Strategic Technology

University Strategy and IT: A World View from the University of British Columbia
Ted Dodds, Chief Information Officer and Associate Vice-President – IT, University of British Columbia, Canada

What Martyn described in terms of the CIO role inspires both inspiration and envy in me. The work in Cardiff is pretty outstanding. I’m honoured to be here today and I’m very much looking forward to meting as many of you as possible and exchanging our experiences. At meetings like this we get a chance to learn from each other. I’d also like to pay special thanks to David Harrison who spent most of his weekend entertaining me and showing me the sights of Cardiff.

The conference theme…I love the title and the idea of IT and people and partnership. I’ll use the term community in this presentation and it really is a euphemism for the theme of the conference around people and IT and partnership. So I feel very much at home just by virtue of the theme of the conference. The longer I spend in the IT world, the more important I find the relationship between IT and people.

I want to share observations and common strategic issues. I spend a lot of time interacting outside my institution, as well as interacting within in. I network with my colleagues and peers around the world. I want to look at the focus on people and the power of the community and leadership and the role of the CIO, though not nearly as eloquently as Martyn’s presentation.

University of British Colombia quick facts: it is a multi-campus, research-intensive university with 50,000 students and $1.5bn revenues. We have top 30 or top 40 international ranking. Our IT is highly devolved. 80% of staff are outside the centre. So the ability to make decisions and set strategy in a way that doesn’t rely on complete control of resources but rather on influence and persuasion is crucial.

Richard Katz is a thought-leader. Involved in Educause and ECAR. I went on a voyage of discovery with him by taking a year off and exploring professionally and personally and have time for reflection. I sought to gain understanding; fortify relationships; establish new connections; understand the global context; personal renewal; find the grail of IT – who is doing best practice in all these areas.

We didn’t find the grail – there is no one institution or country or region or one way of doing things best but we did find a common range of strategic themes. These are:

• leverage
• open (everything)
• aspirations
• e-research
• e-learning

Leverage: it’s about combining our resources with those of others for a common purpose. Universities do not invest in IT to increase their market share, unlike some commercial organisations. In the HE field our incomes are to a large extent rather fixed and so when we make those investments it is becoming increasingly important to leverage the resources of my dept, my institution and even my country with those of others. I think this is where the international agenda also becomes quite important. I’m happy to see the networking that takes place in a conference like this to help that kind of leverage take place.

The University of Stuttgart has the good fortune of being in the same city as Mercedes Benz and Porsche and they leverage their resources with those companies. The companies need high performance computing and they can invest in this kind of facility in a way that the university can take advantage of eg using the spare cycles, but also picking up some of their capacity when it is upgraded (which commercial companies usually do sooner than universities). Endowments are another form of leverage but in the current economic climate this is changing. We didn’t find the same role for endowments in Europe as in the US and Canada.

Open everything
I would assert that over the last number of years, HE as a community has developed a real understanding of what it means to be open. We are taking something we have always been reasonably good at – sharing knowledge – and developing services around that. The movement to open is visible everywhere.

Open standards: little bit of a dichotomy but standards leads to flexibility and to creativity. 100 years ago there were as many ways to screw in an electric lightbulb as there were lightbulbs. It inhibited development. Or look at railroad gauges. Different gauges inhibited the free flow of railcars. The free flow of knowledge is made easier with a well set-out set of standards. It has been a real driver of innovation and creativity.

The open forum: fascinating conference coming up in December in the US . Full details on the slide. I think it is the road that we’re on and it will require a range of changed management structures we need to start to think about.

Another good resource is a new book called Opening Up Education, published by MIT Press. It’s covered by the Creative Commons licence. Just begun to look at it and it is fascinating reading.

Open source is one example of open that has come of age as a viable alternative to market offerings. It has already become a de facto driver of innovation as it offers an alternative in the market place which is typically dominated by a few large players. It increases competition and keeps the commercial world on its toes in important ways.

Aspirations
I read a lot of university mission statements while on study leave. How many can a person read and remain sane? We all aspire to similar things and I think there is something to be said for being a little bit more selective. Can a university be all things to all people? The universities I think of as excelling are relatively young as institutions:

In the private realm, Carnegie Mellon, which made a decision to be the best in the world in narrow research disciplines where they could be the best in the world, defined their strategy as narrow but deep and through that they have been enormously successful.

