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[CSG Winter 2011] Unified Communications Workshop – part 2

Published January 13, 2011 Higher Education , IT Management , Technology Leave a Comment

Jim Jolkl – UVA Voice Replacement Project

They’ll supply a phone device for those that ask for them – phones are cheap compared to support calls for softphones.

Need to take on moving academic areas, and hospital and clinics.
~ 20k lines remaining

People tell them that keeping their email working is more important the their telephone.
Budgets are impossibly tight

Call centers, emergency calling, are important. Some parts of universities are very phone-centric (hospitals and clinics among them).

Vendor types:
- Traditional PBX (Avaya, Cisco, Siemens) – don’t save much money, but you get modern services
- Centrex – voice from local phone company. Not low cost
- Carrier products moving to enterprise (Broadsoft, MetaSwitch) – good core services at reasonable cost.
- Open Source efforts (Asterisk, Nortel SCS, sipXecs & Ezuce)
- New entries (Microsoft OCS/Lync)

Talked to Skype, but they’re not interesting in importing current sets of numbers. They don’t want to become a regulated carrier.

Are we at an industry shift point yet?
- Are the more discruptive players “there” yet? (technology, reiliability, features)?
- are they far enough along to influence the type of contract terms we get?

Key RFP focus areas
Cost reduction – Most users do not need 5-9s reliability, but many still do. Be able to implement different levels of reliability at different costs.

Enhance user productivity – end user call control, mobile integration

Provide high-end services where needed

Be open to use of multiple products

RFP: http://www.procurement.virginia.edu/pagerfp
responses are in, presentations being scheduled

Thoughts – where does OCS/Lync server fit in? Soft client support; audio issues, etc; Focus on a shorter planning horizon; cellular coverage, wifi integration

[CSG Winter 2011] Unified Communications Workshop – part 1.

Published January 13, 2011 Higher Education , IT Management , Technology Leave a Comment
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Mike Pickett (Brown)

What is UC?

Multiple devices, platforms, time-span, products
Will affect workflow, ability to integrate with lots of devices
“UC is integration of real-time and non-real-time devices across platforms”
Brown engaged – WTC Consulting – Phil Beilman

Why care? Allows business process integration, to simplify and integrate all forms of communications to optimize business processes, reduce the response time, manage flows.

Survey Results – 2 campuses are on the way to eliminating desktop phones.
Illinois – have about 18 months to go.

Bill Clebsch – at Stanford they’re finding that people think they want the soft phone, but after two or three days of using it they find they don’t.

Iowa – deployed OCS for presence and IM across campus, and people like it. 150 people on OCS voice, paired with unified messaging. UM has been the killer app.

Greg J – 4 dimensions to communications we need to unify – voice, text (becoming one), documents, video. Many-to-many video is a big unsolved problem. We’re not going to control any of these, so moving towards understanding how to move forward with these in ways that allow people to collaborate is important.

Shel asks “can we embrace mediocrity at the institutional level, because the innovation is going to happen around us?”

Tom Barton – thinking about the global use as we extend our campuses is important.

Klara – How far do we go in supporting mobility in the hospitals?

Jim Phelps – thinking about how we migrate the store of rich streams as systems transition is important.

Ken Klingenstein – there’s a level of indirection we can provide in this space, and that is our business.

Two Expert Views:

Vern Elliot – Gartner
- cellular providers don’t take direction from universities, they take it from 16 year olds
- it’s all about the network
- Big driver – things are moving to commodity hw, TCIP-IP
- h.323 is becoming dominant
- communications are becoming integrated with apps
- sonsumerization
- on demand, cloud-based
- desk phone will have a diminishing role for at least 10 years.
- don’t get tied into a single vendor – not a good time to make a big bet if you can avoid it
- need a vision / strategy to resolve organizational issues over 3-5 years.
- cell phones are leading the convergence
- Google doesn’t have an enterprise approach yet
- MS Lync option is getting pretty impressive

WTC – Phillip Beitleman
- Reinvest in wire as you adopt a wireless strategy
- Harden the entire network – most eggs will be in this basket
- carrier neutral distributed antenna systems
- figure out actual costs across all IT services so funding can be mapped
- put together formal, structured plans across technology map and across multiple years – identify future funding strategies
- take longer planning cycles – 10 years for infrastructure
- don’t throw things away
UC doesn’t usually end up saving money in the near term because of complexity.
- rate models need to evolve to include telephony, network, and IT services
- WiMax as lost the battle – LTE will win

Directories are important.

