McSmith and Associates

July 26, 1995

Mr. Andrew A. Sorensen, Provost
The University of Florida
235 Tigert Hall
Gainesville, Florida 32611

Dear Andy:

Enclosed is my report on the organization of information technology at the University of Florida. I enjoyed immensely my two days on campus and I came home with several very good ideas for how I can improve things at the University of Virginia.

I think you have a great opportunity here to shape the future of Florida. If you can create an organization and funding model that will enable the rapid evolution of a coherent infrastructure for information, you will have created a platform on which not only academics fluorish, but very substantial improvements in institutional efficiency can be built.

The key is removing the barriers of organizational suboptimization that now exist and making sure you have a leader that has both the mandate and ability to lead the transformation you want to make.

I hope that if questions or issues related to my report arise, you will include me as you see fit in the ongoing dialog within the university.

/signed/ Polley Ann McClure

As a large state research university, the University of Florida has a rich mission including undergraduate and graduate education, research, and service in the liberal arts, medicine, agriculture, and engineering. The information technology function is and will be increasingly critical to all of these elements of Florida's mission and to the internal management of the institution.

I was impressed with the overall knowledge and attitude of individuals I met. They understand the directions of IT that are important for higher education and they have selected the right standards and technologies. They are creative and hard working and have made good progress in establishing a direction for the university. Two organizations, in particular struck me as very effective: NEKDC and FCLA. Despite the difficulties caused by an unwieldy organizational context, there is remarkable good will and sense of cooperation.

In 1991, the Provost authorized a task-force to assess the state of information technology in the university. That report is insightful and, in most respects, remains a valid blueprint for action in 1995. Some progress has been made on several of its goals, but not the amount of progress that should have been made. If Florida does not increase the pace of improvement, it will fall further behind as the standards for all universities escalate. There is a widely held opinion on campus that the main reason for slow progress is lack of funding, but I believe that a more serious limiter is the lack of a coherent organization structure and management of information technology as an institutional resource.

The Provost and President need to attend to the organizational issues directly. The Council on Information Technology and Services, established in response to the 1991 report is a good vehicle for coordination and communication and the people I spoke with all agreed that it had been a positive influence in these dimensions. The problem is that communication and coordination alone cannot substitute for effective organization and management where institutional infrastructure is concerned. Today the organizations responsible for various elements of the information technology environment are widely dispersed across vice presidential and provost units. They are optimized locally and this is a serious impediment to the goal of creating a general infrastructure in an efficient manner. In developing the recommendations below I have made a few assumptions: First, I assume that efficiency in the use of human and financial resources will be important (there won't be unlimited additional funds to pay for the new things that must be done). Second, I believe that communications technology needs to evolve into infrastructure, like plumbing and electricity. It should be ubiquitous, reliable, support the diverse needs of the institution and be capable of evolving with changes in technology and needs. Third, I assume that voice, video and data transport are evolving in such a way that five to seven years from now, it will be possible to deliver integrated information across a common physical layer and using common switching technology, and that Florida will want to take advantage of that opportunity.

My recommendations, then, focus on the strategy for organization:

1. The University needs to establish a position at a high level in the institution for a full-time manager and leader of information technology (a ClO). The position could be a vice president, associate provost, or other appropriate designation but it must be clear that the entire institution's direction in IT is in the hands of this office. The office does not need to directly manage all technology functions but it has to be an effective leader, advocate, and coordinator, not only for the units it directs but others as well. This role is best established through the formal delegation of responsibility and authority and selection of a person to fill the position who is effective in both leading and managing.

2. Reporting to this office should be organizations focused on communications, computing, applications, and user support (including microcomputing, student computing and instructional technology support). The office does not need to have responsibility directly for managing IT services in individual schools and departments, but it must have effective control over institutional standards, conventions, and IT architecture. Local department-based user support, in particular, should be encouraged and promoted. The central user support organization should position itself as an effective agent to support and coordinate departmental support staff.

3. The highest priority should be the consolidation of communications. The telecommunications unit currently reporting to the physical plant should be moved to the new department. The construction-related functions in that unit do not need to move, but the staff who service users, manage the telephone contracts, and provide telephone billing and maintenance should be moved to report to the ClO. The new department should focus on building an integrated communications function, incorporating telephone, data and video. A plan for installing structured wiring in all buildings should be developed. A plan should be devised that will allow the central unit to manage connectivity of voice, video and data all the way to the wall plate. The current "POP" model will fail under increasing pressure for reliability and when integrated transmission is possible. The new communications organization should build a business plan that can deliver integrated services under a coherent financial model. A five to seven year agenda for creating the physical infrastructure to support data, voice and video could be funded through a modest increase in current telephone rates. These charges should be repositioned as "communications rates". In suggesting a five to seven year time horizon for support of integrated communications, I do not intend to imply that Florida can wait for five to seven years to gain control of its communications infrastructure. Even as I was on campus, there were several outages of the data network and people told me that this was not uncommon. I would put a very high priority on making the campus data communications environment ubiquitous and highly reliable.