In the public realm, the University of San Diego, took the decision not to be all things to all people and so they moved their veterinary college to UCLA and shrunk the capacity of the university and so increased its capability in what was left. Gutsy decisions.

We found that institutions that were well established were perhaps less focused on the value of Bologna than younger, less well-funded and ambitious institutions. Saw it not as a threat but how can we bring the brightest and best to our institutions.

Rankings: why do we care about them so much? We can’t see how we’re doing on the stock market so we look at rankings instead.

e-Research
Research is no longer the preserve of the lonely scholar in a garret. We’ve been eliminating the boundaries of time and distance. The grid, the cloud, the idea that I can sign into the cloud and just get on with it. These are tools for collaboration, to have that immersion experience. ‘Industrial’ approach to e-research – positive trend of CIOs being recruited in from the private sector. Most people to survive and thrive through that culture shock. All these investments result in a lot of stuff which takes up a lot of space and draws on a lot of hydro, which requires heat, which requires cooling, which requires more energy. The green implications of these high performance computer clusters is starting to have an impact on the environment. Green ICT is coming of age. Cloud will be an interesting change management exercise.

[Slide e-Research – ICT and CO2 emissions contains various facts about the environmental impact of computing]

We’re going to start by researching and publishing research and best practise around green IT. Carbon trade system in ICT? Educause has identified green IT as one of its potential foci in the future.

Data centre projects require space and resources and people. Huge investment going into them [see slide e-Research – Data Centres]. Would it be possible to have “zero carbon” data centres? Then we can scale up as zero times zero is still zero. We have the capacity to do this today but we haven’t previously conceptualised the problem in this way before.

e-Learning
Current state of play: Market consolidation; litigation and patent rulings; disruptive behaviour; difficult to tailor or personalise products. I think the time has come for a new generation of systems. The current generation have not simplified tasks for most people and the systems are not user-centric and are increasingly complexity despite substantial investments being made over many years. We have a service deficit. They are monolithic and so inflexible and so time-consuming and expensive to adapt to changing practice. Upgrade cycles are frequently not driven by the needs of the customer and in-house development has become unsustainable.

Time for a new generation of systems: need modular, flexible, loosely coupled and systems-based (Service Oriented Architecture). Collaborative, shared development with commercial business models for implementation and support. This is made possible by maturing technologies.

Information systems for the net generation. Kuali – community source software. This is the idea that institutions band together to create products of interest to us. Also have commercial affiliates, both big and small.

UBC is leading a project called Kuali Student. Our vision is to support students by anticipating their needs and helping them to make choices and set goals and reduced the time it takes them to complete administrative tasks. Also to support a wide range of learners and activities, and support a wide range of academic processes which are not silo-based.

List of founders and investors available on the slide.

Ted runs through the role of the CIO and identifies the issues for CEOs and CIOs – the full list is on the slide. Major complaint with dealing with CEOs is that technology is only visible when it is a problem. For CIOs, think about demand not supply and think about restructuring around Operations and Strategy.

Q+A

Mike Groves, University of Reading: Ted – your last slide was about the authority of the CIO – could you say more about it?

Ted: in the environment in which I work which is highly devolved, the importance of IT governance and the ability to have authority that doesn’t manifest itself in command and control and centralisation - those are very bad things in our environment and I wouldn’t last long if I pushed that. The CIO needs to be involved in those decisions and set policy – how do we decide who has decision rights and who has input rights and it needs to be clarified that the CIO is in the decision-making role within a collegial environment. To Martin’s point about the importance of building trust, the more you can show a track record n this type of governance structure, what are the benchmarks we can show people to illustrate progress?

David Harrison, Cardiff University: I think that 3TU have got a lot to teach us about SOA. We have been trying to do some stuff on it but seeing it turned into practice would be very interesting.

Ted: very important point that David has raised. I’d love to exchange what we have been doing. SOA is at the heart of what we are doing with Kuali and it would be great to exchange expertise.

Craig Wentworth, JISC: JISC’s funding some work into SOA so I’m interested in whether you have found that the modelling you are doing has facilitated any other benefits, even if not intended.

Ted: defining what that service is, is definitely the direction we are going and we should see some results from that soon. We have an active project with Ian Dolphin from JISC to learn from each other around SOA and the e-framework as one way we can have a common vocabulary in order to span nations and I think that’s where we will see some real benefits.