I had a whirlwind trip to Michigan State University and East Lansing, Michigan for the CIC CIO TechForum (The Big 10 is the athletic arm of the CIC). Because of local commitments I had to miss the first day of the conference, but I made it in time to for the second day. This was particularly good because I was speaking on the second day.
The morning started with a talk about Shared IT Leadership by Ann Hill Duin and Steve Cawley, the Associate CIO and CIO, respectively, of the University of Minnesota. It had a good deal of research and case studies. Anyone who has done the IT Leadership Program (ITLP) will recognize some of the statements and conclusions of the report. To summarize, our institutions are large and IT is distributed. In order to work across IT at an individual institution or the CIC, it is necessary to develop relationships, credibility, and eventually trust between IT groups. A shared leadership approach is necessary for this.
The report was followed by a panel of four CIOs who responded to this. One thing which resonated with me was what UIUC CIO Sally Jackson had to say. She is in charge of the central academic computing arm of UIUC. She spoke about a concept she calls "IT Illinois" which is the whole of IT at University of Illinois (and not just the U-C campus). I think "IT Penn State" is moving in this direction with groups like our College IT Directors and Campus IT Directors. Again, it will take relationships, shared experiences, and eventually trust to create this reality. If you're in any IT job at Penn State, it's worth looking at their presentation.
I was part of a set of three presentations in the "Nuts and Bolts" track. Jim Green presented on how MSU uses Shibboleth. Something which struck me was how their directory gets populated by multiple sources including the Registrar's Office, which does it via XML representations of course memberships using Internet2's eduCourse specification (I did say this was "Nuts and Bolts" didn't I?). Using this method, course information is not copied from the source, but the source which is responsible for the information (and the FERPA privacy of it) directly communicates with the (LDAP) directory.
I spoke next about work that Chris Hubing, some of our Internet2 colleagues, and very minimally I have done regarding a collaboration framework known as COmanage. One of Chris's innovations is the ability to put a COmanage instance along with some collaborative applications which use COmanage into a Amazon Web Services Image (AMI). Using this, AWS users can locate the image, and have COmanage working in a very short amount of time. It's sort of like "COmanage in a box" and allows one to very easily try COmanage without using any of their own hardware of software. It's really very creative. Our presentation is on-line at the CIC TechForum site. It was very helpful that we followed Jim Green because he covered Shibboleth and federated identity so we didn't have to.
The final presentation in our group was by Nick Roy from University of Iowa on their Metabot. Nick's presentation was the most technical. Metabot is a provisioning and updating engine which uses a Web Services model to interact with existing administrative and student systems at Iowa. While their world is mostly Microsoft based, we should be looking carefully at the model for mediating communication between disparate systems (Do we have disparate systems at Penn State?). This was a very nice bit of work.
The final session was by MSU Head Basketball coach, Tom Izzo. It was very good. He started his presentation, by telling us how much he hates IT people. He told a great story about team chemistry when he was an assistant coach for Jud Heathcote at MSU. One of the final things he said was, "Our jobs do have one thing in common: 80% of the people who talk to me think they can do my job better than I can -- and don't hesitate to tell me." Most people wouldn't make that connection. The choice of Tom Izzo for a speaker at an IT meeting was truly inspired.
The morning started with a talk about Shared IT Leadership by Ann Hill Duin and Steve Cawley, the Associate CIO and CIO, respectively, of the University of Minnesota. It had a good deal of research and case studies. Anyone who has done the IT Leadership Program (ITLP) will recognize some of the statements and conclusions of the report. To summarize, our institutions are large and IT is distributed. In order to work across IT at an individual institution or the CIC, it is necessary to develop relationships, credibility, and eventually trust between IT groups. A shared leadership approach is necessary for this.
The report was followed by a panel of four CIOs who responded to this. One thing which resonated with me was what UIUC CIO Sally Jackson had to say. She is in charge of the central academic computing arm of UIUC. She spoke about a concept she calls "IT Illinois" which is the whole of IT at University of Illinois (and not just the U-C campus). I think "IT Penn State" is moving in this direction with groups like our College IT Directors and Campus IT Directors. Again, it will take relationships, shared experiences, and eventually trust to create this reality. If you're in any IT job at Penn State, it's worth looking at their presentation.
I was part of a set of three presentations in the "Nuts and Bolts" track. Jim Green presented on how MSU uses Shibboleth. Something which struck me was how their directory gets populated by multiple sources including the Registrar's Office, which does it via XML representations of course memberships using Internet2's eduCourse specification (I did say this was "Nuts and Bolts" didn't I?). Using this method, course information is not copied from the source, but the source which is responsible for the information (and the FERPA privacy of it) directly communicates with the (LDAP) directory.
I spoke next about work that Chris Hubing, some of our Internet2 colleagues, and very minimally I have done regarding a collaboration framework known as COmanage. One of Chris's innovations is the ability to put a COmanage instance along with some collaborative applications which use COmanage into a Amazon Web Services Image (AMI). Using this, AWS users can locate the image, and have COmanage working in a very short amount of time. It's sort of like "COmanage in a box" and allows one to very easily try COmanage without using any of their own hardware of software. It's really very creative. Our presentation is on-line at the CIC TechForum site. It was very helpful that we followed Jim Green because he covered Shibboleth and federated identity so we didn't have to.
The final presentation in our group was by Nick Roy from University of Iowa on their Metabot. Nick's presentation was the most technical. Metabot is a provisioning and updating engine which uses a Web Services model to interact with existing administrative and student systems at Iowa. While their world is mostly Microsoft based, we should be looking carefully at the model for mediating communication between disparate systems (Do we have disparate systems at Penn State?). This was a very nice bit of work.
The final session was by MSU Head Basketball coach, Tom Izzo. It was very good. He started his presentation, by telling us how much he hates IT people. He told a great story about team chemistry when he was an assistant coach for Jud Heathcote at MSU. One of the final things he said was, "Our jobs do have one thing in common: 80% of the people who talk to me think they can do my job better than I can -- and don't hesitate to tell me." Most people wouldn't make that connection. The choice of Tom Izzo for a speaker at an IT meeting was truly inspired.
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