What Is Thought?

Rock the ThirdWay!

2012-01-24T09:01:00.001-08:00

ThirdWay@ASU won Pearson Product of the Year at this year's National Sales Meeting in San Diego a couple of weeks ago. It was the first year in the history of Pearson that something other than a textbook has ever received that honor. The prize is shared by a lot of people who have worked together for more than a year and a half to make this new experiment in Public/Private educational partnership successful, on both the ASU and Pearson teams.

The ASU team is led by Dr. Phil Regier, former Executive Dean of the WP Carey School of Business, now VP and Dean of ASU Online. His first officer is Assistant Vice President Kari Barlow, whose previous assignment at ASU was leading the Strategic Technology Alliance program for ASU's Technology Office. Under Phil's leadership, ASU Online has completely reinvented itself to become an emerging leader in online education. For example, in this year's US News and World Report ranking of online bachelor's degrees, ASU Online was rated #1, FIRST, THE BEST in Student Services and Technology out of nearly 1000 responding institutions. As a direct result of the ThirdWay partnership, ASUOnline is now growing faster, serving more students, and delivering online education at an extremely high level of quality.

On the Pearson side, Matt Leavy, Melanie Biel, Marijean Hamilton, Allison King and Kevin Molloy were backed up by a cast of hundreds of Pearson employees and partners who helped ASU completely reinvent their online offering. Working side by side with their ASU Online colleagues, the Pearson team has helped ASU in every aspect of the marketing, recruiting, advising, design and delivery of its online education.
To ensure the quality, reputation and integrity of the ASU Online brand, ASU faculty design and teach every online course, and are also responsible for establishing and enforcing all instructional and academic policies. But the Pearson team provides technology, content, expertise and support services for every aspect of the student lifecycle including:

Pearson LearningStudio as the online learning platform for all courses;
Academic Enterprise Reporting to monitor and analyze trends in student performance;
Learning Outcome Manager for tracking the achievement of learning objectives and goals;
Enrollment services including engagement, retention and student support;
Prospect and lead generation services
Admissions support services to better connect with and keep students engaged during every stage of the enrollment process.

The match between the Pearson ThirdWay offering and tthe ASU Technology Strategy is uncanny. In 2009, ASU was actively seeking a new model for accelerating its online offering. In the midst of a 10 year plan to expand the size and scope of the University while simultaneously raising its academic quality, ASU had already become the nation's largest residential university.
But President Michael Crow's vision for a New American University did not stop with residential education. Since 2005, he had pushed his institution to develop an online school of similar size and quality -- setting a goal of 100,000 distance learners inside of a decade. But after two failed bootstrapping attempts, President Crow knew that he would have to find expertise and investment from the private sector in order to compete online with giant for-profit institutions like the University of Phoenix. Determined to maintain online the same educational standard of excellence found on ground at ASU, he nevertheless needed a new kind of partner if the New American University was to be a significant player in online education.
Since 2005 ASU has followed a technology strategy known as Strategic Technology Alliance. Quoting from the UTO's 2006 strategy document:

To meet rising student expectations and create a system of scalable academic excellence the University must turn from the direct provisioning of basic services to the aggressive application of information technologies to the core missions of learning and discovery.
ASU will accomplish this turn through Strategic Technology Alliances – aligning the institution’s technology services strategy with the strategic technology directions of private sector partners who operate at scales 1000 times that of ASU’s. Strategic Technology Alliance will dramatically accelerate the institution’s technology platform development while simultaneously allowing the university to focus more of its talent and core resources on the application of this rapidly advancing platform to increasing student success, enhancing the learning environment and advancing ASU’s research agenda.

In order to keep pace with accelerating technical change, and to extract as much value from the burgeoning power of all things digital, ASU sought to extract itself from the direct provisioning of technology services and instead identify private industry partners who, because of their scale and focus, were better positioned to harness accelerating capabilities at scale.
In a blog post from 2006, I outlined the strategy this way:

Vertically integrated enterprises (like Universities) can use a Core vs. Context analysis to focus resources to achieve leadership. Core activities are those which a firm must concentrate their own talent, management, and internal resources on, because they are central to the enterprise strategy. Context activities, by contrast, are those that might be reasonably provided to the firm in partnership with other firms for whom those activities are Core....
...if ASU can find a strategic ally who can assume responsibility for a major part of a Context service -- an ally for whom ASU's Context is Core, an ally that provides that service at a scale orders of magnitude beyond ASU's size, a partner subject to competitive pressures that force it to adapt more quickly than ASU is capable of adapting -- then I say we should seek those alliances. So I propose that, as part of its technology plan, ASU seek to establish a set of strategic alliances and work with those allies to build an integrated platform that provides those Context services going forward, a platform influenced by the technology visions of the allies as well as by ASU's goals.
In each sector, we want to identify the broadest swath of activity that would be Core to an alliance partner, and identify a timeline for transitioning more of this activity -- over a period of months, or even years if need be -- from direct ASU management and ownership in favor of technology allies whose core business is to provide those services. I believe these alliances are the gateway to developing a technology platform that can more closely track the state of the art and allow ASU to focus its resources on the use of technology in its core businesses.

ThirdWay is a textbook example of this Core v Context approach. Under ThirdWay, ASU focuses on the Core issues of student success, academic rigor and quality. These are clearly Core for the institution. Pearson focuses on providing the widest possible range of support services, which provide the Context for ASU's Core. These services can be Core for Pearson because we provide them to a wide variety of institutions across the country, at a scale much greater than ASU alone.
Pearson is invested in the success of the overall venture. Unlike product models, where the institution purchases specific services and technologies and then bears responsibility for making them work in the field, ThirdWay makes Pearson a true partner. ASU and Pearson pursue ASUOnline's goals together, and Pearson only makes money if the venture meets the growth and success goals the enterprise sets for itself.
It's a great theory -- if I do say so myself-- but it's especially gratifying to see it play out successfully for ASU and Pearson. ThirdWay promises to be an important offering for us this year, and I expect I will be writing about it some more in the weeks to come. So I wanted to say a public thank you to Matt, Melanie, Marijean, Allison, Kevin, Kari, and the extraordinary team that has proved this model out and shown us all how a new kind of Public/Private partnership can make the impossible possible...
Rock the Third Way!

It Does My Heart Good...

2011-11-02T18:43:00.001-07:00

to see Phil Hill at e-Literate speculate on ....

What If OpenClass Succeeds in Disrupting LMS Market? ...

According to Phil people are asking:

will Pearson’s OpenClass LMS offering and associated corporate strategy lead to more competition or less competition in the LMS space for higher ed, or how will the competitive landscape change?

At this point, a couple weeks into the OpenClass beta, I'm really excited that the question is being debated. It means the word is getting out about #OpenClass and people are interested in our new model, and the impact that it may have on the market. A good beginning.

Phil and Michael have an interesting perspective on OpenClass. First, I think they have it right when they say we intend the OC as a disruptive product. We are adamant about making a quality product, but we are also conscious of avoiding feature bloat. We think connection to third party tools and technologies will be crucial to creating the richest possible landscape. This will be an important way that OpenClass will expand its capabilities, to facilitate choice.

e-Literate is also spot on when it says that if the OC platform is successful, it will redefine the LMS category and change the game. OpenClass is intended as a platform strategy -- specifically a co-creation platform. As I understand the term, co-creation platforms allow diverse creators to share a common development and deployment infrastructure at Internet scale to deliver products to a market in an integrated way. Done well, a co-ceation platform can be a tremendous spur to innovation - think eBay, Wikipedia, Amazon.

e-Literate goes on to say that:

If OpenClass is successful ... it will move the learning platform more towards a consumer decision and less of an institutional decision.

I think this would be a good outcome, as long as we can help CIOs prevent data Balkanization. If students and faculty are choosing not just the OC platform, but individual learning technologies and new kinds of content, then OC will be a positive force in education.

I hope we are able to grow the OC into a space that provides an opportunity for innovators to reach faculty and students more quickly, more richly, and that all that activity leads to greater student success. If we can make that happen, the rest will take care of itself.

Published v. Open content: Clash of the Titans or natural coexistence?

2011-10-31T14:40:00.001-07:00

(Deleted this post accidentally...reposting)
I think some folks think that there is a kind of educational cage match between Open and published content: Two will go in, but only One can come out. And we end up with either an exclusively open source or an exclusively published content world thereafter.

I don't see it that way. Seems to me that the world we have lived in for a while is one where open and published content co-exist quite naturally.

Pearson sells educational technology and content. To do that, our content must always add value above and beyond the value provided by OpenSource resources that are available to all of us for free. We are up to that challenge, now and into the future. Professors everywhere are combining their own content with others content, both open and published, to create learning opportunities for students. Pearson welcomes innovation from everywhere, OpenSource and published, that will contribute to student success and accelerate the improvements technology can bring to education.

A Good Week for #OpenClass

2011-10-31T13:45:00.001-07:00

It's hard to believe that Educasue was only just last week. I have to say this past week was a good one for OpenClass.

The response from schools around the world, from the community, and from the press has been terrific, beyond our expectations. Googling OpenClass brings back links to ongoing coverage from the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, US News, TMC Net, ZDNet and many others. We were covered in the financial press too, by Forbes, the Mötley Fool, MarketWatch, and NPR's Marketplace with Kai Ryssdal. The blogging and twitter communities are following us extensively. We were the buzz of the show at Educause.

So all in all, a good start.

More than 1000 Google Apps institutions have already activated the OC for their domains through the GoogleApps Marketplace. Several campuses are considering wider adoptions and I'm confident we will soon be able to announce the first campus to adopt OpenClass as their institutional choice.

The challenge now is to maintain momentum and build the trust of the community through effective and open communication. We have a great core of leaders who have gotten us this far and we hope they will help us as we expand and round out the core feature set, build out the exchange, integrate a broad array of technology and content partners and grow.

In the next couple of weeks we will be opening a common instance of OpenClass we are calling OpenClassU. I'm hoping to move the design discussions to a set of classes there, where we can use the tool we are building out together to share ideas and learn from one another.

Would you have interest in an invitation to an OpenClassU?

Josh Kim's 4 Injunctions

2011-10-25T12:36:00.000-07:00

Our friend Josh Kim posted some more challenges for the OC team. We appreciate Josh’s commitment to more open conversations across the community and for his feedback on our willingness to have a public dialog about OpenClass. We hope that this approach encourages others across the community to participate in the future.
Like all good friends, Josh tells us straight, and in his most recent OpenClass post he gave us four injunctions:

Utilize OpenClass as an Extranet Platform
Aggregate the Discussion
Publish all costs
Publish all adoptions

Regarding Josh’s latest ideas, we’re happy to say that all of these are in our interest and we plan to do each of these, and most will be substantially in place In the next 3-4 months.

Team OC wants nothing more than for everyone to have the opportunity to get their hands on OpenClass. To begin to meet the demand for OpenClass access outside the Google institutions, we will begin sending invitations to those who have registered their interest with us at joinOpenClass.com over the next several weeks.If you are not using Google Apps for Education and would like to get a first-hand look into the product please email info@JoinOpenClass.com We are following a careful growth path, working toward general availability in the first half of next year.
Our goal is to provide as much detail around OpenClass as possible to the community. As details around the OpenClass offering crystallize, we will continue to grow our website, broaden and deepen the available information and create a central place for everyone to find information on OpenClass and discuss how it should improve. As a start, this week we added visual walkthroughs of some of the key features within OpenClass on the www.joinopenclass.com website.
As Pearson better understands the integration and support models that the community will be receptive to, we will publish how we plan to provide those services commercially. Pearson will offer helpdesk, integration and other commercial services to help meet the needs of institutions that would choose Pearson to provide those services. Remember though that Pearson is committed to provide to OpenClass institution at no cost in a self-service way.
TeamOC is eager to share the stories from institutions and other partners as they experience and engage with OpenClass. As we progress we will be encouraging OpenClass users to share their experiences with one another. Look for these in the upcoming weeks on www.joinopenclass.com

We are working hard to meet the demand for information over the next several months as the OpenClass community grows. We are committed to transparency and really appreciate everyone's interest and advice.

Michael's Followup

2011-10-24T16:12:00.001-07:00

Michael Feldstein followed up his first thoughtful post on OpenClass with another. Here's some of what he had to say in his second piece:

I think Pearson is trying to create a platform in the way that Google and Facebook are platforms...I think there is a lot that is compelling about the idea of such a platform, and that it could deliver improvements to the learning experience that would be difficult to achieve without the kind of scale ... that Pearson is trying to create. In essence, the message is that Pearson will get the LMS (and its price tag) out of the way so that, in Adrian’s words, teachers can focus on “climbing the value chain.”

You can read the rest of the post here.
Michael also had some welcome advice for us:

Pearson will need to raise its game if it wants to foster the kind of trust necessary to build the new customer relationships that it appears to be shooting for.

Michael is right. This is a new game for us. We've been playing for a little more than a week, and we already see lots we have to learn, and fast. But we are determined to build on the interest in the OC model and the trust that faculty already place in Pearson when they choose our materials for the students in their courses. The OC team is determined to be of service to this community through the agency of our company, and gain trust one person at a time.

PS - We have posted a slideshow tour of #OpenClass at joinOpenClass.com

Nixty asks...

2011-10-23T21:38:00.001-07:00

Q: @Nixty, a competitor to OpenClass, asks:

What happens when readily available free courses/texts help students learn better than Pearson’s closed expensive courses/texts?
What happens when we have clear research support that shows how students taking the open and free course learn more than students taking Pearson’s closed and expensive course?
Pearson’s stated aim is to make the LMS a commodity so they can sell more of their closed content and course tools. What happens when Pearson isn’t selling enough of their closed content and course tools?

Answer: Is this a trick question? Doesn't this boil down to the more general question --- What happens when a free product is better than one you pay for? There's only one conclusion I can come to - free wins that round. And 'for pay' has to come up with something worth paying for, which is the essence of competition, the arms race that drives economics to produce improvement. I believe Pearson has proven it is up to that challenge for the long haul.
Q: Later in the same post @nixty also asked:

[Pearson's] business model assumes (and this is a fundamentally flawed assumption) that they will be able to sell closed content and tools to support OpenClass. What happens when their assumption proves to be wrong?

Answer: Again, do I have to be careful of a trap? I can only see one answer. Pearson content will always have to continue to be worth money if we expect people to pay for it. Which is why we work so hard to ensure we find new and better ways of ensuring student success. The competition between pay and free will lead both modalities to innovations we haven't yet imagined.
Let the games begin!! And may the best product win!

PS - Nixty has the wrong idea about Pearson's stated aim for OpenClass. OpenClass is open...to all forms of content, both Open and published. We are so committed to open, it's in the name.

Michael Feldstein

2011-10-23T13:50:00.001-07:00

Nice seeing everyone at Educause last week. Katy, Scot and I caught up with Michael Feldstein last Thursday. Michael has recently joined Cengage [a Pearson competitor]. We sat down to talk OpenClass, and after our talk, here's some of what Michael had to say on his blog. It was a friendly conversation; Michael and I have known each other a long time. No one took any notes.

The big buzz at EDUCAUSE last week was around OpenClass, Pearson’s new LMS entrant....My conclusion is that this product could be a very big deal indeed....@Sannier is a big fan of Clayton Christensen, the man who coined the term “disruptive innovation.” If you really want to understand what OpenClass is all about, go out and read The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution very carefully. There are very specific reasons why “free” and “easy” are the words you will hear most often from Adrian when he is speaking about the product. The audacity of what Pearson is attempting should not be underestimated. If they succeed, they could cause major tectonic shifts across several markets that are currently critical to higher education.

He has his concerns too, mostly about privacy and control.
His post is worth a read. Though I don't agree with some of his interpretations -- both of what I had to say and of what OpenClass has to offer -- I appreciate his perspective.

Skeptics

2011-10-21T16:18:00.001-07:00

While the general reaction to our announcement was positive, it wouldn't be Educause without a healthy dose of skepticism. Though lots of people reacted favorably to Pearson's new offering, there are plenty of folks who will need to see us live up to our rhetoric before they become believers. We will be working hard to win you over!

@OnlineAtGC posted: The Free LMS?

@scottphamlin liked our experience but is still unsure: Pearson's OpenClass looks pretty slick. You have to wonder how long it will be free

@nixty's analysis is that OpenClass has no chance at success. Obviously, I disagree :-): Here is a question not answered yet: What happens when Pearson isn't selling enough closed content to support OpenClass?

@michaelochoago posted his reservations: I can see problems...I wonder about Pearson’s role as both a content provider and an LMS. (but in a comment to this article, Edward JennIngs "found [michaelochoago's] article to be biased and protective.)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To everyone -- fan, skeptic or in-between -- who is checking out the OC, the Pearson team is really appreciative and we look forward to your comments and suggestions.

Thanks for a great Educause 2011. I predict an exciting year!

Support for Open Class

2011-10-21T16:16:00.000-07:00

Over the past couple of days we've heard from people all over education who are excited by #OpenClass. Many are excited by our free, cloud-based model. Others are drawn to the OC's user experience and social features.
I've gathered together a smattering of the support we've received to give you a sense of what people that like OpenClass have to say...

1. @EricStoller made Veronica and team's day when he tweeted that:

The user interface for #OpenClass is gorgeous. It's designed for human users.

2. @flairandsquare liked the OpenClass keynote:

@sannier awesome keynote at #navigate2011 have you shared it anywhere?(The OpenClass Educause session is here The Navigate keynote can be found here )

3. @PhilKomarny pointed followers to a keynote I did at ACU Connected this year that foreshadowed OpenClass --

"One of the best keynotes (and visions) that I have seen, ever....My vote for the most inspiring speaker and ed technology at #EDU11

4. Wendy Lampner (@wlampner) liked the model:

What's in it for you? An opportunity to climb value chain. You will love price. Spend Less on provisioning resources....I am impressed that a corporate provider is willing to have public discussion about their product. Good place to start.

5. David Kim (@dskpro) said:

OpenClass as an LMS is just 1st phase. Combined power of social & learning content exchange will advance online learning.

6. @wandajbarreto said OpenClass represented:

"A shift to social education: OpenClass - free course-management tools with advanced social networking and community"

7. @JimLundy sounded ready for our alternative:

Is OpenClass (free offering via google apps) a threat to Blackboard, in the HE LMS market? Choice is good.

8. @I_am_10_ninjas made a pitch for using the OC at UofS:

Pearson's OpenClass ...I'm just sayin'...please tell me we'll just consider this as an option here at the UofS

9. @paulbmckenzie asked:

Will the Pearson/Google LMS, OpenClass compete with the likes of Blackboard - You bet.

10. @mritzius was pleased but a little confused by it too:

Playing with #openclass ... It looks beautiful but I am feeling lost in the woods here... it has an import from blackboard and moodle feature for course creation...I'm kicking the tires, looks great but not all that clear on setup

11. @jessemoland was a somewhat more comfortable:

Playing around with OpenClass on Google Apps. Looks nice so far, and setup was quick and easy.

12. @cloggingchris blogged about OpenClass:

...interesting presentation and discussion about a new VLE just launched by Pearson....Easy to use interface, content looks easy to create and upload, and from the student perspective you can create communities, collaborations and share stuff very simply. You can get to your gmail from within it, see your google calendar, Skype students directly and chat...It's attracting a lot of attention, and there's a lot of buzz about it here.

13. @binaryape commented that:

Marketing whinges aside, OpenClass does look like it might be a positive step away from the old VLE idea towards the PLE holy grail.

Educause 2011 Roundup

2011-10-21T14:44:00.000-07:00

The #OpenClass team was thrilled by the enthusiastic reception that #OpenClass received at Educause in Philadelphia this week. I was so busy responding to people in person the past couple days that I've fallen behind in responding to all the comments and questions folks have posted.
Rather than spamming the twitterverse with a burst of replies, I decided to gather up my responses in a blog post instead.

My favorite tweets about OpenClass in the past couple days were these two:

1. Inside Higher Ed (@IHEtech), which broke the story about #OpenClass, was following us so closely they even gave a sartorial review:

Apropos, @sannier et al. at Pearson booth dressed like they're about to help you move. Or stage a skit for your kids.(First time anyone has ever noticed my wardrobe! This is a good thing, right?)

2. It's hard not to like a tweet that uses "pig pile" as a technical term, and I think @nengelbert spoke the truth when she said:

Launch of any new product always brings on the pig pile of functional requirements & immediate naysayers-Give OpenClass a chance! (I can almost hear Yoko in the background...All we are saying, is 'Give the OC a chance...')

==============================================================
For more on reaction to OC from Educasue see:

Support for OpenClass More Answers and Skeptics

Some more responses for IHE

2011-10-18T08:04:00.000-07:00

@Joshua Kim has been covering the announcement of #OpenClass and has fostered a dialog between our team and the IHE community. At Pearson, we think this kind of dialog will be critical to the evolution of OpenClass, and appreciate Josh making it easy for us to get it started.

We very much want OpenClass to prove useful to a broad swath of institutions and a dialog with the community will help us understand where we have things right and where we need to improve.
In a comment to Josh's "Pearson Should Engage", Mark Gbur raised some additional questions. We’ve answered those here:

0. I was unable to find a link to their site from Pearson, unable to find a press release, and unable to find anything explaining the Google partnership.

Answer: The OpenClass announcement is linked from the Pearson homepage(pearson.com). You can find more information at joinopenclass.com, including our press release. Googling "Pearson OpenClass" returns a lot of early OpenClass coverage. On Twitter, follow @JoinOpenClass or search for #OpenClass.

1. If an institution has no affiliation with Google Apps for Education, is there a hidden cost?

Answer: No, OpenClass will be free for all institutions. We made Pearson OpenClass available to Google Apps schools first because we felt those schools would be most receptive to a cloud-delivered LMS. As we evolve, we will be making OpenClass available to all institutions.

2. What are the requirements from Google, deploying through GoogleApps for Education? -

Answer: The only requirement is to have Google Apps deployed on campus. From there, your Google Administrator can adopt OpenClass via the Google Apps Marketplace with no additional requirements.

a. Is Google Apps required to sign up for Open Class?

Answer: During the beta phase, OpenClass is only available to Google Apps for EDU institutions. But early next year we will extend access to all institutions (Google Apps or not) and to adoption by individual professors.

b. Can a University authenticate through something beside Google? -

Answer: When we broaden availability, we will also extend the options for authentication, including industry standard solutions for LDAP authentication and single sign on.

c. Does that make their Google email their primary account?

Answer: I'm not sure how to answer this. Google Apps for Education provides a single sign on solution for institutions that allows faculty and students to use their institutional credentials as their "primary account". Does that answer the question?

5. What does the Assessment platform look like?

Answer: OpenClass supports a variety of assessment tools, including gradable discussions, online assignment submission and an exam tool which accepts import of QTI. Check out our demo at Educause. We will be posting videos of those online the week after.

6. What plans are there for backing up course content and archiving?

Answer: All course content is backed up and archived.

7. Is Google going to offer packages for additional support?

Answer: Pearson will offer a number of custom commercial support options - including a 24/7 helpdesk, operational client services and strategic account management.

Some answers for Josh and IHE...

2011-10-17T09:29:00.001-07:00

@JoshKim posted some questions for us relative to our newly announced #OpenClass. We certainly don’t intend to be frustrating and we’re excited to answer questions and be clear about what we know and what we don’t. It’s still early in the evolution of OpenClass. The response to our Beta announcement has been great – and we know there are lots of questions about the nature of this solution and how it will roll out over the coming months. We’d like to take a moment to answer some of those questions, and we know that others still remain. Please join us at EDUCAUSE Booth #1210, email us at info@JoinOpenClass.com or post your questions to @askopenclass

1. What kind of technical and instructional support will be provided with OpenClass?

ANSWER: OpenClass is designed to be a self-service learning environment with a robust knowledge base, support forums and instructional videos. Of course, we know that self-service isn’t the right solution for everyone – so there are also a variety of custom options available to deliver 24/7 email, phone and chat support to administrators, professor and students.

2. What programmatic options do schools have to integrate OpenClass with our student information systems, portal systems, custom authentication systems, and other enterprise systems?

ANSWER: We are committed to providing a platform that is open to integration at many levels – including student information systems, content solutions and third party learning applications. To us, this means a focus on industry standards (IMS, SCORM, etc.) and delivery of a diverse set of tools that promote the extension OpenClass by our educational and technology partners. Watch for these solutions (and many more) with the release of the OpenClass API Program later this year.

3. Why would a company that sells two platforms - Pearson Learning Studio (powered by eCollege) and Fronter - offer a competitive platform (or is it a much lesser capable and feature rich version) for free?

