This week, I had the pleasure and honor of being a part of the most recent graduate ceremony for Penn State participants in our local Information Technology Leadership Program, ably produced by MOR Associates. I've been to quite a few graduations at this point and I can say that each one has its own personality, this one being no different. Brian MacDonald is a master at putting everyone on the spot in just that way that they are most uncomfortable, so I was furiously taking notes during the various presentations to make sure I was prepared for the Brian moment. In less than 40 minutes of presentation I had a full page of notes and could have truly riffed for *hours* on what I was listening to - there was so much journey packed into each presentation that I wanted to talk about it all.
The core of what I heard was about balance. Or at least, the core of what I digested was about balance.
Balance in perspective.
Balance in problem solving.
Balance in leading, following, fighting, facilitating.
Balance in periodicity (be a specialist, be a generalist at varying frequencies over time).
It was a room full of people who were reflecting on what it was going to take for them all to maintain balance and supporting each other to have the strength to maintain balance. It was breathtaking.
Imaginiff is one of my family's favorite games to play. I like it because no matter who wins, I can always claim I win.
Imagine if you could write the contract - or rewrite existing contracts - for software that we use. What would you insist upon in terms of integration with existing systems? adherence to standards? terms of use? termination conditions?
I'm participating in such an exercise with some others in the CIC, and if you have a moment to chime in - it would be most helpful.
Thanks.
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More slots have been set up for continuing the "Coffee with Kevin" breakfasts. The web site has been set up to accept new registrations. Over the last year, 60 people were able to participate and I'm hopeful that some of you will still take advantage of the opportunity to meet some others from ITS and talk about the issues of the day. If you've already been able to participate and would like to do again, I ask that you wait a little while to give others a chance - and if after a couple of weeks there are still slots available, go for it.
Looking forward to getting to know some of you a little bit better.
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On Monday and Tuesday of finals week (fall '07) , Penn State's course management system experienced extreme performance problems, a surprising anomaly in a system that had seen few interruptions of service. These problems were very disruptive to faculty, students, and staff during finals week. Our staff worked feverishly over those trying 48 hours to make the system as usable as possible under unprecedented and unpredicted load. Still, the impact to some faculty and students was profound.
Since 2001, we have done rigorous analysis on a semester by semester basis and upgraded hardware, software, and processes accordingly to meet what we believe will be the coming academic year's demands. Heading into this semester there were over 75,000 students signed up for over 250,000 course section enrollments. This finals week, we saw a demand for use not seen before and it appears that there has been a fundamental shift in how it is faculty and staff are using the service as well. This combination of factors pushed demand over the headroom built into the systems.
ITS has been working non-stop since the problems occurred to make the system improvements necessary for a successful spring semester and beyond. What we need to improve falls into two categories: system performance and communications in emergency situations. We are in contact with all of the vendors that provide the various pieces of the system to aid in the analysis of finals week and put in place non-disruptive enhancements to dramatically improve the performance headroom heading into the semester and particularly for finals week. Additionally, we are having intense conversation about how it is we can better reach faculty and students should such a situation confront us all again. It is our goal to have an update on both aspects of the challenges before us on January 7, 2008.
Penn State's course management system is arguably our best supported application/service. There are a number of first-rate personnel that support the service from the technical plumbing to training and to support in the classroom - there isn't an aspect of the service that we don't put a lot of energy and passion into, and we've been doing it for years. And even with that commitment, we've been humbled by the intensity and volume of the anger and frustration voiced by those faculty and students that were most greatly impacted. We deeply regret the disruptions that were caused during finals week, and we are doing all that we can to make the spring a great success so that faculty, staff and students can teach, learn, discover and not have the technology get in the way.
It takes years to build trust and confidence and only days or even moments to lose it. We understand it will take time to regain trust and confidence, and we've tightened up our boot straps to take that journey, however long it may be. We hope that recognition of our historic commitment to ANGEL will reduce the time it takes to regain that trust, but if it doesn't we'll keep making it better until we get back to where we were and beyond.
UPDATE, January 6, 2008:
Staff in ITS have been hard at work to continue to address the issues of finals week.