Charlie – we only need phone numbers because of the legacy systems. If we all had SIP systems we’d use our network IDs.

Klara – voice is an immediate mode of communication (just one step down from video), and there will always be a role for it. Different population segments communicate differently, and we will have to support all of them.

Elazar – let’s move the risk of technology changes from us to the carriers.

Shel – if we endorse a solution, then we need to be the advocate for our users with that service.

Andy – people want a number as an enterprise identity. The carriers have ways to have multiple numbers on a single device – UMich is doing this in a pilot, where they put a UMich number on people’s individual cell phones.

Bill – Want some people to reach you by your institutional identity. We have three separate identities now – a network ID, an email address, and a phone number. Can we go to one? Security of research information is very important – how do we protect that? Only we can answer those questions.

Tracy – some of the reasons people don’t want to give up their devices aren’t yet supported in the new models. Where will people forgive convenience for mobility, and where not? When we think about remote locations, we need higher fidelity and bandwidth – will we find mobile ways for that?

Ken – metadata is (as always) important – where’s the metadata that says what was in that videoconference? Where’s integrated search?

Shel – we’re in a purgatory period – most voice mail just says “hi it’s me – call me.”

[CSG Winter 2011] InCommon Silver

Published January 13, 2011 Higher Education , IT Management , Technology 2 Comments

InCommon Silver is an Identity Assurance Program. Requires a set of infrastructure requirements around eight assessment areas. Three general categories of requirements:
1. Documentation of policies and procedures and standard operating practices
2. Strength of authentication and authorization
3.?

CIC CIOs provide strong exec. sponsorship.
The CIC universities will implement Silver to support LoA 2 by Fall 2011

CIC co-leads – Renee Shuey (Penn State), Tom Barton (Chicago).

Michigan State – goals were to enable collaboration, so needed to build trust with external partners and can facilitate access to services. Initial challenges revolved around interpreting the Bronze/Silver Identity Assurance Profile (IAP) – luckily friends in CIC helped decode it – it’s got very complex ideas. Password policies didn’t map – were too simple. Sorely lacking: documentation, policy. Who to provide this for? Try to pare down scope. What’s the killer app? Has yet to rear its head – most likely to come out of NIH. Argument has been let’s try to be proactive and be prepared before it becomes a requirement.

Approach – work with other institutions, partner with campus stakeholders, identify a subset of users (likely research faculty), leverage ID office (verification process, credentialing). Investigating second credential (certs) through iClass ID Cards – might do that rather than strengthen passwords on first credential.

Mary Dunker – VA Tech

REwind to CSG, Jan 2010
- Developing levels of assurance for personal digital IDs at Tech.
- Developing method for determining LofA.
- Developing tech for authenticating at LofA
- Aware that InCommon Silver was “out there”, but was going down road towards NIST certification.

Now
- Established standard for personal digital identity levels of assurance
- CAS recognizes LoA of authentication credential
- CAS front-ends SHibboleth
- ox-officio member of CIC Sliver Project planning group.

Where they’re going
- achieve InCommon Silver with personal digital certs on a usb token. Later possibilities – VASCO digipass one-time password devices. Soft certs (require infrastructure changes, developments of new UI).

Remaining tasks – Wait for Silver to be finalized, ensure compliance with silver – may require chante to record (and encrypt) DL or passport number. Ensure that CS checks revocation list for certs. Reuest audit. Apply for silver.

Iowa (Chris Pruess)

Silver thinking – Project doesn’t stand in isolation. Identity service served central academic space, but not hospital. Brought hospital into space starting in 2000. Current Authentication Focus – Active Directory Assessment – Can it provide required level of authentication strength to meet Silver? Have strong Project Mgmt discipline in IT org. Leveraging other projects – campus ID card (id proofing improvements – brought hospital badging requirement in also), revision of enterprise password policy (established framework for multiple strength passwords).

Tom notes that while the initial use cases for Silver are for smaller specialized populations (NIH apps, TeraGrid) we should be ready for the larger cases coming – e.g. TIAA/CREF, financial aid, etc. Chicago wants to get to Silver using existing user name/password credentials. Requires a bunch of work on things like how passwords are stored and managed.

