2010.01.13 NuTech Meeting-UNL CIO’s Year 1 Planning

It seems the title of this month’s UNL NuTech meeting was a bit misleading though I found the meeting to be very interesting and full of information to share. The room was much fuller than I had seen it in a long time. Though I didn’t take a formal count there must have been over 75+ people in attendance. The meeting kicked off with Mark Askren, CIO describing Information Services’ direction over the next few months. His message has remained the same, which for me is a tell tale sign that IS is not wavering in our mission to offer infrastructure and scaled solutions to help achieve the mission of the university through teaching, research, and service.

I’m sure by no means a complete list but highest priority within the short term (3-6 mo):

• IDM
• Security
  • vulnerability testing
  • purchased security software
  • organized group is for support
• Shared Storage
• Desktop support
  • LanDesk and/or others

John Gilliam was also gave a quick update regarding new ideas surrounding video and presences awareness, unified communications (not just e-mail, im, and voice). He explained systems that need to integrate with each other, adhoc desktop video conference scheduling and more.

David Defruitter and his staff from CBA ITS described the services they are currently offering of which seemed to focus on desktop support though they also are experienced in web2.0 app development, backup solutions, virtualization etc. The CBA ITS web site has a comprehensive list of offerings.

A new acronym (which slips my mind and my scribbled notes) formally known as CIT was unveiled by Bob Losee. He briefly explained the changes that are occurring in their department moving more toward and academic offering than service offerings. Contact him directly for more information. He described their strengths in CMS offerings, especially business management and decision making regarding content provision. They also offer many of the services that other shops offer as well on campus.

Univerisity Communications, Bob Crisler described their presence in design and adherance to web standards. This affords the best scale and support model.

My descriptions of the above are very truncated and highly edited, the main thing I took away from the meeting was that there are many IT and Web experts in the UNL community. Mark described a need to pull together and collaborate whenever and where ever possible. He also described a future of data centers, power consumption, and the necessity of economies of scale. It will be imperative for our institution to begin to monitor power consumption and look at utilizing data centers in the cloud.

The last thing that stuck in my mind is that Mark has mentioned in various discussions that it seems that in higher ed, we always think of 20 ways we are different or special. He mentioned that we need to begin to think about how we have similarities and maximize economies of scale in those areas. Build upon community source projects and leverage our personal networks to achieve our goals.