Can we afford choice?

How often do we find ourselves in conflict? Someone wants something slimmer, lighter or prettier than the standard HP PC.  The argument has been rehearsed for more than ten years and is getting boring.  It's the total life time cost that matters.  Let's not squander our money on being different just for the hell of it.  

Here’s the data to show why standardisation is so much cheaper for the University in terms of total life time cost of running a PC, based on the most recent, very detailed, data from Gartner.

All these numbers are in dollars, but they make the point.

Key assumptions:

·         Desktop costs $972 with monitor

·         All PCs are replaced every four years

·         ‘Managed PC’ means there are tools, processes and policies for centralised management and the users cannot install software or change settings without involvement from IT

·         ‘Unmanaged PC’ means there are little or no management tools and the users can install their own software

Total four year direct cost of running a unmanaged PC: is $8,152 or 8.3 * initial purchase cost

Total four year direct cost of running a managed PC:- $6,896 or 7 * initial purchase cost

Saving per year per user is $296.  On an, estate of 3000 PCs this represents a saving of $888K per year for the organisation.

Gartner also has data for the additional ‘indirect’ costs of the time spent by users fiddling with their own computers in unproductive ways in these two scenarios. (Don’t pretend you haven’t done this!) The numbers are simply boggling then, with estimated total savings per year per user of $2,485 or $7,450,000 for 3000 PCs.

These are based on US labour rates so we’d come out a bit lower.  Nonetheless, the point is made.  We have to pursue the savings when we can, so that we can afford to do things differently for researchers when necessary, as it so often is. 

Please can we have a new home?

We just completed a useful experiment.  For two weeks we tracked the hours spent by my team walking back and forth between the five locations that now house us.   It turns out that we are spending 1.5 FTE staff time, or £80K per year, walking.  No doubt this has consequential health benefits  but the University didn't budget for this.  I'm more concerned about other losses - all the waste effort, missed opportunity and general dysfunction that occurs  when teams can't work naturally together.

We are about to reorganise ourselves with the express aims of breaking down silos, reducing handoffs, improving teamwork, improving the first time fix rate, reducing waste effort and, above all, getting better at innovation and problem solving.  We categorically know that we can't do this without a new, properly designed space in which to operate.

Great meeting today with Estates, turning these ideas into a proper business case for investing in a new open plan environment - one in which people can work fluidly together, choosing where they want to work based on the task at hand.  Spaces need to be designed accordingly,  some being appropriate for quiet concentrated work, others more for project or problem solving teams.  And please can we have some social spaces in which to have the kind of relaxed conversations which make for accidental genius?  Good things happen when people can talk to each other without appointment or agenda.    

What's the value currency in a University?

Why is a University such a confusing place for someone who served their professional apprenticeship in the private sector? It should be easy.  Senior executives are simple creatures aren't they?  They only care about three things: the top line (are we generating revenue?) the bottom line (are we managing costs?), risks (what bad things might happen?). Not in a University it seems. Here no one knows what anything costs, or whether anything is profitable and they certainly don't want to hear bad news.

So what do they care about? Finally it dawns. Knowledge, not money, is the value currency around here.  A university is a knowledge factory, its job to create, share and breed wisdom.  And this isn't a zero sum game either.  We can all have more of it.

What a surprise then, that so many attempts to prioritise one investment over another have ended in dissonance.  How stupid to ask the venture capitalist which project will give the best return when we can't quantify this knowledge currency.

Strangely though, we often witness remarkable consensus.  Many will have the same gut feel that something is a good idea. I guess we are going to have to carry on following these hunches. If the purpose is true, and we have a way to serve it, let's JFDI and hope.

Time to walk tall

As A.A. Milne aptly wrote, 

"When I was one I'd just begun,

When I was two I was nearly new,

When I was three I was hardly me,

When I was four I was not much more,

When I was five I was barely alive,

But now I am six! As clever as clever!

And I think I'll stay six now for ever and ever!"

Our IT Services is now six years old and it's time to walk tall. 

At the start it was about professionalising, setting up the Project Support Office and the Service Desk, implementing ITIL disciplines, benchmarking costs, building a governance framework…..

Then it was about modernising the infrastructure  so we could run it efficiently, reducing risk, information security policy…...

Now at last, we can become the trusted IT partner we always envisaged, helping the University to create a digital campus in which students and staff can be productive and creative as possible as they learn, teach, do research and run the organisation.  This is going to be a lot more fun.

It was so useful to hear from Gartner this week that this is the common experience of many, and the pace for us hasn't been any more painfully slow than their's.

Do we need Virtual Desktop?

