Project title:
Building from the Outside In: Coordinated Academic Divisional Support in a
Consolidated IT Environment
Submitter’s name, title, and contact information:
Andrea Hesse, Director
Academic Divisional Computing
ITS East, UC Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
ahesse@ucsc.edu
831-459-3637
Names of project leader(s) and team members:
Scotty Brookie, Divisional Liaison for the Arts
Michael Edmonds, Divisional Liaison for the Social Sciences
Terry Figel, Divisional Liaison for the School of Engineering
Stephen Hauskins, Divisional Liaison for the Physical and Biological Sciences
Andrea Hesse, Divisional Liaison for the Humanities
For a complete list of team members please consult our website: adc.ucsc.edu
Preface
This proposal is not about code, big iron or big data, but rather about the development of
collective organizing principles that have enabled a small distributed and embedded IT
staff to see to local IT infrastructure and day to day support in five academic divisions,
including the individualized research and instructional enterprises represented
therein. Built on principles of cooperation and collaboration, we provide integrated and
operationally efficient access to an expanding set of technology tools aligned to the on
the ground needs of the campus’ disaggregated faculty. As such, we are the silent
partners on the campus’ most distinguished and exemplary research projects.
Problem Statement
The problem we faced was how to build a coordinated team to support increasing
demand for new and expanded services from a distributed staff with external alliances
and accountability, absent a campus strategy or source of funds.
Timeline
Addressing this has been an evolutionary process that began in earnest in 2010 and
concluded with the public announcement of a new unit and service catalog in 2014.
History and Context
UC Santa Cruz’s IT consolidation project was announced in 2003 as a component of a
larger campus business transformation program with the objective of saving money,
reducing duplication and improving service. At that time, a commitment was made that
‘academic computing support would be assessed in consultation with faculty and that
aspects of the current organization and reporting structure would remain.’ In 2005 the IT
Transformation concluded with the consolidation of staff distributed throughout campus,
who were performing IT jobs, into a new, single Information Technology Services (ITS)
division. In keeping with the early commitments, aspects of the local IT staff in the
academic divisions who provided direct support to faculty and research remained
embedded in those divisions, overseen by a Divisional Liaison, with dual reporting to the
then Director of Client Relationship Management within ITS and their respective dean or
designate in their local division.
One salient feature of this model is that when staff consolidated, the operating budgets
did not. While this reinforced the importance of partnership and insured that local IT
services evolved in accordance with divisional objectives, the permanent allocation
represented a point in time snapshot of local staff, not a strategy to resource demand for
local IT services as new faculty, labs, programs and buildings were brought online.
Further, the post-consolidation reality left a number of core services (file, backup, web)
in the local portfolios that had been envisioned to be offered centrally. And while over
the past ten years the number of faculty FTE has remained relatively constant, the
appetite and expectation for IT services in the academic divisions has reasonably
continued to grow. In this context, staff assigned to the direct support of faculty is
increasingly challenged to provide flexible and innovative services to meet both new
needs and new demand within the existing FTE allocation.
Improved Operational Efficiency and Usability/Accessibility
A happy outcome of IT consolidation was putting in place a structural connection
between the academic divisions’ computing directors where none had previously
existed. The new organizational structure institutionalized interdivisional communication
by way of the council of divisional liaisons that meet weekly. While designed as a place
where central IT service and project managers could come for input on functional
requirements, the DL Council has evolved into a venue to share information and best
practices related to localized service requests from the divisions. This has led to a
shared understanding of our external accountabilities, enabled coordination and
cooperation that did not previously exist and, in turn, made it possible to extend
divisional IT services to a broader constituency when that could be done with limited
impact on the local environment. And so we reorganized to better reflect the reality of
our responsibilities, our portfolios and to place emphasis on our common academic
function. At an operational level, what it meant to work at the localized level was left
undefined by consolidation. Our new unit, Academic Divisional Computing, announced
in winter of 2014, demonstrates that the goals of the IT Transformation: saving money,
reducing duplication, and improving service are best delivered at the local level in a
coordinated, rather than consolidated, environment.
One unrealized theory of the consolidation was that the divisions would be motivated to
make further permanent investments in the now consolidated but still distributed
units. Divisions have continued to invest one-time funds in the hardware and software
but the staffing levels, absent a funding strategy, have eroded at the margins. Further,
the faculty profile is changing. Newer faculty may be more self sufficient in taking care
of the basic IT needs (connecting to printers, installing and using applications,
troubleshooting configuration and connection issues) but the complexity of their support
requirements when they do need help is increasing as well. So in addition to expanding
infrastructure, more rigorous security requirements, and higher service level
expectations, the problems presented by individual researchers now tend to require
deeper consultation, research and technical skills. This has been acutely felt in
disciplines that have become more computationally intensive over the past decade (arts,
humanities and social sciences).
Efforts were made to protect academic support in ITS as the division incurred a
cumulative 25% budget reduction. But by necessity Academic Divisional Computing
(ADC) was not immune to cuts. And yet, over the same period, the academic divisions
have generally experienced an increase in locally available IT services. This is in part
possible because ITS has brought new central services online (such as Standard
Desktop Support and Google Apps for Education). But it is importantly because working
together we have found that some locally developed services could be extended beyond
divisional boundaries with minimal local impact.
