Workstation standardization
November 17, 2006
Elias Eldayrie, Associate Vice President for Information Technology, welcomed a large group of Information Technology professionals at the November 17th Town Hall and gave a progress update of the IT Strategic Transformation Project Teams since the last Town Hall in September. Eldayrie commented that the Project Team progress was reviewed at the first meeting of the Executive Technology Advisory Group (ETAG), which was recently established and composed of vice presidents, deans and faculty. The meeting was described as very engaging. The ETAG is part of the Governance structure that was originally proposed as part of the IT Strategic Transformation process details
Eldayrie updated the meeting on other team progress:
- Funding approval for the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) project occurred since the last Town Hall, and the implementation team is actively working on the implementation schedule. The Team is hopeful to begin implementation in January. Also, Active Directory and DNS services have begun consolidating.
- The SIRI project is more like an initiative than a project", stated Eldayrie, "in that it is something that UB will be working on for at least five years. The Strategic Information Reporting Initiative Team has made some great progress, and completed the recommendations." In preparation, CIT has invested in upgrading the data warehouse infrastructure.
- The Recruitment Management System will be launched in January and ePTF has been piloted to five units who will change over completely from the Renaissance system by the end of this year.
- The implementation teams for email, database, print/file, and antivirus of the Servers and Services Consolidation Team have been launched.
- The IT Shared Service Desk Team is making progress focusing on two major issues - building a service catalog and service desk support software options.
- Other Project areas being considered are streaming media, door access, video surveillance and Citrix
Eldayrie thanked the group and said "There is no way we can do this work without all of the people who are currently involved." He added "Other schools are interested in what we are doing and how we are doing it. I appreciate all of the work that everyone has put into it." Eldayrie then introduced Peter Rittner, Assistant Dean for Educational Technology, College of Arts and Sciences and Team Leader, who presented the focus of the Town Hall, Workstation Standardization.
Rittner presented the recommendations which are in the final report that the Team recently completed, and will be presented to senior administration at the next meeting of the ETAG.
Rittner began his talk with acknowledging the people who have participated in the Team's efforts, saying, "There was a substantial group of people who put in an incredible amount of work. A lot of people have given a lot of time."
He proceeded to swiftly review the Workstation Standardization Team's charter, goals and deliverables, and spent more time on the Team's assumptions and principles. One of the major assumptions made is that distributed IT service organizations will be in place for the implementation of the recommendation. One of major principles, and one that Rittner stated he feels very strongly about, is that the Team's recommendations will support "necessary and productive diversity", but will not be responsive to "unnecessary and unproductive diversity", covering about 80% of the workstations on campus. Rittner gave an example of unproductive diversity in discussing where icons are located on the desktop.
Rittner described the list of potential transformation areas that includes;
- refresh systematically and equitably
- de facto hardware standards by platform
- leverage buying power
- create de facto baseline software configuration standards, and
- pervasive support interfaces
He relayed that much of what the Team recommends supports The IT Bill of Rights, which states that everyone should have the necessary equipment to do their job.
Next, Rittner reviewed general recommendations with the audience. He highlighted the need to ensure that there is some sort of feedback mechanism so the effectiveness of what is done can be measured and evaluated, using both a perception and quantitative approach.
Rittner spent a good amount of time talking about the details of what volume purchasing of workstations might look like with a four year refreshment recommendation. He explained, "When I talk about workstations, we are very clear that we have to include laptops. They are a necessity, not a choice, for many of our faculty and staff." The Team's research resulted in a workstation price of approximately $1500. Ray Volpe, Program Director for UBMicro IT Support Services and Team member, added "$1500 is for a reasonably high end machine that will last the full four years, and also includes the large volume discount." Rittner said "We're saying that when the machine gets delivered, it will have an image on it, and it will be secure and network ready. We are hoping it will be so good, that you will want to build on it, and not blow it away and start from scratch."
Rittner presented other areas that triggered discussion such as who would be the most appropriate party to put the image on the workstation, how would redeployment work, and are the vendor warranties the most cost effective.
Someone in the audience asked if leasing was discussed at the Team meetings. Rittner responded that no, it hadn't, but should be at some point.
As a means to carry out the recommendations, the Team is proposing the creation of three Boards. These Boards would establish the de facto standards, engage in the RFC processes, and enable the University to leverage licensing and buying power. The Workstation Board would be the umbrella for the other two Boards (software standards and hardware standards) and optimally would merge with the established iConnect standards group.
A question from the audience asked about the possibility of faculty making personal purchases through the volume buying program. Volpe indicated that UBMicro will be in a position to extend those opportunities to Faculty and Staff as it has in the past.
Finally, Rittner offered his view on what immediate action items of the Workstation Standardization Team would be while the recommendations are being reviewed by the Steering Committee. The Team can act immediately to establish the three Boards, leverage the University's buying power through UBMicro, and deploy enterprise anti-virus services.
"Part of what we had to do here is to not get distracted with the exceptions," concluded Rittner. Overall, the Team came to an agreement that "less is better" and that "there will always be needs that can't be met, but we can come up with a desktop and a laptop to cover 80% of the University."
The next IT Town Hall meeting is scheduled for January, 2007. The meetings are open to all IT professionals across campus. Their goals are to contribute to building a sense of institutional community among those working with information resources and information technology, and to provide a forum for information and discussion.