Members of the campus community – and faculty members in particular – are being asked to provide their input about how the campus can meet new and emerging information technology needs through IT@Illinois, a campuswide initiative started by Provost Linda Katehi in December. The goal of IT@Illinois is to rethink the configuration of information technology resources at Illinois so that they can be more efficient, more cost effective and dedicated to higher value activities that more directly support the university’s core missions.
“Our usual way to do this is to set up a task force, and give them a due date for returning a concept, but this time we decided we weren’t going to do that,” said Sally Jackson, chief information officer at Illinois. “We began mobilizing people around the general goal of re-equipping ourselves for research and education in the 21st century under the constraint that we can’t spend any new money. Then we made the presumption that anyone on campus might be able to come up with a creative way to do that.”
The initiative officially got under way Dec. 10 with a symposium, followed by two workshops. Within a matter of weeks, almost 75 concept papers were submitted that addressed various IT problems on campus, Jackson said. “It was obvious that there was a lot of thinking going on, but we needed to raise the thinking to a higher, more general level. So the provost asked to have one or more broad concepts for organization of IT services brought forward, and 14 concepts were submitted.”
The 14 concept papers were considered at a forum in March, and were reformulated into five concept papers that now are posted on the IT@Illinois Wiki for feedback.
Among the proposals in the concept papers is the creation of an IT Council that would be responsible for coordinating and guiding IT services at the campus and unit levels, including deployment of new services and the initiation of new virtual services such as the Scholarly Commons. The proposed IT Council also would support creation of Virtual Guilds of Expertise that would provide faculty and staff members with better access to IT staff members with strategically important IT technical skills. Additionally, the proposed council would maintain a directory of departmental IT professionals on campus, but IT funding and staff members would remain in the units where they currently add value.
Another of the concept papers proposed unifying most IT professionals on campus, including those in Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services and new hires, in a new organization called IT@ Illinois.
“This leaves academic departments and other mission units free to act with great agility, and it assures that ideas flow freely across unit boundaries, that all resources available to people are visible and accessible to them, that divisions among IT support providers do not become obstacles to connections among potential collaborators, and that all changes in the IT environment can be examined for impact on our complicated sociotechnical system,” the authors of the paper wrote. “In this unified organization, many individuals now in local support roles will be drawn into a common IT@Illinois division, and this will stimulate increases in productivity that will make it possible for some IT professionals to transition into more specialized analyst roles.”
However, this won’t mean centralization of IT services – a concern raised by some faculty members at the April 27 Urbana-Champaign Senate meeting – or that departments will relinquish control of their IT support personnel, Jackson said. “The provost has come up with a set of outcomes that any plan is going to have to meet, and one of those outcomes is to reduce centralization to the minimum possible. Another required outcome is that departmental budgets can’t be transferred to central units.”
Among the challenges facing the campus is the high cost of converting departmental space that might be used for classrooms or offices to housing hardware such as servers. Some units have well-run data centers that could be shared to help minimize the costs of converting facility space as well as the costs of administering the data services, Jackson said.
“We know we can find the resources to commit to new things,” Jackson said. “We don’t know how we’re doing to do that yet, but we see plenty of potential in the system. Now we need to know what our reinvestment will look like. And for that, beginning in the fall, we’ll need to go discipline by discipline, faculty member by faculty member, and try to understand the direction that each of the disciplines is going and how we need to prepare the campus IT infrastructure to allow everyone to act at the forefront of their discipline.”
After faculty members’ needs are determined and issues of governance and structure are resolved, a timeline for implementing reconfigured IT services will be developed.