Shareable and Readily Implementable Elsewhere at the University
The organizational challenge we faced was to take what was essentially a band of tribes
and leverage commonalities that enabled us to extend our reach with a fixed permanent
staff allocation. This meant embracing our diversity (geographic, disciplinary,
technological) and developing organizing principles that recognized our external
accountably individualized within the disciplines:
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We are the localized ITS staff embedded in the campus’ five academic divisions.
We provide personalized, discipline-specific, IT support for faculty, staff and
students in accomplishing the academic mission.
We aggregate what we learn to provide as input to ITS.
Under the direction of the DL Council, we leverage commonalities through crossdivisional technical communities to develop and deliver right-sized/right-priced
common services as appropriate.
This service aggregation is important for several reasons. It produces cost savings for
everyone, both in dollars and opportunity. It provides better coverage, interoperability
and bench depth throughout. It is also a laboratory for the incubation of IT services and a
collective description of need.
Interoperable and Integrated
The ADC service catalog (adc.ucsc.edu) began with common definitions and the launch
of our initial version in 2012. Through this analysis we found that specialized services
fall into three basic categories: Infrastructure, Digital Media Services, Academic
Research Support and that across the divisions we all do all of these things to varying
degrees. Further, most local services share a common foundation and that across the
divisions we are all doing all of these things to varying degrees: Consulting Services,
Specialized Desktop Support, Server hosting: File/Web, LAMP, OSX, Authentication:
AD, OD, LDAP, Web Design, CMS, Branding, Small App Development (FMP, PHP),
Cluster Support. With this shared understanding we are now able to build based on both
individual and common interests and to better leverage common technologies.
Leveraging a coordinated approach we now share the following services across
divisions:
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Campus Rocks (HPC)
Bacula Offsite Backup
Web hosting (informal reciprocity)
Full Tunnel VPN,
Authentication (LDAP, OD, AD)
Monitoring (Nagios)
RT Queues for non ITS functions
Brass key inventory database for facilities
Some of these efforts have already led to interdivisional investments: Baskin School of
Engineering (BSOE) and Physical & Biological Sciences (PBSci) on Campus ROCKS,
now utilized by Social Sciences as well; ADC, Arts, Humanities and BSOE on off-site
backups; BSOE, Arts and Humanities on an Open Directory service. This has also
articulated service requirements resulting in new centrally supported and globally
available authentication, full tunnel VPN and a WordPress web hosting service for
faculty.
The Technology Utilized in the Project
The technologies are unremarkable. They represent the utilitarian deployment of
extensible, standards based, open source technologies brought to bear against common
problems. In fact, several examples of these services (Nagios Monitoring for Omni
Locks and the Campus ROCKS Cluster) have been individually proposed for Sautter
Awards in previous cycles. What distinguishes this work is that through the utilitarian
deployment of extensible, standards based, open source technologies brought to bear
against common problems we have been able to provide access to those services
across the academic divisions where capacity and access previously had not
existed. Through cooperation and shared understanding of common purpose (direct
support of faculty in alignment with academic mission), we have been able to leverage
common technologies to serve the greater good.
Demonstrated Success of our Organizational Model
1. Physical and Biological Sciences made a $40,000 investment in a service that
was designed and implemented by the Baskin School of Engineering. The
cooperative investment shored up the service and extended availability of a
computational cluster to graduate students in the sciences.
2. Arts and Humanities Divisions co-invested in hardware ($5,000 and $9,000
respectively) to extend availability of a Bacula service managed by Baskin
School of Engineering providing Arts and Humanities with off-site backup of
critical divisional data for the first time.
3. Common Open Directory Service (feed by a common LDAP) enabled the Arts
Division to migrate and deprecate a corrupted directory without service
interruption and eliminate the need for a local password. Humanities migration is
underway.
4. Full tunnel VPN services launched in Physical and Biological Sciences and the
School of Engineering, then extended to the faculty at large, provided baseline
usage requirements that resulted in a central campus offering that is now
available to everyone.
5. Divisionally provisioned CMS web hosting services (such as Drupal, WordPress,
Concrete5) demonstrated an aggregated need that has led to a campus
WordPress and persistent URL offering for individual faculty that is scheduled for
pilot this summer.
In Conclusion
Academic Divisional Computing recognizes that IT organizations cannot engineer
technical solutions to organizational problems. We further acknowledge the intellectual
diversity represented in our faculty is best served by services that are adaptive and can
nimbly evolve to meet the changing needs of the research and instructional
landscape. By standardizing on commonalities rather than enforcing externally applied
standards, we are able to develop right-sized, right-priced IT services that continue to
support growth in a resource-constrained environment. This organizational model
listens to understand, builds partnership opportunities, honors creative license and calls
for self-regulation. In doing so, we have reduced isolation and extended low (no)-cost
opportunities for cross-training and professional growth for our staff. But most
importantly, we have created a comprehensible and aggregated description of local IT
support and services that can be easily accessed by faculty and reviewed by decisionmakers to inform shared investment in commonly understood requirements across the
disciplines.