The Landscape of IT in Cambridge 

The Landscape of IT in Cambridge…

…is flat

• 31 Colleges
• >100 Departments
• Each has own IT department and is organisationally autonomous
• Need to work through consensus rather than diktat

This is because there are 31 different colleges, over a hundred departments (the precise number depends on how a department is defined) and a slew of central service units.  Each of these is an autonomous organisation and provides its own services internally, so IT support within Cambridge is much closer to the model of a large number of small organisations each having a small IT team rather than a large central unit.

A consequence of this is that any University wide action has to be achieved through consensus; the independence of each organisational IT unit means that there is no mechanism for a central authority to force them to do something.  They need to be won over by discussion to believe that the action is in their interests.

This isn't purely a feature of IT – it's a feature of how the University of Cambridge works in general.  It's both a great strength and a great weakness – a weakness because it means that the University is very slow to respond to anything and has to put a lot of resource into the process of discussion and liaison.  On the other hand, when the University does act as a whole its actions have been well tested and considered.

Central Services

• University Computing Service: IT support to academic users

• Networking
• Systems
• Training
• Help desk
• Grown out of Computer Laboratory, so academic in culture

• Management Information Services Division: Administrative computing systems, IT support for Administrative Office
• CARET: Research into new learning technologies
• University Library: Access to e-journals and Web 2.0

This diversity and decentralisation extends to IT services too – there are at least four different organisations concerned with central IT provision.

Until reasonably recently, the Computing Service was a part of the Computer Laboratory so as an organisation it still carries a strongly academic ethos.  It is responsible for the provision of University-wide services such as the network, e-mail (though a few organisations still maintain their own), the cam.ac.uk namespace and similar functionality.

The IT department of the Administrative Service (the Management Information Services Division or MISD) has become more significant in recent years.  As the administration has increasingly centralised accounting packages, HR packages and other administrative software, MISD has had an increasingly high profile as they need to interact with an increasing number of departments.

CARET, or the Centre for Applied Research into Educational Technologies, tends to be more research based, working on many small, JISC-sponsored projects.  They currently only run one enterprise-wide service, the University's VLE – an installation of Sakai called CamTools.

The University Library is increasingly moving toward the adoption of e-journals.  Librarians are also the greatest users of blogs, wikis, RSS feeds and other interactive web technologies across the University.

Current challenges

• Funding (a universal issue!)
• University politics
• Need for consensus
• Increased commoditisation of IT
• Uncommon skills are in short supply

As with any institution, there are a number of challenges we face.  Many of these are not unique to Cambridge but a few are exacerbated by our structures.

Along with the whole of the HE sector, there is a lot of uncertainty about funding.  There is an increasing tendency to freeze posts when people leave or to hold them open for as long as possible.  In a structure of departments with IT departments of 2-4 people, this leads to a greater loss of service than a person leaving a large, centralised IT department.  There is also the issue that IT has no presence on the main University funding bodies, leading to a generally low profile during decision-making.

The highly feudal nature of the University leads to people in the political arena attempting to enlarge their spheres of influence.  With nobody representing the IT function, it gets increasingly sidelined and squashed.

The inability to enforce and dictate IT decisions centrally means that IT staff in individual units need to be won over separately.  Consequently, it can be a long, slow process to win staff round with the result that new technologies and strategic repositioning can take an excessively long time to implement.

As computers become more pervasive, there is an increasing perception that people can provide their own support and equipment without needing recourse to a specialist IT team.  We had one salutary tale of a department that was needing to store a large number of images.  The Computer Officer provided a quotation for a SAN with full redundancy and backup. The Head of Department felt that this was excessive and purchased a hundred external USB hard drives…

When you have a couple of hundred small IT departments in a city as small as Cambridge, it can be hard to find people with all the skills that are needed for each department.  Getting enough Windows admins is just about manageable, but it’s a great deal more challenging to find enough Mac admins.  We particularly notice the imbalance in the number of developers who seem to apply for advertised IT positions, however little development they involve.

New opportunities

• Increased appetite for collaboration
• New Vice Chancellor — a man with a track record!
• Special projects
• Increasing realisation of need for strategic approach to IT provision

Increasingly we’re seeing more groups wanting to collaborate; given the Cambridge mentality, many still want to do so on their terms alone, but it’s a start.  The IT managers in the colleges have now had a peer support group for a number of years and the departmental IT managers are beginning to follow suit though, as a much more diverse group, it is a slower process for them.  The challenge for us is to somehow tap this momentum and to channel it in a constructive direction.

From the start of the 2010/2011 academic year, we will have a new Vice Chancellor – the current head of the Medical Research Council.  The MRC is a similarly federated structure to Cambridge and has, under his tenure, begun to pull together as a more coherent body.  If he can achieve the same result in Cambridge it would make a tremendous difference.

We are beginning to see an increasing number of fixed term special projects where we are able to fund a person or two for up to a year in order to make something happen.  Current projects involve a scoping exercise on videoconferencing and an ID management system which marries together a number of systems, all of which believe themselves to be canonical.

We are also starting to see a realization of the value of taking a long view.  Initially this is coming from Schools (funding bodies which finance about a dozen departments) who are looking to provide some School-wide services or to standardize service levels across departments in the Schools. Initially the driver for this is financial, but in time the added benefits of shared, co-operative services should start to become evident.

 

Paul Mazumdar, May 2010