I had assumed a compelling case for Virtual Desktop (VDI) would eventually emerge .  Our 23,000 students and 4000 staff hold dear their 'academic freedoms'.  Even the word 'corporate' has evil connotations.  For us then, the holy grail of platform independence would be particularly seductive.  But a strong case to do more than play with this technology still eludes us.

Which of these is the problem looking for a VDI shaped solution above all others?

1. How will we provide our researchers with their Linux and Mac devices access to corporate applications now and again?  We could use VDI but why over complicate this?  Web access should work fine.

2. How will we provide 7000 distance learning students access to the same software as our campus based students from their personally owned devices?  We could use VDI for some applications but not the ones with complicated licensing restrictions and not the greedy ones.  So if it's not the complete answer, perhaps we should just give them a managed laptop?

3. How can we make it cheaper and greener  to run 1,400 standard PC seats for students on campus? We could use VDI here but why would we?  We already do this very well and extremely efficiently.  Hard to see how this could save us much.

4. How will we provide professional services and senior management staff with access to sensitive  master data when they are working remotely? What's wrong with an encrypted laptop and a VPN?

 

Is there anyone who works with highly sensitive data, has to work on a platform we don't manage and must be able to do so without leaving a local footprint?  I haven't found them yet.

Anthropology of IT

My highlight at this Gartner conference, if I have to pick one, was a talk by anthropologist Genevieve Bell.  She joined Intel fourteen years ago to fill an information void of colossal proportions. Two simple questions were asked of her at interview and have dominated her career ever since:

1) What do women want?

2) What does the rest of the world do with IT?

('Rest of world' means 'not North America' so we assume that Intel felt pretty expert on how American men behave in their natural habitat. )

Her talk was full of delightfully funny and thought provoking observations about what we know, and what we think we know about the way people use gadgets, consume and share information in their lives.  Why do we use the word 'love' about our iPads? Why do small children expect all shiny reflections (including oven doors)  to respond to touch?  Why is it so rare to see a women holding the remote control?  How do we manage different personas in different spheres and what do we feel about the obliteration of boundaries between them?

There it is again...The most important lesson of all in this fast moving game.  Watch.  Observe.  Use objective evidence.  React.  You do not know the answers.  Unlearn as fast as you learn.    

How long for the Windows PC?

Windows XP must be banished by the end of 2013 or dire things will happen.  We are doing well.  We've nearly finished our Windows 7 roll out.  Plenty are behind us on the endless treadmill that Microsoft designed so cleverly for us back in the 90s. And meanwhile, Windows 8 is upon us.

We need Windows now, as we always have, because we depend on applications that won't travel. But Gartner tells us we've passed a tipping point.  In 1996, most organisations needed Windows to run 95% of their applications.  Gradually the ground has shifted and we use more and more software that will run on any OS, often through a browser.  In 2012, the percentage for most organisations dropped below 50% for the first time.   Perhaps the treadmill does have an end? Perhaps we just completed our last major corporate roll out of a new Windows version?

Certainly, the PC is no longer the centre of the Universe. Watch the research academic in action and you'll see her juggling collections of devices, some personally owned, which are simply different ways of reaching information in different contexts and for different purposes.  The Cloud replaces the PC at the heart of this world.  Our job will be to make this easy and make it safe to bring multiple gadgets into play. Perhaps Windows 8 is destined to be just one of the many now - just one more way to run a browser.

Big Data means big opportunity for new MSc programmes

 4.4 million jobs will be created globally but only a third will be filled - easily the most striking prediction to come out of the Gartner Symposium this year.  

14% of the world's economy is now transacted on line.  There are nearly a billion people on Facebook and 5.6 billion mobile devices wondering the planet.  All this creates unimaginable quantities of data.  We are going to need a very large number of highly skilled data scientists to find the value in all of this, to help work out the next generation of business models that will change the world.  And, human nature being what it is, we'll need nearly as many security experts to help us do this safely and wisely.

My guess is that we should start selling MSc shovels to these gold miners.   

Everyone needs a Mobile App

History repeats.  Do you remember when everyone needed a Web site but few knew why?  They  knew they had to catch the bus but had neither the time nor the imagination to conceive fully of the destination. They recruited a 'Web Master' who could write HTML and throw up the first web presence.  Doesn't that title sound anachronistic now? Now we know that the Web is for everyone and every purpose.    How utterly game changing the destination turned out to be. 

We are in the same place with mobile apps.  We proudly launched our first app last week.  It’s great to see it there in the App Store.  Great too to see the tweets from students telling us that the 'find a PC on campus' feature is really handy.  Now I'm wondering if we need to recruit an 'App Master' or two to galvanise us towards the next stage.  At least I know I don't know where this particular bus is heading. 

