Director’s Blog
administrative

LSCR has hired two new employees this month to fill vacant positions.

Craig Carlson joins us on the “Tilden” desktop support team.  Craig comes to us from UCSF, where he was working as the front-line desktop support person in the Pediatrics department.  (Coincidentally, our open position was created when Mical Wilson took a job at UCSF.  It’s all interconnected.)  Craig will initially be sitting with Mary Wielski in Wheeler Hall, and helping support the Tilden departments in Wheeler, Dwinelle, Barrows, and the PowerBar building, among others.

Ray Spence has joined our Unix team, replacing Julie Ashworth, who took a position at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute.  Ray comes to us from LBNL’s NERSC research computing facility, where he was in charge of some of NERSC’s infrastructural Unix systems.  Ray’s primary office will be in Evans Hall with Igor Savine, but he will also have space in Le Conte where he can hold office hours.  Ray’s primary responsibilities will be Unix systems outside the Math department, mostly in Physics and the biological sciences.

Peggy Huston posted a message today about changes to the campus’ network funding model.  The current model, which is based on a per-month, per-connection charge, has a number of signifcant problems.  The four main issues with the current model are:

• It fails to accurately track costs.  There are a number of reasons for this, but most importantly, wireless networking isn’t included in the cost model at all.
• It encourages undesirable behavior.  From a technical perspective, we would recommend that every desktop computer be connected via its own individual wired connection.  The per-port installation and monthly costs of the current model encourage departments to use other connection mechanisms, such as commodity hubs or wireless, which provide poorer service and false economy.
• It does not include the cost of upgrading legacy networking.  L&S has several buildings which are still using shared 10-megabit networking that was installed in the early 1990s.  The current funding model provides no way to replace those old, slow, unreliable networks.
• Subsidies are asymmetrical and insufficiently funded.  Each department which existed on June 30, 2000, has a certain number of nodes in its “node bank.”   Some departments are node-rich and others are node-poor, for reasons which are historical rather than .  Newly-created departments have no node bank and thus no subsidy.  But most importantly, the campus has never truly provided enough funding for the node bank, which has forced us to run the network in deficit.

Most universities are moving towards some kind of per-head model for network funding.  Charing by head (or by knowledge worker, or FTE or whatever) is attractive for a number of reasons.  Primarily, FTE models adapt much better to changes in technology; when our current node-based model was developed, it may have made sense given the technology we were using at the time, but now that wireless is a large and growing part of our network costs, our model no longer maps onto our costs.  FTE models can be adjusted and trued up as the technology changes.  Also, FTE models tend to be neutral in terms of their effects on user behavior; they don’t provide incentives to engage in bandit networking.

At this point, it looks like the campus is going to move to an FTE model that will include all staff and faculty FTE.  It appears that students will not be included in the FTE count.

The biggest issues remaining to be discussed are around subsidy; is how much will be involved, and how it will be implemented.  It is clear that L&S departments cannot absorb significant new charges without an offsetting addition of funding; I will continue to advocate on the network funding committee for full subsidy of baseline networking for all faculty and staff.  Cal Moore, as a faculty representative on the same committee, is also looking out for the interests of academic departments.

There should be some interesting discussions over the next few months; I will continue to provide updates as I have new information.

Shel Waggener put together an interesting presentation (PDF) on campus IT spending from 2001-2007.  Some of the highlights:

• Total campus IT spending is estimated at $136 million.  $56 million of that is within IST or the CIO’s office; the remainder is elsewhere (including L&S).
• Total IT spending under the EVCP control unit (basically, the academic units minus IST) is approximately $50 million, just a bit less than IST spending.
• Only 1% of EVCP spending is for IT; that percentage is less than half of any other control unit.  (NB: There is probably some IT spending in academic units that is not captured by these numbers, such as having GSIs/GSRs do computer support for faculty labs.  I don’t recommend the use of grad students for IT support, but it is common practice in the lab sciences).
• IT spending per campus FTE has been basically flat since 2001.
• IT spending as a percentage of total campus budget has been trending downwards since 2001.
• IT spending as a percentage of the institutional budget is in line with other universities; but spending per FTE is quite low.  (This basically indicates that IT isn’t the only thing that’s under-funded).
• Two-thirds of our IT spending is on people (salaries and benefits).  Salaries and benefit costs have gone up since 2001, while hardware and licensing costs have gone down.
• IT spending as a percentage of total budget has actually dropped significantly in physical and biological sciences.  This might be due to large initiatives like QB3 coming online without sufficient funding for IT, or could be an artifact of how they’re looking at the data.
• State funding has dropped from 61% to 56.9% of campus IT funding.  “Indirect cost recovery” (which I assume is synonymous with “recharge”) has risen from 4.9% to 7%.  “Other sources” has risen from 8.9% to 12.1%.  We’re having to get creative to fund IT, even more so than in other areas.