We are increasing the computing capacity for web transactions by adding 100% more Web servers. Additionally, we are in receipt of a larger, faster database server and will begin acceptance testing as soon as we possibly can.
We are working with our vendors to develop methodologies for increasing computing capacity for finals week at the end of spring semester. There have been countless emails and two conference calls to get to the bottom of the issues. There are tentative plans to conduct a summit of sorts between all parties, in the coming weeks - when the effectiveness of telephone calls has been reached
We are refining technical mitigation strategies should system degradation reoccur. Stay tuned to the ANGEL log on page for a description of those strategies.
We are developing guidelines for faculty about importing their courses and course materials prior to the start of a semester, to spread out the system load due to import/export during the first few days of classes.
We are outlining a processes for rapid crisis communications, proactively using a variety of vehicles. We also plan to meet with a subset of ANGEL users so we can better anticipate their usage at critical periods during a semester. Our future crisis communications also will outline ways the community can minimize the load, including alternatives to accomplish some tasks outside of the ANGEL system.
"If history teaches any lesson it is that no nation has an inherent right to greatness. Greatness has to be earned and continually re-earned."
"Only by providing leading-edge human capital and knowledge capital can America continue to maintain a high standard of living - including providing national security - for its citizens."
- Norman Augustine
A review of the report titled, "Is America Falling Off the Flat Earth?" is compelling reading, as is a summary of the report's recommendations. Mr. Augustine also recently briefed congressional staff on the report. His testimony can be found on the National Academies Press web site.
Let's hope our government is listening. There are strong cases made for new (or renewed) investments in education, research and infrastructure - all of which would have an impact on research institutions and their IT organizations.
Technorati Tags: cyberinfrastructure, psuits
As part of the strategic planning process, Penn State units must develop a recycling plan for a certain percentage of their budgets.
"A five-year recycling plan that describes those adjustments that would be necessary for the unit to recycle centrally up to 1.0 % of its permanent operating budget each year. Some continued central recycling will almost assuredly be necessary to balance the University’s overall budget, providing for regular and competitive salary increases, improved facilities, and limited new strategic investments."
You can find the Provost's original memo in its entirety on the ITS wiki for strategic planning on wikispaces.psu.edu .
In our ITS Senior Leadership retreats we've started the discussions about how we might do recycling, but I'm very interested in hearing what ideas others might have. How would you change something your group does to recycle (give back) some of its budget? Is there an activity or service that you think could be completely eliminated? I'd rather not constrain thinking with specific dollar values, but to get started think handfuls of thousands of dollars and beyond. And anything in ITS is fair game, you don't have to just think about your own area.
Comment here or send me an email with your ideas. We could really use the wisdom of our crowd on these kinds of challenges.
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This isn't the second part of that thought by any means, but a report was released recently that may very well begin a dialogue about how to go about changing IT.
James Duderstadt, highly respected former president of the University of Michigan, recently published a report outlining some provocative thoughts about the future of engineering education. It isn't long at all - but in short he suggests that we might want to look at engineering as we do a degree in law or medicine. Perhaps engineers, and I'll add IT professions, should be trained more broadly as an undergraduate and pursue their professional degree as graduate work. That might make more room for ethical frameworks, etc. in the overall education. It's an interesting idea.
In our last all-staff meeting one activity I foreshadowed was an upcoming presentation to our University Research Council that Vijay Agarwala and many others developed. Vijay did 95% of the talking, I just did some set up and some closing. The presentation is laid out in three sections - who we are, what we've been doing, and the results and early analysis of a recently done survey of current customers of ITS research computing and research cyberinfrastructure (or cyberinfrastructure or cyberinfrastructure or cyberinfrastructure or cyberinfrastructure - you get the point) services. The early returns have been pretty good from the members of URC. As I said in the all-staff meeting, this is a general overview but also tailored specifically for that audience. If something doesn't make sense, feel free to post a question here or ask Vijay or me directly.
Technorati Tags: cyberinfrastructure, psuits, puppy
I made a mistake at our last all-staff meeting and I'd like to apologize and clear it up.
There were a couple of light hearted questions that came in and I was thankful for the give and take. When I saw the question about wiki's, I mistakenly thought that it was also a gag - but it wasn't. I was disappointed in myself for not thinking longer about the question.
