IT Staff Convention 2007:Managing IT Faster Cheaper Better

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Managing IT: Faster, Better, Cheaper

IT Staff Convention, April 27, 2007

Session Three: 11:30 – 12:30; Ben Franklin Room

Moderator: Helen Anderson, SEAS

Notes: Kristin Nelson, ISC

Global trends have pushed all professional services, including technology, to shorten project realization time and cut costs while also improving quality. This discussion will focus on what this means at Penn and what we in IT can do not only to improve the quality of our services, but also to tighten efficiencies in our work.

Initial question: Why would you choose to build it yourself, customize off the shelf, or use off the shelf?

An example: outsourcing email – SAS – The system was at end of lifespan Look for resources for things you can get at low cost versus spending on things that Penn can uniquely provide (e.g., outsourcing email vs.handling campus wireless)Seeing where the technology is going, we need to determine which way to go (e.g., Penn got rid of the modem pool and was one of the first to dothis) Why SEAS isn't outsourcing e*mail – They had put something in place that could be expanded over time to meet new requirements by adding incremental items/components.

Also, SEAS need to provide disk space and unix access to students, so the incremental cost of email (beyond that) is smaller.

Wharton – email outsourcing – Looking to be able to provide additional services (e.g., folder share) that isn't in place locally Let the market drive the new offerings which are offered on a larger scale and take advantage of that

Outsourcing

Helping people adjust to the change in outsourcing

• Explain why it's moving – e.g., federal regulations make it a requirement
• Determine how to push to end user – e.g., push all at once, or incrementally
• Some use this to have the vendor become responsible to meet compliance regulations e.g., PCI compliance with credit card information moved to Verasign
• look at changes in the business process, outsourcing may provide additional efficiencies

How to determine when we need to build it ourselves

• evaluate if there is something available off the shelf before doing it in-house
• continue to ask what value are we adding

Other questions at Penn

• do we do it ourselves or use centrally available services
• if something is useful campus wide, it's likely to be supported centrally. If it's specific to a department, you’ll own it forever
• Looking to be able to add flexibility to help across campus
• How do you deal with the bloat from all the specifications, wants, and wishes from the client into a product

On Customization

• Going forward – does the product support customization to not overwrite the customization (e.g., Oracle does – upgrade doesn't

overwrite the customization ; Blackboard needs to have ongoing maintenance for updates.)

• Major area of customization on campus – PennKey

Use of data warehouse in applications

• Wharton – local copy of warehouse files initially due to downtime – now includes additional data and functions
• Go to the original source to modify the data

Some people don't know about the SIGs that exist. http://www.upenn.edu/computing/group/

Managing IT so it is "better"

• sharing authentication among related applications (e.g., Blackboard, media, iTunes U)
• Business process – determine what people want & need, communicate with then, and figure what will work for them
• Bring awareness to defining full requirements up front
• Develop a basic prototype which is built upon – decrease time between requirements and release
• IT partnering with client to better understand business processes – get hands on experience with processes & data

Recommendations:

• Look for what collaborative groups don't exist on campus
• development - code / development
• Groups that set policy & direction – take a step back and reevaluate function (e.g., what does faster, better, cheaper mean on Penn's campus)
• In the absence of a baseline service, some users will go out and create their own
• Create a web developers sig. Web sig itself is about content and appearance. This would be for programmers who use db back ends which connect to Penn data sources, people who need to do authentication and authorization on the web, people who monitor web security, etc.