January 2007 Archives

I had my first ITS-internal dog and pony show with Security and Operation Services a couple of weeks ago. It was well structured, content rich and gave me a much better handle on what people in the group do and how they do it. I knew most of the people in the group to begin with, but it was still good to see where people worked and get exposure to some of the tools of the trade.

The biggest revelation I had from my time with the group is that I'm beginning to challenge the way I've been thinking about SOS for all of these years. Up until a couple of weeks ago, I had regularly thought of SOS as an enforcement function IT at Penn State, not too unlike the function of policing or law enforcement. But as the "show" went along, I was struck more and more by how much the group reminded me of a hospital or health care. There is an emergency room function, well-care visits, epidemiology, preventative inoculation, reactive inoculation, and lots of awareness raising to be done about good network and server health. Looking at SOS this way has changed the way I look at incidences and the future. I wonder what kind of perspective shift I might get in upcoming "shows."

Can't wait to get to know more about what we do and how we do it.

One last item I'd like to share about the visit is my last question to the group. I asked where is it that I should "hang out" on the web to better understand what kinds of knowledge gathering the group does. The 5 places I took away with me are:

Stormcenter (SANS)
Search Security
FIRST
SecurityFocus
REN-ISAC

If you're interested in paying more attention to what our colleagues in SOS watch closely, that's a good start.

I've talked about this publicly from time to time, and I think this would be a good forum to get the idea on the table a little more widely.

Open source, open standards, and openness often get confused with each other in conversations about service design and/or requirements gathering.

All of us in IT at Penn State should be, in my opinion, placing interoperability near the top of the list of criteria when designing a new service. Openness.

If the fundamental protocols and formats that a solution uses are based on open standards (not necessarily industry standards - another point of confusion at times), openness is likely to be achieved.

Open source solutions tend to embrace open standards. As a result, most open source solutions lead to openness.

Openness is a must in a diverse environment like a university. Open standards are necessary to achieve openness in such an environment. Open source is one way out of many to get there. If there dogma in any of this, it is openness. Sometimes, open source zealots turn their confidence in an open source solution into dogma and that muddies the waters. Sometimes, the open source skeptical hear that dogma and the cycle of fear, uncertainty, and doubt is fueled with all of the wrong perceptions.

Let's be open in our solutions. We should either be establishing an environment for interoperability or improving the state of interoperability where it doesn't exist. We can't afford to take steps backwards in interoperability. It is expensive in many ways.

I finally got a new mobile phone after about 4 years. Felt like a very long time to me. I'd been on the fence about a new Blackberry, a Q, a Treo - or even waiting to see what the real buzz is about the iPhone in the summer. I pulled the trigger last week and got a new Blackberry 8700c (Thanks Tracy and Linda Witt!) primarily on the strength of the success that I saw Rich Cropp having with it about a month or so ago. After a day of fighting with it, I finally won - with fantastic help from John Kalbach last night.

I got the SyncJe client from www.nexthaus.com and Oracle Calendar is working like a champ. e-mail, SMS, etc. are also where I want them to be. The gmail client works just great on the new phone and updated OS from what I used to have. The web browser is vastly superior to what I used to have as well. I'm back in the driver's seat again in terms of being able to connect lots of tools I use to get work done.

I used e-mail, on-line forums, the ITS ET wiki, Nexthaus' helpdesk, Cingular's helpdesk, and of course google search to help improve my understanding as the day (and night) went along.

The joy of a new toy is wonderful but it overwhelmed by the joy in the victory of making the new toy a new tool - at least for me. And I got it all working just in time to enjoy Zach Braff's latest movie, "The Last Kiss".

Penn State Student Affairs, working with ITS (John Harwood and myself), developed a Pulse Survey on Net Behaviors. Much of the data confirms notions I think we already carry around with us, but there was a small handful of data that is making me think a little differently or at least forcing me to challenge my current personal models.

Approximately 11% of students report having an unwanted contact with someone they met on a social networking site.

I think that's a high number, when you consider 11% of our total student population. "Unwanted" can constitute a number of kinds of contacts, I know, but it is still a high number for me.

Approximately 34% of Penn State students report having been offended by a group on a social networking site.

I wonder if this is a general rule that applies to relatively uncontrolled social marketplaces. Will that percentage change in the face of editorial control, or will the total number of participants simply drop? It would be interesting to know, but maybe impossible to know, what facebook groups offended everybody and where are the gray areas.

2/3s of Penn State students have exercised privacy settings on social computing sites.

This suggests we need to the same (and in some cases better) with our services - and we do, but are we presenting that capability in a way that is familiar with students?

I think it's great that this many students are thinking about managing privacy. I wonder what the percentage would have been 4 years ago.

Less than 10% of Penn State students use relatively well known knowledge-based tools of connectedness, contrasted with over 80% who do use these tools for social reasons.

Can we leverage the skills learned at and attractiveness of sites like facebook in the presentation of academic workflows (ANGEL, LIAS, ePortfolio, etc.) and business workflows (advising, grade reporting, etc.) to improve the service to students?

If you saw other interesting data in this survey, please share.

I have always felt that there have been a few friends, colleagues, and even some family members who have thought it is a little crazy to have named a child after a baseball player. This article is the best explanation of having done that that I've read and probably will read. These kids weren't named after a baseball player, but rather a stand up citizen who does good things.

I didn't get to a distillation of feedback from the all-staff meeting last weekend as I had hoped. That's still on the to-do list for sure. There is something that has happened in the interim, however, that needs to be shared.

In our staff meeting this past week (ITS Leadership) we did a brief review of the all-staff meeting. The highlight of our review was a commitment to working on the "how" for each of the themes.