The overall message is unsatisfying but not unexpected; during a period when IT has become more important to our core mission every year, we have actually reduced the resources dedicated to IT.

We’ve submitted our recharge proposal for 2008-2009.  As of this point, there are no significant changes to our lines of business; our rates in all lines of business are going up slightly (4-9%), mostly due to increased salary expense.

The new rates are:

• Annual Desktop Support: $1410/year (was $1290/year in 07-08, $1320/year in 06-07)
• Unix and server administration: $89/hour (was $83/hour in 07-08, $75/hour in 06-07)
• Web and database development: $77/hour (was $70/hour in 07-08, $70/hour in 06-07)
• General hourly work: $75/hour (was $70/hour in 07-08, $69/hour in 06-07)

(See our “What we do” page for descriptions of these services.)

Our strategic planning process is nearing a close, and we are beginning work on a significant reorganization of LSCR’s business.  We expect to develop a significantly improved financial and support model that better meets the needs of our customers and the College.  I think we’ll have something specific to talk about in the next month or so.

Today, a number of departments received messages from CDW-G about needing to renew Software Assurance for one or more of their licenses. The messages look like this:

Dear HENRIETTA TWITTLEWHEEZE

The Software Assurance (SA) portion of the current three year UC Microsoft Select license agreement will expire on January 31, 2008.

Select SA coverage provides you with the right to upgrade to newer versions released during the term in which you own SA. SA is valid for the term of the agreement, purchased in one, two or three year increments depending on when during the three year agreement period you purchase the license with SA. Renewals are all for the full three year period. SA also provides you with certain learning tools and trainings that Microsoft makes available to customers who own SA.

If you purchased or renewed Select SA coverage at any time from January 2005 through December 2007 and wish to renew that coverage, *you will need to submit your renewal order to CDWG by February 26, 2008* to ensure process time before the deadline with Microsoft.

Your order(s) that need to be renewed are:
Q5877392

Items ordered were
ACAD MS SEL VIRTUAL PC MAC LIC/SA 1Y

I think I can speak for the majority of our departments when I say: Huh?

What happened here is that the department (often unwittingly) purchased a license for Microsoft software that includes Software Assurance (SA) for one year. (That’s what “SA 1Y” means at the end of the license). Usually this was unintentional and caused by the confusing CDW-G price lists. What it means is that you purchased the right to upgrade your software to the latest version, for a period of up to one year. (Actually, it’s not really a full year; it’s whatever portion of the year was left until January 31, and it’s not pro-rated). If you renew your SA (by paying an additional license fee), you’ll continue to have the right to upgrade to the latest version; if you don’t renew, you’ll have to buy a new license when you want to upgrade.

Our general recommendation on SA is, don’t buy it unless there’s a specific reason to. The way the pricing works is that you pay almost double the stand-alone license cost for the right to upgrade to a future version you don’t even know you’ll want. Better just to buy the stand-alone license, and buy another one when you know you want to upgrade. (Back in the old days, you could buy a cheaper upgrade, but Microsoft and most other software companies have done away with upgrade pricing.)

But, if you got one of these messages, you already bought SA, so what should you do? First of all, you should make sure you have the most recent version of the software; you’ve purchased the rights to it, so grab it before your rights expire. If you already have the latest version, you probably don’t need to renew SA; you can just buy a new license when the time comes.

Licensing is one of the issues we’re examining as we develop a strategic plan; this situation highlights the high cost of managing and keeping track of software licenses the way we currently do. I would like to move to a model where a standard suite of software licenses is paid for centrally or included in our yearly rates, so that departments don’t have to spend so much energy on these kinds of issues. It will take a fairly significant reworking of how computing in L&S is funded, but I think we can do it.

For several years now, I’ve coordinated a bulk purchase of computers for L&S units. The idea of the bulk purchase is to save us the time we spend configuring identical or nearly-identical computers one at a time, and the extra 10-20% more we spend for those computers than we would if we bought them all together. Purchasing in bulk just makes sense.

However, coordinating the bulk purchases has been challenging. The vendors give me pretty tight timelines, so there’s not much opportunity to publicize the deal before the deadline for the discount expires. I always get requests from managers the day after the deal expires. And the rest of the year, managers have to decide whether to buy a computer when they need one, or wait for the bulk purchase to save a little money.

