Information Services

Looking to the ANU Information Service Horizons

Division of Information
December 2007
CRICOS Provider No. 00120C

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Introduction

Information is central to a University’s business. It is the primary output from a research institution and the currency that it trades in when it exchanges ideas with collaborators, passes knowledge on to students, and makes effective management decisions. The information portfolios responsible for supporting appropriate management of the information services, and the infrastructure needed to support and enable the community.

The portfolio supports and underpins the entire range of University activities and is charged with not only the good governance of the present but with identifying trends and providing guidance to the University community about the future issues and opportunities on the horizon.

Context

Information services are consumed across the University. The ANU has a central Division of Information (DoI) which provides services to other central areas and to the academic Colleges, in support of the research, education and administrative functions of the University. The business processes of the University are owned by those other areas, on infrastructure and development processes coordinated by the DoI, and there is continually increasing demand for new and modified information services from those areas.

Other administrative areas rarely face major changes to their internal processes, let alone disruptive changes on the scale introduced by for example the uptake of email, the web and other communication and collaboration services. These disruptive changes have to be planned for as far as possible, and then introduced and supported by the DoI, against a context of stability and robustness for existing services. These introduce significant pressures, and risks.

Managing Delivery

Effective service delivery in this context requires careful and detailed planning, taking into account pressures as diverse as long-term asset management and short-term technology opportunities. Governance has to bring in awareness of user requirements from an extremely diverse and evolving user community, an understanding of risk profiles, and budgetary impacts. While technology change can be introduced in short-term project activities, these do not allow for long-term user support, migration of platforms and services, and maintenance of the underlying systems. Some changes need to be planned for as long-term transitions.

Issues for the future

Key Drivers

Any research-intensive organisation faces a broad range of information service issues at any given time. These issues come from a range of drivers within the organisation itself. These can be broadly classified under business changes, technology changes, and user changes.

Business changes

While many central areas have close working relationships with the DoI, the Colleges are only starting to understand the opportunities offered by ‘services in common’ being provided from the middle. As the costpressures have become more obvious to them, and the inherent transitional changes brought about by the introduction of the College structures, more and more of them are asking the DoI to support their information services directly. This creates pressure at the centre to scale the DoI’s physical and software infrastructure as well as the support mechanisms for the services, and increasing expectations of robustness of those services. It provides cost-savings back in the Colleges, which can be better invested in specialised services.

Within the central areas there has been a growing uptake of services to support their processes. The initial applications supported the traditional key functions of Finance, Student administration and Human Resources.These have now grown to include alumni management, accommodation management, building maintenance, building access control, facilities and asset management, fleet management, identity and attribute management, library management, messaging and communications, parking, records management and research management, amongst many others.

Many of these applications can be provided at a very basic level through commercially available platforms. However, customisation is usually necessary as commercial products are not designed specifically to meet the needs of the higher education sector. For example, financial applications often do not recognise that in a university there will be scores or hundreds of individuals authorised to make purchases; HR software does not easily accommodate multiple appointments remunerated from multiple resources over different time periods; HR and student administration must deal with the complexity that many students are also employees.

Given the large set of administrative processes and platforms, interoperability and integration between these systems is crucial to the provision of services that collectively enable the University to operate successfully. Many of our needs cannot be fully met from commercially available options, and require careful enterprise architecture planning.

All of these systems underpin the information the University uses to manage itself effectively. This has serious implications for the quality of the services to meet audit and archive requirements, and being built on well designed platforms to meet business continuity and disaster recovery requirements.

User changes

Universities are seeing significant environmental and cultural change, at an accelerating rate. Technology has enabled a range of new processes in users' environments, which in turn has created new expectations in the culture of users. New (young) students are being described as 'digital natives', a significant change in the incoming culture of the user base. This change is rapidly propagating into the 'older' generations as well. Students coming from an existing professional background, i.e. partway through a career, are aware that technological measures can support greater flexibility to suit their needs. These users are expecting to be supported by more flexible and functional services, with higher levels of robustness than ever before.

At the same time, the user base is becoming more mixed and more flexible. It is no longer possible to categorise users as purely teaching, learning, researching or administrating. They are now undertaking several of these roles at any given time. This leads to a greater demand for integration of services, to simplify their experience and processes.

There is a growing expectation that everything can be put online, and can be accessed at any time from any location from any device. This requires significant preparation early to avoid disadvantaging some users or making significantly more work for the producers, and dealing with a greater heterogeneity of users and devices.

Technology changes

The last ten years has seen a significant change in broad access to technologies. While the desktop computer introduced a major change from the mainframe era, improvements in handheld and other portable devices have created an even greater wave of change. It is now common for most users to carry multiple devices, from multiple vendors, which can all access the internet in some fashion and store and create information. Standards are emerging for delivering information services to those devices, and there are likely to be significant benefits for users in supporting these devices. Similarly online environments have become virtual meeting places for a large proportion of users, and offer new models of interaction between users for research and education processes.