ANSWER: Pearson LearningStudio and OpenClass serve different markets. Pearson LearningStudio is the de-factor standard for fully online programs at scale, allowing programs a great deal of control over the academic experience. By contrast, OpenClass is designed for the campus market, where curriculum decisions are made one professor at a time. We understand the needs of these markets are quite distinct and have made OpenClass with that in mind. We recognize that there is more than one set of institutional requirements around the world for a LMS. OpenClass complements Pearson’s other platform offerings very effectively.

4. What granular customization controls will the institution, the faculty and the OpenClass end-user have to configure it as a campus-wide service, giving instructors and end-users ample room for personalization, sharing and openness, while preserving student privacy, intellectual property, copyright and institutional policies?

ANSWER: In many ways, we have patterned the OpenClass offering to match the Google Apps for Education model. Like GAE, OpenClass allows campuses to brand and restyle their OpenClass experience. Features that are clear improvements to the platform will be made immediately to take advantage of the speed that cloud development affords. Significant feature changes, or the implementation of new features, will be released in tandem with their “classic” behavior to allow users to choose their preference. New capabilities will be offered on an opt-in basis for campuses to allow them to manage their change processes. And, all participants in OpenClass have access to a set of privacy tools that control display of their personal profile and online status.

5. Free-hosting sounds great, but at what price? What sorts of idiosyncrasies and limitations will this cloud-based LMS have?

ANSWER: Again, we’ve patterned the OpenClass offering to match the Google Apps for Education model. Beyond that, we have some flexibility in our hosting strategy that we will use to adapt to the requirements of our early partners to ensure OpenClass is attractive to a broad swath of institutions.

6. Where is OpenClass' service level agreement?

ANSWER: We will provide a level of service consistent with the high level of service that we provide on all of our other SaaS applications. If additional service levels (whether guarantees or help desk or technical services) beyond what is offered with OpenClass are required by an institution those will be made available on a commercial basis.

7. Do we have back-end access to our institutional OpenClass system and data?

ANSWER: Yes, institutions will have access to a rich data set within OpenClass at no cost. They will also be able to access for fee services from Pearson for expert analytics consulting and data analysis tools.

8. Will Pearson provide independent instances of OpenClass for each college and university? Joined tenancy SaaS are absurd, even when free, we need a private cloud.

ANSWER: OpenClass is offered as a single instance, multi-tenancy solution. We have considerable experience running these types of environments scaled to millions of students, and have an excellent security and privacy record. We believe in the power and efficiency of cloud delivery as we use with most of our other products and platforms, and as is used by Google, Amazon, SalesForce and other leading companies.

9. Our institutions must retain full say on how and when our LMS is upgraded and outfitted with new features and services (or not). Will we have full SysAdmin control?

ANSWER: We believe there are many institutions that find LMS upgrades disruptive, unproductive nuisances, and far from seeking control, would love to see them never occur again. As a cloud based offering, OpenClass has the ability to evolve rapidly and incrementally – without the need for large-scale upgrades or major upheavals in user experience. With that said, we also recognize that it’s important to allow institutions and professors to have control over when and how things do change in the learning environment. For that reason, many of the updates we release in OpenClass will be done through an “opt in” process. We’ll let customers know when new features are available so they can try them out and ultimately decide when they’re ready to adopt it.

10. What IMS and other open standards does OpenClass support? We would need to easily ingest years’ worth of LMS course sites and educational materials.

ANSWER: We know the challenges and benefits that come with integration – and we are committed to supporting industry standards (like IMS) that make these conversations easier for us all. Today, we support import of exams via QTI and the import of course content from a variety of learning platforms. But that is just the beginning. We are also actively working toward tools that allow SIS integration via LIS 2.0, tool integration using LTI, and content import and delivery through Common Cartridge and SCORM.

11. We would also need an exit strategy, and be able to take our stuff with us should OpenClass become inadequate for us. Again, support for IMS open standards are key.

ANSWER: OpenClass will support standards based export.

12. Seamless out-of-the-box OpenClass integration with Google Apps is great, but that's already possible with Blackboard Learn and the free open-source Bboogle add-on from Northwestern, and Blackboard Learn itself is slated to have built-in Google Apps integration in 2012. What other key integrations are there?

ANSWER: We’ve built our integration through a close collaboration with Google and design partner institutions that have adopted Google Apps for Education. We invite interested institutions to take a look and see for themselves the unique approach we’ve taken and learn more about how we’re continually advancing this integration.

13. Blackboard Learn gives us a rather mature set of free, commercial, open-source, and built-in integration and add-ons that extent the Blackboard Learn teaching and learning environment. Third-party tools and integrations like plagiarism detection, voice tools, web conferencing systems, PhotoRosters, lecture capture systems, multiple publisher connections (not just Pearson), video distribution systems (like ShareStream and Kaltura, i.e. not just YouTube), text messaging systems, student response systems, personal learning networks, electronic portfolio systems, tutoring systems, student retention software, ad nauseam. Hundreds of LMS extensions, a smorgasbord of extensions. Many of these are also available for Desire2Learn, Moodle, Sakai and others. How can OpenClass be extended?

ANSWER: We are really excited about all the ways our partners will extend the features of OpenClass through integration. Over the next few months, we will be rolling out the OpenClass API Program. This rich set of tools and services will be available to both institutions and third parties at no cost – allowing for the rapid evolution of add on solutions available in OpenClass!

14. LMS mobile apps are a must, so we would assume OpenClass has them for all major mobile platforms: generic (but elegant and fluid) Mobile Web, iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile?

ANSWER: Pearson is committed to mobile for OpenClass and to offering apps to institutions for free. In addition, we’ll be opening up our mobile API’s for intuitions to advance and customize as they choose.

15. Is OpenClass really meant to be an enterprise LMS? A replacement for Blackboard or Moodle or Canvas?

ANSWER: OpenClass is a full featured learning environment. However, unlike commercially driven LMSs, there are few barriers to trying it out before committing to it as a replacement for other campus systems. Since there is no money to be paid and no servers to be acquired, we expect many institutions to use OpenClass on a pilot or partial basis and then decide for themselves whether it has the features that they want for all or part of their campus.

16. … the yearly licensing costs for an LMS are actually the smallest part of the investment any institution makes in our LMS deployment.

ANSWER: True. But hosting and licensing together are a considerable part of the investment, and both of these are free with OpenClass.

Colt '45

2011-10-16T16:00:00.000-07:00

Enjoyed Waiting for Disruption post about #Open Class by @KateMfD.

She had a couple nice things to say about us:

This week’s excitement has been the announcement by Pearson of their shakeup of the LMS experience... @Sannier brings serious university research and administrative experience to Pearson’s push into the edtech market, and I’m confident that he knows what he’s talking about when he says that the standard LMS has “only ever been an ineffective administrative tool … it’s closed, it’s clunky to use, it’s costly.”

And this is one of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me:

...his claim is a bit of a heartstopper for all the institutions who’ve woken up contractually handcuffed to the corpse of one or other dead LMS, for several years to come. It’s such a bold prediction that I’ve been distracted by visions of @Sannier delicately blowing the powder residue from the barrel of his Colt 45 as he enters the darkened saloon where the frightened townsfolk have been cowering. Yup, the LMS as we knew it won’t be bothering us no more, no sir.

Though she did have some nice stuff to say, its clear reading her post I that while Kate is intrigued by the idea of OpenClass, she's skeptical we will do what we say and frustrated that we haven't shared more details. In fact she wonders why we announced it at all, until it was open to everyone.

This coming week at Educause we'll be demoing the first version of OpenClass and I'll be talking about it in my talk and in Google's booth. We'll capture the talk and post it too, so if you aren't in Philly this week, you will still get a chance to see it if you're interested. We'll be posting captures of the demos too.

OpenClass will also become available this week for download by Google Apps for Education institutions, through the Google Apps Marketplace. That will let us grow the number of institutions we've been working with beyond the our design partner institutions and systems that have been helping us so far.

We don't mean to be frustrating, we're just trying to proceed carefully. We want to make sure we create an offering that works for a broad swath of education and is attractive to institutions, faculty, students, and educational content/technology innovators.

Thought it has benefitted from years of Pearson technology investments, OpenClass itself is less than a year old. We started in January with an idea of our own, and went around to 50 or so institutions around the country, talking to their CIO's, presidents, provosts and academic technology teams to learn more. Everywhere we went, the ideas behind OpenClass got an enthusiastic reception.

In July, we deployed the OC to our design partners and we've been honing since, preparing to support the next wave of schools. We chose the Google institutions because we felt those schools would be most receptive to our free, cloud based offering -- in many ways we've structured the OpenClass offering around the Google Apps for Education model so it will be easy for those schools to begin using it.

In the first half of next year we want to continue to widen the community of institutions using OpenClass, and to expand OpenClass beyond just institutions to general availability. We will also be working with our growing community to understand:

how to best extend the social learning experience and
how to best structure the LearningExchange, to make it a useful place for professors and other course creators to invent or discover best practices, to discuss and improve them, and to adopt and adapt them into their own courses easily.
how to best support the RESTful web services that underlay all of OpenClass's user experience and make them open to developers

Because I'm very interested in seeing OpenClass grow, I'm hoping enough folks will have patience with us while we prove our value proposition and grow our community. We are trying hard to listen.

OpenClass Announced Today!!

2011-10-13T11:45:00.001-07:00

An exciting day here in Denver as the first coverage on our new, FREE LMS offering OpenClass broke this morning with articles in the Chronicle, Inside Higher Ed, MarketWatch,and Campus Technology, among many others.

Loved Lev Gonick's quote:

I think that [OpenClass] really marks another, and important, nail in the coffin of the proprietary last-generation LMS

Also loved Kevin Roberts quote:

We truly believe OpenClass is a disruptive technology in Education.

Pearson is tweeting about the OC from @JoinOpenClass. The hash tag #OpenClass has been getting a goodly amount of activity today as well. For example:

Stoked beyond belief. New Pearson product #OpenClass is going to blow up the higher ed world. This is gonna be huge!

Watch out Blackboard!

Freer than Moodle!

Beginning of the cloud based edtech revolution.

Noticed there was some attempt by Blackboard evangelists to try to equate CourseSites with OpenClass, but make no mistake -- when it comes to free, OpenClass is in a class by itself. Blackboard's CourseSites is confined to individual professors with a limited number of courses. OpenClass supports whole institutions at no cost, a thing Blackboard charges dearly for.

It's a new day and our team couldn't be more fired up to bring some disruption into this marketspace.

Thanks to Pearson for backing our play.

Last Post

2010-02-27T13:37:00.000-08:00

About 1700 days ago, I put up my first blog post prior to taking the job as University Technology Officer at Arizona State University. Today marks my last post from that position.

In April, I'm leaving ASU to join Pearson eCollege as vice president of product marketing. It's a great spot for me I think, and I'm really excited to return to the private sector, but I've certainly enjoyed my time here at ASU. I believe that the UTO has done more good than harm during the time I've spent here, the result of the hard work and dedication of the nearly 400 men and women I've been privileged to work beside.
One of the weird things about keeping a blog is that you can remember with nearly perfect fidelity what you were thinking years into the past. And on that July day in 2005, I remember writing on my lakeside porch, imagining what difference technology might make in supporting President Crow's vision for the New American University:

Next month I start a new job at Arizona State University as University Technology Officer. I'll be working out of the Office of the President to develop a long range technology plan in support of President Crow's vision for the New American University. Over the next six months, I will be working with folks throughout the University to identify ways to apply new technologies to improve ASU's academic, administrative and research environments.

The ensuing 40,920 hours certainly haven't diminished my belief in the accelerating power of technological progress. In the past 243 weeks, despite the worst economic downturn in our lifetimes, we've seen all sorts of progress:

Google Apps and netbooks, Iphones and Droids,

Ipads, Kindles, and LED TV's

Pandora, YouTube, the Wii,

Amazon EC2 and Avatar 3D

So the technological goose hasn't stopped giving in the past 2,455,200 minutes. Things are still tearing along at Moore's Law pace. Storage and bandwidth costs continue to fall, processor speeds continue to double every 2 years. Five years ago I hoped that these technologies might:

...do more than streamline the University's back office administrative processes. These dramatic changes in communications, and the capture, storage, retrieval, and presentation of information can be used to enhance every student's academic experience while at the same time lowering costs and increasing the university's reach...There is an opportunity for ASU to be a leader in the application of these technologies to the academic enterprise.

So, how'd we do? How much of the last 147,312,000 seconds did we spend delivering on that potential? Obviously, the bulk of the effort went to delivering the hundreds of individual services -- hosting servers and data, patching operating systems, upgrading machines, helping with questions, loading paper -- all the thankless but vital day to day chores that make a modern university hum. But in four years, we also made more than our fair share of change.

Looking back, the changes have been mostly good, some promising, and one not-so-good.

First the good:

We saved ASU's back office from imminent collapse, and did so in far less time and for far less money than any enterprise our size has ever done before.
We led the way in bringing cloud computing to universities as the first major institution to partner with Google on Google Apps for Education.
We successfully pruned and concentrated ASU's web services to make MyASU the number one web destination for SunDevils, with over 1,000,000 hits a week.
We helped Provost Capaldi develop and deploy eAdvisor, which has already helped increase ASU student retention.
Working closely with our partner Qwest, we increased wireless coverage to nearly 100%, including the residence halls; network reliability now approaches 99.9% availability.
Working closely with our partner Perceptis, we brought ASU 24x7x365 online technology support which has dramatically increased customer satisfaction and productivity.
We successfully mediated 100% of ASU's university-scheduled classrooms at all 4 campuses.
Led by John Rome and his team, we've helped ASU make better decisions because the data to support those decisions is easily available through ASU's industry leading dashboard infrastructure.
We radically changed ASU's technology strategy, and repositioned ASU as a technology leader among academic enterprises.

Then, the promising:

Through MyApps, we're making some 250 software applications available over the web to faculty, staff and students wherever in the world they choose to work. With nearly 10,000 users a week, MyASU is a growing resource for the ASU community. The "AppStore" release this summer will make MyApps even easier to use and bring application streaming of ASU's most popular apps.

Through Server/Storage on Demand, we're making it easier for faculty and staff to put up secure servers or gain access to terabytes of backed up, secure storage. With hundreds of servers under management, this resource is making ASU nimbler and more secure. This spring will see the release of a new Server/Storage on Demand interface in MyASU and a partnership with Amazon EC2 that will make it faster and cheaper to get access to scalable compute resources.

Finally, the bad:

Certainly no one at ASU wants to return to August of 2007, least of all me. While all the other major systems deployed without disruption, we stumbled hard out of the gate with payroll. While paychecks to the large majority of ASU staff were issued without a hiccup, we didn't handle the ones that weren't issued smoothly. It caused a lot of turmoil and disruption to the campus for several weeks.
Everyone has an opinion of course, but if I had it to do over again, I'd be less ambitious. Changing not only the system that computed pay, but also the payment period, the rules for entering time proved and a host of other procedure changes proved to be more change than we could collectively handle. On reflection, if we'd settled for replacing the old with the new, we'd have got through without a scratch.
While I regret not scaling back the attempt, I will always be proud of the dedication and skill shown by the ASU staff that worked tirelessly to quickly restore order, in a matter of weeks, in the face of a community's outrage and with no prospect of it's gratitude. They didn't have to do it, but they did and the university advanced over a hurdle because of them. They are the unsung heroes of the Summer of 2007.

All in all, a reasonable way to spend four years. I remain a firm believer in ASU's mission and think it will come out of its current fiscal stress still firmly fixed on its goals. I've made many friends here in the desert and will always remember this time fondly. I look forward to working with many of you in the future. Education's future is intertwined with technology's now, and I can't wait to see how the next 10 years play out.

What's next?

Good Idea?

2010-01-12T03:55:00.000-08:00

I was talking with Emily Dalton-Smith, Dawn Feldman and Phil Regier yesterday about all things ASU Online. One of the things we discussed was that, for online students, any and all services they are offered have to be available without ever coming to an ASU campus, an obvious but often overlooked fact. Some of these services, such as enrollment and registration, are already available online 24/7 through myASU. But we were talking about some that aren't, like for example Career Counseling.

So we start brainstorming, as that group is wont to do, when what I thought was a really good idea emerged. Essentially a mashup between an online career site -- say Monster.com -- and student profile information, resulting in a daily feed of job postings suited to the student's major, coursework and interests. So right there, in MyASU, from day one (even as you're applying perhaps), ASU would be showing a student a steady stream of jobs that their training and interests was preparing them for.

Ahh, but wait. There's more. Now mash up against an idea from Pandora. No, not the planet from Avatar. The music site. The one that feeds you a steady stream of new music based on a match against your interests. With every song, they ask for a thumbs up/thumbs down, and use that info to guide the music they send in the future. In the proposed context of course, students would give a thumbs up/thumbs down to the the days' job listings, and we (or Monster) could use that information to better understand what jobs interest the student (and prospective graduate) in the future.

I'm thinking this is a career service that would get our students thinking about careers early, help them flesh out their ideas about what kinds of careers they are preparing for, and get them thinking about what separates a good job from a bad one for them.

Good idea?

Wile E. Wireless

2009-10-14T03:03:00.000-07:00

The State Press recently released the article "Official: ASU wireless network open to hackers" in its October 9, 2009 edition. The article makes some good points on the importance of knowing how to protect yourself and your personal information online but may lead readers to believe that ASU's wireless network isn't safe to use. I'd like to re-assure the ASU community that every precaution is taken to ensure the safety of users on ASU's wireless network.

ASU's wireless network allows students, faculty and staff to connect to the Internet, My ASU, Blackboard and other ASU resources from anywhere, anytime. Because ASU's wireless network doesn't require a password, it is considered "unsecure," but this is no different than any other public Wi-Fi spot like your favorite coffee shop or cafe.

In general, wireless networks are typically less secure than wired networks, so there are precautions users should take with any wireless connection, even in one's home.

There will always be a Wile E. Coyote looking for a way to outfox users online, and this is true at just about any Wi-Fi location. The important thing to remember is that instead of getting scared, you simply need to use wireless networks safely while keeping your best interests in mind, which means knowing when and where to access personal information online and knowing how to avoid common trickery like phishing and email scams.

For more on information security at ASU, visit http://getprotected.asu.edu

As always, your comments and suggestions are welcome.

My wiki would rather play shuffleboard.

2009-05-14T06:08:00.000-07:00

ASU has outgrown its current blog and wiki service, the one we started as a beta back in February 2006. That's close to age 65 in blog and wiki years.

Although many students and faculty members have used this service successfully over the past three years, we're finding it hard to keep up with superior external services like Blogger, Twitter and Google Sites.

These newer services offer improved editing tools, more intuitive interfaces, customizable templates, enhanced multimedia features, upgraded commenting and collaboration features, better group blogging controls, and the ability to post to your blog from your mobile device.

So rather than spend money while continuing to fall farther behind, we're considering retiring ASU's blog and wiki service due to the small number of users and the existence of good, free alternatives like the ones listed above.

I'd like to hear your thoughts and notions about this possibility.

Would it inconvenience you if ASU discontinued this particular service?

How important is it for you to preserve the contents of your existing ASU blog or wiki? Would you be willing to migrate the content yourself into a new blog or wiki if we could show you how, or would you want ASU to do it for you?

How important is it to you that ASU provide blog and wiki services directly or would external services like Blogger or Google Sites be sufficient for your uses?

Please email me with your comments at uto@asu.edu or post them below.

Please Welcome ASU's Newest Freshman to Campus: the Kindle

2009-05-06T01:32:00.000-07:00

For most college students, it's almost a rite-of-passage to spend big bucks at the bookstore. But with advancements in online publishing, digital textbooks are no longer out of the question. Not only are they cost effective, they're convenient, searchable, environmentally friendly, and may even incorporate rich media, giving students the ability to both read about a subject and maybe watch a video about it too.

And yet, even with all their advantages, traditional paper-based books still rule at universities around the country. What gives? Well, in my view, it's a complicated interaction between publishers, faculty, and students all caught in a 20th century business model that's yet to give way.

But all that may be changing, and soon.

Beginning in Fall 2009, ASU is partnering with Amazon to try out the Kindle DX, Amazon's latest digital reading device, to replace traditional textbooks in the classroom. Selected classes of students will begin using the Kindle instead of paper books, and we'll be comparing how they fare relative to their paper book wielding counterparts.

For example, thanks to a proposal from Dr. Ted Humphrey, Presidents Professor in ASU's Barrett Honors College, a group of students enrolled in this fall's Human Event course will receive their textbooks not as bound books but on a brand new Kindle DX instead. The Human Event is a two-semester course required of all Barrett students that covers a wide range of material from about 50 different sources.

ASU is actively working with Amazon to find those courses of study for which the Kindle is a good alternative to traditional texts. In those areas, Kindle delivered e-books would provide students with a significant cost savings and provide them with an additional flexible learning tool. In addition to cutting textbook costs and reducing the weight in students' backpacks, digital textbooks are available for download wirelessly and reduce the amount of paper used to print and distribute textbooks.

Electronic texts provide the capabilities that today's students have come to expect--they're searchable, flexible, easy to annotate, and less expensive than traditional texts. I'm pumped to work with Amazon and to see how the Kindle can help the University accelerate the adoption of electronic textbooks into a variety of courses.

ASU is one of five universities participating with Amazon in the Kindle pilot. The others are Princeton University, Case Western Reserve University, Reed College, and Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.

As always, your thoughts, notions, questions and comments are welcome.

Technology as a Sixth Sense

2009-04-21T02:09:00.000-07:00

Imagine picking up your favorite cereal brand at your local grocer and projecting information about that cereal onto the box - information like what kind of impact the cereal has on the environment, where it was made, etc.

Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry of MIT are making this possible through the use of what they call the Sixth Sense, technology that connects the world to the Internet and delivers information to you about the things you're interested in.

The Sixth Sense (via a camera and mini-projector slung around your neck) recognizes objects around you, then projects information about that object onto any surface - your hand, that cereal box I mentioned earlier, your best friend's white t-shirt. Finger sensors allow you to control and access this information in a way that is most desirable to you.

They did a great presentation on it at TED. You really have to see it to believe it.

Not sure what time it is? Trace a circle on your wrist for an instant watch. Want to take a photo? Frame the image with your hands and the Sixth Sense will snap a pic. On your way to the airport? Take a look at your boarding pass for real time flight info.

Just when you think we're out of ideas, the exponential future pokes its head out...

Confiker Worm Warning

2009-03-26T03:30:00.000-07:00

Wanted to make everyone aware of the Confiker (or Downadup) virus that's rumored to strike on April 1st. The Confiker worm disables Windows security features and can compromise an infected computer so that it can be used to attack others. The virus can gather personal and other forms of information as well.

To protect your personal and home machines:

Ensure virus protection and all security patches for Microsoft are up-to-date on your machine. Turn on your Windows firewall or download one such as Comodo

Run a malware scanning tool (such as Malwarebytes or Spybot Search and Destroy ) on your system.

If you have a current non-supported Microsoft Operating system (such as a trial period OS) and/or virus protection product, please purchase supported versions.

Members of the ASU community can visit MyApps for free anti-virus software (VirusScan).

To read more about this virus, visit ASU's Get Protected site or this article posted on CNET News.

Communicating System Outages

2009-03-10T02:49:00.000-07:00

In my last post I promised I'd tell you about the new mechanisms ASU is putting into place to improve the University's ability to notify the community of disruption in service.

If our mail is any indicator, these kinds of notifications are important to you. When systems are going to be changed or we have outages planned, you tell us you like to know well in advance. When we experience unplanned outages, you tell us that you want to know what's wrong and when it'll be fixed.

We've done some things already -- our System Health page is well visited and moved us forward in terms of keeping you informed about planned outages. The emergency notices we put on My ASU have helped a lot of you know when systems are out and when we can expect them back.

But they don't always work. Sometimes when we have extreme outages, like say the Internet is unavailable or power is lost to the data center, we can't get to System Health and My ASU to update them, and even if we could, sometimes you can't get to them to find out what's going on.

So this month, right after St. Patrick's Day, we're releasing a set of new improvements that we hope will make you better informed in the event of an emergency.

First, System Health is being moved off-site. We're moving it to our Denver facility to improve its availability in those times when major portions of our infrastructure are unavailable.

Second, we're expanding our outage notifications. In addition to announcing outage information on System Health, all unplanned outages will also be announced through a notification group associated with our new ASU Alert service provided by e2Campus. This new service will allow members of the ASU community to receive a text message and/or email message whenever System Health turns red. We are pre-subscribing members of the Outages@asu.edu mailing list to this service, but if you are not already subscribed, you can self-subscribe to ASU Alert. Click here for complete instructions on signing up.

