Themes and Critical Issues

Themes from IT now/future/critical issues discussions – Spring 2004

More than 100 members of nine campus-wide IT-related committees and groups received an overview of the campus’ IT strategic planning process and participated in a facilitated 30-60 minute activity during late March and early April 2004.   During the activity, participants used post-its to describe IT resources and services at UC Berkeley right now and in five years, and worked in small groups to identify the most critical IT opportunities and challenges that UC Berkeley must take advantage of and/or address in the next few years in order to move from our current state to our desired future.

CURRENT STATE	CRITICAL ISSUES	DESIRED FUTURE
Themes from more than 100 campus IT committee members who responded to the question, “What are the first three descriptive words that come to mind when you think of IT resources and services at UC Berkeley RIGHT NOW?”	Themes for critical IT opportunities that UC Berkeley must take advantage of and critical IT challenges that we must address in order for the campus to move from our current state to our desired future.	Themes from more than 100 campus IT-related committee members who  responded to the question, “What are the first three descriptive words that you would like to come to mind when you think of IT resources and services at UC Berkeley in FIVE YEARS?”
complex confusing constrained decentralized disorganized distributed diverse expensive fragmented inefficient network siloed / stovepiped slow unaligned / uncoordinated underfunded	CommuniTY Coordination Customer service & support Employees External relations Funding Infrastructure Innovation LEARNING/TEACHING ENVIRONMENTS Organization & governance Security Standards Strategic vision UBIQUITY	accessible adequate collaborative customer / user focused & friendly cutting edge / leading edge / state-of-the-art easy-to-use efficient excellent / exemplary funded / well-funded innovative integrated seamless secure ubiquitous wireless

Strategic IT Planning

Critical Issues: Opportunities and Challenges

Draft 1.2 - April 8, 2004

Each of the committees working on the strategic planning process developed a list of information technology opportunities and challenges facing UC Berkeley. The facilitating team clustered these responses into major categories. For each category, we selected three or four quotes directly from the raw input, and then we developed a few sentences designed to capture the tone and texture of the group discussions.

Community

•  “IT is more about media rich communications than about data”
• “Facile global communications”
• “Building community”
•  “Ease of access to information resources for the entire community”

 In its infancy, computing was about crunching numbers and sorting lists. Now, and even more so in the future, UC Berkeley’s information technology environment must be more about rich communications among individuals and communities of scholars throughout the world than it is about calculation. It is about building and sustaining communities. Access to information and people, at any time, from anywhere, is a core requirement of a modern IT infrastructure.

Coordination

• “Stovepipes – lack of coordination between central units and departments”
• “Encourage collaboration and discourage duplication”
• “Make it easy to redeploy/reuse/share technology among research initiatives”

UC Berkeley is a large, decentralized, research university in which coordination among its diverse departments is a challenge. Our culture of decentralization has created an environment in which there is a wide disparity in the IT infrastructures of different departments. There is no common minimum baseline of support within the campus, and we often do not coordinate resources and activities well among central, college, and departmental staffs.

Customer Service and Support

•  “User-centered thinking and development”
• “Supporting a diverse decentralized community”
• “Create a distributed support organization that focuses on value-added unique local needs while leveraging a common foundation.”

Compounding the problems of an uneven support infrastructure is the perception that many individuals in technical positions throughout the university care more about widgets than the people they serve. Our decentralized and distributed environment, with its incredible variety of flavors of technology, presents an enormous challenge for staff members who want to support their colleagues.

Employees

•  “Attracting and retaining energetic, competent, intelligent, conscientious, and honest IT    team members”
• “Upgrade staff skills through training and education”
• “Professional approach, professional results”
• “Making UC Berkeley an attractive workplace for IT professionals”

UC Berkeley is blessed with a dedicated cadre of faculty and staff who love Cal. However, the campus faces a severe problem in recruiting new IT professionals to replace the many individuals who will be retiring in the near future and who are leaving the campus because of the significant, and growing, gap between University of California compensation and the external marketplace in the Bay Area. Without an excellent staff, the IT infrastructure will collapse.

External Relations

•  “Work with other campuses, agencies, and companies to learn, to share, and to avoid duplication”
•  “Partnerships and alliances with vendors”
• “Extend the boundaries of the campus utilizing information technology”

UC Berkeley’s IT infrastructure must enable individuals throughout the world to gain access to the treasured collections and assets of the University. Our students should have an on-going relationship with the campus when they become alumni; scholars should be able to interact with colleagues no matter where they reside; inter-campus and interdisciplinary research must be enabled. Our virtual campus should have no boundaries.