Key Issues

The following areas of planning, issues and opportunities provide an indication where analysis and preparation is, or needs to be, occurring today.

Access to services:

− There are continuous demands to provide access to a wide range of University information resources through a ‘single sign-on’ Portal service. The service would provide a personalised user environment that will enable authorised access to integrated content from multiple diverse sources.

− All online interactions with content, services or people are mediated through some trust framework. Today that framework is ad hoc, does not scale, is not particularly flexible, nor does it provide rich levels of trust or privacy. Emerging standards and technologies provide a new kind of framework which could deliver all of these far more effectively. However, they will take significant effort at an institutional level for effective identity management, and at a service provider/developer level to leverage these technologies. There will be a rapid change in the market over the next few years in this space.

− The fixed-network infrastructure (cabling, switches) is a fundamental platform for any organisation. To meet the rapid growth in demand (exponential, 50%+ per annum for external traffic) and expectations of high-availability requires ongoing enhancements and a well-planned asset-management strategy (5-10 years). This ranges from the cabling in buildings and between buildings, to the switching devices across the network, and to the commercially-provided connections to the wider Internet. Demand is being driven by research and education needs, including access to data and collaboration around the world, and potential efficiency gains from offloading some processing from the desktop to more dedicated and cost-effective platforms in the middle. At the same time, the underlying internet technologies are showing signs of strain from the massive explosion of online services, in terms of scaling and security. There will be some significant changes in the next 5 years to the fundamental design and implementation of the Internet itself, which requires the university to be prepared, and our staff to be trained.

− Moving away from fixed networks, users are increasingly seeking mobility, i.e. mobile access to university information services, from an ever-expanding pool of devices. Mobile networks face a range of provider, security and bandwidth limitations. There is significant demand to provide controlled access to ANU services that is shared, equitable and effective. Within 2 years every user in the University Community will carry multiple wireless devices. The networks to support them cover the field from local area to campus area to metropolitan area to wide area. Local services can be provided as a new infrastructure by the university, but beyond that users need to deal with a range of carrier-provided services. Wireless can never fully replace the fixed network services, but users are increasingly expecting to be able to use their latest devices to provide at least some effective access to university information services.

− The last 5 years has seen the beginning of convergence of a range of information service platforms. At a fundamental level, there are significant benefits in providing all communication services through a single (internet-based) network infrastructure. Beyond that there are increasing opportunities offered by linking communication services with access to content, rich collaboration environments, and strong identity- and attribute-based directory services.

Management of Materials/Data:

− Data is captured by a vast array of University systems and is used to inform decisions at every level of the institution. It forms the very foundation of the institution ensuring that the University has control of its operations, can make informed decisions and meet regulatory compliance. Core enterprise systems are seen as authoritative sources, which has strong implications for the quality of the data being collected and stored. Current processes to manage data quality vary significantly. It can be improved by focussing attention at data entry points, e.g. by automation of data entry, and by quality assurance processes that should follow. A key benefit from defining and managing authoritative sources of information is it can lead to unified and more helpful views of disparate information elements.

− Universities are increasingly facing a role as custodians or stewards of data from university business, from education processes, and from research. Users are expecting to have easy and effective access to the world’s research output, and easy methods for providing the rest of world access to locally produced publications and other information such as the raw data on which their research is based. They also see this research data as an asset, i.e. as something of value, a concept also being picked up by funders and policy setters. It will see eventually data-lodgement as a form of publication, and recognised as such. This will put significant pressures on repository frameworks, and on likely institutional obligations to be met.

− Libraries encourage and enable the deposit of institutionally derived digital assets or resources, take responsibility along with specialist agencies for their preservation, and make them available in support of teaching and research. Many leading libraries are supporting their institution to become publishers in their own right. As an institution they continue to face significant changes. The main environmental driver generating change in the library and archives area is the relentless migration from a physical to an electronic environment. Given the increasing uniformity of the range of secondary literature to which academic libraries now give access, especially in the case of electronic journals, there is a growing emphasis on the importance of collecting unique primary materials. In addition to local, regional and national archival materials, kept in archive repositories, libraries are looking to build manuscript collections of local and national significance. Primary materials are, of course, not simply physical in nature but are themselves increasingly digital in origin and format.

− A further major change for libraries introduced by the migration towards electronic environments is that where previously libraries owned their collections, they now merely rent most of the digital resources they make available to their users. This new situation implies real risk since access to these resources may be discontinued at any time for a range of reasons including, for example, the corporate failure of a publisher or the catastrophic and sustained failure of a publisher’s delivery platform. Mechanisms must be found to mitigate this risk.

− All universities face issues around digitisation. Providing flexible access to data will require it to be in a digital form, or at least represented that way. This is becoming easier for born-digital materials, but much harder and more expensive for older physical materials that need to be digitised. There are two crucial elements here. The first is digitising existing analogue materials, which has a wide range of complexities and problems, but there are growing pockets of expertise and technologies becoming available. The second element is recovering existing digital materials from media that is no longer widely supported. There is an opportunity for a short period to proactively address this problem, but the window is rapidly closing as equipment is thrown out before the data has been fully recovered.