Third, all planned outages and system changes will be announced through UTO's new Change Management System. For authorized users, the Change Management System provides a complete history of proposed and implemented changes. Our system was designed by the Communications Subcommittee of the UTC. Again, if you are already a member of the Outages@asu.edu list, you will be pre-subscribed to the system. If you are not a member and wish to subscribe, please send a note to sub-outages@asu.edu.

We're continuing to work on reliability and we hope not to have to use these notification systems as often as we have of late. But we know that when we do have a system disruption, you want to know as much information as you can about what's wrong and when we'll be back online. We're hoping these changes we're making will help with that.

As always, your comments and suggestions are welcome, particularly the constructive ones.

System Outages Explained

2009-03-05T01:36:00.000-08:00

If you've been at ASU this semester, you've probably been inconvenienced by one of the five major system outages we've experienced so far this term. And as you might imagine, I've received more than a few emails from concerned members of the ASU Community expressing their frustration with being unable to access Blackboard, or My ASU or the various other services that have been affected in the past several weeks.

For example:

I am writing as an ASU graduate student, enrolled in an online 8-week, 3-hour graduate course this semester. The repeated system outages, including the one this morning -- unable to get into Blackboard ... AGAIN ... unable to get into "System Health" to find out what's going on and how long it will take to correct -- has left me frustrated beyond words.

Or this one from an ASU professor:

This week, for the second time this semester, we have had large numbers of students unable to log in to Blackboard in order to take their weekly quiz. The problems seem to have been intermittent, but at a rough guess I would say that about 20 percent of the class has been affected.

I'd like everyone at ASU to know that here at the UTO, we all understand the frustration and lack of productivity that these outages cost and on behalf of myself and our team I apologize for the poor system performance we've had this term. This is not the level of service that you have come to expect from ASU and none of us are satisfied with our performance so far this term.

Given how central information technology is to the life of the University, we know that anything short of 100% uptime has become unacceptable. Our team works hard towards that goal, and we treat every system outage as a critical event. So we feel very keenly the amount of disruption that recent system instability has caused this term and we're committed to correcting it.

Since January 1st, we've had five major incidents:

Incident 1: On the afternoon of January 21/22, DARS degree audits and course catalog searches were unusually and inconveniently slow.

Incident 2: From the evening of Feb. 1st to the morning of Feb 3rd, Internet access from ASU was unreliable.

Incident 3: On February 5th, wireless access in a portion of the Tempe campus was unavailable. There was also a one hour interruption to My ASU and Citrix.

Incident 4: For two hours on the morning of February 16th, Internet access from ASU was unreliable.

Incident 5: On February 25th, many of ASU's Web services were inaccessible for most of the day.

To a user experiencing these issues -- even one who regularly visits our System Health site for updates and information -- it must seem that all these outages must arise from some common cause. Our graduate student writes:

What's even more troubling is that no one can explain what the problem is, or why it continues to happen, or what the plan is to get the University beyond this. Additionally, there's been no communication on Blackboard or via email to students with any information.

While the professor understands that people are working hard, but makes it clear that we can't confuse effort with results:

I have generally found your staff to be knowledgeable and hardworking, so I am sure that this down time has been hard on them. I have no idea what the technical problems are behind these time out and login errors. But these issues really do create havoc in this kind of course and make it impossible to keep to the weekly class schedule.

As tempting as it is to think all these incidents are manifestations of the same thing, each of the 5 incidents we've experienced this term has arisen from a different proximate cause:

Incident 1 arose from an unusually large demand for DARS and Catalog services, a demand far greater than in prior terms.

Incident 2 was caused by a latent defect in our border firewall, which a rogue server exploited successfully overloaded the ASU network. Working with CISCO engineers, our team worked around the clock to identify and successfully correct the problem, but only after many hours of interruption.

Incident 3 was the result of a flood in BAC.

Incident 4 was caused by a mistake made by ASU's Internet service provider that affected all of its clients.

Incident 5 was caused by a failure in the UPS backup system that protects the systems in the University data centers in the event of power outages. The resulting hard reset of the systems in the data center made service restoration complex -- it took more than 8 hours to rebuild the systems and restore services.

But even if each incident has a separate technical cause, surely all of them are evidence of incompetence? With all these problems, surely its a sign that the people running these systems don't know what they are about?

It's certainly a sentiment that more than one writer has communicated as an outgrowth of their frustration. And it's understandable. But understandable or not, it isn't true.

Having witnessed first hand the level of dedication shown by the ASU technical professionals who design and maintain our systems and who scramble out of bed in the middle of the night or spend their weekends responding to the equipment failures, power outages, floods, denial of service attacks and hundreds of other failure modes that information systems are heir to, one thing I can assure is that at ASU we don't lack for competent, dedicated, hard-working people committed to providing the information services the University requires.

Unfortunately, despite the dedication and skill of our systems people, to quote the t-shirt, "Stuff Happens." And when it happens, we are either in position with redundant equipment and services that allow us to recover without interruption -- or, if not, we have to rely on people to put the pieces back together again. While our investments in redundant equipment, our 24x7 monitoring, and the expertise and diligence of the ASU staff that oversee our systems successfully protect us from many different sources of outage, we remain vulnerable to system failures along many dimensions.

Over the long run, our overall systems performance is between 2 and 3 "nines." That means they are available a little more than 99% of the time. Sounds pretty good until you realize that 1% of a year is 87 hours. And that doesn't count planned outage windows. Include those and the number of off-line hours gets even worse. 90 hours a year may not seem like much, but if one of those hours is when you have a class that needs to take a quiz on Blackboard, its completely unacceptable.

So what does it take to achieve higher levels of reliability? What do we have to do to move our systems from 2 "nines" to 5?

The answer, unfortunately, lies in additional investments, which is not what anyone wants to hear during the present economic situation. ASU's primary data centers are more than 25 years old, and while they have served the University well, they were built for a day when IT was a luxury, not a necessity. We've helped the situation over the years, with some strategic investments and by working with strategic partners like Google and CedarCrestone. Because data services are our partners' core business and they operate at scales much greater than ours, they've helped us increase our levels of reliability. We've also migrated some of the services we run ourselves from our older data centers to some of ASU's newer facilities. But in doing so we've had to be conservative in our spending, moving gradually over time as hardware ages, to consolidate servers and storage and simplify their delivery.

And up until this term, we'd been pretty lucky. Term over term, our reliability was increasing. But clearly, this term, our lucky streak has run out.

I want you to know we're doing more than waiting for our luck to change.

The president has challenged UTO to quickly put a plan together to get us a couple more "nines" of reliability. We are hard at work on that plan now. It will suggest accelerating migration out of the oldest data centers, moving additional services to strategic partners, improving power redundancy and backup. And obviously, it will be constrained by the realities of our fiscal situation. But I'm confident we will get the support we need to make things better for our community.

In my next post, I'll tell you about some systems we're going to release this month to improve our ability to communicate with you during those times when the information systems are having trouble. We've learned a lot from our recent history and I think we have a good plan to make things better.

As always, we're interested in your comments on these issues, and any others. At the UTO, we're committed to overcoming these recent issues and steadily improving system reliability. We're sincerely sorry for the inconvenience when things don't work right.

Thanks for your patience. We don't take it for granted.

Raving Fans...Six Months In

2009-01-26T04:09:00.000-08:00

According to Ken Blanchard, the way to measure whether your service is any good or not is to find out how many raving fans you have. The more raving fans, the better the service.

When I announced to the UTO team at the beginning of this year that our goal was to build raving fans for technology services here at ASU, I told them we were halfway done. We'd managed to get everyone raving, now we just had to make them fans.

Getting raving fans for technology services anywhere is a tall order. And getting them right after an ERP implementation is a taller order still. So when we set out to improve ASU's technology services, it seemed like an almost insurmountable task, and we still have an awfully long way to go.

But we've taken a lot of steps and a large group of people is working very hard to get us there. Along the way, we made some customers pretty happy.

In August 2007, ASU partnered with the Cleveland-based firm PerceptIS to further advance its level of customer service and support to the ASU Community via the ASU Help Desk. Thanks to efforts led by Russ Seiter of PerceptIS and Sarah Hughes and Mary Covington of ASU, the ASU Help Desk is now available on a 24x7 basis and offers easy-to-find, reliable assistance to anyone affiliated with the University. Russ, Sarah, and Mary worked together to bring industry best practices to ASU while defining new standards and procedures to better meet ASU's growing size and service demands.

An average of 500 cases are handled each day through the ASU Help Desk, with an average time to speak to a call center agent at less than sixty seconds. Additional services including a call back feature; online chat; and a desktop remote agent, which allows Help Desk personnel to directly manage a caller's machine to both teach users & resolve problems simultaneously, have been added to make finding and receiving technical assistance even easier.

The ASU Help Desk currently serves all four campuses including the ASU Human Resources department.

For the Fall '08 term, the Help Desk successfully resolved cases 93% of the time, with the most common calls concerning password resets, phone number requests, and accessing Blackboard classes. Customers are also asked to take a satisfaction survey at the completion of problem calls when a ticket has been submitted, providing valuable information that the Help Desk uses to continuously enhance performance.

Here's what customers are saying:

A heartfelt thank you to all UTO staff, whose customer oriented skills made the request process pleasant and enjoyable. The knowledge and courtesy demonstrated for all the staff is notorious and very appreciated.

Great customer support. Thanks

Great job, timely service. Please keep this personal touch -- it is needed on this campus!

Everyone that helped me was thoughtful, kind and courteous. My case was resolved very quickly. Thank you very much!

The speedy response to my training request is much appreciated. Interaction with service providers has always been very professional and expedient.

As usual, the service I received was prompt, polite, and totally satisfactory.

Everyone was more than helpful, very knowledgeable, patient and resolved my question much more quickly than I had anticipated. Thanks.

The help desk staff were very good. They were polite, sympathetic, competent and my interaction with them was excellent and enjoyable.

Your customer service is EXCELLENT! Thank you!

PerceptIS updates ASUs System Health page when necessary. The System Health page communicates system status information, including planned and unplanned outages, to the rest of the University. Average Help Desk wait times and total calls are posted there daily. If you'd like to learn more about problem reports managed by the Help Desk, check out the link to the All CRM Cases dashboard on the right side of the System Health page.

As always, don't forget to send us your comments, concerns, even horror stories and tell us where we can improve - it's the only way we can keep getting better.

Nudge

2008-12-18T03:18:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.

I like it for two reasons: first, it feels to me like a direct application of computer user interface design to life, and second, I think it has a lot of applications for ASU's Web design and the ways that Web design can influence people to take advantage of what the University offers.

Simply put, the big idea in Nudge is the same as something my favorite band Rush used to say, if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. It's just that the choice you make is one that someone else has provided for you.

For example, road lines may be painted closer together as drivers approach a dangerous curve or potential safety hazard; by arranging the lines closer together, the driver is given the illusion that he/she is driving at a faster speed than he/she actually is, nudging the driver to hit the brakes and slow down.

Another example Thaler and Sunstein give is cafeteria design. By placing healthier food choices, like the salad bar, at the front of a cafeteria, a school might try to nudge students into making smarter diet choices.

This idea is really familiar to user interface designers. Every time a dialog box pops up with OK and Cancel, one of them is highlighted, making it the default choice. Most of us have gotten used to clicking right past all of the Continues and OKs and Accepts that stand between us and getting our work done. In the process, we agree to terms and conditions, install useful pieces of software, and in general make all sorts of tacit and uninformed decisions that user interface designers have in essence made for us. It's a lot of power to give over to someone else, but there's no loss of freedom. You're free to be as careful as you want and make every decision exactly the way you'd like. It's just that most of us have long ago reached a decision saturation point and so tend to reserve our careful judgment for fewer and fewer things.

Which brings us to University design and the Web. By carefully crafting default positions, we could achieve all sorts of goals that might improve student success and retention. Say a University believed that having students stay in residence halls on campus was a major factor in improving student success and graduation rates. According to the Nudge philosophy, an effective way to dramatically increase the number of students choosing to stay on campus would be to, by default, assign them to a residence hall immediately upon acceptance of their application. There's no loss of freedom since a student could easily change their residence hall assignment or even apply for an exception to live off-campus. But every student would start from a different place--by default they're on campus instead of having to opt in to campus living. So those who don't want to spend their decision energy on where they live in college will end up living on campus instead of the other way around.

Feels a little like Big Brother but given that everyone has a choice, I think it's high time it fall into our Web design as a way of helping students and the University achieve its goals.

It's an interesting read either way, with some serious implications for public policy.

Disrupting Class

2008-10-28T03:17:00.000-07:00

Book

Welcome to The Cave

2008-10-09T05:00:00.000-07:00

There is an oft-overlooked corner of the University Technology Office called The Cave. Its a small, cramped room buzzing with energy, and the student developers who labor within its walls are responsible for making it one of the most productive pieces of real estate on campus.

Like the cave dwellers in Plato's The Parable of the Cave, who face challenges as they encounter a larger reality, ASUs cave dwellers must solve significant problems as they work to create a remarkable technological reality.

But unlike Plato's cave dwellers, who prefer the familiar darkness and regularity of their surroundings, ASU's student spelunkers are enthusiastically lighting the path to a new and innovative way of presenting information using Dashboards. Dashboards increase the visibility of ASU by organizing and presenting complex data and information in a way that is easy to understand and visually appealing, as shown below:

The Fact Book presents a summary of information, including student, employee, and enrollment data and resource information such as typical student costs and sponsored project awards.

In Platos allegory, the cave dwellers equate the path to enlightenment with madness and danger, but thanks to UTOs Enterprise Data Services Team, including Kelly Briner, Don Chiurazzi, Bala Gurrala, Senh Luu, John Rome, and the Cave Dwellers -- Guruprasad Ayyaswamy Balasubramaniam, AJ Fairfield, Shikha Khetan, Venkatesh Mandalapa, Radhika Nair, and Rajkumar Ponnusamy -- Dashboards have been hailed by the ASU Community as practical and illuminating.

Arizona Indicators is a community-based dashboard that answers questions about the current state of Arizona and the direction the community is heading. It includes such dashboards as Arizona's population by county; AIMS scores; and renewable energy, among others.

The Dashboards Project has also lent ASU's students a terrific opportunity to garner real-world experience while creating a world-class product and gives undergraduate students the chance to work alongside graduate students.

"Every day is a learning experience that lets me explore different skill sets and learn how an office works," said Radhika Nair, a graduate student in computer science.

Work in The Cave has proven fruitful following graduation for a few former Cave Dwellers as well.

"It's been great seeing some of our students take the hands-on experience they've gained in The Cave into the job market," said John Rome, Associate Vice President for UTO Enterprise Data Services. Several students were offered jobs or internships from companies like Toyota and salesforce.com after showcasing the dashboards they'd developed."

To recognize the efforts of ASU's Cave Dwellers, Rome dressed up The Cave by outfitting it with a fresh coat of paint; artwork; a comfy bean bag chair; and a large, flat panel screen.

"It used to be a kitchen," said Venkatesh Mandalapa, a graduate student in computer science. "Now I often come here just to study. It's a pretty friendly place."

Pre-computer science undergraduate AJ Fairfield agrees. "It's very personal to all of us. It's like our second home."

Students hanging out in The Cave.

The Future of Dashboards

Dashboards are quickly becoming an essential Business Intelligence tool.

"I think ASU Dashboards will greatly help various aspects of the University from operational support to student admissions," said Senh Luu, Enterprise Data Services Systems Programmer. "They provide transparency to the inner workings of the University, and I foresee greater involvement in creating actionable dashboards as a way for the entire University to gain meaningful metrics, set goals, and measure organizational success."

For more information on ASU Dashboards, visit http://dashboard.asu.edu.

There's no need to fear...the Help Center is here!

2008-09-16T10:18:00.000-07:00

If you haven't already seen it, check out ASU's new online Help Center. The Help Center replaced the Technology Knowledge Base (commonly called the Techbase Wiki); it's easier to use, has enhanced search functionality, and users can even request the addition of new articles. We're hoping to make it a one-stop shop, a place where you can get answers to all your technology questions.

Martha Steinacker is the Help Center's editor. She's responsible for reviewing data from the search logs, the Help Desk, and CRM to continuously find out what people want to know. It's interesting that so many of the community's questions cluster into relatively small groups. We've found that more than 70% of user questions can be answered by fewer than a hundred articles. So Martha concentrates a lot of her effort on those first hundred articles, making sure they're both technically accurate and reader-friendly.

Of course, there's the other 30% to consider. This is what you'd call The Long Tail. If your question is a little off the beaten track, its answer is still awfully important to you when you need to know it. That's why we're seeking articles from around the community. There's a terrific set of FAQs listed in the Help Center that tells you what types of articles you can submit and how to submit them. Martha will help vet them for accuracy and style and link them in to try to keep the Help Center as complete as possible.

You may remember my earlier post on the amazon.com-ification of ASU's Internet technologies. We hope the Help Center is a part of that process. By reducing the number of places you have to look (pruning) and consolidating the most helpful stuff in an easy to use place (concentrate), we hope to make ASU's technologies easier to use.

We patterned the Help Center after Amazon's site. There's an old saying in product development that's a little out of place in a university: when creating a new capability don't shade your eyes, plagiarize. Amazon probably spent a lot of money to figure out a good way to help their customers. If we can do half as well, we may be on the way.

As always, looking forward to your comments and feedback...

My ASU ROCKS!!!!

2008-08-26T09:55:00.000-07:00

I have to say that I'm really excited about the new My ASU. It's loaded with useful tools and resources, and I believe it will make students' academic lives less rocky by making the information they need much easier to find.

My Classes (see example below) is really cool because it lets students see their course schedules and instructors by semester. Clicking on an instructor's name takes students to that instructor's ASU Directory profile, where students can learn more about their teachers' specialties, interests and backgrounds. Clicking on a course's title takes students directly to that course's Blackboard site. My Classes also has links that make it easy for students to print out course schedules, view course locations, add and drop courses, and browse ASU's course catalog.

My Programs & Advising shows students what their chosen majors are, identifies the advisors for that major, tells them how to contact their advisor, and lets them know whether they're on track for graduation. How cool is that?

My Tasks alerts students to tasks they need to complete before registration, like immunizations they'll need to have before attending classes on campus, or outstanding fees they need to pay. My Tasks even includes a notepad for jotting down ideas and reminders.

My Accounts gives students direct access to financial information, including financial aid, tuition and scholarships. Other useful links include Test Scores, Parking, Health Insurance, and more!

My Tools, in the toolbar on the right of the My ASU screen, features links to email, My Files, My Docs, and Blogs & Wikis. My Files is a terrific new application that gives students 4GB of storage space to save their work on, keeping their files organized and secure, always available online from any computer.

Check out the new My ASU Interactive Tour for more rockin' features, including Resources and My Stuff.

Here's what My ASU users are saying...

I like it. Its easier to get to certain areas like DARS, financial aid, and etc. One of my favorite parts is that I can click on the "books" link and the exact books for my classes come up. I don't have to enter in all the numbers to search for them on the bookstore website. Good job!!!!

I love the new site! It has everything I could need, all in one place. I can't think of anything better!!!

Looks great and easy to use.

I think this is really organized. I love it and it is very useful. I like this version better than the other one.

This new site is AMAZING! I love how much more simple and easy it is to use! Thank you!

I think everything is so much easier to get to now that we don't have to go through multiple sites to take care of our academic needs.

I LOVE this new format! Much easier to find things!

The future of My ASU

The future of My ASU is partly up to you. I'd like to hear what you, the ASU Community, have to say about things we should do to keep improving My ASU - what to add, what to remove, what's working for you and what's not. You can comment on this blog or send your ideas using the feedback button at the lower right corner of the My ASU page.

Better together...

2008-07-29T06:38:00.000-07:00

ASU is sweeping up its garage and organizing those boxes that have been sitting around collecting dust.

By combining the functionality of ASU Interactive with the features of the students page and the personalization of the Google Personal Start Page, ASU has created an altogether better My ASU experience for everyone in the ASU Community. Finding what you need has never been easier; now you can find everything all in one place.

Some of the enhanced student features include:

Easy-to-find class schedule with class information and course registration links
Campus maps
Academic advisor information
To dos and Holds
Financial account quick links

Enhanced faculty/staff features include:

Easy-to-find access to HR information
Calendars
Teaching and student support tools
Faculty/Staff news

And theres more The My Tools section includes links to useful applications, like email, Google Docs and Sheets, plus there's new functionality provided by My Apps and My Files. I'll tell you more about these later.

For now, you can take the My ASU Tour to learn more about the new, "combined" My ASU - a better integrated, more seamless online experience.

My World gets Lively

2008-07-10T05:19:00.000-07:00

You may remember the strangely ambiguous "My World" posters placed around campus last year. (What was that about?)

Now the secret is out: thousands of ASU students volunteered to solve the mystery, and, as reported by the Associated Press in the New York Times, two thousand of those students were selected to join Googles Trusted Tester program to test Lively, Googles new interactive virtual environment. The students were asked to use the alpha version of Lively and to provide feedback.

For more information about Lively and ASU's collaboration with Google, see
"Google Ventures into Virtual Reality with 'Lively'" from the New York Times Business section, and Kari Barlow's blog post, "3D Social Networking for REAL Life".

But that's only part of the news...

ASU is excited to present My World powered by Lively, a virtual environment that enables members of the ASU community to interact with one another and other Web users in real time and in 3D.

My World at ASU isn't just seriously fun - it's also a fun way to pursue serious ideas. In the beginning, it will support several educational initiatives, including advanced placement (AP) instruction and virtual study halls for subjects like English and math.

For instance, ASU will use Lively by Google to offer Calculus instruction to students preparing for the College Boards Calculus AP exam, with more virtual-world advanced placement courses available in the future. You can learn more about the planned My World AP Calculus course at http://whatscool.asu.edu.

Can you imagine the ways that education and research could flower in a virtual world? We want your ideas. Think about the box.

The Concept of One & the Concept of Zero: Achieving More with Less

2008-06-16T07:41:00.000-07:00

Information technology organizations in institutions, both private and public, are struggling to shift their energy and expenditures from Context to Core. Context activities are those that an institution requires but which do not distinguish it from its competitors. Core activities are those which, when improved, provide an institution with differential advantage. For a university, Core activities are those that improve teaching and learning, enhance the growth and quality of research, and attract talented students and faculty.

A typical IT enterprise spends 80% of its resources to run the operation (Context) and only 20% to improve it (Core). However, some leading-edge IT enterprises have been able to shift these percentages dramatically, pushing more resources into advancement by using IT Simplification to continually reduce the costs of operation. ASU believes IT Simplification involves the repeated application of two concepts: the Concept of One: Do it once. Do it right. Use it everywhere and the Concept of Zero: Dont do it at all. Let someone bigger do it.¹

University IT is often characterized by differences that make no distinction. Applying the Concept of One means identifying and eliminating such differences. The simplification that results from doing things one way and doing that one way well releases resources and energy that can be put toward advancing the institution.

Beyond the Concept of One is the Concept of Zero. ASUs technology alliance strategy is an expression of this idea. When a university technology service can be replaced by one provided commercially, by a firm operating at a scale hundreds to thousands of times greater than the university can ever attain, efficiency and progress result. Large-scale technology services afford greater security, reliability, speed of innovation, and come at ever-lower cost. ASU believes such alliances are critical to maintaining an information environment that continues to meet ever-rising student and faculty expectations.

---
¹The Concept of One was originally put forward by Hossein Eslambolchi, former CIO at AT&T and current President of AT&T Labs. Dr. Eslambolchi also formulated a Concept of Zero that differs from the one presented here, but the symmetry of expression was irresistible.

UTO Reorg

2008-05-03T10:38:00.000-07:00

If you havent already heard, we've made some changes to UTO's organizational structure to help us serve the University better. You can see the new organization chart on the UTO People page. We've focused the bulk of the team around three principal activities: Operations, Customer Care and Development - Ops, Care and Dev for short.

	The Ops team, headed by Bob Nelson, is charged with *making today as good as yesterday*. This means the Ops team is focused on providing a rich and reliable technology utility including robust network and voice connectivity, managed technology services, and 24x7x365 access to the range of applications and online services central to ASU's academic, research, and administrative activities.
	The Care team, headed by Sarah Hughes, is charged with *making every day a great day*. Their mission is to create raving fans of ASUs technology services by providing in-person, online, and self-service aid to ASUs students, faculty, and staff. The Care team also works closely with Ops and Dev to make ASUs technology environment understandable and enhance our customers' productivity.
	The Dev team, headed by Max Davis-Johnson, is charged with *making tomorrow* better than today. and is responsible for working with all of ASUs administrative units as well as students and faculty to continually improve the information technology environment at ASU in support of University priorities.