I'm challenging myself to personally add to how we're going to achieve the goals inherent to each of the themes and to also stimulate broader action that will support each of the themes. All of the senior leadership of ITS agreed that this was a laudable goal, and we thought this was something we should all do. And not just for those of us sitting around the table at the Penn Stater, but that we'll ask everyone to make the same commitment.

What can you personally do to "leverage ITS"? What can you do to encourage others to do the same?

What can you personally do to "strengthen our relationships with campuses and colleges"? What can you do to encourage others to do the same?

What can you personally do to "put the core business of Penn State in the center of service design and delivery"? What can you do to encourage others to do the same?

What can you personally do to "develop a culture of collaboration and teamwork"? What can you do to encourage others to do the same?

I'm taking stock of how I'm doing in these areas and at our next all-staff meeting, I'd like to report back on what I've done and reflect back what you have done, too. Sometime between now and May, I'll be asking for you to tell me what you've done, no matter how small or large and we'll find a way to share how it is we've all taken steps in these directions.

It was suggested that the themes be posted here, so here they are. I'm also game to hear any ideas you might have about a more pithy way refer to them.

o Leverage the strength of being ITS
o Recognize and affirm that IT at Penn State is larger than ITS, and strengthen our relationships with campuses and colleges
o Put the core business of Penn State in the center of service design and delivery
o Develop a culture of collaboration and teamwork

Some folks have sent thoughtful reflections on the themes that got on the table during our all-staff meeting on January 8th. I'll be summarizing those and reflecting on them here soon, hopefully over this weekend. If you have any ideas or thoughts about it all, please do keep the cards and letters coming. I'd particularly like to encourage those of you with less sanguine views to write directly. I'm getting those views, but second-hand (apparently).

One small item someone asked about was the music. It was Jeff's idea (and I grabbed it :-) ) and my son and I came up with a playlist. Just in case more than one of you is interested, here are the songs:

Entrance
"Memory Lane" Elliott Smith
"Fa Fa" Guster
"Not Just Sometimes But Always" Idlewild
"Next Plateau" Longwave
"14,000 Things To Be Happy About (safe)" Troubled Hubble
"Pink Bullets" The Shins
"Lillian Lies" Youth Group
Exit
"Ooh La La" The Faces
"A Fond Farwell" Elliott Smith
"Mr. Blue Sky" Electric Light Orchestra
"Virtual Insanity" Jamiroquai
"Philosophy" Ben Folds

And while I'm at it, thanks also to Jeff for the idea of the commercial spoof and once again to Tom Flach, Robin Anderson, and Pat Besong for the execution.

And if it weren't for Jeff Badger and Josh Schubert, nothing would have worked. Thanks guys.

One of my favorite moments during the week is catching "This American Life" on WPSU. It always makes me think and takes me away from the world of information technology (usually) . I like "This American Life" so much I brought it up for almost no good reason - except to say that something I heard on Terry Gross' "Fresh Air" while traveling between holiday break destinations really intrigued me.

Terry Gross often interviews interesting musical acts. Last week, the Philly public radio station she works out of aired her interview with the creative muscle behind the group Radiohead, Thom Yorke. During the interview he said something close to,

Playing together is one thing, but what we play for each other is really what makes us who we are.

So - you know you're focused on work when, you are trying to get away from it, it smacks you in the face.

His quote spun my head around and I really didn't understand it at first. He qualified it during the conversation and the work angle hit me: What we do is service, but how we serve each other is what makes us what we are. I think that's darn near perfect in terms of how we need to think about each other. If we serve each other well, we can serve Penn State well.

Never thought Radiohead would make me think of work, but it happened.

From January 3-5, 2007 I attended the winter Common Solutions Groups (CSG) meeting at the University of Southern California. Attending with me was Steve Kellogg and Vijay Agarwala. The agenda and materials from the various presentations can be found at the CSG website.

The first workshop was on "Models and Methods of Hosting Research Computing." We talked about governance, funding models, and developing cyberinfrastructure support on our campuses. The presentations are on the web site, but the big takeaway for me is that everyone is either starting an investment in developing cyberinfrastructure support of figuring out how to invest more in what they already do. With the reports coming out of various consortia and the recent meetings I've attended, it is abundantly clear that this is the hottest topic right now.

The second workshop was about managed storage solutions. The presentations on these ran the gamut and are very content rich. I found myself coming away from this workshop with the feeling that we don't leverage what we do and know about storage within ITS as much as we could. Perhaps we should do our own workshop on managed storage solutions in ITS.

The Collaborative Tools workshop was highly charged and provocative. Not only was the format engaging, but the dialogue that was stimulated really helped peel apart the onion as they say. An overwhelming majority of us are in the same boat - working hard to understand the landscape in its own right, what we need to do to serve our campuses, and what we need to do within our own organizations. I highly recommend reviewing these presentations.

The meeting topics (the meeting is separate from the workshops) were, as usual, compelling. The last session on DRM, lead by Paul Hill, validated my concerns about how terrible the landscape is in all phases - technology, standards, existing laws, possible future legislation, etc. So much is happening so fast that our country is having a hard time wrapping its head around the social and economic outcomes of the changes. As a result, there are knee jerk reactions to what's currently happening and of course, in such an atmosphere every vendor is scrambling to create the one tool or technique that will master lock-in. And even with all that, it's a challenge we really need think about a lot. This one isn't going away, it's getting more complex, and we'll need to be able to help out when it collides with how we're helping people manage their content and how they gain access to others content. Our own Mairéad Martin was mentioned twice in the conversation - she may be hearing from some of her old friends in I2 about DRM in the future.

As usual, a stimulating meeting. We meet next at Columbia in late May.