   The most difficult part of achieving this recommendation is creating a staff that can truly deal with integrated communications. Today there are many deeply held, emotionally based beliefs and experiential factors keeping the staff who currently deal with data, voice and video from even being able to think of themselves as in the same business.

   Staff for this new integrated communications unit could be derived from the current UFNet group, CETS, NERD C, CIRCA and Telecommunications. If NERD C is going to create and manage networks on campus, it must be accountable to and subject to the priorities of the new communications department. Likewise those staff who currently establish UFNet connections for users who are in these other units need to be managed by the new communications department directly.

   Healthnet and IFAS must be governed by technical standards established by the new office, but they do not have to be managed directly by it. Healthnet in particular is focused on a specific mission and little would be gained through direct management by the new office. IFAS on the other hand seems less unique in its mission (at least the health-care applications are less) and if the new office and leadership in agriculture could reach agreement on the "communications to the wall plate" model, it might be possible to free up current IFAS staff to focus more intensely on applications rather than infrastructure.

4. Within the next year or two, Florida needs to make a decision about whether it intends to continue to purchase telephone services from Southern Bell or whether it wants to in-source that function. The current contract runs until 1999, but it is not too soon to start to plan if in-sourcing is a possibility. There are excellent consultants that could assist with an analysis of the options, costs, benefits and issues raised.

5. Several parts of the Office of Instructional Resources dealing with faculty support, multimedia, and audio visual services should report to the new unit. The traditionally analog technologies supported by these units are very rapidly becoming digital and need to be managed with the rest of microcomputing and user support in a coherent model.

6. NERDC needs to be managed more effectively as an integral part of the University technology function. Its "arm's length" relationship to the University of Florida is contributing to the slow progress. An ideal relationship would be if it could become a fully integrated part of the new organization and contract with other institutions and FCLA for the services it provides to them.

7. The CETS organization that currently reports to the School of Engineering should be made into a university-level auxiliary, reporting to the new office.

   8. The new organization must have at least a small applications and data administration staff. Providing access to institutional data in a coherent fashion needs to be a high priority of the unit. In addition, there are institutional applications such as email and directory services that must be managed by the institution as a whole.

8. The staff for applications and data administration could be derived from current units reporting to administrative affairs, the registrar, financial aid and others. I am unclear how planning and institutional research and records management are managed at the university, but these functions might also provide some synergy with this new group.

9. There may be an opportunity for cost reduction if the applications development and support staff from administrative affairs, the registrar, financial aid, and others were to be centralized and managed as a single unit. I counted close to 100 FTEs in these dispersed units. As a point of comparison, the University of Virginia, Indiana University, Purdue University and Pennsylvania State University all manage administrative applications as a single department and their current staff sizes are 27, 42, 46, and 42 (in random order). It was clear from conversations with the units affected that they view the current

   arrangement as being very successful and would resist the centralization suggested. The Provost and President will have to decide whether the local optimization of these administrative units is sufficiently important to merit the cost they are paying.

10. CIRCA appears to be a high quality user support and academic computing unit. The new integrated Helpdesk is a very positive step forward. CIRCA needs to have its microcomputer labs established on a regular budget of replacement, not to exceed three to four years. CIRCA should promote and support personal ownership of microcomputers by students, but this will not decrease the need for computer labs in the next few years. In fact some universities are finding just the opposite. Students who become active users of computers through ownership want even more support when they are on campus and not in their own housing.

11. The University should develop a program to put microcomputer and network support all across the institution on a solid fiscal footing. At present, as is true in most institutions, equipment is being purchased through one-time funds. There is no ongoing budget to cover upgrades, maintenance, and replacement. There is inadequate funding for local support personnel in schools and departments, and so faculty and others assume these roles. The magnitude of the unfunded information technology needs in many institutions approaches the magnitude of deferred maintenance of the physical plant. The new office should develop a model for remedying this problem and pursue the development of a multi-year program to make the necessary funding available.

It is beyond the scope of a two-day visit to suggest in detail how such a reorganization should be done. Indeed it is important that those who will have to make the new organization work take responsibility for designing the new structure. However the drawing attached suggests some possibilities.

/signed/Polley Ann McClure