We are determined to use this new organization to improve UTO's operational efficiency and reliability, accelerate development, and provide better customer service. Making the three missions of Ops, Care, and Dev as distinct as possible will give us greater clarity on how to measure and improve success.

Next up: the Concept of Zero and the Concept of One.

Boys & Girls Clubs Team Up with ASU

2008-04-11T07:07:00.000-07:00

I'd like to thank Karl Bond and Duane Woerman from UTO Network Communications and Sam DiGangi's group at alt^I for working with Qwest to bring the Internet2 network to the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Scottsdale's Vestar Branch. Internet2 is an R&D consortium of researchers and educational institutions working with industry and government to accelerate the development of tomorrow's collaborative, universally available Internet. Internet2 broadcasting capabilities are being used at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Scottsdale to provide telepresencing, streaming live video communications directly from the Internet. Members of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Scottsdale will use telepresencing to view live images of Dr. Robert Ballard, discoverer of the Titanic, as he explores and studies the ocean for months at a time as part of the larger Immersion Presents program. Immersion Presents exposes youth to ongoing scientific explorations, encouraging them to learn about the positive roles science and technology play in our everyday lives.

While other Boys & Girls Clubs across the nation participate in the Immersion Presents program online or through delayed satellite feeds, Scottsdale's Vestar Branch is the only Club in the U.S. with access to telepresencing and the live interactions and communications it provides. ASU is excited about helping provide this free educational service to young people in Arizona.

Deep Linking

2008-03-13T06:34:00.000-07:00

Id like to talk about a nifty piece of technology that has great potential deep linking. Deep linking lets two systems communicate with one another in a way that looks and feels seamless. ASUs PeopleSoft system now has the ability to deep link to ASU Dashboards and vice versa.

What are ASU Dashboards?

ASU Dashboards organize and present data and information in a way that is easy to understand and fun to look at. Check out an example of a dashboard below.

CRM Support Dashboard

Dashboards are being created by UTOs Enterprise Data Services Team, which includes John Rome, Don Chiurazzi, Senh Luu, Bala Gurrala, Kelly Briner and several students. The team thought it would be beneficial to be able to deep link into PeopleSoft via dashboards when looking at a students records or an open CRM case. UTO's Development Duo Robert Yosowitz and Ron Hill helped make this happen using PeopleSoft technology. With this newfound ability, a person using dashboards can drill down into the original, live data where appropriate. Pretty nifty?

Many of the dashboard developers are students who are gaining great experience developing dashboards.

Want to see deep linking for yourself? ASU employees whod like to look up their Year-to-Date earnings can login to Employee Self Service, click on 2007 YE Balances, and easily view their earnings without realizing they are actually using a dashboard. Because dashboards can be customized, ASU's dashboards look just like a PeopleSoft screen. This is the beauty of deep linking and is a terrific example of Amazondotcomification as everything is stitched into a single environment. Deep linking has great potential going forward.

Other Cool Dashboards

Another new feature in ASU Dashboards is the Research Dashboard, which allows you to take a closer look at research projects going on across the University. The drill-down interface is easy to use and gives an overview of proposals, awards, and expenditures. You can check out different research projects by academic department, research center, or sponsor, and you can even search by an investigators name. Get monthly details or watch for trends using three-year charts spanning back as far as February 2000.

The Research Dashboard is filled with all kinds of handy built-in features, thanks to Rick Bolin, the database programmer behind the scenes; the PRIDE Analytics team, who helped with the initial design; and Senh Luu and Don Chiurazzi, who implemented the design as the dashboard we see today. For example, clicking on an investigators name will take you to that investigators ASU Directory profile so you can learn more about the person behind the research. Data is also rolled up together and presented in a consistent manner, eliminating discrepancies that occur over time, like changes in an academic departments name or location.

And thanks to the collaborative efforts of videographer and editor Matt Robi nson and cameraman Andrew Maher, you can now watch a movie explaining how ASU Dashboards work. Leading actor John Rome takes center stage, and Anish Adaljas creative direction adds clarity and a designers edge to the movie.

Looking forward to your questions and comments...

Strap on Your Rocket Shoes! Google Sites for ASU

2008-02-29T05:30:00.000-08:00

Students, faculty and researchers, strap on your rocket shoes: "Google Sites" was just released to ASU as part of our Google Apps for Education suite.

"Sites" is not only a killer web page and site building tool, it also excels as an intuitive web-based collaboration medium. Google has blended web pages, blogs and wikis into a seamless, virtually effortless whole.

Sites will let us - ASU students, faculty and staff - forget about specific software and special languages we've needed to manage blogs, wikis and web pages in the past. Now, collaboration and commenting is an option on any ASU sites page. Sites aims to be a one-stop shop - a Mom-and-Pop-easy-shop - for creating interactive pages that you can co-publish with others, whether they're in the next chair or on the next continent.

"Enough!" you say. "How do I get started?"

Just go here and follow the directions. Making a personal site is a great way to test the waters. You can also create a practice site and then delete it when you're done.

To make a new page, just hit the "Create a new page" button. You'll see several options that define not just form, but more awesomely, function. In addition to standard web page layouts, you can create a "Dashboard" page full of gadgets ("mini" applications embedded in the page; think "My ASU") or a "List" (really a whole set of functions for project management and other kinds of task management) or a "File Cabinet" (all of your uploaded files, lined up and reporting for duty).

Want to change the format of the navigation menu? Just drag-and-drop content blocks or edit them after hitting "Edit sidebar" in the sidebar. Want to stir calendars, spreadsheets, slide shows, video and other rich media into your page? In page edit, hit the "Insert" button in the toolbar, locate your file - it's done. Versioning is automatic so you can change your mind and switch to an earlier revision. And if you're collaborating, versioning allows you to see who changed what.

It took just 30 minutes to port the content of the blog you're now reading into a quick Google Site: check it out. It doesn't take much of a leap to see how researchers might - much more easily than before - exploit the power of The Cloud to build shared bodies of knowledge; how teachers could publish their course materials and encourage student interaction within course-based sites, and how students could work together, inside or outside of classes, to learn and to teach one another.

And here's the best part: the power and flexibility of Google Sites is free to ASU students, faculty, researchers and staff. The elves who brought us this technology from an advanced alien culture created it while we were sleeping.

There's plenty more to come. Stay tuned!

Power for Algernon

2008-02-04T08:01:00.000-08:00

Maybe he was a rat with dreams...Maybe he came from the wilds of Arizona seeking a higher education. Maybe he was just cold...We don't really know.

What we do know is that a lot of people spent most of the weekend repairing the damage caused by one little rat that crawled his way into a transformer.

Now, the rat couldn't have known that this transformer powered many of ASU's computer systems and that, besides the small matter of frying his brains, he was going to cause a major service disruption. Fortunately, he sought shelter late on a Saturday night during the lowest period of computer use. We have a UPS but the battery ran out before our power problems were resolved. Technicians worked through the night to grab a generator, hook it up and then restore our equipment.

We were back to full power by 6:30 am Sunday, when the software and hardware people took over to restore services. Support services, such as Blackboard, Exchange and IDEAL, had to come up first so that they'd be available when the Web came back up. Most services were available by 11:30 am, though system functions needed to be reviewed throughout a very long day.

I'd like to thank each and every person who helped get ASU's services back up and running. Many thanks to:

Terry Hinton & his staff - Chris Beke, Robert Blackmon, Alexandro Bonos, Shawn Bryan, Mark Fornefeld, Kevin Lockart, Reyes Mori, James Prather & Brian Shaw; Jack Hsus staff - Chris Coffin, Brent Dunlock, Jim Durand, Jane Flores, Sean Garrett, Paul Harper, Bob Kaneshige, Joe McDonald, OJ Redhair, Jim Salverson, Jeff Scheib, & Greg Wilson; Ken Carl & his staff - James Muscara; Robin Manke-Cassidy & her staff - Gregory Alcorn, Zach Chamberlin, Erich van Sanford & Goska Zapolska; Dave McKee & his staff - Franco Lomonte, Tom Bauer & Duane Woerman; Kari Barlow & her staff - Nancy Lee, Nathan Gudmunson, Andy Beier & Minnie Fontes; John Rome & his staff - Sangeeta Agarwal, Ali Benmalek, Jack Davis, Daren Kahus, Dennis Monce & Bob Sookvong; Max Davis-Johnson & his staff - Walt Ellis, Neil Fritz, Jason Green, Ron Hill, Tasleema Lallmamode, Joe Nadeau & Lori Reents; Sarah Hughes & Samuel DiGangi & his staff - Ruvi Wijesuriya.

And what about Algernon? He may not have made it to grad school, but he did help us learn some things. We knew that we needed redundant power systems and Algernon helped make it a priority. Unfortunately, the more elaborate the infrastructure, the more expensive redundancy becomes. As we move toward a 24 by 7 world, the last couple of 9s are the most expensive. It's interesting to note that services supplied by our partners, Gmail from Google and PeopleSoft functions from CedarCrestone, were not affected by this power outage. Our little rat friend would have had to travel a long way to disrupt them, and due to their scales of operation, they may be a little more varmint-proof than we are.

Comments - even rat jokes - are welcome...

Making the Grade

2008-01-24T03:24:00.000-08:00

Thanks to much hard work and many late nights, the launch in December of the new Faculty Center, ASUs new online roster and grading application, worked well in posting Fall 2007 grades!

The Faculty Center replaced RosterGrades, a system that wasnt compatible with ASUs recent PeopleSoft implementation. While the rollout wasn't without challenges, especially for professors with the largest classes, we successfully replaced the old with the new.

Tremendous efforts went into getting the Faculty Center ready on time, and Id like to acknowledge some of the people most responsible, especially Jill Bailey and Jennifer Glawson. Leah Lommel directed and managed the project while Jill and Jennifer helped interface with developers and test the new system. Through Jill and Jennifers efforts, the Faculty Center was customized to fit both ASUs business and faculty needs.

Another shoutout goes to the team of Roster Contactsall the departmental personnel throughout the University who assist their department faculty with grade administration. These folks were instrumental in entering grades and helping their departments transition to the new system. Thanks also go to Kathy Tibbetts and Carrie Bauer, who worked hard to correct errors within the system, ensuring that instructors could successfully access their classes. Our master trainer, Sensei Paul Stoll, worked with the development and implementation teams to create and deliver training materials, including online courses in Blackboard, training guides, and a Faculty Center news blog. Step-by-step instructions were also posted directly onto the webpage where faculty members entered grades for easy reference, and Paul, Jennifer, and Jill delivered in-person presentations with question and answer sessions across each of ASUs four campuses over two different training rounds. In addition, the Registrars Office helped answer faculty questions, phone calls, and emails.

Because of the efforts of these dedicated employees (as well as many others not mentioned here by name) a greater percentage of grades were entered on time this semester using the new Faculty Center than in past semesters with the old system. Most instructors have reported the Faculty Center easy to use and are satisfied with its new features, including the weekly calendar view of their class schedule and the ability to import grades directly from an Excel spreadsheet or to post students grades immediately. The Notify feature allows faculty to directly email one, some, or all of the students enrolled in a course.

We're not finished by a long shot. Plans are in the works to improve performance and increase the integration between the Faculty Center and ASU's learning management systems, Blackboard and Sakai.

Again, Id like to thank everyone involved. Please dont hesitate to send me your comments and feedback.

Check Out Our New Catalog

2008-01-06T03:47:00.000-08:00

If you havent already, you might want to check out ASUs new online course catalog. The catalog is an early step toward making the many opportunities at ASU more accessible. Its obviously Amazon inspired, our attempt to make as much information about a course as possible so students can more make informed decisions.

Several months ago UTO programmer Matt Rapp set out on a mission to update ASUs catalog. He started with a web-based mockup of the site, which he patterned after an Amazon product page for others to review. Based on Matts novel designs, development of a new Schedule of Classes and Course Catalog began this past fall under the guidance of Project Manager Barb Sowden and the expertise of both Matt and an outside consultant, Jim Conner.

Administrative and student feedback following the November launch of the new Schedule of Classes and Course Catalog has been extremely positive.

I loved it, it showed all of the information I could possibly need such as seats available, course credits, times, etc. The search function made it really easy for me to look up my graduate classes that I plan on taking this upcoming semester.

Excellent! Its a great improvement over the old system. The search is simpler and yet more intuitive, and the results are much more readable.

Thank you so much for putting this together. As an academic advisor, this helps because the students want to know course descriptions and times and awareness areas.

I love this new website! It is so much better than the other way of looking for classes.I like the fact that I can see all the classes that fit my description in one page without having to scroll down like the other websites for searching for classes. I like how all the information for that class is listed on one page. I like the colors since they really help me differentiate between the classes and different information. I truly love it!

The new system accesses PeopleSoft Student Administration data directly in real-time and allows students to compare classes to one another by displaying this information in an easy-to-read grid. Each header column on a students results page is a link for sorting information, so students can quickly group their results by weekday, times, location, etc. Clicking on an instructors name will link the student directly to the instructors ASU Directory profile. The student can read their instructors bio, see their instructors photo, and find out what other courses their instructor is teaching. Similarly, clicking on class location links the student to ASU Google Maps, making it simple to see where a class is being held on campus.

Obviously, were just beginning. For starters, the new system has space for a course description much longer and more informative than the 2 sentences the old system allowed. Theres room for links to other online material, reviews, in short any information that would help a student make a better choice about what to take next term. The new catalog gives us the ideal platform to make these kinds of changes.

Check it out if you havent already. Matt or Barb or I would be glad to hear from you with suggestions for improvement or other feedback.

Go Ask EDNA...

2007-12-09T08:54:00.000-08:00

I often talk about how companies like Apple and Google are redefining the scale of technology over the Internet, but that doesnt mean there isnt a lot of technology innovation going on in universities. Over the last 13 years, ASU has been developing a system called EDNA. EDNA (Enterprise Dynamic Network Authorization) is basically an authorization service. Shes kind of like your mom - you ask her if youre allowed to do something, and shell say yes or no. You might ask EDNA to let you use a specific application or log onto a computer system, for example.

Remember when you asked your mom for dessert, and she asked you if youd eaten your dinner first? Well before EDNA decides if you can or cannot access something, she will ask herself a series of questions about who you are to determine what level of access she thinks you should have. The great thing about EDNA is that she asks these questions dynamically against enterprise databases, so shes always current and knows exactly whats going on. For instance, if an employee leaves the University and is no longer affiliated with ASU, EDNA will clean up after him or her and will automatically revoke his or her access to ASU systems or applications.

Other cool things about EDNA are that shes secure; shes mostly automated; she centralizes authorization policies but decentralizes administration; shes business-rule driven so you can capture the reasons authorizations are granted; and she centralizes audit so you always know whos asking for authorization, why authorization was or was not granted, and when the request was made.

Crafted by ASU's own Derwin Skipp, Joe McDonald and Jack Hsu, EDNA is a real example of innovative software development. We're in the process of working with ASU to move EDNA into the OpenSource domain. Interested? Just let Derwin know.

WSJ

2007-09-28T11:16:00.000-07:00

It seems that last Tuesdays Wall Street Journal article about ASUs ERP implementation has stirred considerable discussion in various venues around the country. Much is being extrapolated from some fairly vague details in the article. While we appreciate the Journals take on our progress, short articles like this have limited space for specifics. And focusing on controversy, while providing a provocative read, doesnt create the best backdrop for discussing the broader issues.

In the interest of spurring a solid debate on the virtues and drawbacks of ASUs approach, I'm using this venue to answer some of the questions that the Journal article either missed or answered incompletely. Hopefully the context added here will contribute to public debate.

Why Did ASU Undertake the Project?
In December 2003, three distinguished university CIOs were asked to review ASU's aging administrative systems. Their exceptionally frank report made it clear that:

ASU's administrative systems were on the verge of collapse;

ASU's administrative computing strategy was fundamentally flawed, focused more on conserving resources than on replacing the aging systems - a replacement needed to mitigate the serious risk of total systems failure;

ASU's lack of an effective replacement strategy and the "can't do" attitude of its IT staff made any contemplated replacement plan extremely risky;

In the opinion of the reviewers, replacing the legacy systems at ASU, one of the nation's largest universities, would require 5-10 YEARS (and an investment of some $70-$100M).

(For more on this, see How Deep Was the Hole?)

What was Unique about ASU's Approach?
At ASU we advanced a unique approach to cost-effectively deploy our Oracle/PeopleSoft SIS and HR/Payroll system. The approach had three key components:

First, we used a strategy we called Regents Vanilla to quickly win and maintain strong cross-university executive support. A key component of the Regents Vanilla approach was our commitment to base the system deployment on an existing implementation, rather than the usual approach of building the system from scratch;

Second, we used an approach we call Implement, Adapt, Grow. This approach allowed us to contain scope creep and included a commitment to stick to a well-planned schedule of rolling component deployments, and to bring in additional resources to correct defects exposed by our extensive system testing, rather than delay deployment. "Implement, Adapt, Grow" includes an implicit acknowledgment that, despite the high level of testing that we actually conducted, no amount of testing would produce a perfect deployment, leading to our commitment to rapidly respond to defects in the system in the first few weeks of deployment. This is the reality of every major new system deployment in every organization. We may have just been more honest than some to admit it up front, but the perspective gave us the flexibility to rapidly find and resolve problems;

Third, we used a Strategic Technology Alliance to reduce our time to market. Our alliance strategy included decisions to externally host the application and to choose a single partner (CedarCrestone) for both implementation and hosting.

How Big Was This Project?
At 65,000 students, ASU is one of the nations largest research universities, located in the rapidly growing Metropolitan Phoenix area. In February 2006, ASU began a project to replace seven of its core administrative systems Admissions, Financial Aid, Student Records, Registration, Talent Acquisition and Payroll. Eighteen months later, at a development cost of about $15M, the replacement systems are fully operational. Six of the seven major components - the exception being payroll - went into service with negligible interruptions to University business (apart from the enormous work load placed on the dedicated cross-university team that labored so hard to make things go as smoothly as possible).

Was the ASU Approach Successful?
It's only after an institution begins to reap the benefits of its new systems that the whole story comes into focus. However, some facts not covered by the WSJ article point toward success:

ASU enrollment grew during the period of deployment.

ASU successfully registered approximately 65,000 students for the Fall 07 semester with very few visible glitches. At the peak of the drop/add frenzy, ASU ran nearly 6,000 concurrent sessions with decent and consistent response time - and no crashes. Not many SIS systems can make this claim on their first go-live (or second, or sometimes third).

Financial aid was distributed accurately in a timely manner.

From concept to final cut-over, the project was completed in 18 months for about $15M. For an institution of ASUs size and complexity, previous project forecasts put the costs at many multiples of $15M and at least a 5 year implementation time frame.

But Payroll Was a Disaster, Right?
ASU regrets every payroll difficulty that we caused our employees and we are working very hard to rebuild trust in our new payroll system. Clearly, if we had it to do over again, there are things we would change. No question. And once the dust clears, Ill be happy to share our conclusions about what we did right and what we did wrong.

The basic facts are these: we underpaid around 3,000 of our 12,000 employees in the first three payrolls. Half of those underpayments were for $100 or less. 84% of the underpayments were managed within 4 days of each payroll. But that still left several hundred employees with short checks that were not corrected quickly enough. To make matters worse, the majority of the people affected were hourly employees, who tend to be least able to financially weather missing or late paychecks. As the Journal reported, it was not so much that the software failed us, than that our employee support environment wasn't up to the task.

That said, the great majority of our employees were paid correctly and accurately. By the third payroll, the error rate for the new payroll system (4%) was 33% lower than the error rate of the system it replaced (6%). We successfully ran Open Benefits Enrollment for all employees with barely a ripple. The web time clock - which proved to be a bad cultural fit for our organization - was replaced with a more friendly system by the third payroll, and that is running smoothly.

Right now ASU is working through the process of adapting to the new system. We're fixing things that need improvement; we're implementing new ideas and new interfaces. It's safe to say we are at the low point of enthusiasm for the system, which is not atypical of the adoption cycle for systems of this magnitude. But our community is working with us patiently to advance and improve. Most importantly, we are safely on the other side of the river. All of our investments are going toward the future. There is no risk of having to retreat to the legacy systems, no risk of being unable to run the business on the new system. We look forward to interacting with the Higher Ed IT community over the next several months to learn the lessons, both positive and negative, that this implementation can teach us all.

What a fine "sole" you have...

2007-09-20T10:30:00.000-07:00

You may be familiar with the Brothers Grimm fairy tale The Shoemaker and the Elves. For those who are not, the story goes as so:

Once upon a time there was an impoverished shoemaker. With his last piece of leather, the shoemaker prepares to craft his final pair of shoes. He lays the leather out onto a table, intent on finishing the shoes early the next morning. The shoemaker awakens and to his surprise, finds the shoes already made, and sells them for a lofty profit. Next night, same deal. Long story short, it turns out that while the shoemaker sleeps soundly, two tiny elves prance into the shoemakers shop and skillfully fashion fine pairs of new shoes.

ASUs partnership with Google is much like the story of The Shoemaker and the Elves. Through Google, ASU is able to rise in the morning and discover new applications and features without ever having toiled in the process. This very morning, the ASU community awoke to find Google Presentations added into Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Google Presentations lets users create online slideshow presentations to share with fellow students, teachers, friends, and shoemakers.

We just woke up one morning and there it was, ready for all of us to use. It's like magic.

Check it out and see for yourself.

Strategic Technology Alliance: Avoiding the Phoney War

2007-09-13T03:08:00.000-07:00

Regents Vanilla helped us build institutional will quickly by using NAU's version of PeopleSoft as a reference implementation. But just using NAU as a model wasn't enough. In order to get started right away, we had to find a way to avoid the Phoney War.

According to Wikipedia:

"... the Phoney Warwas a phase in early World War II marked by few military operations in Continental Europe, in the months following the German invasion of Poland and preceding the Battle of France. Although the great powers of Europe had declared war on one another, neither side had yet committed to launching a significant attack, and there was relatively little fighting on the ground."

In the context of an ERP implementation, the Phoney War is the part where you've declared your intention to implement an ERP system but lack the technical resources or expertise necessary to implement it. In the traditional mode, this means that you send a large number of your folks to school where they learn how to bring up the various platforms you'll need. Much hardware is bought, software installed and patches applied. Lessons are learned as systems fail and are restored due to nuances in the deployment of the databases, development environments, and applications software that go into making an ERP.

This normally takes a considerable amount of time, especially for an institution the size and complexity of ASU. The real Phoney War lasted several months and ASU's Phoney War would certainly have lasted at least that long. We needed a way to trim nine months to a year off the front end of the development schedule so that work on a Regents Vanilla solution could begin immediately. Our answer came in the form of a strategic technology alliance. By finding a partner that was already skilled in the deployment of PeopleSoft applications, both for development and large-scale delivery, we could eliminate much of the start-up time and have confidence that the solution we deployed would be able to handle ASU's loads.

We put our proposal out to bid and chose CedarCrestone as both primary implementation partner and hosting provider. CedarCrestone offered more than just rack space, power, and a guy to watch the lights. Their experienced team already knew how to create the various development and test environments needed to implement, as well as the complex, multi-tiered, load-balanced environments needed to deliver production performance under load. While ASU's technical team is certainly able enough to create these kinds of environments themselves, the new skills needed to create this specific environment are not trivial to acquire. To make matters worse, the world does not stand still during the months of training; software and hardware versions continue to advance, making the end target even more difficult to hit. Working with CedarCrestone gave us the opportunity to skip much of the learning curve lag and focus instead on the work specific to ASU.

Time to market is really important. The longer a project takes, the more it costs, not only because people have to be paid during its entire duration but because every day that goes by is an opportunity for the scope to get larger. The job of a CEO is said to be killing good ideas so there's room for great ideas to flourish. The Phoney War period of an ERP is an enormous opportunity for the proliferation of good ideas at the expense of focus of the central idea: system replacement. An early start has a lot to do with an early finish.

The ERP troubles experienced by other universities, including the North Dakota University System, Cleveland State University, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, were proof enough that ASU needed to carve a new path in the ERP jungle -- one that was easier and faster to travel, one that was shorter in distance, and one that posed less risk. It was critical that we get to work immediately, and our strategic technology alliance with our state-of-the-art hosting and implementation partner CedarCrestone was a key component in forging that new path.