RL Bob Morgan – Refining Silver.
We were working on feds E-Auth requirements, but then they phased that out and started ICAM.

Need to change based on feedback – it it’s that hard for Va Tech, that’s a problem. It has to work for everyone. Needs to be as simple to understand and implement as it can be while still dealing with federal requirements. People read every word. Watch out for “must”. Remove most requirements not referenced by ICAM TFPAP. Exception is some other potential Silver consumers such as TeraGrid/IGTF.

Business, Policy, and Operational Factors is the primary section where elements have been removed. Audits and Auditors – Recognize need for shared risk between InCommon and campuses, propose an Assurance Review Board, Role of Auditors: confirm management assertions, not guarantee IA conformance. Reduce number and fequency of audits. Tom notes that they’re working with ACUA (the association of college and university auditors) towards guidelines on how to audit identity management. Matt notes that working with the auditor before setting down this path is a very good idea.

IAM functional model – flesh out enterprise scenario, vs dedicated IdP – et multiple apps, RAs, password stores. Streamline terms. Define terms in context.

Registration and proofing – clarify some concepts – existing relationship, identity information (e.g. meaning of “address of record”).

Kevin Morooney – It’s important – You should care. Two perspectives

Campus CIO –

4 basic principles/observations
- We want more. always
- They said it couldn’t be done, but we did it
- If your best friend jumped off a bridge….
- We are playing our part in an epic battle.

The importance of Trust increases with transactional importance – from affinity cards, through credit cards, driver licenses, passports, social security card, birth certificate.

Principle: OVer time we want to do higher stakes transactions online. True within campus, and off campus, between campuses, etc. Klara’s point – we’ve been doing it all along for quite some time. The value of doing silver is already paying off.

Principle: eduPerson, authentication, authorization. Each of these was a hard effort, but we’ve made a lot of progress. Every step along the way there were naysayers – they weren’t right. But they could have been. NIH is taking this trust fabric idea very seriously.

Principle: Others with whom we do business are heading in the same directions, for incredibly similar reasons.

An epic battle is being waged – Popularity vs. Truth. Our institutions are largely in the business of getting it right – what we’re constantly up again is popular knowledge that hasn’t been vetted. Getting trust right is a part of truth. Changing scholarship models will require making strong assertions about our people.

A late addition – big companies have contacted Kevin about learning how we’ve done identity management – because we’ve been dealing with the chaos that they’re just beginning to experience.

InCommon guy -

Principle – it’s about community. InCommon maturation – size and shape of the org are changing. Lot of dialog about wanting InCommon to play more of a role – community asking it to do things.

Principle- Silver is one of many things that supports the theme of the future – ever increasing trust.

InCommon’s success is dependent on what we do on our campuses.

[CSG Winter 2011] IT Alignment, efficiency, strategy and governance, part 2

Published January 12, 2011 Higher Education , IT Management Leave a Comment

Mike Pickett is talking about Governance Audit &
Centralization/Decentralization. Why did they want a governance audit?
They didn’t ask for it – it’s starting to be a buzz topic among audit
departments at universities nationally. Maybe it’s a way to help
thinking about the maturity of the organization – you can treat the
lack of planning and maturity as a risk to the institution.

Audit was conducted June – Sept 2010. Talked to wide range of people
in virtually every part of the university, including the senior
officers.

Goals – Assessment of IT governance processes and key IT risks and
controls – spent about an equal amount of time looking at both. Used
COBIT to assess and benchmark quality of processes. Provide detailed
recommendations for improvements; provide a proposed action plan;
Provide estimated investment; provide strategic input

In talking about lack of IT funding as a risk, need to phrase it in
ways that make sense in a setting where nobody has adequate funding.
Probably needs to be communicated in terms of not being funded at an
adequate level to enable the academic goals of Brown.

Opportunity risks – what are the things that would prevent Brown from
being the institution it wants to be? e.g. what infrastructure is
needed to support growth in continuing education?

The report is recommending that the board of trustees have some
oversight of strategic technology investments.

There’s a question about whether we’re doing something wrong by not
persuading institutional leadership that technology is of enough
strategic importance, so that we’re seen as a cost center rather than
a strategic partner. Joel notes that it’s a challenge to have the
conversations about using technology to help research and teaching get
better. Tracy says that in industry oftentimes the CIO has come up
through the ranks within the business, which is less true in our
institutions. Building credibility with faculty and researchers then
becomes critically important.