Most of you reading this know what a wiki is, but just in case you don't - wikipedia has as good a definition as anyone. In short, a wiki is a web site that allows people to easily edit its contents directly. Some wiki's allow anyone (who has registered with that site) to edit the material, other wiki's restrict access. The best example of a wiki where anyone can edit the web pages is wikipedia - go here and try it if you are curious. It's free, legal and in a weird kind of way, it's also fun. In ITS, we have examples of wiki's that require that potential editors login with their Penn State Access Account, and there are still other internal wiki's that limit editorial rights to certain groups that are working on a given project. One of the best examples of a wiki at Penn State is the one used in ITS Consulting and Support Services to help sustain community knowledge in a transitory work force.
Wiki's are just one tool we are trying to learn how to embrace and master to help us create discoverable knowledge, as we try to break out of the old communication modalities. Blogs, podcasts, screencasts, etc. are other tools being utilized, explored, etc.
A meta-question that I am asking myself as I try to atone for my error at the all-staff meeting, is what dynamic is missing from our internal engagements where everyone in ITS wouldn't have already heard about or been encouraged to explore wiki's? If you have any thoughts, I'm all ears.
And just as it was after the last all-staff meeting, I'd also be interested in any feedback you'd have to help us plan the next one, when it should be, etc.
Technorati Tags: psuits
On October 24, 2007 I attended "Forum for the Future: An Energy and Environmental Discussion."
The keynote was delivered by Dr. Richard Alley. I had somehow managed to miss numerous other opportunities to hear him speak about climate change and was thankful to hear him at this forum. If his passion and knowledge don't grab you, the topic will. I highly recommend seeing Dr. Alley if you get a chance.
I learned lots during the forum. The big takeaway for me was the commitment I made to see what I can do personally, as a family, and as an organization to reduce our contributions to global warming. I know this is sometimes a touchy political topic but I am scientifically convinced - we've got a problem. We've put sustainability in our strategic planning conversations now as something to take into consideration in all we consider.
There's a lot going on in sustainability at Penn State and a new web site was developed to act as a landing place for the many web sites that portray the working going on regarding various aspects of the energy and climate discussion.
More recently, I've been spending some time thinking about the "other side" of thinking green. More often than not, when I'm pulled into this conversation people want to talk about duplex printing, using recycled paper in printers, deploying new techniques in remote system management to allow for desktop computers to be shut off at night, buying more efficient power supplies in servers, embracing virtualization, etc. These are all important aspects of thinking green in IT, but I think there is lots of impact to be had by applying IT solutions to make more green academic and business processes. If you create 10 pounds of IT CO2 by running a service that keeps people out of cars and airplanes, the net improvement could be multiple orders of magnitude improvement.
I asked for a back of the envelope calculation with whatever assumptions someone wanted to make about how it is the Adobe Connect might have positively impacted our CO2 production. Here's an excerpt from the exchange:
"I'm thinking that if we assume 1/4 of the meeting sessions save just one person traveling 300 miles (that would be 150 miles both ways), then in October, which shows over 4,000 meeting sessions, Connect would have helped save:
1000 meetings * 300 miles = 300,000 miles
and if you expect 30 miles to the gallon, that would save:
300,000 miles / 30 miles/gal = 10,000 gallons.
A gallon of gasoline is assumed to produce 8.8 kilograms (or 19.4 pounds) of CO2 (I found this at http://www.epa.gov/otaq/climate/420f05004.htm).
If we save 10,000 gallons of gasoline in October alone, we save:
10,000 gallons * 19.4 pounds/gallon of CO2 = 194,000 pounds or 97 tons of CO2"
I know more people are doing similar analyses of how these kinds of tools can help out.
On another front, I know The Computer Store has been aggressively pursuing incentive based recycling programs. What other activities are going on to help us better manage scarce energy resources that are getting more expensive? What are we doing to reduce our creation of harmful emissions? Recycling? We're doing a lot, we could do more. Some people like to cloud the conversation with trying to establish priorities. In my opinion, our number one priority is shifting to a culture of thinking about energy consumption and emission production in all that we do - that's #1. A pretty good way to get going on that is to start doing something.
Technorati Tags: climatechange, energy, sustainability