Not that this decision was without controversy. How could we consider taking the University's core data assets and entrust them to the care of "outsiders"? What about privacy concerns? What about business continuity concerns? Could we expect "outsiders" to look after our data as well as we could? Would they care as much?

Our decision to externally host can best be understood as an abiding belief in the virtue of banks over mattresses. It's entirely consistent with ASU's overall Core vs. Context technology strategy to look for partners whose business it is to provide safe, secure, backed-up, redundant storage and hosting rather than continuing to build it ourselves. In the transition away from the cottage industry phase of IT, enterprises must look outward to identify players who are engaged in activities at scales larger than their own if they wish to keep up.

Our partnership was central to our success in several key ways:

CedarCrestone was already experienced with PeopleSoft implementations.

We were ensured a stable hosting environment, enabling us to move forward quickly.

We were able to decrease the time to market, eliminating a Phoney War.

Working with CedarCrestone helped us take the next step, and while we had to learn to dance with a new partner, we were in the dance much faster - with a higher level of quality and reliability - than we ever would have been otherwise.

Previous: Regents Vanilla

Applistructure: The Marriage of Applications and Infrastructure

2007-09-13T02:56:00.000-07:00

Arizona State University's hosted PeopleSoft Applications System reflects its first move toward the marriage of enterprise applications and infrastructure technology known as applistructure. The entire system, spread across over 25 UNIX servers, has close to 11 terabytes of disk and a 1/2 terabyte of memory allocated to it. In addition to the UNIX servers, 32 physical and virtual Windows-based servers also support the application system.

The 3 main non-production environments (development, test and training) consist of a production-sized database for each of Oracle's four Enterprise Applications (PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance, PeopleSoft Human Resources/Student Administration, PeopleSoft Customer Relationship Management and PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal). In addition to these 12 environments, there are 15 specialized environments to help support rapid implementation of the entire technology stack. The total 27 non-production environments have over 6 terabytes of space allocated to them.

The 4 production databases consume over 1 terabyte of space. To access the production systems, users encounter their first of many custom integration points in the custom single sign-on process. Users are then routed through load balancers to one of 21 web servers, then on to one of 24 application server domains. To allow for efficient batch processing, there are 9 batch/reporting servers. The partnership between ASU and CedarCrestone's Managed Services Center allowed for the application system to be quickly scaled from a peak of 2,600 concurrent users in March 2007 to managing over 5,800 concurrent users in August of the same year.

In addition to user volume, ASU's Enterprise Applications are also able to provide and consume web services. Integration points such as tuition payments, distribution of PeopleSoft transactional data to University systems campus-wide, and notification of service outages of University systems, have all been redeployed as web services - with more to come.

Regents Vanilla

2007-09-06T03:11:00.000-07:00

The 2004 independent CIOs report did not paint an encouraging picture: IT with a cant do attitude; a serious risk that the administrative systems were at the end of their life, subject to unpredictable failure; no strategy or institutional will to address the issue -- and even if the institutional will could be summoned, any fix would likely take 5-10 years and $70-$100M.

Not good.

Within days my arrival at ASU in August of 2005 (New Post), it became clear that if ASU were to move forward technologically, some solution to the ERP puzzle would have to be found: a daunting task since smart people at ASU had been trying to solve that puzzle for the previous decade.

The Student Information System, SIS, had been in place at ASU since it was written in 1980. In 1992, the Human Resources portion was converted to a vendor's package and its database moved from IDMS to DB2, replacing the network/hierarchy database structure with a more standard, better-supported relational database. However, the SIS proved more difficult to convert.

By 1995, it was already clear to many at the University that our 15-year-old system would have to be replaced. A 2-year effort, the "Student Process Reengineering Project," was launched University-wide to develop a common understanding of how to create a new system. The effort didnt result in a new system but did expand the life of the old one by adding a web self-service front-end and DARS, a degree audit system.

In 1999, ASU took another 2-year run at developing the institutional will to replace the aging system, this time through a development partnership with SAP. SAP and ASU staff worked together to define a student information system for North America but disbanded their cooperative venture before deploying any product at ASU.

In 2004, right after the independent IT report came out, ASU began exploring a PeopleSoft option. However, this was suspended when Oracle acquired PeopleSoft, making the future of the product temporarily cloudy.

In any case, the price tag on the table was still $70M+ dollars, and the risk of total failure loomed large. To put the cost in perspective, $90M is the entire annual IT expenditure for the whole university. $70M is serious money. Combine the magnitude of that expense with the very real risk of failure: U of As 7-year Cosmos Project was about to be reported to ABOR as an aborted attempt, after $18M spent trying to replace just the Student Information System -- without success. And stories of larger-scale projects at schools similar to ASU in size and complexity -- Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Johns Hopkins -- ran to the $100M+ range. ERP replacement at those prices, with those delays, those disruptions, and those risks, just seemed like a bad idea.

We tried for several weeks to formulate a renovation strategy, similar to the approach taken in 1995, based on encapsulating the existing system and refitting a new front end. But to do that would require an internal technical champion, and no one was stepping up to lead. Perhaps no one really believed renovation was even possible anymore.

The last week of August, Max Davis-Johnson and I went to visit Fred Estrella at NAU (Visit to NAU). Max had led NAUs PeopleSoft team for Fred but had come to work at ASU the year before. On that trip, I learned that NAUs experience with PeopleSoft HR in the late 1990s had been difficult but that their recent project, the one Max and Fred led, had been pretty successful. They had replaced the Student System successfully in 3 years:

I was very impressed with Fred Estrella (the NAU CIO), his crack IT team, and the administration folks that helped craft their PeopleSoft Human Resources and Student Administration implementation. From what I gathered, their implementation did take somewhere between 3 and 5 years, and while they managed to skip the worst of the monster phase, their system did have to grow live rather than go live.

But all the participants in the project that I met and I met easily 20 from both the technical and business side were unanimous that the new system meets their needs better than the old system and it gives them a better platform for addressing the future.

It was also interesting to learn that their decision to go with PeopleSoft did have its roots in a crisis a registration failure one fall that sent all the students to the gym with pencils and 3×5 cards.

Given that we want to avoid a crisis, I wish there was a way to wave a magic wand and be where they are now.

In a sense, our magic wand came in the form of an ice cream flavor: Regents Vanilla. It didnt work instantly, but it did put us in NAU's position inside of two years from when we started - a far cry from the predicted 7 years.

In a blog post at the end of September of 2005, (The Relative Importance of Keeping Score), I drew an analogy between the administrative computing system and the scoreboard at a football game each necessary to play the game but neither one central to the game itself.

...as important as this function is, the scoring system isnt in any sense strategic. No student is going to choose ASU because of the student administration system that we pick. The NSF wont select ASU to lead an ERC because we have a state-of-the-art ERP (arent acronyms great?).

Despite the fact that it wasnt Core, I advanced the argument that the investment to replace ASU's administrative system still had to be made:

In the considered and expert opinion of its authors and maintainers, the Universitys core information system, the Student Information System, simply does not have the flexibility to meet the needs of the New American University.

The only other user of ASUs SIS system, Northern Arizona University, has already experienced a failure of that system, and as a result, abandoned it in favor of an industry standard ERP solution from Peoplesoft/Oracle.

The university is not prepared (nor should it be) to modify its enterprise goals and strategies to continue to fit within the confines of what the existing infrastructure can accommodate.

Given the foregoing, a new system is inevitable for ASU. It is only a question of when we start, how long it will take, and how much it will cost.

There are no serious alternatives to a vendor supplied system. No champion has come forward with a vision for internally writing a new system from scratch or radically rewriting the current system.

Based on this set of facts, Im convinced that ASU should implement a vendor supplied solution that removes the scorekeeping system as an obstacle to change subject to the following criteria:

* we want the lowest risk we can find
* we want the lowest cost we can find
* we want the fastest implementation we can find

If the scorekeeping system is not strategic, then the goal is to remove it as a constraint as quickly and as cheaply as possible, while minimizing the risk of failure.

We introduced the idea that to replace a non-Core yet essential system, ASU needed to find the lowest risk, lowest cost, fastest approach. We contrasted that with Rocky Road, the traditional approach that has caused so much risk in the marketplace.

va·nil·la (va'-nila) adj.

Flavored with the flavoring extract prepared from the cured seedpods of any of various tropical American vines of the genus Vanilla in the orchid family, especially V. planifolia, cultivated for its long narrow seedpods from which a flavoring agent is obtained.

Lacking adornments or special features; basic or ordinary: We went through a period of vanilla cars. (Charles Jordan)

Implementing a full featured ERP product that has proven its ability to run a University by customizing the product as little as possible and instead adapting the business processes to match the softwares capabilities.

The fastest, lowest cost, least risk method for implementing an ERP.

rock-y road - (rak'-e rod) adj.

A common ice cream flavor. Though there are variations on the flavor, it generally combines vanilla ice cream, chocolate ice cream, marshmallow and nuts. The flavor was created in 1929 by William Dreyer during the Great Depression to calm jitters.

A rough and difficult path, a metaphor for any challenging and uncomfortable journey.

Implementing a full featured ERP product that has proven its ability to run a university by convening committees to redesign, usually on paper, the business practices the software supports, and then implementing these newly redesigned procedures through the use of custom code that overrides the base functionality of the product.

The slowest, most expensive, highest risk method for implementing an ERP.

After talking with CIOs from both the higher education and commercial communities and reading the histories of failed and problematic implementations of ERP systems, I know what my favorite flavor is.Regents Vanilla.

What makes Regents Vanilla so attractive? Well the NAU SAS/HR system was developed from a system with common roots to the ASU system. The organization that developed it, NAUs IT team, has an excellent working relationship with the ASU team. Regents Vanilla has been in production successfully for 3 years and has proven its ability to successfully run an Arizona Regents University.

If we implement the NAU system with the minimum set of changes possible (and defining that minimum is the key of course), what good will it do us? Well, it will be the fastest way to implement a new scorekeeping system that doesnt act as a gate for the go forward. It will also be the cheapest way, if for no other reason than because development costs will be lower. And it will present the lowest risk, from a technical point of view, because its already proven to work in the closest real time production environment to our own.

So whats the rub? Well, implementing vanilla means changing procedures, which is never popular and sometimes unwise. (A theme that will emerge again near project's end...)

Regents Vanilla changed the debate. It lowered the cost, risk, delay and disruption to a level that gave decision makers comfort that there was a strategy that with high liklihood could address the issue without derailing the progress of the University. Over the next 3 months, the growing team of technical and functional experts were able to build institutional will around the Regents Vanilla plan -- a system based on NAUs successful code, to be deployed with alacrity to minimize cost and risk. By January, we were ABOR bound.

Next Up: Strategic Technology Alliance: Avoiding the Phoney War
Previous: How Deep Was the Hole?

How Deep Was the Hole?

2007-09-03T02:54:00.000-07:00

Today's post is the first in a 3-part series on ERP the ASU Way. In comparison to the traditional university take on ERP, the ASU Way has shown itself to be lower-cost, lower-risk, quicker to get in play, and nimbler once it's deployed. ERP the ASU Way doesn't begin from a blank page. It relies on strategic technology alliance to get a faster, safer start and uses the Implement, Adapt, Grow methodology to replace critical enterprise processes quickly, then nimbly adjusts them to fit. Over the course of the next week or so, I'm going to expand on this approach here, and the way we used it to dig ASU out of a serious and very risky hole, a hole where it found itself after 25 years of underinvestment in administrative computing systems.

Why would we bother changing these systems -- Admissions, Financial Aid, Student Records, Registration, Talent Acquisition, and Payroll -- in the first place? We've spent about fifteen million dollars on development so far: that's a lot of scratch. And even if 6 of the 7 systems went in smoothly, you have to admit Payroll wasn't painless. (If your pay is one of the ones affected, it was the definition of painful!) So what's the hurry? Couldn't we have left well enough alone? It's easy to forget just how serious the problems faced by ASU's administrative computing systems were in August of 2005, only two years ago. Many readers of this blog probably have no idea. But the depth of the administrative computing hole in which ASU found itself provides an important backdrop to this project, and fortunately we have the independent report that three experienced reviewers gave to ASU in January of 2004 to give us all a common understanding of just how precarious the situation was.

So, what did James Bottum, Chief Information Officer & Vice Provost for Computing & Information Technology at Clemson University; Ken Klingenstein, Chief Technologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder; and Joel Hartman, Vice Provost for Information Technologies & Resources at the University of Central Florida have to say about ASU's administrative computing situation circa 2004? Their report is exceptionally frank, as shown by the following excerpts from the full report:

Planning and implementing a new ERP system typically takes 5 10 years.

The current administrative computing strategy is flawed the strategy appears to be based more on avoidance of making the required investment than developing the administrative applications and services required to meet the needs of ITs constituents now and into the future. An effective forward-looking ERP strategy needs to be defined and costs identified so that attention can be drawn to the considerable planning, implementation, and funding requirements.

Given the age of ITs ERP systems and their reliance on COBOL, planning efforts should start immediately for transition to a new ERP system.

The university's administrative computing systems will soon be at the end of their life cycle and need to be replaced... In the meantime, the current systems will likely not scale to the university's stated enrollment goal of over 90,000 students, and the lack of integration between systems will become increasingly limiting and problematic.

Planning needs to begin immediately to assess the true useful life of current administrative applications, and to develop and gain consensus and support of university administration for a plan to have replacement systems in place when the legacy systems inevitably reach the end of their functional lives.

The campus has a fragmented approach to enterprise-wide applications, both ERP and others, that warrants a solid underpinning to provide the levels of service needed now and in the future.

The IT organization does not exhibit a 'can do' attitude and seems to defensively retreat behind a perceived lack of resources... The current state of central IT organization and operation is not sufficiently aligned with the university's directions to become a significant partner.

There is little historical evidence of comprehensive strategic planning, both at the university level and within the Information Technology unit... IT's vision, directions, and challenges are not widely recognized or understood throughout the institution.

The report of these experienced university CIOs made it abundantly clear: as 2004 opened, ASU was neck-deep in trouble and its administrative systems were on the brink of sudden unpredictable collapse. And throughout 2004 and deep into 2005, it still had not found its way out of that trouble. ASU did very little other than continue to patch the existing systems with chewing gum and bailing wire. And so the trouble grew as the systems continued to age.When I arrived at ASU in August of 2005, ASU's administrative computing car was still limping down the road, but with a horrible knocking sound coming from up front and inky black smoke curling out of the tailpipe. Not the best time to be looking for a new car, especially if the dealers tell you it will take 5-10 years to get it delivered.

Next Up: Building institutional will and confidence around an ice cream flavor.

How 'bout those Devils!!!

2007-09-02T03:54:00.000-07:00

How about those Devils last night? That's the way you do it!! From where I sat, they looked very good, on both sides of the ball, special teams, few penalties...Very encouraging. Congratulations to Coach Erickson and the whole team. An awesome debut.

Even with such an auspicious start, I noticed that about midway in the second quarter, some of the guys behind me in the stands were already starting with the Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda. Shoulda run this play. Coulda taken better advantage of that opportunity. Woulda been better this way than that way.

Of course, armchair analysis is part of the game. Part of every game, really. Every real fan does it. And the coaches do it too, of course, to understand where things went right and wrong, to better prepare for the next game.

We've been doing a fair amount of that lately with the OASIS project. Not so much around the deployment of Admissions, Financial Aid, Student Records, Registration or even Talent Acquisition. Those systems all went in pretty painlessly for the institution as a whole. But in the past month or so, there's been a lot of focus on the problems that the university has had adjusting to its new payroll system.

I feel a little like a football coach who's been hired to turn a team around. We changed the offense from 3-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust to an aggressive West Coast passing attack. We won a few games in the beginning of the season (listen to the State of IT iTunesU podcast to get an idea) and got people excited. Now, we're mid-season at half-time in the big game with the powerhouse team from ERP-U. The ERP team has dominated the NCAA for years with their crushing defense. Michigan, Minnesota, Johns Hopkins, U of A ... all of them have met their match in ERP-U and gone down to tough defeats. But so far, in our game with ERP-U, the run-and-gun game plan got us out to an early lead (installing Admissions, Financial Aid, Student Records and Registration in record time on a record scale), but near half-time, our team made a couple of errors and we threw an interception that, because of some missed tackles, got run back for a touchdown.

Now some of the fans are booing and throwing things from the stands, and a bunch of people are romanticizing about the glories of teams from yesteryear. People are saying the West Coast offense was always ill conceived and we were lucky to win our early games. "Go back to Indiana, ya bum!!" (Indiana? I've never lived in Indiana...)

But I have to tell you I'm not worried. Not one bit. It's the fourth quarter in this game with ERP-U, we're already ahead, and I know we'll win. We have tricks up our sleeves that no one in college football has ever seen, and we are not only going to the Rose Bowl, we're going to win the national championship and establish a football dynasty.

So let 'em boo and throw stuff. I love the fans. Pasadena, here we come!!!

I'm planning a series of posts this week -- a 6 part series on ERP the ASU Way.

Next up: "How Deep Was the Hole"

HCM DTA Hands on Open House Workshop Event

2007-08-09T11:16:00.000-07:00

A hands-on, open workshop for Departmental Time Administrators (DTA) has been scheduled for Friday, August 10, 2007, in Computing Commons Room 207.
You can stop in anytime from 9:00am to 5:00am.

You may bring your own laptop or use one in the room. Please bring your work, and experts will be available to assist with questions and techniques. We look forward to seeing you.

DTA training and Forum time conflict

2007-08-09T02:41:00.000-07:00

Todays Forum will not be replacing the DTA training. If you feel that attending the training session would be in your best interest then by all means please attend the training. For those who cannot attend the Forum and would like to address their concerns, please contact my assistant Marsha Frank at marsha.frank@asu.edu to schedule a time to meet with me either one on one or as a group.

Henley...

2007-08-08T17:27:00.000-07:00

Don Henley was in Phoenix tonight, appearing with the Pretenders. I've always liked Henley. I think he's a political poet. He opened with one of my favorite songs -- Dirty Laundry -- and closed with another favorite -- I Will Not Go Quietly.

Gotta love Henley. I find him inspiring...

Open Forum on Payroll Conversion, Thurs. Aug. 9

2007-08-08T11:37:00.000-07:00

Since last week, Ive had the opportunity to talk with a number of people about their questions and concerns regarding the payroll conversion. I have been impressed both by the quality of the conversation and the commitment everyone has to the success of the university and its mission. I promised last Friday to hold an Open Forum to enable people I have not been able to reach individually to engage in this same type of dialogue. The first of these Open Forums will be Thursday, August 9, from 2 until 3:30 p.m. in the Pima Room of the Memorial Union on the Tempe campus. I am setting up similar sessions on the other campuses next week, and Ill update my blog and send an additional email with those times and locations. Please come to the forum if you still have unanswered questions or a perspective youd like to share with me. I look forward to meeting with you.

Testing?

2007-08-05T05:29:00.000-07:00

In a comment to my previous post, Kristi writes:

Dr. Sannier,
Isnt it usually customary when converting such a large legacy system to a new one that the new system shadows the old system for a period of time to work out bugs before it goes live? As far as I know, this was not done with the HRMS to PeopleSoft conversion. Why is this?

Deploying a system of this magnitude without a plan for testing it would be reckless indeed, and deserving of censure. But that has certainly not been the case with ASU's OASIS project.

We could not have been nearly as as successful as we have been over the last 18 months if we had not followed a rigorous testing plan. Payroll is the most recent in a series of successful system deployments, systems that include Admissions, Financial Aid, Student Registration, Benefits, Talent Acquisition -- all major applications which have been in steady, high volume use by the university since their respective launches between January and June of this year.

Heres a quick breakdown of the testing that the new Payroll system underwent in 2007.

In January, the OASIS team initiated the record conversion process to move data from the legacy system to HCM. Unit testing of individual modules and data conversion tests were begun and continued to be run until the go-live in July. From February through April, over 50 test payrolls were run on a regular basis, to identify flaws in the new system and ensure their correction. By March, the majority of payroll records had been successfully converted, but continual evaluation and improvement of that data continued through to go-live.

In May and June, a series of test payrolls were run in parallel with the Legacy system, to help the team identify any remaining errors. Over 150 separate audit procedures were created and run after each conversion and test payroll to verify accuracy and identify issues. Beyond the testing for delivered software, all modifications and interfaces ASU created itself included their own set of unit, regression, integration and parallel testing.

Despite this extensive testing, which included parallel runs with the legacy HRMS system, some problems remain to be fixed once the system comes live. Testing and quality control can only do so much. Like the punch list on a new house, some flaws must be repaired all together, at the end. It's tempting to believe that any system can be tested to perfection, but complex systems like these, involving hundreds of thousands if not millions of records, are moving targets. Testing can tell you a lot about the robustness of the operational components, but it can't reveal every flaw - a fact that provides little consolation when the error directly affects you.

Thats why its important to remember that the key to our success so far -- in each of the OASIS rollouts -- has been the combination of extensive testing with the adapability and flexibility of ASU's staff. It is staff members who are making this system work: by quickly learning new procedures, by having patience and confidence while issues are resolved, by helping to identify remaining gaps, and by working together to solve any challenges we face.

It will be due to staff cooperation and diligence that, after the dust has settled, ASU will regard OASIS as a collective success, one that reflects positively on the New American University. It will be because all of us will have worked together that we've been able to rapidly and cost-effectively deploy new application systems to help ASU achieve its goals. Those goals - access, excellence, impact - a quality education for the public good are surely worthy of our best efforts.

I assure you that everyone involved with the deployment of the payroll project -- from managers, to coders and testers, to those entering data or helping staff to ensure their pay is correct -- all of them are working hard to fix any outstanding issues and make things right for anyone who has been adversely affected by the recent changes.

If you are experiencing an issue that the regular OASIS channels aren't fixing quickly enough, please email me at adrian.sannier@asu.edu. I will personally ensure that the problem is addressed quickly.

Fire Adrian!!!!

2007-08-03T07:28:00.000-07:00

It's not everyday that you see people calling for your head in the public square.

Of course Ive been reading yesterday's Tribune article and the comments posted there (http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/94382). And you can bet Im losing some sleep over the comments that ASU employees and concerned family and friends are leaving there.

So, what are we doing about it?

First and foremost, Matt McElrath, Christine Cervantes, Carol Campbell and myself are scheduling an Open Forum for this coming Thursday (August 9th) to hear the community's concerns and discuss the issues. When we have a room and time booked, I will publish it here and send a blanket email to all employees. I'm also happy to meet personally with anyone and everyone who has a concern they would like to discuss privately (my email address is adrian.sannier@asu.edu). I appreciate that there are those who might be concerned about "retaliation that some of you might be uncomfortable speaking directly to a member of the university administration about your frustrations. All I can say is you need not fear speaking out.

Second, Im opening the conversation here at my blog where comments come directly to me and I can publish them with responses.

Finally, and most importantly, the OASIS team is working tirelessly to correct the remaining implementation issues. They have worked very hard over the past year and a half to transition ASU's legacy administrative systems into the PeopleSoft environment and their efforts are laudable and hard fought. I encourage you to consider that they too are ASU employees and continue to work diligently to provide this community with the best managed PeopleSoft implementation possible. When the dust has cleared, I am confident their efforts will be judged a resounding success.

So we will meet publicly, discuss your concerns and produce from the discussion a better ASU administrative system.

And if that means we have to fire Adrian, then that's what it means.

Score one for Windows . . .

2007-06-20T00:56:00.000-07:00

So far I'm really enjoying my Mac conversion. Couple things have been a little discomforting though. For example, yesterday I was giving a talk at Educomm and was planning on using my Mac to display. Preparing the talk was easy...I used a combination of Keynote, Photoshop and Powerpoint under Parallels...very natural...But I forgot to bring my "dongle", the essential piece of conversion hardware to allow a Mac to connect to a standard VGA display...Arghhhh!!! Fortunately, the speaker before me was also an Apple user, and she graciously lent me hers...So the friendliness of the Apple community overrode the awkwardness of the dongle requirement....

But, it appears to me that Finder, while it has a nice interface for connecting to ftp sites and displaying the files therein, does NOT ALLOW writing to the ftp directories. I tried a few things, and did a little Google searching, but it appears this is just the way it is...

In the end, I went into Parallels and accessed my ftp site through the Windows XP explorer...Dead easy and very clean...Would have expected the Mac to work the same way...

WWDC . . . and an Apple for me . . .

2007-06-18T15:07:00.000-07:00

A Steve Jobs performance is never to be missed and last week's Keynote at the Apple WorldWide Developers Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco was no exception.