Collaboration:

− There is a growing expectation that users can collaborate online in rich and functional environments. There are clear research (broader input) and education (peer-based interaction) applications as well as support for administrative processes. Broadly collaboration services can be classified into real-time and non-realtime. Non-realtime (or asynchronous) covers technologies such as email, web spaces, and services such as podcasting and streaming-on-demand. These include the emerging social networking concept where users collaborate in formal and ad-hoc methods, predominantly via the web, and work together to e.g. annotate online materials. Realtime applications cover the range of 'conferencing' technologies, ranging from lowbandwidth web-based services through to rich, high-quality and high-bandwidth services. Between them are applications such as lecture-recording from a live theatre event or from a lecturer’s desktop between lectures. One of the great risks being faced here is the push by the market to fragment into proprietary platforms, rather than adhering to the two or three key standards. Standards-based frameworks provide significant services, and are widely leveraged in areas such as Voice-over-IP, but do compete with various audio and video-enabled chat tools from major vendors.

Infrastructure management, maintenance and scaling

− There are significant pressures to enhance and make better use of physical spaces. The issues start from simple utilitarian needs for space to host racks of equipment for servers up to supercomputers, and keep them supplied with electricity and cooling, as well as separate spaces to provide failover facilities for business continuity. For users, especially students, there is a growing need for ever more generous on campus provision of teaching and learning spaces. These spaces include individual and small group study spaces through to full sized lecture theatres. All of these spaces have particular functional requirements which need to be enhanced and expanded over time. These include enhanced audio-visual equipment for displays and the associated cabling issues, the ability to provide more effective recording of events in these spaces beyond trivial audio recording, additional devices such as smart-whiteboards, pen-tracking systems and tablet input devices, incorporation of video conferencing technology which will eventually see the blurring between traditional video conference centres and video enabled seminar rooms and lecture theatres.

− It is increasingly difficult to maintain the argument that all collections of physical materials should be housed onsite in large library buildings. An acceptable response to these pressures has been the relocation of lesser used materials to an off-campus store. Such a store is not a simple repository but a service facility from which requested materials are made available within agreed delivery timeframes.

− Supporting growth and changing modes of access provide major planning inputs to develop a rolling fiveto-ten year asset management strategy for network and server infrastructure. Network bandwidth and functionality need to increase to keep up with demand. Use of digital materials in research and education is increasing and leads to a growth in storage requirements. Increased demand for centralised processing and a pressure to reduce costs will lead to an increased use of virtualisation technologies. While that approach reduces the physical demands and enhances the agility to deploy new services, it increases the management complexity.

Support

− The university has come from an environment where only a small fraction of users were ICT-based, and where support could be provided almost one-on-one (or 'at-elbow'). That fraction has now basically reached saturation, and it is no longer affordable to provide one-on-one support. This means significantly redesigning awareness and support materials and processes, to make them more effective and available on demand at any time by any number of users. This ranges from simple web pages being developed and made discoverable through to rich self-paced training materials for all users. At the same time, users’ expectations of assistance when the need is real ("something is broken") still have to be met through direct one-on-one support. This means upgrading helpdesk and field-service processes, combined with the need for a more effectively managed environment.

People

− Information services are provided through platforms and through people in almost equal parts. As the range of services have increased, so has the need for specialisation to support those services, and the need to reskill staff released from other duties. This presents several problems. Firstly staff need to be trained either before they start, which is not happening at a rate commensurate with needs, or trained on the job, which leads to slower rollout of new or enhanced services. The staff that are finally skilled up then become more valuable to the wider university workforce and to the outside market, which leads to staff turnover and the cost of new recruitment, and potentially training, processes. To mitigate against the time pressures there will continue to be a need to hire short-term contractors, or to fully outsource, for many services at a higher cost to the university.

− The skills issue for recruitment of information service professionals across the globe is driving up salaries at greater rates than CPI and typical enterprise agreements. This market pressure flows into institutional budgets, where cost-benefit decisions need to be made about recruiting staff on higher salaries just to meet market rates.

Market factors

− Consolidation within the software market, through acquisitions and mergers, has the potential to lead to higher prices for products. Commercial software also tends to require costly upgrades. Where users have customised the software to meet their own business needs, these customisations need to be repeated with each upgrade. Upgrades tend to be more frequent as market consolidation drives the user base on an upgrade path under threat of the withdrawal of vendor support for earlier versions.

− The use of open source software is increasingly of interest and offers the potential to address some concerns regarding the risks, costs and performance of commercial software products. Opportunities are increasing to work in open partnership with global alliances of universities and commercial organisations to design and develop open source application frameworks and tools for all types of users. In many instances large commercial software organisations have also engaged with the open source initiatives and are able to offer support for open source products.