1. Reasons You Said For Attending Networking: meet people; learn about what’s going on in other units What MSU (institutional level) projects are going on Overall vision and direction Acquire/share specific skills or knowledge “…establish a feeling of community in IT at MSU” These were OUR reasons for wanting to do this conference

2. Your Collective Top-5 Greatest IT Challenges Communication Security Staffing and management Policy and governance How can we possibly keep up?

3. Baseline CIC comparisons for most recent year for which comparable data are available MSU’s Comparative Status -- Big-Picture Terms (proportion of central/local IT spend quite comparable across all CIC participant institutions)

4. MSU’s Comparative Status -- Big-Picture Terms

5. Thank you… We can be collectively very proud of what MSU has achieved, given these relative statistics. And, they describe the context of our particular challenges.

6. 6 Domain Specific Discovery & Innovation, Teaching & Learning Necessary Infrastructure Leveraged Discipline Research Stacks Innovation Metadata Computation, Storage Models Networks Chemistry Visualization Curation Anthropology Searching & Retrieving Networks Metadata Curation Innovation, Publication Storage Visualization Business Networks Curation Storage Metadata Retrieval & Analysis Innovation Primary Storage Particle Physics Distributed Storage Networks Metadata Models Computation Visualization Innovation The “Wheeler/Hacker” model for Scholarly Infrastructure Shared Cyberinfrastructure Line Here? © Trustees of Indiana University

7. U Iowa Analysis of Research Support Services

8. Collaborate or Not? Brad Wheeler: “Collaboration is hard, and necessary.” Two vignettes about making the choice to collaborate, even when hard, rather than working separately and in conflict… WebTeam (UR, ACNS) Cyber security (DPPS, ACNS)

9. Ask the Vice Provost… Sakai v. ANGEL?; ANGEL upgrade? Gmail? Institution-wide calendar?; open calendar standard? OpenID for identity mgt? Laptop requirement (what it really is) for students; how are we encouraging faculty and staff to use laptops and to engage students in laptop use

10. Stopped doing a number of things and moved the budget and staff attention to things of greater need or higher value. Paying attention to work process quality and collaborating effectively … where skills and resources from more than one unit required to accomplish a service effectively. “Putting work in the right place”… for sustained support. This helped us to apply the right resources in the right ways, and to better know the true costs of each project and service (which helped to assign or get the right resources in place). Applied basic quality improvement techniques across a broad range of issues; have measured performance and use the measurements to improve service. Culture has continually shifted to one in which debriefings of failures are seen in a positive light as ways to learn lessons and get better. How can we do more (communications and collaboration, and services) when budgets are shrinking? 5-year LCT experience… Doing more, but budgets shrank: No one reason for this, but perhaps the result of a number of things, cumulatively, such as…

11. Ask the Vice Provost… Central v. local support; breaking down federalism of IT groups -- what are we doing about this? What do I see as biggest IT challenge for MSU for next 5, 10, 20 years? (myriad of challenges, so biggest is working together to make all the others more manageable) (next 6 slides)

12. High-level challenges for IT planning and execution, and what MSU is doing about them –Persistent overarching goal: Continue and expand MSU’s greatness -- Enable people –Effective use of limited resources –Capacity for innovation and advanced capabilities –IT environment (technologies and uses) constantly shifting

13. MSU’s greatest strengths determine its IT needs and approach… Key factors in MSU’s capacity for success are its institutional diversity and large scale… –These are strategic assets –Variety of IT needs, and variety of capacity to address those needs –Federated IT environment…

14. Federated IT environment… Balancing cost-effectiveness with specialized needs and capacity to innovate (and placing good speculative bets) Not all IT services can, or should, be shared or standardized Shared resources do not need to be central MSU’s greatest strengths determine its IT needs and approach…

15. Optimizing in a federated IT environment Balancing the right mix of standardization v. specialization, consolidation v. federation –Consolidation and standardization can provide economies of scale -- and can induce large scale and complexity –Large scale can produce fragility –Standardization can enhance efficacy of operations -- and can limit creativity and efficacy of operations –Consolidation can mitigate risk, and can increase risk

16. Driving optimization in a federated IT environment Communication, Coordination, Collaboration –Shared vision, developed through collaborative development of models for shared and distributed services –Consistent architecture and implementation standards –Active collaboration  Coherence

17. Communications ideas (how can we keep this going, after this Conference?): –Podcasts re: topical skills, IT directions –Do this venue every 6 months, 12 months –Monthly or bi-monthly brown bags?