It began with a nice bit from John Hodgman, starring as PC from the PC/Mac ads, pretending to be Steve Jobs. Dressed in jeans and a Steve Jobs signature black mock turtleneck, PC tried hard to convince the crowd that Apple was in fact closing up shop due to the incredible success of Vista. The partisan crowd ate it up... But I have to admit that after Steve was finished, I had to consider the possibility that Apple is out innovating everyone else in the desktop/personal computing space.

I enjoyed my 8 minutes of fame later in the day as part of the State of IT. My talk focused on the amazing difference that Apple's iTunes U has made in getting ASU's podcasting capability to market quickly. (While the State of IT presentation is covered by Apple confidentiality restrictions, I made remarks similar to my State of IT thoughts in a recent podcast (transcript).

No doubt about it, Apple is pretty hot right now. The iPod redefined music... Leopard is amazing... the iPhone promises to be a breakout device. Sales of MacBooks are really brisk... and getting brisker. Apple stores rule as a shopping experience.
So as of last week, I have officially switched. Over the course of a couple of days, I migrated all my files to a MacBook Pro equipped with Parallels. So far I'm really impressed by the experience. I'm running Outlook side by side with Safari and iChat, and so far its the best computing experience I've ever had.

Plus I can now identify with the cool kid in the ads... I've always been a sucker for the cool kids.

ASU and ItunesU

2007-06-18T14:57:00.000-07:00

My name is Adrian and I am the University Technology Officer at Arizona State University, one of Americas largest and fastest growing universities serving metropolitan phoenix and the citizens of Arizona. Under the leadership of President Michael Crow, we are developing a new vision for American higher education, something we call the New American University. A new gold standard for access excellence and impact that judges a university by the quality of its output, not just the quality of its input; a university as proud of who it includes as who it excludes.

I’m here today to briefly describe for you how Apple is helping Arizona State University use technology to improve its academic excellence, increase educational access, and accelerate ASU’S impact on its community and the world.

There was a time when Universities were leaders in technology innovation. Certainly there are people in this room old enough to remember when people got their first email address in a .edu domain; when the largest networks were among the buildings on campuswides, the bits travelling over cables lovingly twisted and pulled by university it staff. Some of the first online applications were self service were college registration system and online card catalogs in university libraries.

But in the last decade, with the accelerating consumerization of high technology, universities have long since lost the lead. Consumer technologies are no longer watered down versions of industrial grade capabilities. Consumer technologies are now setting the pace, and along with it they are setting the expectations of our user communities. In the case of universities, the digital natives that are our incoming students expect us to provide a technology experience at least as good as the leading consumer edge. And educational institutions around the country are struggling to meet those ever-escalating expectations.

Over the past decade, Universities have moved from the technology drivers seat, to the back seat. As the innovation curve that leaders like Apple are on continues to accelerate, without serious help we may soon find ourselves on the side of the road watching consumer technology’s leading edge disappearing in the distance.
At ASU, we believe the answer to regaining the technology initiative lies in changing our focus from Context to Core.
As Geoffrey Moore, of Crossing the Chasm fame, defines it, Core activities are the ones that distinguish your enterprise, the ones that set it apart. In the case of a university then, a core activity is one that brings us new students, or attracts world class faculty, or helps students to succeed.
Core activities you must do for yourself. No one else can distinguish your institution for you. And everything else is context for that core.
One of the reasons IT shops today find it increasingly hard to compete with the consumer experience is that what was once core has rapidly become context. We still spend 80% of our time on infrastructure, storage, networking and content distribution. None of which will distinguish our university. There's almost no time left over to apply the leading edge to our Core activities of teaching, learning and research.
If technology is to matter ASU, our shop has to climb the value chain, leave the enabling infrastructure to others, and focus 80% of our energies on the core. The value added application of emerging consumer technologies to the central academic and research missions of the university.
And as we shift our focus to Core, we believe our context must come from strategic technology allies like Apple -- consumer technology powerhouses who are setting the pace of innovation and who operate at scales far beyond our own.

ASU's new technology strategy was featured in the 2006 Holiday Edition of The Economist. In that article I said that using leading edge consumer technologies is like getting technology from an advanced alien culture. Nowhere is that more true than in the case of ASU's partnership with Apple around Itunes U.

The democratization and explosion of rich media authoring promises to revolutionize education. But as new capabilities for creating, sharing and displaying content roll out in an endless stream, institutions struggle to put the supporting infrastructure needed to store and distribute this new content.

With iTunes U, it’s as if ASU got to skip a few grades. Itunes U lets us jump right over the part where we design and build a university owned and managed delivery system that would be a poor cousin to iTunes and go right to the head of the class -- to use all the power of Itunes itself, to showcase and distribute ASU's rich media content not as a shadow of the leading edge, but with the very same rapidly evolving tools and services that Apple is using to help redefine the whole world's media experience.

Because of iTunes U, ASU can forget about the how and focus on the why; focus on the myriad ways that these new kinds of content can advance the mission of the University, enrich the learning experience, and reach out to the community in powerful new ways.
iTunes U has provided President Crow and the rest of our University with a new platform for communicating the New American University's message of excellence, access and impact to our community and the world. The New American University channel allows us to reach out to communicate a message of change throughout our community and around the world, and keep everyone interested in this new vision for American Higher Education abreast with its progress in the Valley of the Sun
iTunes U has also provided ASU with a new and powerful vehicle to communicate the excitement of higher education to K-12 students around Arizona and around the world. In the same store where aspiring students find the latest from their music idols, podcasts like ASU's innovative "Ask A Biologist", put middle school students from around the country in touch with what skilled science educators can teach them about their world and their own place in it.
Finally, ASU has been able to use the iTunes U infrastructure to create a highly integrated rich media experience for its faculty and students. Professors can easily create course specific podcasts to provide access to lecture materials, or supplement the class experience with timely discussions that all feed to student ipods and powerbooks seamlessly thorough the iTunes client.
All of this adds up to acceleration for ASU. Apple's Itunes U has made it possible for ASU to distribute its content on a state of the art system that defines the leading edge, but without losing control of our brand, our content or our domain.
It's allowed us to focus on how this technology can attract new students and help our current ones to succeed. We're doing our part by instrumenting our campus for capture and ensuring our network can deliver this new content where and when its needed. And helping our students and faculty find new and productive uses for what this technology revolution enables.
iTunes U.... technology from the advanced alien culture that is Apple, ....helping ASU meet the higher education challenges of the 21st century

House Committee on Science and Technology

2007-06-08T00:44:00.000-07:00

The role of technology in reducing illegal filesharing: A university perspective

June 5, 2007

Dr. Adrian Sannier

University Technology Officer

Arizona State University

Thank you, Chairman Gordon, Ranking Member Hall, and other Members of the Committee for giving me an opportunity to describe for you Arizona State University's use of technology to reduce the incidence of copyright-infringing filesharing on its campus networks.

As one of the nation's largest universities, with over 65,000 students attending its 4 campuses in the metropolitan Phoenix area, ASU provides its students, faculty and staff with an extensive and evolving array of computing and communications services. These services have become a core enabler of the University's academic and research missions.

To govern the legitimate use of these services, ASU developed an Acceptable Use Policy for its computing and communication services that expressly forbids their use to transfer or exchange files when that transfer or exchange would infringe on copyright. Users of the University’s computing and communication services must electronically agree to this policy as a condition of connection. The policy explicitly forbids the use of university communications or computing infrastructure for any unlawful communications, including "threats of violence, obscenity, child pornography, copyright infringement and harassing communications".

I am pleased to report that, despite some news reports to the contrary in the popular press, ASU has a relatively low rate of complaint about the illegitimate use of its network from copyright holders such as the RIAA. ASU’s complaint rate, which is the number of individuals alleged to have distributed copyrighted content per thousand students, was only 0.52%, the lowest among the 25 institutions for which the RIAA released data this past Spring.

In a recent letter to University Presidents around the nation, the RIAA outlined a set of four best practices that they recommend universities employ to prevent or reduce student exposure to lawsuits and/or Digital Millennium Copyright Act notices. ASU was an early adopter of each of these best practices, and they are the cornerstones of ASU’s successful containment efforts.

The first recommended practice is to educate students about the do’s and don’ts of downloading and copying music and other copyrighted works. ASU incorporates these topics as part of our new student orientations, our residence hall orientations and our twice yearly information security week orientations.

The second recommended practice is to offer students a legitimate online service, one that provides an inexpensive alternative to illegal file-sharing. Beginning in July of 2005, ASU was an early adopter of one such service, a digital entertainment network designed specifically for college students known as Ruckus. ASU's subscription provides its students with downloadable access to 2.75 million songs, full-length feature films, short-form video, sports clips, and music videos, as well as access to a social network site focused on the network.

The third recommended practice is to take appropriate disciplinary action when students are found to be engaging in infringing conduct online. Under the terms of ASU's Acceptable Use Policy,

upon receiving notice of a violation, ASU may temporarily suspend a user’s privileges or move or delete the allegedly offending material pending further proceedings. A person accused of a violation is notified of the charge and has an opportunity to respond before ASU imposes a permanent sanction.

In addition to sanctions available under applicable law and ASU and regents’ policies, ASU may impose a temporary or permanent reduction or elimination of access privileges to computing and communication accounts, networks, ASU-administered computing rooms, and other services or facilities.

The RIAA's final recommendation encourages universities to implement a network technical solution to restrict, filter, or curtail peer-to-peer file sharing. Any technical solution must balance the rights of copyright holders with the legitimate uses of the university’s network and its users’ expectations of privacy and academic freedom.

Beginning in December of 2000, ASU's first attempt at a solution was a network monitoring solution from Packeteer. ASU used the Packeteer product to monitor network data streams and use the protocol information contained in the streams to prioritize traffic. This allowed ASU the amount of university bandwidth devoted to peer-to-peer traffic to be strictly limited. Over a five year period, ASU invested more than $250,000 in the installation and maintenance of this solution, which was purchased and maintained solely for its role in protecting the interests of copyright holders. In 2006, as the legitimate traffic volumes continued to increase, requiring a concomitant increase in investment in Packeteer, ASU began to look for a different solution.

After evaluating several different products and approaches, we have finally settled on Audible Magic's CopySense Network Appliance. The CopySense product does not disable peer-to-peer networking services or restrict the bandwidth available to them. Instead, the CopySense Appliance treats copyrighted material as if it were a computer virus on a P2P network. It works by blocking the exchange of copyrighted content while allowing legitimate files to transfer unobstructed. While our technical team was skeptical of the approach at first, our initial tests convinced us that the CopySense approach would provide us with a viable solution.

We installed the CopySense in spring semester without fanfare. It was configured to reject any traffic identified as registered commercial music, likely commercial music, likely commercial film and TV, or likely commercial software. It began rejecting about 5% of the overall network bandwidth immediately, identifying that traffic as the exchange of copyrighted material. Despite the interruption in network transmission, there was no noticeable increase in calls to our helpdesk, and we received no complaints about network performance for legitimate purposes attributable to the CopySense product.

Overall I would classify our adoption of CopySense as one of the easiest technical adoptions we have undertaken and that it has thus far caused very little disruption in our community.

The list price for the CopySense product at ASU's scale is just over $200,000, but ASU expects its costs this year, as a Pioneer Reference Account, to be closer to 1/2 that price.

While we at ASU are pleased with our new technical solution, we remain concerned about the potential for an ongoing "arms race". Peer-to-peer services have evolved to defeat effective counter-measures before and it would be foolhardy to believe that no further evolution is possible. As long as this "arms race" continues, universities will continue to be called upon to spend scarce resources procuring and deploying the latest technical counter-measures and expending time and energy in the protection of copyright at the expense of the value-added application of emerging technologies to the core missions of the institution.

We therefore applaud the progress that Apple and others have made in developing new and more effective business models for the consumer friendly distribution of electronic content and look forward to the day that these improved services make copyright-infringing file exchange unattractive to all but the fringes of our community.

Thank you again for the opportunity to share Arizona State University's experience with you.

Testify...

2007-06-08T00:38:00.000-07:00

This week I went to Washington, to testify before the House Committee on Science and Technology about the university perspective on illegal filesharing. My testimony resulted in what may be the worst picture ever taken of any person, at any time, ever.

ASU was invited to testify before the committee to describe its approach to illegal filesharing on its campus. In my remarks, I outlined how ASU uses a combination of education, enforcement, legal alternatives, and network management to contain copyright infringement by members of its community. I also pointed out to the committee that while potentially effective, the protection offered by any given technical measure is temporary, and that the "arms race" of escalating counter-measures needed to combat evolving file-sharing programs over the long term is an increasingly expensive proposition for universities.

I believe that the only permanent solution to illegal filesharing must come from the marketplace. Its hard to sell CD's when they are no longer the product that customers want to buy. If more companies follow the example of EMI and Apple and begin to offer products in forms that customers want, at prices customers are willing to pay, illegal filesharing will move back to the margins and out of the mainstream.

At least that's how it looks to the goofy guy in the tie with his eyes closed on CSpan2. What's with that smirk anyway?

Now is the winter of our discontent...

2007-03-11T14:34:00.000-07:00

If this week's weather was any guide, we're looking at a glorious spring here at ASU. And in anticipation of that glorious spring, this past Friday, we had a little thank you picnic on the Hayden Lawn to recognize the hard work of the OASIS team, complete with yours truly in a Dunk Tank. Make no mistake. This was no "Mission Accomplished Celebration" to be sure. We're not hanging any banners yet. Everyone on the team knows we still have a long way to go, and a short time to get there. As I told the team on Friday, in the words of Winston Churchill, "This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning!!!"

And taken all in all, it's been a good beginning. Given the way this team has hit its deadlines, deployed the systems, and shown an incredible ability in responding to problems to ensure that a system once deployed stays deployed, a beautiful late-winter afternoon was as good an excuse for a MidPoint Picnic as we needed.

For an ERP project of this magnitude, one that is just past its first birthday, OASIS is in awfully good shape. We've met every milestone so far. We're still under budget. The new system is already posting jobs and processing applicants. The schedule of classes is online. The student records are already converted, more than 50,000,000 of them. We're successfully processing student applications and we've been admitting students since November. We're computing their financial aid and we're registering them, by the thousands.

So while nobody's planning to don a flight suit and land on an aircraft carrier any time soon, its still useful to take a minute to take stock. And as I look at it, I have to say that ASU's strategy of Implement, Adapt, Grow is succeeding.

Recall that ASU opted for Implement, Adapt, Grow to avoid the Frankenstein Factor, a phenomenon I warned of in September of 2005. The Frankenstein Factor occurs when complex systems are developed, often over a period of years, without coming into regular contact with reality. Created in a castle laboratory, far from the pressures of the real world, the entire system is carefully designed and assembled, all the complex pieces carefully tried against test suites, and then assembled to create a whole. Only after the monster is complete do its creators jolt it with electricity in the appropriate fashion, bring it dramatically to life, and proudly lead it down to the public square to live among the people.

Who, of course, run screaming...

...because new systems always look different and are hence ugly. And taking a new system in all at once - even if the creating team has scrupulously given laboratory tours every Friday since the project's inception - when the monster finally comes alive and people are expected to work with IT every day, well...let's just say there's always an awkward period of adjustment. Even if the system eventually becomes a handsome prince.

Surprisingly to some, despite the best laid plans of the creators, every new system will have its flaws. As the military strategist von Moltke is credited with saying, "No battle plan survives first contact." No matter how carefully designed and implemented it may be, when a new software system first comes online, its flaws emerge, flaws that must be fixed in-vivo, with the electricity on. A project will be successful if it hits the right balance between upfront design and nimble response. Stay in the lab too long, and the costs mount without a guarantee that the system will be better for the time it spent there. Come out too soon and the flaws may be more than the institution can absorb.

ASU's strategy for avoiding the Frankenstein Factor has been to risk creating the system right in the middle of the public square, deploying the individual system components one-by-one as soon as they were able to stand on their own. In every case, their first contact with real data and real users has revealed problems, but so far they have been problems that the teams have been able to solve in-vivo. By staying on schedule, deploying 80% solutions and refining them in place, we are managing to advance the system on all fronts in an amazingly cost effective way that has so far avoided a full blown Frankenstein experience. This has been our strategy for managing complexity, and thus far, while not perfect, it is holding.

Which brings us to the winter of our discontent...

In my experience, in any major project there's a point in the middle somewhere where it begins to seem to some people like we'd all be better off if we'd never have started the whole thing in the first place. Surely, they say, someone should have planned this better. We should have bought a different product. We should have taken more or less time, or done a better job gathering requirements, or had a more complete understanding of how complex it would be. Think the deck of the Nina in early October, 1492. The third day at Thermopylae. A couple of days before the Battle of Agincourt. The midst of the London Blitz. History is rife with examples to support any argument.
A period I would call "the winter of our discontent"

In the winter of our discontent, the focus can turn from looking forward to looking back. No matter how successful a system implementation may be, no one plays a perfect game, and when the winter comes, folks can start to dwell on what's gone wrong instead of what's gone right. While a complex system is going in, its construction makes lots of resource demands, but it has yet to provide most of its benefits. Deals get broken. Midnight oil gets burned. The mess of construction inconveniences everyone, making every job a little more difficult and some a lot more. In the middle of implementation, serious institutional challenges remain -- challenges of far greater importance than the system itself -- and these challenges are made daily more difficult because of the dust and general incompleteness of everything. During this period, in the middle of the tunnel, there is every temptation -- and every opportunity -- to attribute various institutional ills to the disruption caused by the construction process.

Consider the plight of the Dave's Dog House.

The Dog House is a popular spot on University Avenue here in Tempe and they make a mean Boston-style dog. But this year, because of the Light Rail construction on the street outside, some days it must be a lot harder to sell 'em than ever before. Dog House Dave may well be a Light Rail believer. He may be convinced that in the end he'll sell two dogs a day, every day to every Light Rail rider. But should he miss his 2007 sales goal, the disruptive effects of Light Rail construction will be the reason given. In the end, when the dust clears, and we can see with 20/20 hindsight, a careful analysis might find lots of factors went into a decrease in sales. Adding up all those factors, we might find Light Rail was nearly 100% of the reason for the shortfall, or less than 1%, because lots of factors go into determining how many hot dogs they sell besides construction traffic.

But if the Dogfather isn't selling what he needs to sell, I'll guarantee you he's not spending any time analyzing those causes. Because figuring the causes out isn't all that important when you get right down to it. In the end, what really matters to the Dog House is whether or not they sell enough hot dogs this year. So I guarantee you their spending all their time figuring out new ways to bring more new customers in the door for the first time and get all their current customers to come back for more. There'll be plenty of time to figure out the shoulda, coulda, woulda's after the tale is told. In the middle of the fight, it's about moving forward.

I used to work for this guy, Marty, who was great at surviving these hard winter periods. Deep in the middle of a project, often a skittish customer would grow concerned at a perceived lack of progress, and go over my head to Marty. Deeply concerned about impending risk, customers would sometimes call him and raise a host of issues, and complain of mistakes and mismanagement. In a couple of extreme cases, they even threatened to walk on a contract, or sue us, or defame us, or whatever.

Marty was great at this. He would listen carefully and patiently, without saying too much, 'til they'd had their say. Then he'd always tell them the same thing: "I understand that you're upset and that you feel that our team has taken certain actions and made certain mistakes that have put our joint project at risk. And I know that you understand that while we might acknowledge that we have made some mistakes, we feel most of what we've done has been right on target. We might even point to mistakes that you've made that have created challenges."

Right around this point, you could feel the customer getting ready for an attribution fight, a good old he-said/she-said, about who was right and who was wrong, and my lawyer will call your lawyer... But instead, Marty would say: "But none of this is going to help us succeed. We've both done things right, we've both done things wrong. And from where I sit, we can still be very successful in what we set out to do together, as long as we focus on moving forward. So let's put aside the conversation about how we got here. We're committed to helping you meet your goals, so let's focus on what's important to you, and figure out how we work together to advance..."
I can't remember a time he wasn't able to get the client to agree and turn a difficult situation into a success.

The OASIS story is full of good news, but it still faces its share of uphill climbs. And in some quarters, the challenges threaten to obscure the path to success. But if we follow Marty's advice, and continue to focus on the challenges and find solutions, we can bring this ship safe home.

There'll be plenty of time to look at the scoreboard at project's end. The tale will be fully clear by fall. And just so everyone is clear about it, the success of OASIS won't be measured by whether or not it came in on time and under budget. Those factors are important, sure, but the real test of OASIS' success will be:
Did ASU meet its 2007 enrollment goals?
Was ASU able to recruit the faculty and staff it needs to succeed?
Were we able to retain students in greater numbers for the fall?
Has OASIS positioned ASU to grow?

If the answers to those questions are yes, then OASIS will be judged a success. If the answer to any of the questions is no, then the judgment will be harsher, whether OASIS is 100% or 1% the cause. All we can do, every day, is all we've been doing every day: focus on the goals of the institution, and solve the short and long term problems that get us closer to meeting those goals.

It's a core part of the OASIS strategy. Implement, Adapt, Grow. All along, we're identifying errors and fixing them. We're streamlining processes. It is painful and difficult and disruptive -- and so far it's working.

Knowing what I know about these implementations wherever they have been done, if someone last year had shown me where we are in a crystal ball last year and asked "will you take this position or play the game again," I'd take this position in a minute. This game is ours to win.

So if now is the winter of our discontent... here's to making it a glorious spring...

More on the Tech Fee...

2007-02-19T04:59:00.000-08:00

It's been a busy last couple of weeks. Among other things, I've had the opportunity to discuss the student technology fee proposal at 7 different Open Forums that were held at each of the ASU campuses.

I'd like to thank those students who made time to attend one of the meetings or who have posted comments online - either at my blog, or at one of the two facebook sites devoted the fee, one in support and one in opposition. Clearly the fee proposal has its student supporters and its opponents, but regardless of position, I have found the discussion interesting and helpful. While I would have hoped for stronger turnouts at the forums -- none of the meetings had more than a dozen or so attendees -- the students who did come out drove a lively and informed discussion of the options.

The remainder of this post is meant to consider and respond to the comments we received during the meetings and electronically.

How much is the proposed fee? Who does it apply to?
The proposed fee is $100 per student per year, and would apply to students on every campus.

Why do we need a student technology fee?
Technology is an increasingly important part of higher education and keeping up with its rate of change is an expensive proposition. A student technology fee ensures that a reliable and significant source of funding will be devoted to continually enhancing this important part of the academic environment.

More than 70 percent of public universities have a mandatory student technology fee, including the University of Arizona and Northern Arizona University. These institutions have found that a reliable fund for investing in student technology initiatives is an important tool in remaining competitive.

How much money will it raise?
If the fee is paid by ASU’s 65,000 students, the proceeds will total about $6.2M. Minus the 15% (or $940,000) reserved for financial aid, the net proceeds to fund student computing will be about $5.2M per year.

Will the fee “yield benefit to most students, beyond what they are already receiving” ?(see Hector’s comment for a rebuttal)
I appreciate this student's sentiment that the existing wireless coverage is adequate for his needs and thus needs no further investment. Others expressed similar ideas about the common computing labs, saying that they already serve their needs well. If things are so good, why do we need further investment?

I'd like to say that some students agree with the idea that technology services at ASU are all they could ask for, but I'm afraid that lots of students still have needs that aren't being met. But, even if we accept that the present day services are adequate, unfortunately, none of these services continues at the same level without consistent investment. Computers age, wireless standards evolve, bandwidth demands increase.

As the old Woody Allen joke says, technology services are like sharks. They have to constantly move forward or they die. Without consistent investment, we'd soon have a dead shark on our hands.

How will a student technology fee improve the quality of student computing?
Technology platforms are expensive, and they require consistent investment because of constant improvements in hardware and software systems. The academic platform at ASU today consists of several interconnected elements:

Wired and wireless networks that connect students to ASU resources and the Internet

Mediated classrooms

Blackboard and other multimedia course creation/delivery tools

Common computing labs and associated software access

Support systems including online support, help desk and emerging 1:1 support systems

ASU/Google Apps for Education

ASU iTunes University

The student technology fee will allow ASU to continue to maintain, enhance and expand the elements of this academic platform to enrich the academic experience and enhance student success.

What will the proceeds of the fee be used for?
The fee will be used to fund initiatives to improve the academic technology platform at ASU. Near term priorities include:

Expanding ASU’s wireless network on all four campuses, including expanding coverage within the residence halls, public areas, classrooms, and research facilities

Increasing the number of technology-enabled classrooms

Developing a system to allow students to easily access University-licensed software on student owned machines from anywhere in the world, reducing dependence on common computing labs.

Expanding and improving the online self-service environment to reduce the administrative burden on students.

