Director’s Blog
strategic planning

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.

Here’s a scary statistic for you: The Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) on hard disk drives is generally reported by manufacturers as 300,000 hours or more. That means that, on average, a disk will fail after 300,000 hours of use. That sounds like a long time–300,000 hours is 12,500 days, or about 35 years on average. Not so bad, right? The scary part is that I’d estimate there are at least 50,000 spinning disks on campus right now, which means that there are probably multiple disk failures on campus every day.

We recently had a hard disk drive failure in a customer’s machine that was not backed up. She lost years of stored email, along with a database and other documents which took uncountable hours to create. We’ve all heard similar horror stories, or lived through them, yet we still seem to make the same mistakes.

Some people back up their files to writable CDs or DVDs; removable media are cheap and it just takes a couple of minutes, right? That’s my backup scheme on my personal machine at home. Now ask me, how long has it been since I actually backed up my home machine? (Answer: No idea, but it was at least 6 months ago, probably a year or more. But thanks for reminding me–I’ll go do it tonight.) For backups to be effective, they really need to be automatic and invisible to the user.

Fortunately, the campus has an inexpensive automated system: UC Backup, which is based on IBM’s Tivoli Storage Manager. For just 30 cents per gigabyte of data stored, you can install the TSM client on your machine and be protected in case of data loss. The office of the Vice Chancellor for Research provides an additional subsidy; researchers can get their data backed up for only 15 cents per gigabyte while funds allow. (See UC Backup’s page for information on signing up for the service and the research subsidy).

LSCR would like to see all of our customers’ files (both staff and faculty) regularly backed up by UC Backup or a similar system. I’d recommend the same for all computer users in L&S departments. The cost is low and the benefit is large; our institution has a huge liability out there due to irreplaceable data not being backed up. We’ll be contacting our departments to encourage them to sign up all their users with UC Backup, if they’re not already. (Over half of our administrative staff users are already being backed up through UC Backup, but for our faculty it’s a very low percentage).

Side note: The campus-wide IT Strategic Plan identifies backup as a critical issue, and sets a goal of having 80% of faculty and staff backed up by July 2006. [Obviously the plan needs some updating.] Personally, I think that the current UC Backup model doesn’t put the campus in position to accomplish this goal; the low cost is OK, but the administrative overhead required to manage the billing, even for that small a charge, creates a barrier significant enough to keep many departments and individuals from rolling out this professional backup service. I would like to see the service be free of cost to the user up to some reasonable threshold of data storage; 10GB or so. It’s really not worth generating hundreds of BFS transactions for $1.50 each.

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).

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.