Recommended reading: IT
Governance, Weill & Ross, 2004 HBS Press
Chuck Powell – Yale has drafted an institutional IT strategic plan. Grew out of a realization that the IT organization was too technical and not aligned with the institution. Had a strategic planning process, gathering input from a wide variety of sources. Created an ITS Relationship Management – like senior client account reps in corporate world. Aligned with strategic clients. Strong alignment with their strategic issues – mainly there to make sure that the latest great idea is captured, understood, and potentially funded. These are full-time roles for senior people, each of whom has a team of between 5-10 people. Sounds to me like they pulled the people who do requirements gathering and project definition and management across the organization and assigned them to work with specific units – like the people who used to do that for the student system are now assigned as relationship managers with academic administration. All projects over $250k must go through the process, and there is architectural and regulatory/compliance checks of smaller projects if they have large impacts.

[CSG Winter 2011] IT Alignment, efficiency, strategy and governance, part 1

Published January 12, 2011 Higher Education , IT Management , Technology 1 Comment
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Jim Phelps is setting the stage – what does it mean to be a mature enterprise? 5 stages – Ad Hoc, Basic, Standardized, Managed, Adaptive – lower levels driven by technologies, upper levels driven by business strategiies. Adaptive is designed to pursue change and adapt quickly. Higher Ed governance structures are designed to resist change – to keep processes going through turmoil.

Why change? Not just because it’s fashionable – a lot of compelling drivers, like cost differential between cloud and on-premises services. Huge shift in how business is being conducted globally – See the article in Atlantic on The Rise of the New Global Elite, and the article in the Chronicle on European university mergers. Higher Ed has a terrible time making decisions.

Bernie takes over – asking Why Alignment so Important? Typically only about 1/3 of the total institutional IT spending is in the central IT organization. As we move into challenging days, the reaction may be to lower central administrative spending, but that may not help with IT. We need to help our institutions understand how IT works in the institution and how to rationalize.

Role of Governance – to understand leadership role in facilitation of conversations. Understand what customers are looking for, and to help lead and socialize directions. Strategically choosing governance groups is critical. Choose who will be part of which groups and what the roles are in continuous technology conversations. Often groups like to think they get to tell the central IT shop what to do, but we need to help them understand their role within the governance continuum. Looking for a shared set of strategies to move forward.

IT Strategic Planning Goal – “Identify and invest in technology projects that are transformative and provide competitive advantage…” Terry asks who is the competition? Competing with other institutions, as measured by rankings, research dollars, – but what happens when everyone’s strategy is to be in the top 3? Tracy notes that the differences are how we translate the goals into our culture and practices. Some of us are focusing on international programs, some on bridges with K-20, etc. Mike Pickett says that while the rhetoric may be the same about seeking competitive advantage, we want to make sure that IT is not perceived as a competitive disadvantage.

UMN has rolling 6 and 2 year plans, and then work on quarterly work plans, where they try to focus on the planned vs. unplanned activities. Trying to manage an IT investment portfolio and bring everybody into the conversation. Project selection criteria include the kind of project, what value it brings to the institution, and how its financed. Focused on strategic and operational priorities.

What criteria do you need to have in place to make a decision? definition, functional owndership, business case, and finance plan. Some projects are in planning and development phase where these things are not yet clearly understood. How do those get decided and resourced? Iowa says those that have strong champions get resourced. At Brown they have a committee chaired by the CFO – everything that’s over $50k or is a new service is supposed to come through that group.

Looking at Risk – Org and Tech readiness, architecture fit, definition is well understood, infrastructure compatibility. Looking for Value on Investment – look at over 5 year term. Looking to figure out how to shrink effort on non-strategic work and increase resources available for strategic initiatives. It’s an art form with a political calculus.

Joel says this is less about the org chart and more about the real relationships with people so everyone really understands their role. John from Duke notes that lemmings are perfectly aligned – sometimes you want to see a diversity of approaches, like with learning management systems where all the current answers are crummy. Sometimes you need to embrace chaos. Terry agrees that we need to consider alignment and efficiency vs. effectiveness. We don’t have that many arrows in our quiver to gain efficiencies – automation, de-duplication of services, and standardization. How do we try to live in a mode of pushing efficiencies while meeting the ever more disparate needs of our audience? Tracy says that part of the CIO’s role is to balance the gaining of efficiencies with the fact that two years from now people may have money again and will be driving towards flexibility.