It's sociology not technology

Wonderful talk this week from Richard Harper a sociologist from Microsoft Research Labs. As he said he would,  he "explored the use of new and old communications media – Twitter, Facebook, instant messaging, phone calls and traditional letters – and suggested that one should not view the proliferation of such media as creating communication overload... a better approach is to think of our rich communication media as being the means through which a texture to human relationships and individual identity is created".

Who would have guessed that a text message could be so intimate, that some would hate voice mails - too indelible, that so much personality could be crammed into a Tweet, that an email could be so loud and aggressive, that an instant message could be so chummy?  Fascinating to see people relating through these different media in such different ways.  And the Kindle has made us rethink the meaning of print. Do I need to point out that the three people sharing a Sunday newspaper around the kitchen table in my house this morning were not really reading. They were reminding each other that all is OK with the world (apart from Syria and the euro crisis and......)    

We need Digital Tour Guides

We digital incomers exist in a foreign land. The natives - our students - leave us behind with their fluency.  How to keep an open mind and learn from them? I've just written a job description for a 'Digital Tour Guide' to help us understand this new world. I wonder if I can make this happen....

Wanted!  Recent graduate or current student. Passionate about the ways in which IT can be useful in life and learning.  An excellent communicator who can explain technology in an accessible, empathetic manner.  Be an advocate for the IT needs of students and help to improve communication and engagement between University planners and the community of students.

And here's where tact is needed......able to act as a mentor to senior staff, providing practical guidance and demonstrating the value of new technologies.

The network is the computer - new role for JANET

One of many important and succinct things that John Naughton says is his new book 'From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg' is 'the network is the computer'. I've not heard anyone call an iPad a 'dumb terminal' but that's what I had on my desk twenty something years ago, and that's what I'm using to write this post. OK so it's not so dumb, it's certainly prettier, better with pictures and music too, but it ain't that brainy.

I went to the first Advisory Board for the new JANET (UK) Brokerage this week. This is where some of the most important action is going to be. Now the cloud is real. It turns out that our staff and students didn't need to be told it was Bring Your Own Device to work day. We need to work out how to connect them from these devices to the stuff they need, and the stuff usually won't be on our campus.

JANET's job is to connect our people from wherever they happen to be to the resources they need, even if they are in a remote village with a grotty ADSL link (which I am). That's a challenge - a global one. But we want them to do much more to catalyse the cloudward shift. The new framework agreement for managed Data Centre and co-lo services is a start. Next, a co-ordinated discussion with Microsoft to help us realise the huge potential of their Office365 offering. This is the kind of help we are going to need to enable us to work with these suppliers in entirely new ways. Exciting for both sides of the relationship and plenty of space for JANET in the middle!

Goldilocks data centre

We have a data centre unworthy of the name. It's running out of power and cooling capacity.  We are blowing two kilowatts heating the atmosphere for every one that runs computers.  The occasional floods don't help. At last we have the budget to do a proper job. But here's the hard decision. How much to spend on our Goldilocks data centre - one that's not too big, not too small?

How many flops and bytes do we need on our campus now that cloud computing is real? Now that Google, Microsoft and the rest run their monster operations in forgettable places with their own power stations? Surely only a fool with a control complex runs their own data centre now? We've been round and round this one. We've done feasibility reviews and modelled scenarios. Too many variables. Eventually we will pick a number (£s, KWs) that's affordable and that isn't so obviously wrong that I get the sack!

How to shorten your literature search time

Wouldn't it be great if a search engine could do your speed reading for you?  Google will find words but it can't tell you whether they matter, whether they are interesting or part of an article you should be reading.  I saw a demonstration from these guys at MIMAS which really could make this possible.  The potential for researchers is huge.  In fact many of Leicester's research articles are already searchable here.

Focus on the research elephant

Why do we spend so much energy running the corporate University?  Learning and research is what we are here for.  By most measures, research is the most demanding.  It produces most data, uses most power, is the most complex, diverse and unpredictable.  All disciplines need IT as they mine huge data, spot patterns and follow hunches, solve big computational problems, simulate phenomena in the natural and human worlds, try to predict, visualise and project into the future.

My pitch at the UCISA conference was that we need to focus more on the research elephant.  We haven't got a good record here and the elephant has a long memory. We need to build trust and show that we can do really interesting things together when we work as partners.  The BRISSKit project is a good example.  We need more of these.

Office 365 looks tempting

Enjoying myself at the UCISA conference at Celtic Manner. Microsoft just announced Office 365 for staff as well as students on a no fee basis, including Sharepoint and Lync as well as Exchange. This is a game changer. Whole community could have integrated team collaboration sites, email, calendar, web conferencing, instant messaging and presence. Can't see how we can resist. There's just the little matter of the anarchic explosion of information that will happen when 26,000 users get hold of this...