Additional initiatives will be advanced in response to emerging technological innovations, developed in consultation with student and faculty advisory groups.

Virginia Smith asked if ASU's student technology survey was offered to all students or only downtown students? Isn't a big chunk of student input missing? Others questioned the survey's methodology. Wasn't the survey really rigged to produce support for the fee?

Dr. Sam DiGangi, Director of ASU’s alt^I, who developed and conducted the survey, responded with this: “There are actually two surveys that have been conducted relating to campus technology. The first was distributed in summer 2006 to all students who are in programs at the downtown Phoenix Campus. Another survey was distributed to EVERY currently enrolled 2006-07 ASU students (62,670). This survey included questions directly relating to the technology fee, along with other technology use and preference questions. The initial invitation was distributed via email on 10/12/2006. A reminder was sent on 10/19/2006 and again on 10/25/2006. Details on the procedure, response rates across campuses, and results can be found at: http://alti.asu.edu/node/87”

Several students who accepted the rationale for the fee nevertheless questioned its amount. Does the fee really have to be $100? That seems like a lot of money per student.
While we recognize that $100 is a lot of money for many students, we believe that it is the right amount for the fee this year. Of the more than 70% of public universities that charge a student technology fee, the average for that fee is almost double what we’ve proposed.

Keeping the academic technology platform current is an expensive proposition, and the revenue from the student technology fee will certainly not be enough to defray all of the costs associated with creating and maintaining it. Rather, the proceeds of the student technology fee are intended to fund initiatives to advance the platform’s capabilities and allow it to keep pace with a rapidly expanding technology base.

Who will decide how the money is used?
The technology fee will be administered by the University Technology Office. The UTO will establish student advisory boards with members from each of ASU’s campuses, both graduate and undergraduate, to gather input on student needs, act as a sounding board for proposals, and to provide oversight of fee expenditures.

Since the fee increases the total cost of education, won’t a technology fee serve as a barrier to access for financially disadvantaged students?
15% of the overall fee is directed toward need-based financial aid to help offset the fee’s impact on the total cost of education.

Anthony Garone asked the tough question, "what will happen if the technology fee isn’t assessed? From the blog post, it doesn’t sound like anyone wants to talk about that."
The short answer is that, without the fee, we're back to the dead shark. With a growing demand for services and a shrinking pool of money, the net result will necessarily be a decline in services. If we don't invest in expanding the wireless network and demand for wireless bandwidth continues to grow, the result is a less reliable, less useful service. As the demand for software access grows, in the absence of investment in new strategies to expand software access, the lines get longer.

At UTO, we're committed to providing excellent service for our customers and improving those services when our customers are unhappy. Fee or no fee, we'll work hard for you. But if our resources fall, its hard to imagine that it won't have an impact on our service.

I'm sick of hearing about this. When will the issue be decided, and by whom?
The fee proposal will be voted on by the Arizona Board of Regents at their March 8-9 meeting.

A Letter to the Editor of the State Press...

2007-01-25T03:53:00.000-08:00

I’m writing as a follow-up to the article in the January 24th edition of the State Press, USG Takes Tech Fee to Student Voters. I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce the University’s perspective on this important issue and assure students that we’ve been working closely with their representatives. Beginning in November of last year, I began working intensively with a group of student government representatives, including: Maria Ronan, Elizabeth Simonhoff, Ross Meyer, Christopher Gustafson, Amanda Confer, Devin Mauney and James Alling. Along the way, I’ve provided them with written details and participated in a series of face-to-face meetings to discuss the fee. This past Sunday, I posted a summary of the information I shared with these student leaders on my blog. I hope students interested in this issue will have a look at the post and feel free to share their comments there. As these representatives will tell you, we haven’t always agreed, but we have had an open dialog and spent many hours discussing why the fee is needed, how it will be used, and how to include student input in a meaningful way. Though our conversations have been spirited at times, I know these students feel that their ideas have been taken seriously, because they’ve told me so, face-to-face.

The heavy usage of our wired and wireless networks, the lines at the computing sites, and the many requests for more support, more online services, and more access to software tools – all of these things tell us how important information technology has become to our students.

The results of this fall’s university-wide technology survey reveal a student body that expects the University to do more for them in the area of technology. They want more connectivity; they want better technology support services; they want the academic experience to make better use of emerging technologies. In the survey, the students make it clear that they want ubiquitous wireless connectivity, better technology support, and a broader range of software and services, accessible from anywhere.

The fulfillment of these expanding needs is the purpose of the fee. Maintaining and growing a complex technology infrastructure requires a stable source of revenue, and while the cost of providing these services is rising, the patchwork of non-recurring funding sources we have used to get this far has expired.

ASU is not the first university to require a technology fee as a reliable way to fund these crucial services. In 2002, according to an EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research report, nearly 70 percent of public universities had instituted a mandatory student technology fee. According to that report, the average student technology fee at these schools was $197. Both our sister institutions, the University of Arizona and Northern Arizona University, already have similar technology fees in place to meet the needs of their students.

Because this fee is directed toward student needs, we look forward to any input on student priorities, including the USG’s recently announced survey. In addition, please consider this an invitation to the electronic discussion being held on my blog. I’ll respond directly to your questions and provide you with as much background as I can.

Also, since nothing beats face-to-face feedback, I’m planning a series of Open Forums to be held in February at each of the ASU campuses to explain why this fee is so important and to listen to your concerns. We’ll begin on the Tempe Campus in Murdock 100 on Tuesday, February 6th from 5:00-6:30pm. We’ll be announcing sessions at Downtown, West and Poly in the coming week.

I’m looking forward to meeting you and learning more about what’s important to you.

Student Technology Fee

2007-01-21T13:02:00.000-08:00

No one is particularly fond of new taxes (or fees), especially those people called upon to pay the tax/fee. But sometimes new sources of revenue are needed to help an organization meet its obligations. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "Taxes are what we pay for civilized society."

At the November 22nd meeting of the Arizona Board of Regent’s, ASU proposed a student technology fee of $100 per student, per year. The proposed fee is intended to supplement ASU’s existing state technology budget and allow for continued investment to meet student’s growing technology expectations. The fee is slated to be considered at ABOR's March meeting. While we'd all like to keep the cost of education as close to free as possible, I support this fee because I know how crucial it is to maintaining and advancing technology in support of the learning enterprise here at ASU.

As a student, your first instinct may be to oppose this fee, but I'd like to ask you to reconsider. I believe technology support is an important priority for many of you and supporting this fee is one way to ensure that ASU can continue to meet your growing and changing technology needs. At the UTO, we are working with ASU student government leaders to get them up to speed on the rationale behind the fee; as well, we're planning a series of open forums to be held in February on all 4 campuses so students can teach us more about their ideas and concerns. I'll be writing more on the timing of those Forums in a future post, but I wanted to share some of the background on the fee here, and in the podcast I did on Friday.

ASU isn't the first University to seek a fee like this one.
The quality of technology available to students has become an important factor in student recruitment and retention as well as the overall quality of the educational experience. But the increasing pace of technological change, combined with its rapid obsolescence, has escalated the funding pressure on universities as they struggle to keep pace with the advancing expectations of incoming students.

To augment institutional support for student computing, universities throughout the United States, including both the University of Arizona and Northern Arizona University, have already implemented student technology fees as a mechanism to provide a stable and recurring source of funding for student related technology initiatives.

In 2002, according to an EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research report, nearly 70 percent of public universities had instituted a mandatory student technology fee. According to that report, the average student technology fee at public universities was $197.

While the proposed fee will not defray all of ASU's student technology related costs, a focused fee structure will provide a targeted allocation for investment in student-related technology activities. The advantage of a student technology fee is that it will provide ASU with a stable and recurring source of revenue to be invested in technology with which we will continuously improve the quality of student computing.

A student technology fee would subsidize, but not replace, course fees. A student technology fee would be centrally managed, while course fees are local to departments and are much easier to adjust as changes in the curriculum occur. Course fees are well-understood and well-managed funding vehicles that are meeting existing departmental course needs. The proposed student technology fee will be used to fund university-wide projects that directly serve student needs. Appropriate uses of the proposed fee will focus on supporting student co-curricular IT services not currently funded through course fees.

A Student Survey
ASU students have a broad array of unmet technology desires and expectations. Fulfilling these expectations enriches students' academic experience and helps them make the most of the substantial technology investments they already make on their own behalf - in the laptops, desktops, cell phones, PDAs, MP3 players and other personal computing devices they bring to school with them.

The 2006 university-wide survey of the technology habits and desires of ASU’s students provides insight into ASU student attitudes toward technology. It suggests that ASU consists of a student body that is technologically savvy; a student body that brings its own tools to school – phones, computers and other devices; a student body that uses these tools every day to stay connected with their community and to further their academic careers.

But the survey also reveals a student body that expects the University to do more for them in the area of technology. They want more connectivity, they want better technology support services, they want the academic experience to make better use of emerging technologies. In the survey, the students make it clear that they want ubiquitous wireless connectivity, better technology support, a broader range of software and services, accessible from anywhere. The fulfillment of these needs is the purpose of the proposed fee.

Related Excerpts from the Survey Results
When asked if it would be useful for ASU to create a model in which student's pay a technology fee to advance technology and support services, 33% said yes, 36% were indifferent. 31% were opposed.

When asked to prioritize the features and support they would most like to see result from the fee, responses were consistent across campuses and between graduate and undergraduate students. Through analysis of fixed response and open ended questions, the most prominent requests included:

Wireless everywhere

Increased support for 1:1 computing

Enhancing common computing areas

More comfortable environments to use laptops and work together

Automatic creation of podcasts for all lectures

Mobile phone services

A print quota rather than per-page charges

Increased access to software, including Microsoft Office and the Adobe Creative suites

24x7 help desk support capable of providing assistance with all aspects of technology use and access

DELIVERABLES
For 2007, ASU is proposing three projects which will be partially funded by the student technology initiative. All three are in line with student technology priorities as revealed by the student technology survey. The three initiatives are:

Continued expansion of the ASU wireless network to provide ubiquitous mobile connectivity on all of ASU’s campuses

Deployment of a service to increase access to common software tools for ASU students to increase the value of personal technology investments

Development of one or more additional technology services – e.g. enhanced podcasting support, extended service hours, increased printing support, expanded software bundle, increased support for laptop computers – identified by students as important, to be chosen in direct consultation with student representatives.

The UTO will be responsible for the implementation of initiatives funded by the Student Technology Investment. To help ensure that these initiatives are responsive to student needs, the University will appoint a Student Technology Council (STC) that will be responsible for working with the UTO to represent student interests and advise the UTO on how best to allocate the Student Technology Investment in alignment with student priorities.

To assist the STC in its oversight of UTO’s administration of the Student Technology Investment, the UTO will develop detailed financial and technical proposals for projects of interest to students for the STC to help choose from.

A representative of the STC will also have a seat on the University Technology Council, the advisory body which provides technology direction for ASU as a whole.

The STC provides an ongoing mechanism for students to help shape their technology environment and to help the university focus resources on student priorities.

INVESTMENT PLAN FOR 2007
Student Technology Investment Estimate
Proposed Fee $100
Estimated number of students 65,000
Total Student Technology Investment $6,500,000

Investment Breakdown
Financial Aid Reserve $975,000
UTO Directed Investment $4,550,000
Student Guided Investment $975,000

Investment Plan for 2007
UTO Directed Investment
Expanding/Improving University Wireless Network $2,350,000
Expanding/Improving Software Access $2,200,000

Options for Student Directed Investment
Instituting/Expanding the Student Print Quota $300,000
Expanded Academic Podcasting $300,000
Expanded Software Bundle $780,000
Expanded Service Hours $400,000
Expanded Laptop Support $500,000

Work-Life Balance

2007-01-02T02:25:00.000-08:00

There is an interesting article in the 2006 Holiday issue of The Economist that covers ASU's technology alliance strategy. It uses ASU's embracing of Google Apps for Education and Apple's itunes University as examples of how "consumer technologies are invading corporate computing". The article has an unusual title, "Work-Life Balance", describing not the usual balance we all must strike between work and family, but instead the balance that companies must now strike between their use of consumer technologies and more specialized "business-grade" technologies.

As technology becomes increasingly central to daily life, consumer technologies, produced for wider markets at greater revenue and profit, can quickly outstrip more specialized technologies, even when those specialized technologies started out in the lead. There are lots of examples of this phenomenon in technology: the way video games commoditized and dramatically accelerated the development of 3D graphics technology particularly for personal computers; the way the military and intelligence establishment embraced private sector information technology because of its superior pace of innovation.

As the Economist article points out, in the web space "as everything else migrates to web-based services, software will increasingly resemble the web technologies of the consumer market".

Nice to see that ASU is not alone in thinking that strategic technology alliance is a significant trend whose time has come.

On a personal note, the "Work-Life Balance" title was especially ironic for me, since I did the interview for it over a cell phone from the waiting room of the hospital where my oldest son was in surgery to get his broken nose repaired.

While I understand that this is probably not everyone's idea of a healthy work-life balance :), it works for me. I know that a lot of people feel that laptops, crackberries, wireless networks and cell phones all work like electronic tethers, keeping people tied to work 24/7. I can see that point of view, but for me these personal technologies mean flexibility and substantially less worry.

I spend less time than I would in the office, because I know that apart from meeting with people face-to-face, there's nothing I can't do remotely. I take more hikes because my Blackberry lets me monitor my mail while I'm out in South Mountain Park. I worry less because I know if a crisis or an opportunity emerges, I can be ready to respond no matter where I am.

So when the author of the Economist article's window of opportunity coincided with an important moment for me as a dad, I didn't have to choose between being a responsible dad or getting good press for my school. Technology allowed me to juggle both responsibilities, letting me get more out of that day than I would have been able to otherwise.

That's my work/life balance story and I'm sticking to it...

A UTO Retrospective...

2006-12-10T06:58:00.000-08:00

This month President Crow asked the members of WG1 to put together a list of accomplishments for their respective areas over the past 6 months. As I was getting the list together for UTO, I thought I'd take it as an opportunity to share some of the things that we've done at UTO since July and see what feedback there might be out there.

The list below is by no means exhaustive, but I'd like it to hit the highlights of UTO's contribution to the mission of the New American University. If you have suggestions, additions, corrections or omissions, please email me at (u t o @ a s u . e d u) or simply enter a comment to this post. Any constructive advice is appreciated.

Operations
On the operations side, over the past six months:

UTO has provided reliable voice and data network service, with very few disruptions.

UTO staff members were an important part of the team that successfully prepared ASU's Downtown Phoenix Campus for its successful August opening.

Beginning in the 2007 fiscal year, the UTO decreased ASU's long distance phone charges 75%, from 19 cents/minute to 5 cents/minute.

Support
In the area of customer support, in the last half year:

UTO's customer support team helped faculty, students and staff solve tens of thousands of questions over the past six months.

UTO is continuing to work to improve our support systems to ensure timely answers to every question and improve the second-line support we provide to other support personnel throughout ASU.

The support team successfully developed and deployed two new initiatives:

the development and launch of Downtown 1:1 in partnership with Dell and Apple and;

the creation of the New Media Innovation Lab in conjunction with ASU's Cronkite School of Journalism and Gannet.

Development
The second half of 2006 saw UTO successfully complete more than 30 development projects. For a more exhasutive list, please see the completed project listings at ASU's UTO Labs site. Highlights include:

In October, ASU announced the successful deployment of Google Apps for Education. ASU was the first major university in the world to make Google's Gmail, Calendaring and Talk client available as part of a major .edu domain.

In November, the UTO announced the successful deployment of the personalized Google Start Page for students, another first for the ASU/Google relationship.

In cooperation with its sister institutions, Northern Arizona University and the University of Arizona, ASU's UTO contributed to the completion of the first phase of the AZUN educational portal.

In conjunction with online service providers from around the university, UTO completed the first phase of ASU Interactive 2.0, an ongoing effort to integrate and streamline the interactive services provided to ASU's faculty, staff and students.

UTO helped ASU improve its efficiency and service for staff by replacing many of its paper-based forms with online versions.

OASIS
UTO's most significant development effort in 2006 is OASIS, a 5 year, $25M project to overhaul ASU's student information and human resource management systems. Led by a team from UTO, this massive development project includes functional and technical resources from around the university, working together to improve ASU's administrative systems and position the University for growth. So far, OASIS continues to be on-time and on budget and successfully passed several key milestones during the last half of this year.

Several of the PeopleSoft Campus Solutions Components are already in production, including: Academic Structure, Campus Community, Catalog and Class Schedule.

In November, the OASIS team successfully went live with Admissions and Recruiting for Fall 2007.

Several PeopleSoft CRM Components will go into production this week, including support for the College of Extended Ed's marketing program, e-Support for WP Carey, Sales for MBA recruiting, and Field Support for UTO-Telecom.

December will also mark the forst "go-live" for a PeopleSoft HCM Component when Talent Acquisition goes live on 12/11.

Alt^i
In addition to administering ASU's academic technology environment, ASU's Applied Learning Tehcnology Institute launched the following two initiatives in 2006:

In cooperation with Apple Computer, ASU has emerged as one of the leading universities in Apple's Itunes U project. UTO successfully launched the ASU Itunes U site in October, including integration into ASU's single sign-on environment and the creation of access controlled course shells for more than 5000 ASU courses.

In November, in collaboration with the Arizona Department of Education, the UTO launched IDEAL, the Integrated Data to Enhance Arizona's Learning (IDEAL) to provide Arizona's K-12 parents, students and teachers with a single online resource to meet their educational goals and needs.

Again, not an exhaustive list, but not a bad set of highlights either. Please let us know your feedback, as well any additions to the list.

Like Technology From An Advanced Alien Culture...

2006-10-16T07:52:00.000-07:00

The past week was an exciting one for the UTO, as ASU and Google announced at EDUCAUSE the first large scale deployment of Google Apps for Education to the ASU student community. As the chronicle of higher ed put it:

Arizona State University is the first to try Google Apps for Education, and it joined up in a dramatic fashion...

The announcement was the culmination of amazing work by a Kari Barlow led team that included James Palazzolo, Ron Page, Nate Wilken, Jason Pratt, Noel Lindner, Jeff Nickoloff, Anish Adalja, Xavier Valencia, and Joe McDonald. In just under two weeks, ASU and Google managed to:

Integrate ASU’s single sign-on, allowing students to use their existing ASURite UserID to login to Gmail for ASU

Modify the EMMA client to allow student users to convert to Gmail for ASU with a single click.

Create a staggering 65,000 new Gmail for ASU accounts

Create clear messaging to communicate the news to the ASU community and to the world

On the day of the announcement, students were converting to Gmail for ASU at the rate of 300 an hour.

At the announcement at EDUCAUSE, I told the group that this was a story of speed. In addition to providing an exciting new service for students, ASU’s UTO was using the Google alliance as a way to demonstrate the agility of the New American University. The feat that Google and ASU achieved in the past fortnight displayed a nimbleness that rivals the best of what Silicon Valley can do. Building a reputation for agility is critical to the success of our technology alliance strategy, and we made a big stride this week.

But perhaps more importantly, by partnering with Google, ASU was able to dramatically accelerate its technology development curve, an acceleration that will be core to achieving the New American University Vision.

As everyone in the Valley of the Sun is by now aware, President Crow is reshaping Arizona State into a new kind of institution, a New American University that uniquely combines Academic Excellence, Access, and Impact. The New American University is a reconception of the 20th century research university intended to meet the new challenges and capitilize on the new opportunities presented by the 21^st century. At its core, the New American University will define itself not by who it excludes, but by who it includes; it will distinguish itself by the quality of its output, rather than the quality of its input.

The United States has many excellent universities, that in many ways represent the highest expression of higher education. But these institutions at the very pinnacle of academic excellence serve only the relative few, and this by design. Central to their strategy for continued excellence is extreme selectivity in the students they serve. The United States also has many colleges and universities that provide access to higher education, struggling to make the experience affordable and valuable to the masses not served by the nation’s elite schools. As demand for higher education grows, and the gap between excellent and “adequate” accelerates, the tiered approach will not suffice.

At ASU we believe that to serve the American people's growing need for higher education excellence, a new way must be found, one that combines academic excellence and access in a single institution. But to attain this goal – to reach out to twice as many students, to support the success of a diverse student population of uneven preparation, all the while maintaining academic excellence – will require new ways of thinking, new ways of teaching, new ways of supporting and guiding learners that yield better results at comparable cost. Many of these new approaches will be based on a continual infusion of emerging technologies, skillfully applied to accelerate the advancement of teaching and research.

The exploding potential of information technology is the most promising and hopeful development of our age. Each day capability expands, and each day it becomes more affordable. Such powerful gifts are rare in the history of the human race.

But to realize the potential of this technological “golden goose” in higher education, we all have a long way to go. You don’t have to take my word for it. In his book the Creation of the Future, Dr. Frank Rhodes, president emeritus of Cornell, points out that:

in the basic business of teaching resident students, universities have not diverged much from the methods of Socrates, except that most faculty members have now moved inside.

[P]aradoxically, the research universities, which created and developed much of the new communications technology, have been slow to apply it to their main stream activities.

Most instruction is still a cottage industry, little influenced as yet by the benefits and support of modern technology. It is as though an industry had computerized its business and management activities, but left its manufacturing operations and sales distribution essentially unchanged and unimproved.

At ASU we have recognized that the accelerated pace of technological change is outstripping the development capacity of internal university IT organizations. The cottage industry phase of the information revolution is rapidly approaching its end.

Regular readers of this blog will recognize the curve on the left from a previous post, outlining how the fate of "Near Followers" in technology would be to fall further and further behind industry leaders like Google and Amazon. ASU recognizes that if we are to realize the full potential of this rapidly evolving technology, our internal IT organizations must somehow leave behind the provisioning of individual services and climb the value chain to focus on the application and integration of rapidly emerging capabilities to continuously improve the university's core activities.

Which is why we are so excited by our alliance with Google -- because the Google alliance not only provides a vastly superior capability for our students on the day we unwrap the box it places ASU on Google's exponential technology development trajectory.

The range of technology solutions that Google is putting forward, at the speed and scale that they have proven they can deliver them, is sparking nothing short of a revolution in the IT business, completely changing the paradigm for how hardware/software solutions are created and delivered. Allying with Google g ives ASU access not only to today's innovative Google Apps suite -- that is an order of magnitude better than what ASU could field on its own -- but it also puts ASU on an accelerated technology trajectory that is capable of keeping pace with the leaders in the field

ASU’s new challenge -- at least in this applications segment -- switched over night from the provisioning of email, IM and calendaring service to the intelligent integration of Google's rapidly evolving collaboration and communications suite into the academic enterprise as fast as our little legs can carry us.

We hope that Google Apps for Education is the tip of the iceberg and look forward to working with the Google Apps team -- and other parts of the Google enterprise -- to help harness their unprecedented technology engine in the service of higher education.

Rock on!

Grand Theft Auto

2006-10-09T04:57:00.000-07:00

I had a crazy idea the other day about how a new approach to drug development for the third world might help accelerate the contribution of technology to education. But it needs a little setup first...

In the mid-nineties, the company I worked for, EAI Interactive, created a series of interactive CD-ROMs for McGraw-Hill called "The Dynamic Human". As McGraw-Hill Higher Ed describes it, Dynamic Human was an interactive tool to help:

"students visualize relationships between human structure and function. The Dynamic Human includes 3D rotatable models, histology review, animations and quizzes to help reinforce anatomical concepts that are often difficult to understand."

It was a nice enough series for its day, though two things held it back from being all that it might have been. First, the technology limitations in the 90's were pretty severe. Video content and 3D visualization was still pretty exotic, and the technology of the day put severe restrictions on resolutions, sizes, speeds, and complexity of models.

These limitations have been mostly overcome in the ensuing decade. By the end of the next decade, they will be all but forgotten, a curiousity of an emerging technology, like the grainy, jerky, silent films that marked the early days of the movies.

But the second thing that hampered Dynamic Human's development remains with us, and shows no signs of disappearing. DH was by far and away the most expensive CD-ROM that EAI made for McGraw, but for all that its budget was about $150,000. Mike Sellberg, who helped oversee the development of DH, tells me he thinks EAI actually spent closer to $500,000 on development. As Mike, now executive vice president and chief technology officer at iMed Studios put it, "Oh yeah, we took a bath on that one."

At the same time, EAI could easily get more than a million dollars to make games like Barbie Magic Hairstyler or A Bug's Life. And those budgets are child's play compared to the $10-$30 million dollar development budgets for major hits like Grand Theft Auto and World of Warcraft.

