our interaction with departments and programs in H&S is through Christine, David and I.  Sean and Ellen spend most of their time on IT-related projects in the Dean’s Office, so they may not be as familiar across the school.  You can read more about us -> HSDO IT Team

This limited group of names above does not tell the entire story.  I think of our HSDO IT team as including our contracted support from IT Services.  This is where most of our interactions occur in the school, as the team provides computing support to all staff, faculty, emeritus faculty (if they are working/teaching), graduate students and post docs.  These ITS folks work with us in a way that is as close as any team that was directly hired by the Dean’s Office could.  The team is basically the left side of the org chart shown -> IT CRC Org Chart More difficult to notice, but important to understand, is how closely we work together in planning, identifying projects, matching services to needs, consulting and finding service improvements.  In this way, Kim Seidler, Liz Goesseringer (Liz is our business partner from ITS) and Sam Ablao represent an extension of our H&S Dean’s Office IT management team that helps us lead IT efforts for H&S collaboratively with central IT Services.

What do you do? IT seems directed at problem-solving in general, and I would not argue against that being our bread-and-butter in the HSDO.  I think a misconception for problem-solving is that it is always responsive.  Yes, we want to be responsive and we are good at that.  However, through active participation in Stanford’s IT strategy and planning, staying up on higher education IT subjects/issues, and in applying our learning from observing H&S school-wide IT issues/needs from this wider viewpoint, we are frequently able to ‘problem-solve’ issues that have not yet filtered down to individuals and groups, so that our recommendations, projects, support efforts, etc. come in as planned and understood solutions/services, not as quick fixes spun out of chasing our tails when problems arise.  Some of that is more vision than reality, but certainly this is our goal.

Current IT solutions/services that are H&S specific and that we are leading include:  The computing support described above, the backups solution for H&S desktops, the HandSOn application in the HSDO, converged communications with H&S (the new Cisco IP phones), networking infrastructure/support for our buildings, help with space and support for some cluster computing, support for the SULAIR-based academic technology consultants that work in H&S, computer replacement program for H&S, multiple website project involvements and the new grad aid application project.  / to name a few

Current IT-related initiatives that are Stanford-wide, but for which H&S is influencing/partnering with central groups include:  Cloud collaboration, information/data security awareness, admin system project management/portfolio initiative, business intelligence efforts, admin systems application requirements working group, leadership training programs.  / to name a few

Additionally, you might want to know just how far your questions/ideas/gripes/praise might go when it comes through the HSDO IT team.  As the largest school, and also as the school with the most dependency on central services, H&S gets an attentive ear when we have something to say about IT at Stanford.  I participate in the IT strategic partners committee, which is a smaller group of IT leaders at Stanford who are now adding strategic IT input on a broad scale for Stanford.  I also lead the CampusIT committee, which brings together lead folks from a broad set of IT organizations at Stanford to share information and filter-up response for IT-related projects coming from central offices.  David Hart and I participate in a SU Webleaders group (all things web at Stanford, led by university communications).  Christine Jacinto and I represent H&S with the campus e-mail partners group that worked throughout the Zimbra project and will continue with cloud collaboration effort.  There are even more committees and groups that we work with, which is all to say that the IT folks in the HSDO are frequently working to influence IT on behalf of H&S with (hopefully) a better end result in the tools and services that our H&S groups and individuals see at the end of the day.

I am very interested in feedback, ideas and questions about our IT team(s) in H&S and whether our work is paying off for the school.

-Matt