1.) How should UVM institute IT leadership?
a. How should UVM institute IT leadership?
b. What should the reporting structure be?
An important consideration, here, is what the new President is thinking in terms of (re)structuring the upper administration of the University. The current structure established the Provost as the Chief Financial and Operating Officer of the University, the "on-campus President," freeing former President Salmon to focus on other issues such as the legislature and advancement. If Judith Ramaley, with her stronger academic background and hands-on approach, chooses to be more involved in the day to day academic and administrative operation of the University, that structure may change. This may impact on whatever structure is suggested.
A CIO should have a close and collaborative relationship with the Provost and VP for Administration. This position should exist at the senior executive level with the VP for Administration, if elevated to it's former level of responsibility, along side the Provost. The CIO would respond to and accept guidance from a council of University citizens, such as ITEC, and would be accountable to the President and Board of Trustees. This should be a position without tenure.
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c. What parts of IT should this position be responsible for?
The CIO will play a role in all major IT planning and purchasing decisions, would approve IT standards and practices, and would be the key long-term IT planner for the institution. With guidance from the ITEC, the CIO will establish the "technology floor" for both academic and administrative IT users, and promote the continuing development and improvement of our IT infrastructure. S/he would also oversee the development and implementation of instructional technology.
2) How should UVM budget for IT?
a. Who determines IT budgeting priorities?
The CIO, working with the ITEC or similar body, should develop a list of priorities for the institution.
b. How do we set IT budgeting priorities?
The CIO's job is to work with upper administration, the advisory group, and others around campus to establish the list of competing needs for IT dollars. A set of criteria should be developed and applied to each need, creating an odered list of priorities. The CIO, however, is the final determinant of how dollars are spent, and should not necessarily be locked into a quanitative priroritization model.
3) To what extent should UVM adopt standard IT solutions?
IT is critical to the smooth operation of any large business or institution in today's world. For IT to work seamlessly across the institution, standards must be adopted and compliance strongly encouraged. Standards must be open and agreed upon through a collaborative process that considers the needs (and constraints) of academic and administrative units, with an understanding that there are core business and academic functions that can and should be accomplished in a uniform way. By establishing such standards, can we leverage our support and training efforts tremendously.
a. How do we gain the benefits of standardization without unduly stifling creativity, deterring useful exploration or interfere with getting specialized jobs done?
It is incumbent upon us to properly fund projects that show promise, that will move us further along towards seamlessly integrating IT into both administrative and curricular efforts, and provide opportunities for innovation. An IT development center (real or virtual) should exist to examine emerging technologies and evaluate possible applications of new IT. Naturally, much innovation can and does occur beyond a centralized facility, and a model such as used by ITEC to fund innovative IT projects should be applied.
b. By what process do we select standards? Support them? Encourage their use?
How do large, IT intensive corporations handle this? They too, must be responsive not only to their business needs, the ability to perform their core functions efficiently, but they must also be continuously improving processes and exploring new ways to get the job done. The aforementioned development center should provide a testbed for evaluating standards and applications. Further, there should be an identified group of people whose role is to assist in the evaluation of new approaches, applications, and standards.
c. How often, and under what regimen or circumstances, should standards be evaluated/changed?
The evaluation of existing standards is a continuous process. UVM's IT professionals are responsible for keeping up with changes and new approaches in their fields. The point at which we decide to implement updated or different standards is, to some extent, market driven, as in our decision to stop supporting WordPerfect products. When mission critical applications are no longer supported, these applications must be updated, or the standard changed. That's the easy case. In the case of standards that may still have support, we have to ask, "what will this new standard allow us to do, that we couldn't do before?" This must be weighed against the costs of implementation. The CIO is the gatekeeper for the broad implementation of new technologies and standards.
4) How do we ensure that UVM students, faculty and staff have the necessary IT skills to achieve their goals?
a) How do we reduce the need for specialized IT training?
The use of standard software suites for most of what we do could eliminate a huge portion of the training shortfall, provided we properly fund and deliver training to our faculty, staff, and students. "Specialized" training needs will always arise, but they must be examined in the context of what improvements in the quality of teaching , research, or business processes will result.
b) How do we make IT education available when needed?
We have underutilized the technology that already surrounds us. The answer to IT education is to use IT! Training on new standards, whether hardware or software, should be integrated into the way we do business at UVM. People who "don't have time for training" are often the people who need it most. I do not accept that an institution in the business of education can't come up with effective ways of educating its own employees, both faculty and staff. Such training needs to be scheduled as a part of an employee's work, and should carry weight in employee evaluations.
5) How do we support IT infrastructure?
a) What parts of IT should be treated as infrastructure?
IT infrastructure comprises both physical and virtual resources. The "physical plant" of IT; hardware (including telephones, overhead projectors, etc.), cabling, network devices, computers, and, to some extent, classrooms and offices, should be considered part of the IT infrastructure at UVM. The "virtual plant" of IT, applications software, network software, library access methods, and so on, should be standardized to the extent that a particular set of applications can be used ubiquitously to perform the basic tasks expected of a UVM employee in a particular position. The "computer as a telephone" model is very attractive from the standpoint of deploying standardized services, hardware, software, and training.
b) What kind of IT support should UVMers be entitled to?
Training and support of "standard" IT components, whether hard or soft, should be distributed broadly, but coordinated centrally. The "tech web" approach is one that can achieve a good mix of centralized and distributed support.
c) How should it be provided?
The "tech web" model developed in "Doing IT" is a sound choice. This institution will not soon develop the staffing in any centralized unit to provide the level of support and training required by the institution. There are, however, many people at UVM who have, or can acquire, the knowledge needed to support various levels of IT capability. Further, people situated in their own departments doing such training may be more effective, as they will be familiar with the particular culture and specifics of IT application in their units or groups of units.