So this year, I’m trying something new. In collaboration with The Scholar’s Workstation, I’ve managed to get a web page for L&S computer recommendations placed on the TSW web site. This page will include Dell desktops, and Apple desktops and notebooks, with discounted pricing and our configuration recommendations. I plan to add Windows laptop configurations as well. We will keep the page current, so you’ll be able to get our recommendation and pricing any time during the year, not just during a two-week period in September.

I think this will work a lot better for L&S than the bulk purchase program did; the challenge will be keeping up with the changes in products and technology.

At this week’s UCCSC conference, I spoke about a report that I’d helped write, on providing “less seamful services,” and better collaboration between distributed and centralized IT units. I spend a lot of time thinking about that issue, because LSCR is positioned right in the middle of it; to IST, LSCR looks like a department, but to our departments, LSCR tends to look like centralized IT.

(Aside: I would prefer that our customers view us as peers and partners. We do make an effort to behave that way: for example, we locate our folks in departmental space rather than moving off-campus to an office where we could all sit together. We’d rather be closer to the users. But looking at the survey and interview results so far, it seems we have a ways to go to really be seen as integral by most of our customers.)

The report was done as part of ITLP, which is a leadership program for IT folks in higher ed. The program included folks from Berkeley, UDub, Minnesota, and Penn State, and the report we did surveyed people in distributed and centralized IT at all four of those universities. Because they’re all large public research institutions, the issues tend to be pretty similar.

My presentation (.ppt) focused on the communication and collaboration challenges. We have a ton of meetings, but we spend too much time presenting to each other and not enough time talking to each other. Our communications tend to be along accepted and formalized lines, and we often gloss over or ignore the underlying issues which keep us from moving forward. And yes, there is an irony that I was making this point via a PowerPoint presentation; however, the most important part of my presentation was a break-out session where I got the folks from each campus to talk to each other about the pressures or barriers they are facing in their local organization. I think it went well; the room got noisy enough that it was hard to hear, which I took as a good sign.

The report (.doc) addresses the above issue of communication and collaboration, and also has a number of recommendations to make the user experience better in specific technical areas (desktop support, email, and information systems).

One of the things we’ve been hearing from folks in L&S is that LSCR doesn’t communicate enough; that we’re quick to respond when they call us, but we don’t do enough to tell people about what’s going on in technology in the industry and on campus. Part of the reason for that is that to communicate via our web site or email is fairly time-consuming for us. Before we’ll put up a post on our web site, we want to be sure it’s correct and complete, which requires us to spend time developing the content, and then going through an editorial process before a page can go live. For a lot of our content, that process is important; for example, our Thunderbird pages couldn’t be published until we were sure Thunderbird was going to be our email client recommendation, and we’d developed enough content to be worth making an announcement. (And really, we still haven’t made a formal announcement about Thunderbird, because as soon as we do that, people will want to know when we’ll be migrating them, and we’re still working on our schedule for that. The short answer is: within the next six months).

We need a communication mechanism that has a better signal-to-noise ratio than email (what percentage of your incoming email did you actually read today?), but less formality than our web site. Fortunately, technology has already helped us out with this one; blog software is easy to install and use (we’re using WordPress), and it’s easier to be informal in a blog context. Plus, the ability for readers to add comments can create an open dialog that saves everyone from having to ask the same questions over and over.

I’ll be posting news, announcements, and random thoughts about computing in L&S on a regular basis. Pretty soon (once it goes through our editorial process!) we’ll have an advice article on how to subscribe to blogs using RSS, which can keep you updated without the notices getting lost in your email.

We’re also planning to offer blog space to any departments who use our server for their web site; if the department chair or IT manager wants a blog, it’s easy for us to add a new blog to fit into your existing web site.

LSCR has been involved in a strategic planning process for over a year now. We’ve done a lot of work on developing a clear mission and vision for the organization and for computing in L&S in general. We got good information from the L&S computing survey which many of you answered earlier this year, and we have been conducting follow-up interviews with individuals. The CIO’s office is also helping out by conducting an external consulting review of our current operations.

On Wednesday, 7/18, LSCR will be participating in an off-site retreat (at the Headlands Institute in Marin) to synthesize some of the information we have gathered. Our focus will be to come up with some specific action plans and strategic goals which will guide the next phases of the process. We expect that in calendar 2008, we will have some concrete proposals to improve computing in L&S.

The retreat will require the participation of our entire staff, so we will be operating with a skeleton crew on 7/18. We will have someone watching our queues and able to contact us by cell phone if necessary, but we’d like to ask you to limit your requests on Wednesday to obviously urgent calls, or indicate whether the call can be deferred until we’re back at full staff on Thursday.

Thank you for your patience as we try to find ways to better meet the needs of our customers and the college.