ITB Meeting Minutes
7/12/99

In Attendance: Peter Cappello, Glenn Davis, Jeff Dozier, Bob Kuntz, Gene Lucas, Alan Liu, David Mayo (for France Cordova), Elise Meyer, Joan Murdoch, Sarah Pritchard, David Sheldon, Bob Sugar, Ron Tobin, John Wiemann, Michael Young, JoAnn Kuchera-Morin (for Everett Zimmerman)

Absent: Mark Aldenderfer, Bill Ashby, John Bruno, Dorothy Chun, Jennifer Gebelein, Jules Zimmer

 

Bob Sugar opened the meeting with a re-cap of why the Information Technology Board was formed, its relationship to the ITPG, and the IT issues identified and discussed over the past 7 months for which the Chancellor and Executive Vice Chancellor seek the Board’s recommendations. Still under discussion is the whether there should be an Office of Information Technology. While most Board members agree that some additional IT coordination is needed, the exact nature and scope of that coordination has not been determined. Bob opened the floor for further discussion.

Gene: Going with a CIO has implications regarding the model of this office.

Bob: Yes, it has to fit with the campus culture.

Ron: Response to 3/18/1998 CNC Memo, Re: The Organization of Information Technology Services

I'd like to address the weaknesses of the Report of March 18, 1998 in terms of culture, access, advocacy and that dirty little word: cost, all of this with reference to instructional technology. Then some thoughts on process.

Principle: It is reasonable to assume that administrative structures should be in concert with campus cultures?

Has not the culture at UCSB produced exemplary collaboration resulting in more deep use of technology for instruction than on any other campus? I might add "deep and award-winning" use?

Has not UCSB made unusual strides in the past decade because of the campus culture of collaboration? To propose that we are in evident need of a high-level administrator to assure collaboration seems to me redundant.

I would propose that the reason collaboration works so well on this campus is that it assures the one thing we all want: access. Shared governance is just one face of the portrait of a campus that brings more people to the table for important discussions than any other.

In addition, we are very proud of the role that faculty play in all decisions. We should be looking, therefore, for a model that assures broad access and faculty leadership, like the CPC.

Finally, in this respect, a centralized model flies in the face of current ideas on good practice, i.e., service agency should be as close to the client as possible. A centralized administrator would take that relationship one step farther away.

ADVOCACY FOR FUNDING

No guarantee that an Office of Technology will produce, share, or develop more funding than it takes to operate it. Where will the initial monies and the continuing funding come from at a time when the campus admits to a million dollar deficit? (Examples of EAP and OCS).

From the "Five-Year Administrative Review Report of the Office of the Associate Vice Chancellor, Information Technology," UC Davis, dated April 29, 1999: ". . . Since the [Instructional Media] unit became part of IT, declining financial support and Instructional Equipment Replacement allocations had made it impossible to provide an acceptable level of instructional technology support" (30).

"IM staff told the committee that the former IT leadership [Carol Barone] believed that traditional technologies involving slide, tape and film were either dead or dying . . . Important IM staff and management vacancies have been left unfilled. Resources that were historically available for equipment maintenances and upgrading have been redirected to other projects.

There was [consequently] a clear message from faculty and Teaching Resource Center staff that faculty interest in using instructional technology may have actually declined over the past several years. Indeed, the committee heard from some faculty that they are going out of their way to limit their classroom dependence on technology" (30-31).

Better to give some form of committee structure a chance before venturing out on expensive OIT. Library analogy is not compelling because there already is a Library and a Librarian: no new substantial costs involved in hiring new Librarian.

SO: funding will have to come principally from internal reallocation.

1) It has yet to be proven that the status quo is wasteful and that a change would be cost effective. I was brought in to reestablish fiscal sanity to IR and I can assure you that the operations of IC, OIC, and IR are cost effective and the campus gets the best bang for its buck from these centralized units. Yet they would be the ones eventually involved in any centralization under a CIO.

A given in the discussion is that departments know what's best for them: sure. But do they use resources economically; is there not overlap, therefore waste? SO:

--if we centralized everything, including departments, that would be potentially more efficient and cost-effective. But who wants that?

--If we don't include departments, most of what's left belongs to an already efficient and centralized organization, OAP. What's the point of further centralization by an agency that will be farther away from the concerned units than OAP is?

PROCESS

The Report's long-term intention appears to be to recommend the appointment of an administrator for the purposes of coordination and policy--and then find units to oversee. This strikes me as a curious approach for an exploratory project: a judgment is reached on the need for an administrator without the precise nature of the responsibilities being spelled out.

I have difficulty accepting a notion when the full ramifications of it are not clear. Conceptually, it is akin to accepting the proposed conclusion of a research project before you have worked out the procedural steps. Einstein had the right to jump to intuitive conclusions; we don't.

We were asked to develop a model for the organisation of technology on campus. We started with the ITB: have we given it sufficient time to see how it works? Let's use the ITB model for a while--THE ITB IS ALREADY A MODEL--actually solve some problems and see how much of a coordinator we really need. The recommendation we make will have profound consequences for the campus: let's not rush it. Let's not make the same mistakes as some of our sister campuses. (Davis)

I am not for last year's status quo because I do recognize that there needs to be some coordination of campuswide initiatives in technology. I am for exploring a form of this year's status quo: 2 committees, with a part time, faculty coordinator of a broad-based ITB reporting to the EVC.

Bob: There are a whole range of recommendations from an OIT headed by a faculty member with a part-time appointment to one headed by an IT professional with a full time apointment. Let’s look at all of these and try to determine what would work best for campus.

Alan: In previous CNC discussions there were reservations Glenn Davis had.