Elazar – created new governance structure at UCSF – IT Steering Committee chaired by a faculty member – 5 groups under it. Everything that is substantial in university (including medical center) goes through this group.

My Top Listening of 2010

Published December 31, 2010 Uncategorized Leave a Comment

There sure has been a bunch of great music from this year that I’ve been enjoying! I realized as I listened to my big 2010 releases playlist that there are some themes that emerged, so I’m doing some lumping here.

Theme #1 – Old Guys (and Gals) Rule

  • Robert Plant – Band of Joy

    I was never much of a Led Zep fan, primarily because Plant always sounded like a cat that was having its tail stepped on. I began to get interested when he collaborated with Allison Krause, mostly because it seemed like such an odd couple. But this new album floored me. Spooky, rootsy music with lots of atmosphere, but always retaining soul. Banjos and upright on some tunes, lots of electric distortion on others, and sometimes all of the above together.

  • Mavis Staples – You Are Not Alone

    A joyous celebration by the legendary gospel and soul singer. Produced by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, who had the good sense to record Mavis with her superb hard working road band.

  • Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – Mojo

    To my ears the strongest Petty work since Damn The Torpedoes (that ought get a rise out of some folks). I read in Tape Op that before this Petty had been listening to lots of Muddy Waters, while Mike Campbell was spending time listening to old Zeppelin. Both influences show and work together beautifully. A rocking, bluesy, mature work from what is arguably the best band in the business.

  • Los Lobos – Tin Can Trust

    Are these guys simply too good to be popular? This is their best effort in a while, showing off the incredible range and sonic versatility they’re capable of. The one-two guitar punch of Cesar Rosas and David Hidalgo just gets better and better, and the songwriting and singing are equally strong.

  • Keith Jarret and Charlie Haden – Jasmine

    What can you say? This is another gem in a spread out series of Charlie Haden’s duets with marvelous pianists (previous efforts featured Hank Jones and Kenny Barron), and it’s wonderful. Charlie Haden, as always, makes every note count, and Jarrett plays right in sync with him. Gorgeous music.

  • Bettye LaVette – Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook

    While it sounds like a concept that might fail miserably (veteran neglected soul singer takes on hoary British rock anthems from ’60s to the present), it mostly works quite well. I’m particularly fond of her takes on the Beatles’ The Word and Paul McCartney’s Maybe I’m Amazed. And I like her good taste in picking Salt of the Earth, though her version doesn’t really add anything to the Stones’ original.

Theme #2 – In which I discover some younger veterans that I had never listened to before

  • Superchunk – Majesty Shredding

    I had never listened to their earlier stuff (this is their ninth album, and the first since 2001), but I really like this one. Great power pop, putting an equal emphasis on both words. Killer hooks, heavy guitar, terrific sound.

  • Jenny and Johnny – I’m Having Fun Now

    Thoroughly modern girl group surf music that’s more sophisticated than it sounds on first listen. Jenny is Jenny Lewis, formerly of Rilo Kiley. Johnny is Jonathan Rice, who has worked with Elvis Costello. Big Wave is the catchiest tune yet written about the economic crisis. Pure pop for now people.

  • Belle and Sebastian – Write About Love

    I’d tried little snippets of Belle and Sebastian before, but Bryn convinced me to give them a go again, and I’m glad she did! Perhaps a bit too earnest for some, but their tuneful, intelligent Scottish pop somehow soothed my hectic fall season as I started transitioning to a new job in a new city, and it’s stuck with me.

  • Spoon – GaGaGa

    I know – everybody’s been into Spoon like forever – where have I been? I like this. Don’t make me a target!

Theme #3: Not all good jazz is from the US

  • Moutin Reunion Quartet – Soul Dancers

    Francois Moutin is probably the number one on-call jazz bassist in Europe. His upright technique is awesome, but it never gets in the way of his musicianship. His own quartet, including his brother Louis on drums, really come into their own on this recording. All acoustic (well, some light electronic keys), but to me it seems heavily influenced by late quintet to early electric Miles, say Filles de Killimanjaro to In A Silent Way and early Weather Report, while still finding an original voice.