 Funding

•  “Sustainable funding models required for both the short and long terms”
• “Technology baseline support for all”
•  “Information is capital”

Clearly California’s current financial crisis is creating significant problems for the campus and its IT infrastructure. This challenge received the largest number of comments by a wide margin. Demand for more and better IT services continues to expand rapidly while available resources are shrinking. Without a sustainable funding model to support IT the campus infrastructure will lag our competition and then deteriorate significantly.

Infrastructure

•  “Under-funded and outdated….. particularly in classrooms”
• “Uneven across campus”
•  “Explosion of computational biology will be very IT intensive”
• “Complete upgrade of campus network”

A significant ongoing impact of the current fiscal situation is the gap in the permanent funding required to maintain, expand, and operate the campus digital network and other segments of the IT infrastructure. The network is rapidly falling behind our peer institutions and it will not be able to support adequately the new initiatives selected in the strategic academic planning process. Technology support in our general classrooms is even further behind what is required in a great university.

Innovation

• “Do away with paper….. streamline all of our business process”
• “Dissolve boundaries between classrooms and labs”
• “Encourage exploration of new modes of research made possible by IT’
• “Build the library of the future”

UC Berkeley is an engine of technology advancement for society. Our IT infrastructure needs to support this vital role, particularly with respect to our location in the Bay Area. The campus must support its information intensive centers such as the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), the Institute for Biomedical Research (QB3), and its five “New Ideas Initiatives.” In addition, it should continue to play a leading role in advanced state and national networks such as CENIC and Internet2.

Learning and Teaching Environments

• “Inadequate funding for labs, classrooms and teaching”
• “Understanding the student and teaching perspectives”
• “Enriching the learning experience”
• “Encourage new modes of learning and teaching made possible by IT”

Learning and teaching are at the heart of Cal’s mission. However most of the core teaching activities on our campus, and in most universities, is performed much as it has been done in the past. Technology has been introduced in our classrooms only at the margins. UC Berkeley faculty and staff have a great opportunity to explore new modes of learning and to contribute not only to the creation of new information technologies, but also to the development of how these technologies can augment the learning experiences of our students.

Organization and Governance

• “Balanced constituencies”
• “Effective division of responsibilities between central services, academic, and support departments”
• “Become more flexible and responsive to change”
• “Continue process of building representative campus-wide IT governance”

In Academic Year 2000-01, the e-Berkeley Initiative led to a new organization and governance structure for the campus. The complex web of committees that has evolved includes representatives from all corners of the campus. As part of the current strategic planning process the e-Berkeley Steering Committee needs to review this structure and to make whatever adjustments are warranted by what we have learned and accomplished over the past three years.

Security

• “Worms, viruses, and spam are killing us…… they are likely to get worse”
• “Secure the network infrastructure”
• “Open yet secure”

The Internet as it has existed for the past thirty years is no longer viable. The past open, unauthenticated, unconstrained environment is no longer working for the mission critical demands everyone is placing on it. An indication of this fact is the recent passage of the Minimum Security Standards Policy for Networked Devices here on campus. The network is not usable without security, and we, and all of higher education, have a long way to go to make our domains more secure and reliable. This challenge poses one of the greatest threats to our ability to achieve our IT strategic vision.

Standards

• “Collaboration on standards for security”
• “Best practices communicated to all”
• “Open source, open standards”
• “Ensure that all faculty, staff, and students share or have access to a basic level of IT”

UC Berkeley’s culture resists campus-wide standards of any kind, and information technology is no exception. Several studies have documented the costs to the campus of allowing such a wide freedom of choice, but the costs of constraints on innovation have appeared to be more than the dollar costs of our lack of IT standards. As a result, the campus IT environment has many overlaps and gaps in services, and it is more expensive than it needs to be. With the current financial realities facing the University, we must revisit the standards question and decide where campus-wide standards may now be appropriate.

Strategic Vision

• “Shared vision about how IT aligns with education and research”
• “Ensure that IT activities are aligned with a living campus strategic plan”
• “Align and prioritize objectives, strategies, and initiatives”
•  “Architecture that is flexible and efficient”

The goal of this planning process is to articulate a campus-wide shared vision and set of principles about how information technology should evolve on our campus. In addition, we shall identify and prioritize a set of crucial initiatives that will advance our way towards this vision.

Ubiquity

• “Network speed and reliability”
• “High speed reliable network everywhere – wired and wireless”
• “Make it quick and easy for students, faculty, and staff to be connected with each other”
• “Portable computing power”

Mobile and ubiquitous computing is a major force that we must recognize and harness as part of the campus IT strategic plan.  AirBears, our proof of concept project, is a great success, but we must find a way to make this initiative ubiquitous, permanent, and scalable.