Glenn: The group in minority were those in central services now. The reservations related to the notion of putting together a new organization to solve central problems that they weren’t aware of. The central network services we agreed on. So, what are the problems we are trying to solve. I listened for 1 year. When we started to talk about the future we thought to reorganize to think strategically.

Jeff: We should look at this from the [perspective of] people that are less centralized. For example the Bren School - Windows NT, Unix environment, 3 people run it, it costs a lot, there’s a high level of dissatisfaction among students, faculty, staff and I don’t know how to fix it. Is it a staffing problem? There are many of us all over campus solving this problem over and over again. Web sites, for the most part, are not very good on our campus. These problems are not being solved at the campus level and there’s no real way to get expertise even if the Information Officer is one person with 2 staff reporting to the EVC.

Alan: I understand Ron’s perspective of not fixing what isn’t broken but I see the need of an initiative that gets input from faculty. Whether it’s a board like this or a Czar, there needs to be a way to get centralized support.

Sarah: The way it works on this campus is refreshing in terms of the collaboration that goes on now for computing services. The lack of consistency on the web sites makes it difficult to find things. That speaks to a centralized office that helps provide support, guidelines, etc. . Network issues that come to mind that effect administrators and faculty are the campus contracts with GTE and to renegotiate the ISP provider to get campus specific authentication. How do we do it? Who would do this? It seems a board like this would do this.

Bob: When new campus-wide IT issues arise, it is often not clear who is responsible for them. Currently, that often gets decided in an ad hoc manner. I’ve been involved with networking issues for some time, and this is an area for which no one has full responsibility. When a major task needs to be undertaken, such as the design of a new backbone network, a committee of technical staff from across campus is formed to deal with it. Although these cooperative efforts are very valuable, the staff involved have full time responsibilities in their home departments. They have limited amounts of time to devote to campus-wide matters, and when high priority matters come up in their home departments, campus-wide projects lag. In short, we need to have clear lines of authority, and we need leadership which is dedicated and knowledgeable.

Sarah: Just to make a centralized model work, you do need to have the people dedicated to do this or coordinating it. A new issue is that some of the copyright legislation for web sites has implications and we need an office to be sure we don’t have liabilities here.

Peter: It doesn’t sound like people disagree around the table. Clearinghouse information is a way of giving help. An advisory or centralized place to get help doesn’t imply the need for a centralized office. I wouldn’t want someone telling me how to do my homepage but I would like somewhere to go for help. What is it that we really want? There is a laundry list emerging. Certain campus-wide problems that have become important and more complex than it used to be. Everyone is busy and no one is raising their hand. What are we going to include - what not to include? Try to decentralize as much as possible because those closer [to the problem] give better service. I’ve come to like to look at ALL the problems before getting into the details.

Alan: Should we get the laundry list of what ITB sees as the problems for the next decade?

Bob: Classes of problems rather than specific problems. What are those responsibilities that are essential for a unit to function.

Gene: Moving toward a hybrid model:

- Retain consultative/collaborative model

- Bring problems to [?]

- Strategic planning from a committee of this type won’t happen

- But unit problem solving should take place at unit level and campus problem should take place at campus level

- Not a CIO alone and not a committee alone

- How do you fund them

Engineering has a similar problem to the Bren School.

 

Joan: ITPG made a list of 12 items but we spent many hours and nothing is resolved. We currently don’t have a cost effective model - many staff are forced to take vacation.

Elise: There are a lot of talented people on campus. I spend a lot of voluntary time to get things done. Someone has to be overseeing that things are getting done.

Bob: We have to depend on cooperation among staff, but there are limits to what

they can do in addition to their full time responsibilities to their home departments.

Sarah: Maybe don’t think of it as a CIO but rather a small office of technical expertise that does the coordination and facilitation and bringing to bear of needed expertise.

Michael: Top down controlling would not work on this campus. This is the underlying utility needed to do our business. There are so many decisions that need to be made but [when decisions are made at the unit level I’m ?] not always sure they are in the best interest of the campus. It has become too big, too important and we need help.

Ron: CIO stands for COORDINATING Information Officer. It should be a faculty person. This person should represent us as a research and teaching institution.

Bob: Stuart Lynn recommended an IT professional. Ron is thinking about a member of the faculty. Having a small office could work. There are in fact 2.5 FTE devoted to running the network now. If one starts the way Ron is suggests, it is not as expensive.

Alan: Regarding the authority this entity would have, this might be a hybrid.

- Certain tasks under the authority of this person

- A model of provider would be more acceptable for instructional use of IT

- Develop templates, models, tools for faculty if they want it

Ron: Would you still keep ITB?

Alan: You would have to. I’m more interested in strategic collaboration rather than tactical collaboration.

Bob: I thought the purpose of the ITB was to set priorities and approve policies. You need this type of people in the room. On the other hand, you need the ITPG. We need the person who pulls all this together - coordinating those things that are campus-wide. You would loose something if you didn’t have the ITB.

Sarah: Rather than say it has to be a faculty member, we might list the expertise or qualities this position has to have. Librarians and other IT people can have an understanding of how things need to be done on this campus.

Bob: What areas do we want this person to be able to deal with? What type of person would work best?

Ron: One of the good things at Davis is that the CIO was a Chief Operations Officer.

Bob: Let’s have an mail discussion as to what we want the unit to do and what we want its leader to do.

Joanne: In the L& S model, the Technology Services Group can deal with certain things at the college level and certain things have to be dealt with campus-wide.

Bob: We can exchange options via email and target mid-Fall for providing the recommendation to the Executive Vice Chancellor.

The meeting was adjourned at 5:15PM.