  • Sunna Gunnlaugs – The Dream

    Sunna Gunnlaugs is an Icelandic jazz pianist. I came across her after somehow becoming Twitter mutual-followers with her drummer (and husband), Scott McLemore. This is a quartet effort, and it’s one of the few new jazz releases from this year that I keep coming back to. Accessible and melodic, but not insipid or wimpy – there’s a core of strength and adventure running underneath the beauty that seems characteristic somehow of Icelandic music. Worth seeking out – get it from her web site: http://www.sunnagunnlaugs.com/shop.htm

That’s my list for now – I’ve got a bunch of stuff I haven’t gotten to that is showing up on other people’s end of year lists, like Brandi Disterheft’s Second Side (she’s a Canadian bassist and singer – where do these monstrously good young jazz bassists keep coming from?), the Drive By Truckers’ Big To Do, The Head and the Heart (a good sounding new Seattle band), and lots of others.

CNI Fall Meeting 2010 – Cyberinfrastructure Framework

Published December 13, 2010 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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Cyberinfrastructure Frameork
Alan Blatecky – acting director, NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure

5 crises
Computing tech
Data, provenance, and viz
Software
Organization for multidisciplinary science
Education

Science and scholarship are team sports
Collaboration/partnerships will change
- building dynamic coalitions in real time
Ownership if data plusnlow cost fuels growth and number of data systems
- federation ant interop become mire important

Innovation and discovery will be driven by analysis
Mobility and personal control will drive innovation and research communities. -
- eg using accelerometers foe earthquake detection
Gaming, virtual worlds, social networksm will transform the way we do science, research and education

All the layers have to work together for the system to function. Cyberinf. Ecosystem.

The goal of virtual proximity – you are one with your resources. Collapse the barrier of distance. All resources are virtually present, accessible, and secure.

NSF

Data enabled science
Community research networks
New computational infrastructure
Access and connection to facilities

Impacts on NSF
CI as enabling infrastructure for S&E
New role for data
Multi-disciplinary approaches essential
Education – embedded and integral
More coordinated post-award management

Examples

Transient & data-intensive astronomy
- seeing events as they occur
- complex interconnected earth systems

Four data challenges
Volume
Growth
Distribution
Data sharing

Sea of data
- data enabled sciences
– immediate and long term support of data
– focus on data life cycle issues
– development of data tools – mining, visualization, algorithms
– broad computation science education program
- advanced computational infrastructure
– software elements -> integration -> institutes
– sustained long-term investment in software
- data services – integration, preservation, access, analysis
– community access networks – building virtual communities
— collab tools, secure systems to link peplum etc
- access and connectivity
– connections ton facilities and instruments
— ooi, sensor networks, telescopes (desktop connectivity hasn’t improved)
– cybersecurity
– networking, end-to-end

- data sciences

2010 CNI member meeting – Cliff Lynch intro

Published December 13, 2010 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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Cliff – 20th anniversary of CNI. How to observe? Focus on the future. Going to putntogehter an ebook – the next 20 years – analytic and prescriptive, but not scenarios. Look at where we’re likely to go in the next 20 years  in higher ed, scholarship, etc. Have to also talk about larger forces in society.

Why 20 years? Predicting the future is hard – failures of imagination and failures of nerve (Arthur Clark). Long enough to see change, but not be science fiction. Going to invite anyone who wants to respond to an opening essay that Cliff will write. Will reach out to some specific people. Will package up a selection of the essays in the ebook plus a print on demand option by end of CY 2011. Provide an offset to the short term focus of the last couple of years. When you look at some of the abrupt changes, the have long-term ramifications that need to be thought through. 

It is a good time to think about the long term. Things that have happened in the last year worth mentioning. Some quite incredible things.

Cyberinfrastructure and e-science. Can already see big steps happening in changing of scholarship. Emergence of plan for next gen networks coming out of NLR an I2  - provisioning 10gb lambdas for researchers. Emergence of sensor networks – example of high speed trading, where the speed of light makes a difference. Area of greatest interest here -data curation. Big announce,net is NSF data plan requirement. Major step because it brings researchers face to face with questions about data. What’s important? Where can I get help? Good to get the conversation going across a wide range of disciplines. We’ll see other finders follow suit. Getting services in place for researchers is a non-trivial issue. Guidance for researchers is vague. Review panels could use some guidance. This is a great collective experiment. Would be good to have a database of successful data management plans, use that as a way to get a grip on what we should do going forward. We don’t have a good understanding of data life cycles. Not hearing words lime “forever” in is context. Hearing things like “a few years after the grant” That’s good – we’re good at keeping data for 5 or 6 years. 