Have also seen something today that could help. Idol from Autonomy does semantic search across multiple information silos - and that includes audio and video sources. There is serious power here. Could we stop worrying about meta data and let this engine do the work? I'd like to see it running across an organically grown Sharepoint environment.

And I'm wondering if we'll need a VLE for much longer. Give it a couple of years.

A laptop that works at last!

He turned up on time, ran through his well rehearsed patter and I'm logged on to Windows 7 within a few minutes. Simplicity itself.  Every single IT plumbing component has been redesigned and replaced for this moment. How many human hours have gone into this? We've yet to count them.  For once though, this upgrade is worth the effort.  I now have the core of the modern working environment I've craved since I left the corporate world 11 years ago. I can move seamlessly around from wired to wireless. I can see all my Z drive documents and data wherever I am, update them offline and watch them synchronise back with central storage when I next connect. Everything's encrypted. The 'Programme Installer' is beautifully easy to use and gives me a huge range of apps that can be installed on demand.  Many of these are cached locally so they can be used anywhere so this isn't just a box for running MS Office. Even the email experience is great.  Good to have the full client and to be able to work offline - again with seamless synchronisation.

Well done team ITS!  This is a winner!

Now.  I wonder if we can convince a few folks to try a bit of instant messaging and web conferencing before 2012 is out? Then I really will have made it back to the year 2000.

Keeping up with the mobile pioneers

Really interesting meeting today with our Criminology department.  Students working for the UN, NGOs and aid agencies are now studying for a new MSc in Security, Conflict and International Development in some challenging environments across the world. They each have an iPad carrying their etextbooks and a mobile app to guide them through materials and activities, all linked back to our Virtual Learning Environment.  

So here are a few of the battles that this pioneering department has had to work through.  Sounds easy doesn't it?

• How to give away an iPad 
• How to get an iPad through customs
• How to get a publisher to sell you ebooks in bulk
• How to enable an iPad user to download an ebook that you've already paid for
• How to package material in a mobile app without breaking copyright law  
• How to get a mobile app developed when your IT department has only just written the 'we need a mobile application framework' proposal and needs three months to catch up with you

We are still trying to catch up and already our Education department wants to do this too! 
  

IT Strategy in 140 chars

The IT Strategy was ratified yesterday by our ICT Committee to the unremitting sound of a pneumatic drill.  We took 375 days to draft, debate, edit, discuss and polish this. Thanks to all.  

Here's the byte size version:
"Strategy = ITaaS"

Here's the bite size one:
"If we work together we can have the best of all worlds. We can

·         design services for students which are precisely in tune with them and efficient

·         build an IT research infrastructure which is flexible, agile and cost effective

·         deliver IT services that are better and cheaper"

And the full, word-crafted marathon is here. 

So what would the bite size University strategy be:

'Success = exceptional experience for all students inclusive of distance and background+globally important research+flow-control?' 

Ultra-connected student halls

Three fascinating days with potential ISP suppliers for our new ultra-connected halls of residence. They now get just how ground-breaking we want to be here. We've got nearly 5000 of the most tech-savvy, exacting consumers of cyber content on the planet and yes they do want unlimited bandwidth, totally ubiquitous and seamless wireless, at least four wired connections, simultaneous connectivity for at least five devices (e.g. iPad+laptop+xbox+smartphone+internet ready TV), all the broadcast IPTV channels you can think of, an almost private link to the data centres hosting 4oD, iPlayer, love film, netflix, Spotify....etc. And no we don't want to get in their way, tell them what to do or control their data download rates. As long as it's legal its OK. We want to watch and learn. Not much to ask.

Systems Thinking - being allowed to learn at work

What's going on in the room?  I've been in the room but I'm not part of it yet.  I can see that something interesting is happening though.  The inner circle of 'systems thinkers' are enlivened.  They seem more powerful.  They seem to be learning.  That's the first paradox of Universities. Learning is only allowed in certain contexts.  How invigorating to be allowed to learn at work. Let's hope that no one with their command-and-control-specs on mistakes this for 'consultancy' and tries to stamp it out.  systemsthinking.co.uk/home.asp            

Starting line

This is where it starts. I want to join the party. Starting a career in IT was an accident but 22 years later I guess I should finally commit, let go and abandon myself to its infinite possibilities. I knew something had changed when I got the iPad. It's woven into my real life not just the suited one. May be now I will be able to find things to say about IT from the sofa as well as the swivel chair. My views will be my own. I'll be a three dimensional person whose mind ruminates endlessly and haphazardly about her absorbing job while it also cooks, weeds and walks the dog.