The market rewards for entertainment content are simply much greater than for educational content, and the result is that there is a lot more enganging content being created for the purposes of entertainment than is being made for education.

Which is fine if you're a game junkie or a stockholder in Electronic Arts, but it's more than a little disturbing if you're a parent or teacher trying to encourage kids to spend more time doing their history homework and less time learning how to be a video assassin.

Content creation for this emerging media is an expensive, time-intensive process, and it is likely to remain so even as the delivery technology exponentially increases in capability and decreases in cost. While the market can help companies raise the tens of millions needed to fund the creation of rich, deeply immersive environments to teach kids how to be theives and pimps, there's just no way for a for-profit company to raise a similar budget to help create content of a similarly immersive quality to teach World History, Biology or Chemistry.

Which is where drugs come in...

Because there is a similar problem in the development of a different type of intellectual property -- drugs. Drug development is exceptionally expensive, and the market does not reward the treating of all diseases equally.

As Victoria Hale, a 2006 MacArthur Fellow and CEO of One World Health, the first not-for-profit drug company, put it in a recent interview with Marketplace:

Pharmaceutical R&D, as I'm sure you know, is extremely expensive. And even the ability to recoup the development costs, let alone bring back revenue beyond that, is in some cases, for some diseases just not possible.

One World Health hopes to address this problem by creating drugs targeted at these diseases that the for-profit companies can't touch, funding their development through philanthropic contributions of money and IP, combined with revenues from the products it creates, which will be sold in private markets in the developing world.

It's hard to say whether One World Health will be successful or not, but the idea of creating a company that plays by different funding rules to create worthy products to address needs that the normal market mechanisms can't address is a good one.

So why not a not-for-profit company built along similar lines to create compelling immersive content for educational purposes?

The analogy is pretty tight. Ignorance is the disease the game market can't reach, immersive content the expensive but potentially effective cure that game companies can't afford to create. Donations of IP could include gaming engines, development tools, as well as licenses to characters and concepts from popular culture - like the characters from CSI or the imaginative and popular world of Jurrassic Park. The immersive products could be sold to individuals, teachers, schools, districts for use on PC's or Playstations or whatever delivery vehicles the future brings.

Any investors out there?

Easy to sell...

2006-09-04T15:35:00.000-07:00

I worked with this great salesguy once, a guy named Jeanne (je-nay). Think Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross, but with a wicked sense for product marketing thrown into the bargain. The engineers in the company grew to have a grudging respect for this flawlessly tailored sales dude with the slicked back hair, because listening to him helped them move beyond cool technology to create products people would actually buy.

Among his many principles was one we called Jeanne's Law. According to the law, if you want to make a product that will sell, then you have to make sure that it's:

Easy to buy

Easy to install

Easy to maintain

Not many products of any kind satisfy the Law completely. Cars are hard to buy. Ceiling fans are hard to install. Pools are impossible to maintain. Making a run away product is no mean feat.

Now I realize that it borders on crass to think about higher education as a "product", but the other day, as I was watching our new provost, Dr. Betty Capaldi, outline her plan for improving student persistence at ASU, I couldn't help thinking that Betty's vision for improving ASU's online services has a lot to do with making it easier for students to make educational decisions.

As I listened to Betty discussing how:

welcoming freshmen into majors immediately,

improving the online tools that help a student measure their progress toward a degree,

and creating a more effective ways to browse among programs of study,

would have a dramatic impact on student success, I couldn't help but think about the intersection of Jeanne's Law and amazondotcomification. Because for me, Betty's plan translates to making ASU's brand of higher education easier to buy, easier to install, and easier to maintain; all by dramatically improving ASU's online environment.

And that's where IKEA comes in.

If ASU were IKEA, it would only have the first floor; you know, the warehouse part. IKEA furniture has to be put together, and on the warehouse floor all the individual pieces of bookcases, closet organizers, coffee tables, chairs, couches and every other component of IKEA's brand of Scandinavian interiors are arranged according to the warehouse rules. It's by no means apparent, from any of the information available down there, which of these individual parts might go together to make a Billy bookshelf or a Hopen wardrobe system. There's just a collection of loosely related parts, available for you to take in whatever combination you want.

Not unlike the way ASU presents its courses, arranged according to the departments that offer them. It's not all that easy down there on our warehouse floor to see how a given set of courses is going to fit together to create a career in nanobiology or law or something else that would ignite your passion. Sorting them by department makes all kinds of sense to the folks doing the teaching; but it's certainly not the most straightforward way to think about what's right for you as a student.

Of course at IKEA, you don't shop on the warehouse floor. You shop on the second floor, in the showroom. I like IKEA's showroom. The showroom is where all those slats and knobs and pieces of pressboard come together to make things people might want to buy. Without the showroom, you have to be either gifted, lucky or an insider to know how to make the individual bits and pieces come together to make anything. But in the showroom you can see whole living rooms or offices, building your desire for tables with names like Jokkmokk or BjorKudden. And right next to each item in the showroom you can find the list of the exact pieces you'll need to make one for yourself.

Betty's system will be like a showroom for ASU's higher ed products. Instead of wandering around the course warehouse, trying to figure out how the individual courses go together to make an education, Betty's system will help students browse through -- and ultimately choose -- courses of study related to their interests that prepare them for futures that excite their passions.

And if, after choosing several courses, a student changes her mind, Betty's system will help them choose a new path, and make the most of the courses they've already taken.

Of course my biggest gripe with IKEA is availability. You pick an item from the showroom, get the list of parts that you'll need to make it, and head for the warehouse. You grab one of those wheely carts and start hauling the pieces out when it happens. It never fails. After you've already hefted, dragged, and shoved 6 of the 8 parts you need onto the cart, you discover that one of the crucial pieces is out of stock. No Matteus Desk for you today.

This happens to our students too. Imagine how frustrating it must be to be a few courses from graduation and not be able to get into the courses you need. Or to be excited about investigating a new career option, only to find that all the introductory courses in your interest area are full. Hearing Betty's committment to enrollment planning as a vehicle to drastically reduce these occurances was music to my ears.

So Giddyup I say...I can't wait to get started on this. It's a revolutionary opportunity. Looking forward to working on it with you all.

Hang 10...

2006-08-20T11:01:00.000-07:00

I was in Prescott last weekend at the Arizona Shakespeare Festival's Saturday matinee performance of Julius Caesar. At first, I have to admit, I was a little dismayed at the venue and the turnout. From the name, I was sort of expecting something like the Stratford Festival in Ontario, so when we joined 30 other fans in the Prescott High School auditorium, I was a little uneasy.
But it turned out to be a really enjoyable afternoon - a Julius Ceasar reinterpreted against a 1930's fascist backdrop. The actors were good, the set was well thought out, and the audience, though small, was very enthusiastic.
A particular line struck me during the performance though. It comes in Act IV, Scene III, when Brutus and Cassius are discussing whether to take the initiative against their enemies or behave more cautiously. Brutus argues that the bold way is the only way:

There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which taken at the flood leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

It hit me strongly for two reasons. First, the Downtown Phoenix Campus opened successfully this week, just a year and a half after it was first proposed. The whole project was on an incredibly tight timeline, one that many people thought was completely undoable, even as late as last month. I have to admit that the first time I visited the 411 building -- now University Center -- my first thought was that getting Downtown together could use another 12 months at least.

Glad I kept my big mouth shut on that one! Because by working together, ASU and the City of Pheonix were able to overcome all sorts of adversity and prove the naysayers wrong. They took their sea at full flood and the citizens of Arizona will now ride it on to fortune. The DPC is an excellent example of what the New American University can accomplish.
In OASIS, ASU again finds itself afloat on a full sea. The hard work has begun in earnest now, the first in a string of deadlines looms in October. For those who haven't done a project like this before -- and even for some who have -- it can seem at times like we're going too fast and that the best plan might be to slow down some, maybe take the pressure off just a little.

But as Brutus and MMC both know, there is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune. When we ignore that flood, we do it our peril. We increase the chance of failure, of losing all the different kinds of support so critical to success. On such a sea are we now afloat, and we are taking the current now -- when it serves -- and doing whatever it takes to secure our venture.

Meet ya at the OASIS...

1:1 Launch...

2006-07-16T23:59:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to report the successful launch of the Downtown Phoenix Campus 1:1 Student Computing Initiative. Last week letters outlining the program went out to the Downtown Phoenix Campus students, faculty and staff. A website providing details of the program, and links to ASU specific websites sponsored by our partners Apple and Dell was also launched. These sites describe special laptop offers from our partners -- including on-campus support -- that are now available to members of the ASU community.

In addition to the hardware and support offered by our partners, the Downtown 1:1 program includes the Downtown Phoenix Campus Citrix Environment, designed to make software traditionally deployed in labs and on common computers more accessible to students using personal devices. The folks at alt^i have also been working with faculty from the Downtown programs to learn how to make personal devices a more integral part of the higher ed experience.

There's a pretty extensive FAQ on the site that will get a start on answering any questions you might have. If you want more information, or want to make a comment or provide input on the program, we'd love to hear from you.

While this pilot program was developed specifically with the Downtown Campus community in mind, the partner offers are open to all members of the ASU community, so feel free to check them out whether your a Downtowner or not.

There's no rest for the wicked of course. Now that the pilot program has been launched, UTO will be looking to widen the program to the whole university next year, working with departments and colleges to define the components of next year's platform -- specifying the hardware, software and support packages needed to help ASU keep pace with the increasing tide of technology that each new wave of students is bringing to campus with the expectation that it will aid them in their educational journey.

Thanks go out to our partners Apple and Dell for working with us to get this pilot launch ready under such a tight timeline. Thanks also to Sarah Hughes and Dr. Sam Digangi for their efforts in bringing the DPC pilot program together so quickly.

Web Politics...

2006-07-11T00:30:00.000-07:00

A reader writes:

I read your 6/5 blog posting, "Prune Concentrate," with great interest.

Here at xxx University, my group is charged with redeveloping our website to better align content with the needs of the audience.

Anyway, what you're alluding cuts right into the most difficult part of the web development process at any large .edu institution ... the politics of the web.

Here, as I suppose there, sites aren't generally built around anticipating the needs of the user. Most sites are built around the premise that this or that unit offers this package of services and resources, and the units want credit for doing that. That's where we end up with sites built around the organization chart of the institution, rather than the needs of the site user.

You're challenging that orthodoxy, it seems to me. How are you navigating the politics of it?

So its not just us. And I have to agree with him that the major challenge in moving from a traditional University site to a more user centric one is politics, not technology.

The good news is that resource constraints may be the key to a solution. Around the university, nearly everyone realizes how important the web has become, but individual units and departments are finding themselves increasinglt less able to keep up with the demands being placed on their respective sites by our faculty, staff, and students -- and, of course, by our president, who is oh so interested in the web.

My hope is that by focusing on the heart of asu.edu first -- the part of asu.edu that receives significant traffic -- and building a user-centric approach there -- we can demonstrate and alternative that will encourage individual units to want to make their content part of that new way. In the bargain, we should be able to make it more cost effective for the units to maintain their presence on the web.

As we pick up speed -- showing the success of the new way in terms of visitors, return traffic and the like -- we can contrast that with the stats on the older parts of the site and draw more content in.

We're underway with the administrative content now, working with BTS, USI, and others to remake the face of the eServices page. Proving out this model for web services will give us credibility for the bigger challenge of developing a user-centric model for presenting the academic content provided by departments and schools.

Again, resource incentives will help I think. If we can deploy a more comprehensive directory function, providing deeper access to students and faculty, then the need for individual academic departments to build and maintain their own may decrease. A university wide citation index, selectable by department, school, individual or research interest would relieve some of the pressure on individual academic units to try and keep their individual sites current.
The reader closed his comments by saying:

Attempting any kind of comprehensive web development at a university is
kind of like having an abscess and going in for the root canal. You scheduled the appointment because of pain, and the appointment causes even more pain as the drill gets going, but dealing with it is inevitable and there's an expectation that life will be quite a bit more pleasant on the other side. At least that's my hope...we'll see if my head doesn't end up on a pike.

Rooting for you dude...keep your head clear of pointy objects...

Prune Concentrate

2006-06-05T05:50:00.000-07:00

After a long absence, I am back at the blogging post, with a new look and a new mission. The new look is courtesy of ASU's University Technology office. The new mission is to discuss the tactical and operational issues related to the implementation of ASU's emerging technology strategy.

Before I dive into the virtues of today's topic -- Prune Concentrate -- l want to extend my appreciation and apologies to the "standing room only" group that attended the "State of IT" presentation over in Life Sciences E Wing on May 25th. Next year I promise a larger room. If you missed the meeting -- or just want to relive the magic :) -- you can download a podcast of the event here (or the video here).

Now on to Prune Concentrate...

The long sought cure for acute blogger's block? The worst marketing idea since Milk of Magnesia ? No. Prune Concentrate is a prescription for improving asu.edu in the short term, a step along the road to complete amazondotcomification.

Consider the following excel spreadsheet of web stats that Nate Wilken put together this past week. It shows a couple of interesting things about asu.edu.

www.asu.edu is ASU's highest ranked page (with a PageRank of 9) and it receives about 1/3 of ASU's total web traffic.

Half the remaining web visits are to one of 55 ASU pages, the top ten of which are:

www.asu.edu/lib

www.asu.edu/index

www.asu.edu/prospective

www.asu.edu/students

www.asu.edu/sos

www.asu.edu/directory

www.asu.edu/programs

www.asu.edu/studentaffairs/reslife

www.asu.edu/workingatasu

www.asu.edu/hr

So the lion's share of our traffic hits a relatively small proportion of our site's pages. Which should make creating a world class web presence easy -- establish a single look and feel and concentrate development and maintenance effort on the places people go. Sounds good, but it's not the strategy we follow.

Instead, the lion's share of ASU's web development and maintenance energies are spent in creating new pages, with distinct looks and distinct branding, that end up receiving relatively little in the way of visitors but require significant resources to maintain.

In www.asu.edu we have the web traffic and GoogleJuice commercial players would pay serious marketing dollars to generate. And in my opinion, www.asu.edu looks the part of a first rate homepage. But the pages just one link away from the homepage, while still receiving the traffic, do not recieve the attention. We're just not making the best use of our high value real estate.

Consider the eServices page as an example. Located one link away from the highly ranked www.asu.edu, the eServices page is one of ASU's top ten, a prime piece of web territory. But instead of a cleanly designed web portal, eServices presents a laundry list of links to services and information located on the individual homepages of a plethora of different organizations within ASU. With at least 10 different brandings, designs, portal schemes, and login screens, these services create differences without distinction.Which is not to knock the folks that create and maintain the eServices page. Its just that it was created after the fact, as a mechanism to cope with the proliferation of places where vital information was being published.Enter Prune Concentrate. Prune, as in the reduction of the number of distinct looks, feels, sub brands, and organizational affiliations. Concentrate, as in the gathering of critical content in those places on our site where traffic already gathers.Despite all our efforts to the contrary, our users -- the applicants, alumni, students, faculty, staff and friends -- don't really care if a service comes from Human Resources or Central IT. Its all ASU to them. Our insistence on attribution is just confusing. Multiple login pages, different web designs, portals aplenty -- all of these serve to make our users wonder if they've come to the right place.So as a first step in ASU's amazondotcomification process, we're setting about the task of reworking the eServices page so it feels like a one-stop shop for all of ASU's electronic support. Consistent branding, clean single sign-on, the elimination of overlap. We'll try to do it incrementally, so you start to see benefit right away, and we'll try to keep the dust to a minimum. Meanwhile, if you have other ides about high-traffic, high-value web real estate that isn't reaching its full potential, let us know.

BTW: There are some other really interesting pages in the top 55. Coming in at 45 in May was a page devoted to the Take Our Young Women to Work day event sponsored by the UCW. Number 42 is The Logicite, developed to assist philosophy students at ASU. Wonder how they're driving their traffic?

University Council

2006-03-27T07:21:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow I'm discussing ASU's technology strategy at a meeting of the University Council. With luck, I'll be in a position to podcast it.

In the meantime, here's a link to a draft of the presentation. Real homespun graphics. Note the two small arrows at the upper left and upper right to move forward and backward. There are also some short presentation notes beneath each slide.
Readers of my blog and the TechPlan wiki won't find any surprises here I don't think, but this is the 20 minute version of where I think we're headed.
As interesting to some is what I won't be covering in tomorrow's meeting, namely a new organization diagram for central IT. I'm planning on discussing the details of that reorganization at an All-IT meeting on the 12th of April. Details to follow.

Everybody to the Limit . . .

2006-03-20T02:54:00.000-08:00

I've done a fair amount of tech support in my day. As a grad student at MSU, I worked with a team of grads and undergrads, providing tech support to researchers at the Case Center for CAD/CAM. I've done my time on a software help line too.

But most of my tech support has been more local and seasonal. I specialize in Christmas tech support, for members of my family. Christmas at my house consists of my boys, my wife and I all unwrapping a bunch of new tech gizmos and then rushing off to the four corners to "install" them. Things are better now, as my kids have grown old enough to do most of their own support. But I have spent untold hours of Christmas vacation searching the net for drivers and patches, installing, booting, rebooting, watching progress guages count in irregular intervals to 100 in order to get some new toy to do its thing.
This was all brought home to me a couple Fridays ago on a visit to the Polytechnic campus. I was working in the Computing Commons at about 6:00pm, waiting for traffic to thin out. Just me and the lab monitor. Nice. A professor walked in, with a digital camera that ASU had loaned to him an hour or so before. Said he was having trouble getting his laptop to recognize it.

Now this is just the thing that Christmas tech support is all about, so I figured here was my chance to do a good deed for the day. So after the lab monitor had tried what he could think of, I invited the good doctor over to my laptop to give it a go.

Of course, as it turns out, the camera was pretty old. No simple drivers, no installation disk. After a half hour or so of goofing around with drivers, patches, downloads, web searches and the like, we found one of those desperate solutions you find when you're looking hard...A Finnish web site with a goofy workaround...you know edit some .inf file by removing three strategically placed semi-colons, uninstall the camera, then reinstall it and ignore all warnings...the kind of thing that never works...but at 6:45 on a Friday night, you'll try anything . . .

And lo and behold, it did work. On my computer. And half an hour later, after a lot more back and forth, it worked on the professor's computer too. Crisis averted. Good deed done.

But it really made me wonder. How can we hope to provide that level of support to every member of the community? The level of "work at it till we solve it, no matter what". But if its your problem, that's the only kind of support that is worth anything to you.
Any ideas?

What's Going On?

2006-03-11T17:32:00.000-08:00

Marvin Gaye . . . Man, they don't make 'em like that anymore. Heard it Through the Grapevine . . . How Sweet It Is . . . or my favorite, The Ecology -- better known as Mercy, Mercy, Me . . .

Oh, mercy mercy me
Oh, things ain't what they used to be
No, no Where did all the blue sky go?
Poison is the wind that blows
From the north, east, south, and sea

At one level, Marvin's song is about his feelings of powerlessness in the face of ecological destruction. But as with most great songs, it can operate at more than one level.

For me, it also speaks to how uncomfortable change can be. Change can be very exciting, but the uncertainty of it can sometimes knock you off your stride. For some of the folks in IT here at ASU, particularly here in the Computing Commons, the idea of restructuring is proving both exciting and intimidating. Despite assurances that the world isn't going to be turned completely upside down, it's weird when you're not sure what's going to happen next.

So, to borrow from another Marvin Gaye classic, I'll try my best to tell you what's going on...

In the past three weeks, the transition team (Bob Nelson, Sam DiGangi, Sarah Hughes, Max Davis-Johnson, John Rome, and Henry Barto) and I have been reviewing every aspect of how the Central IT group is currently organized -- every aspect of who does what and how. Thanks go out to all the folks who have taken the time to provide their own takes on their individual experiences and skills and give us an outline of their current jobs. That info is proving very helpful and I appreciate the time it took each person to put it together.

Now, as it turns out, fate is offering us an opportunity to be even more thorough in this evaluation work, and with a nice upside. As you may have read in a recent Insight article, all of ASU's eligible salaried employees will have a bigger paycheck starting May 15. The salary increase has two components:

a $1,650 general adjustment (prorated for part-time salaried employees) and

a merit raise intended to reward significant performance and achievements in the past year.

In order to inform the merit decisions, the UTO team will be doing performance evaluations, which we will aim to complete on or before March 24th. This evaluation process will provide the transition team with even more information, and help clearly communicate to every employee where he or she stands. So personal clarity now has a date and a reason.

Thursday I met with all the members of the management team in UTO to discuss this review process. UTO will be using one of two assessment forms (next year I would hope to standardize on a single approach, but in the interests of time and familiarity ....) Each of these forms provides for a self-assessment and a supervisor's assessment. In addition to comments on various aspects of job performance, every evaluated employee will also receive a clear numerical score: either Level 1, Level 2 or Level 3.

As a group, the management team will be striving to apply consistent standards to this numeric feedback. As you know, the university's scale is:

Level 1—Responsibilities of position not fulfilled;

Level 2—Responsibilities of position fulfilled;

Level 3—Responsibilities of position exceeded

Employees who receive a Level 3 rating should take it as a sign of excellence recognized. It is no easy thing to exceed the responsibilities of a position. By contrast, a Level 1 rating is cause for serious concern. So Levels 1 and 3 are pretty clear.

Level 2 is a more complex message. I encouraged the UTO supervisors, in giving a Level 2 rating, to be prepared to indicate whether they feel the employee is a 2, a 2+ or a 2-. A 2+ should be awarded an employee whose performance is at the high end of fulfillment, along with specific recommendations on how to raise their performance to Level 3. A 2- should be given to an employee who, in fulfilling their job duties has issues that, if left uncorrected, threaten their long term ability to continue to perform acceptably.

I hope the folks in UTO use this review period to talk frankly with their supervisors about any concerns and seek advice on career development questions.

Come the end of this month, everyone in UTO should have a good idea of where he or she stands individually. Till then, hang in there, concentrate on doing your best for ASU, and work with your supervisor to get a thorough review.

As far as strategy is concerned, I'll be briefing President Crow's working group 1 this week on my technology strategy recommendations, and later this month -- after incorporating WG-1's -- I'll be briefing University Council. I plan to podcast that session too, to be as open as possible about where we are trying to take technology at ASU.

Library chat . . .

2006-03-10T08:58:00.000-08:00

The day after Valentine's Day I had the opportunity to talk with a folks from the University Library system. The library put together a three-part podcast of the session -- in three parts because, if you can imagine it, we spent more than an hour and a half discussing the University's technology strategy and the future of the digital library.

Early returns are in . . .

2006-03-07T02:07:00.000-08:00

If you haven't already done so, check out the early returns from the 1:1 Technology Survey. The target population of the first phase of the survey is students who will take classes on the ASU downtown campus this coming Fall.

The results so far confirm that personal technology is the norm among students. Survey results confirm that an overwhelming majority of students report owning a computer (97%). Sixty percent say they own a laptop and thirty-one percent report owning both a laptop and a desktop.
The full 138 page report shows the detailed results for each question. For me its confirms that, at least for the survey respondents, technology is a surprisingly important part of students' lives.

The survey continues and we are hoping it will give a better picture of technology use here at ASU on a program by program basis.Â More here as the results come in.

Podcast of this Week's All-IT Meeting

2006-02-18T05:00:00.000-08:00

The podcast of this week's all company meeting is up on the DMIT channel as of Friday. You can reach it from either of these links: Web Link or Podcast Link.

More and more of what we all say in public is going into the record, which is good and bad. On the good side, it should make it easier to communicate. For example, if you didn't make Thursday's meeting, you can still find out what was said. And if you didn't quite catch something, you can replay it to try and make sense out of it. If you want to discuss what was said with a friend, a podcast gives everyone eidectic memories, reducing the potential for confusion.

One of the downsides though, from my point of view, is that whatever you say can come back to haunt you. And for someone who speaks from the hip most of the time, that's a chilling thing. Because from listening to some of these podcasts myself, I've noticed that I don't always strike the tone I'm aiming for, don't always say the words I mean to say. Combine that with the fact that everything you say means something different to every hearer, and its a wonder we can communicate at all.

I do better when I write I think, because at least then I get the opportunity to review what I'm saying. So if there are reactions, negative or positive, to what you heard in the meeting/podcast, please let me know, either here as a comment, or in an email, attributed or anonymous. I'm trying to help here, so if you heard something you agree with, feel free to let me know. Likewise, if something disturbed you, let me know that too. It will give me a chance to correct my opinion, or explain myself better.

I appreciate your help, and I'm looking forward to working with everyone in the ASU community.