Open data movement. The idea that  Data should be open and shared gaining inexorable traction in some areas. . Not paying enough attention yo software. Erosion of reproducibility makes it difficult. The idea from people like Ian Foster, where everybody should be able to inspect and run the model. Entering an age of simulations and models.seeing things like a proposal out of eth asking for a billion euros to build simulation of social data incorporating input from 70 databases. New kinds of simulation, multiple-input agents.

Getting to be strange world of artifacts. Digital preservation. Trying to get to a shared standard of what constitutes the historical record. Think of the change in news. Community journalism – a form of social network. If you look at how much time people spend I. Social media, you come to the conclusion that we should be preserving and archiving – LC getting the Twitter archive. Not only important retroactively, but turning out that some of the social media are predictive. A whole series of papers from folks like Hal Varian – things like twitter or search streams are good for predicting things like movie box office. Google has been working with CDC to predict disease archives by looking at queries about symptoms combined with geo-location. Interstingnhow difficult iti is to look at these in academic social science because of human subject issues.

Wikileaks – enormous dumps of data on the net that presumably have some historical value. Some libraries starting to amass data documenting human rights violations – the kind of puzzles we’ll be dealing with. The viciousness of responses is interesting. The network is getting to be a vicious place in ways that it didn’t used to be – e.g. The stutznet worm. A very complicated and sophisticated thing with some very specific targets. Lots of implications for what documentation of the social record looks like and our confidence in its integrity.

Rise of new scale phenomena – David Rosenthal has done some fine work. In a big enough system things are always broken, so you have to be able to design around that. The probability that you can read an entire disk is becoming a problem – need different ways of thinking. Resilient system design.

Mobile computing – not just about laptops or cell phones. Seeing devices in the middle, or image sensors, digital capture, overlays on the world. Old news – putting a camera in every pocket has had all sorts of social ramifications. Before the web, we used to have a zoo full of one-off apps, that wanted to be silos. Now we’re seeing that come back in the mobile world. Hundreds of apps, each talks to one specific info resource. Need to think hard about this as we think about integration of mobile. The potential to re-license content we already own is large.

Teaching and learning – seeing a maturation of LMS market. Being extended into collaboration suites. Also seeing a resurgence of other reads where computing gets involved – Intelligent tutoring, e.g. – actual teaching done with statistical models and machine intelligence. Long history of this that never gained traction in higher Ed, though it did in some niche markets commercially. This might be a direction for textbook evolution.

Been a lot of interest unleashing space – want to engage students at a deeper level, and have them take responsibility for their learning. Worry about saturation – engagement exhaustion. The problem is one of local optimization, at the level of the course. Need to think above the course – degree, certificate, etc. Will intersect with discussions of retention and time to degree.

We are busily building systems that collect data on students. Now want to exploit it – retention, student progress, etc. Need to use them wisely and transparently. If we’re not clear with students about data collection, we may lose the ability to make use of data streams. In consumer markets we are seeing the wheels of regulation move, which will complicate things while maybe not solving  them. 

Special collections entering a new golden age as they become digital. Fascinating things going on with individual personal collections. The public interest in private records is a frontier policy area.

Many services migrating out to the network level – software as a service. Lots we don’t u derstand. What do databases look like – linked data, trust, authoritative data, issues. Croppingnup in discussions of bibliographic control. We’ll also see it with names how does that connect to databases of things like grant proposals, biography, family history. The example of mathematical genealogy – your children are the people you advised on their thesis.

Will see lots of development with the relation between what campuses are doing and what’s going on nationally.

Goodbye UW, Hello Chicago!

Published September 14, 2010 Other , Technology 8 Comments
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Last Tuesday was my last day as an employee of the University of Washington.

I’m excited to say tomorrow I start in a new job as Senior Director for Emerging Technology and Communication with IT Services at the University of Chicago. I’ll be part of the leadership team that Klara Jelinkova, their relatively new Chief Information Technology Officer, has put together. I’ve known and admired Klara as a colleague for a number of years now as she’s held increasingly more responsible positions at the University of Wisconsin and Duke before coming to Chicago in March. Klara is one of the new generation of higher-ed CIOs – whip smart, completely grounded in the technologies, but understanding the role that modern IT organizations must play to work with and serve the university. I couldn’t imagine a better person to work for. The other folks I already know in the Chicago organization (Tom Barton, Greg Anderson, Bob Bartlett) are also top notch, and I look forward to working with a whole new group of colleagues.

While I’m sad to be getting ready to leave Seattle, I look forward to getting to know Chicago, a great and vibrant city. It’s gonna be hell on my downhill skiing, though.

I’ll be blogging about my experiences in getting to know Chicago and our work in IT Services as it happens, but I wanted to at least take a brief look back on my 16.5 years at the UW, and all that we’ve accomplished over those years, because over the course of that time we did play a part in changing the world.

It’s easy to forget that in the 1990s computer professionals at academic institutions were busy inventing the future. When I first came to the UW in 1994 it was not generally accepted in industry that internet protocol networking was going to be the way to go, nor that open protocol applications for email and other purposes would be adopted on a wide scale.

In 1994 we were excited about new emerging Internet applications and standards such as Gopher (invented at the University of Minnesota by my colleague Mark McCahill), IMAP (pioneered at Stanford and the UW by Mark Crispin and colleagues) and z39.50. The World Wide Web had been recently invented at CERN, the European particle physics research lab, and the Mosaic web browser, created at the University of Illinois’ supercomputing center, was wowing us with its ability to integrate images, text, and hypertext links in an open way that made it easy to create rich content.

Since that time we pioneered the use of developing technology time and again, we helped convince major commercial interests that the Internet was the way to bring people and business together online (for better and for worse), and we built a large and growing community of technologists and technology users at the UW.

Some of the areas where we can take some credit for being among the first include developing standardizing on IP-only transport on the network, creating a university web presence, building large collections of streaming audio and video, using IMAP as a widespread protocol for email, building web-based interfaces to administrative systems, creating an enterprise web portal before the word was even in use, creating widely-used independent tools for collaboration in teaching and learning, building a GUI interface for searching library resources, having a web-based single-sign-on system, deploying a campus-wide online events calendar, building web services interfaces to enterprise data, and many more.

Recently, we’ve been engaged in projects to really get a handle on how we organize, manage, and budget for IT work at the university. While not as sexy perhaps as some of our past technical adventures, I believe that being organized about how we plan for, manage, and communicate about IT services is a foundational discipline for being effective, agile, strategic, and innovative in supporting the work of the modern university.

The last couple of years have been tough ones in the UW Information Technology organization. It’s no secret that these are not easy times for public universities in general, and Washington’s state budget picture specifically doesn’t look too rosy. Constant cutbacks and layoffs have become part of “the new normal”, as admittedly outsized ambition and reach has been scaled back to a more modest scale.

Throughout all of the years, the people I’ve worked with at the UW have been a wonderful, extremely skilled and talented group. I’m honored to have worked among them, and I’m extremely proud of having played a part in the UW’s efforts over the years.

Harley Davidson – a great early example of working the social nets

Published July 14, 2010 Uncategorized 1 Comment

A couple of weeks ago I went to visit my friend Jim Fricke in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Jim is the head curator for the Harley-Davidson Museum, and I spent an afternoon and the following morning browsing the museum and lending a bit of help to Jim and the crew who were installing the new Evel Knievel exhibit.

I’m not a motorcycle rider, and I didn’t really know very much about Harley’s history, so this was a voyage of discovery for me. The Museum is really good, loads of cool bikes and interesting exhibits and explanations. I loved the “engine room” where you could see why Harley’s engines are different than others, leading to the characteristic Harley sound. There’s a wall that shows the various engine variations over Harley’s history and you can listen to recordings of the different versions – how cool is that?

The story of how Harley was acquired by AMF and became part of a large corporate enterprise in the 1970s, with subsequent declines in quality and reputation, and then had a remarkable rebirth after a group of company executives repurchased the company in 1981 is legendary.

But what I was struck by as I went through the museum exhibits covering those events was the amazing foresight that those executives had in leveraging two overlapping social networks to resurrect the company’s quality and reputation. They realized that using the network of Harley dealers and through them rallying the owners of Harleys to help the company would be key to their effort. The creation of the Harley Owner’s Group (HOG) in 1983 is frequently cited as a stellar example of brand management, but I think it’s more interesting as a very successful pre-online example of using social networking to help inform and support corporate strategy.

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