Information Technology Services Annual Report, 2001-2002

Michael Sherer, Director of Information Technology

I.  Executive Summary

In an era of rapid change and tight budgets, ITS continues to help GC stay competitive with peer schools and find new ways to economize despite ever rising expectations.  During this year ITS achieved single userID and password access to all services, and will complete its migration from Novell Netware to Linux/SAMBA for file and print services. This summer also marks the one year anniversary of going live on our new administrative system and the beginning of our migration to Windows XP and Mac OS X. While IT departments are always in the midst of or between upgrades, GC's long-term technology direction is stable and the IT environment is mature and full-featured.  This enviable situation provides a strong foundation for focusing on strategic use of technology across campus to achieve our academic, administrative, enrollment and development objectives.

II.  Significant Accomplishments

Topping the list of accomplishments for Academic year 2001-02:
1.  Novell to Linux migration for file and print services.  This project was extremely challenging both technically and politically, but is on the verge of succeeding.  The final phase of the project, migrating employee M: drives and departmental drives, is currently underway. Then in the September, our new server will experience full load for the first time and we are optimistic that it will perform up to expectations.  Benefits of the project include $7,000 reduction in licensing costs, improved reliability, improved staffing efficiency, reduced server costs (from 6 servers down to 3), increased storage capacity (1 Terabyte), simplified drive mappings, improved Mac file and print services, consolidation of directories from two to one, simplified client configuration for student computers, and the unification of institutional file space.
2.  Concluded a successful first year on Teams Elite, aka Jenzabar EX. Though not without challenges, ITS worked hard to help departments rebuild and improve reporting functionality and become productive on the new system.  The institution owes Gordon Bontrager, Helen Mirtova and Ezra Nugroho a debt of gratitude for two years of incredibly hard work to keep the institution on firm footing through a challenging transition.
3.  In December of 2001, achieved our goal of single userID and password access to all services. For a full-service IT environment, this is a remarkable accomplishment.  Coupled with our fully directory-enabled infrastructure, GC is among the few schools worldwide to have achieved this level of integration.
4.  In Fall 2001, tamed the bandwidth crisis by adding a Packeteer Packetshaper and 1.5 additional megabits of internet bandwidth.
5.  Implemented the EduPerson LDAP schema and began our migration from iPlanet Directory Server to OpenLDAP. EduPerson is an Internet2 Middleware standard for defining people in higher education.  Adopting this standard positions GC to benefit from projects like the Directory of Directories in Higher Education (DoDHE).  

Other noteworthy accomplishments by category:

Infrastructure.  Though low-visibility, it is hard to overstate the importance of infrastructure in a college IT environment, since it defines the bounds of what is possible and how easy it is to do it.  GC continues to make strategic investments to improve and extend its IT infrastructure.  Noteworthy achievements include:
    1)  Upgrading most legacy Cat 3 wiring to Cat 5e yielded a 10-fold network speed increase for many users.
    2)  Added 7 Lab-template PC's to the library. These proved very popular with the students.
    3)  Labs were upgraded to 1 gigahertz Athlon PC's and G4 PowerMacs. Low-end office PC's are now PII/300's and G3 PowerMacs.
    4)  Transition to a 17" monitor standard was completed.
    5)  An additional 1.5 Mbit of internet bandwidth was added for a total of 3.5 Mbits.
    6)  Achieved single userID and password access to all network services.
    7)  Wired the new Music Center and planned multimedia classroom installations
    8)  Renovated the GCTV studio and Studios A & B in WGCS
    9)  Completed the Umble Center Systems upgrade
    10) Added the new Music Center to the campus backbone

Bandwidth. The beginning of the fall semester brought a new class of file-sharing application--Kazaa and Morpheus allowed students to swap not only songs, but entire movies.  Colleges across the country scrambled to deal with clogged networks and deteriorating service.  GC, after attempting voluntary restraints, purchased a Packeteer packetshaper in November and added 1.5 Mbits of supplemental wireless bandwidth, which has virtually eliminated all complaints about network speed.

Viruses.  The PC virus onslaught only escalated throughout the year.  ITS routinely receives word of 3 to 4 new viruses each day.  Fortunately for the campus, we completed our implementation of Sophos anti-virus this past fall.  Our license covers all institutionally owned computers and extends to all students, faculty/staff home computers and even retired faculty computers.  This level of protection has significantly slowed the spread of viruses and kept the problem manageable for the campus.  During summer 2002 we intend to add anti-spam, anti-virus email gateways to our mail server, eliminating a significant annoyance to campus computer users.

Security.  Security concerns escalated for all IT organizations this year.  Improved hacking tools have allowed relatively less-skilled hackers to do more damage, and worms like Nimbda, Code Red and Klez caused considerable damage across the globe.  ITS had several security-related incidents this year.  In response, ITS has added a firewall, increased its usage of SSL and become increasingly vigilant about maintaining patch levels on Linux and Windows servers.

Cost Control.  Falling enrollment has raised the priority of cost control, both in the current and future fiscal years. To that end, ITS has  taken the following steps:
    1) eliminated VAX/VMS for a savings of $12,000 annually in hardware/software maintenance contracts
    2) migrating from Novell Netware to Linux/Samba for a savings of $6-8,000 annually in maintenance contracts.
    3) elimination of monitors from the three year replacement cycle saves $15,000 in the short term.
    4) PC prices are down to $740 per CPU, a savings of over $10,000 from the previous year.
    5) We will take a sabbatical from hardware upgrades in summer 2003 for a one-time savings of $100,000.
    6) We use reusable rackmount server cases, dual-Athlon server motherboards and IDE hard drives, which allows us to upgrade a server for under $1,000, instead of purchasing new servers for $3-5,000 each.
    7) We are using gigabit copper networking to lower the cost of server room backbone networking.
    8) The college has eliminated its financial responsibility for Mennonite.net, which now exists as an independent entity.
    9) Streamlined the billing process in ITS Media while providing additional detail desired by our customers.  The new process can save over a day per month.

Strategic Use.  Last year we observed a sea change in higher ed, as leading institutions shifted emphasis from building out the IT infrastructure to strategic use of technology.  While ITS has begun this shift, the past year of financial and technical challenges made it difficult to be as proactive as we would have liked.  Nonetheless, several areas stand out as examples of strategic uses of technology on the GC campus:
    1) ITS has been very involved in ensuring the success of administrative departments during their first year on Teams Elite, doing significant work on the overall administrative reporting infrastructure and helping departments build confidence in the system and their own abilities.
    2) New web designer Jane Wyse and webmaster Paul Reimer have made significant improvements to the GC website aimed at better serving our key constituencie
    3) Helen Mirtova and Ezra Nugroho made the admissions database web accessible to the faculty and administration
    4) Pete Oakley and Reynard Hillman worked with Career Services on a very successful Job Bank web application project which now averages 3 job placements daily.
    5) Ezra Nugroho worked with David Deyhle and others on a new admissions reporting web application that promises to give realtime access to critical admissions data.
    6) GC provided the mVision nightly news broadcast at Nashville 2001 and is making plans for similar involvements in the Atlanta 2003 Assembly.

III.  Assessing Our Progress
ITS is continually assessing our progress versus industry, our reference schools and exemplar institution. Anecdotally, there have been some interesting examples of GC's leadership position.
1.  I recently attended an Internet2 Middleware Conference where GC was one of two liberal arts colleges represented.  Our technology environment and suite of services in many respects surpasses what the larger schools offered.
2.  Last Fall we had a visit from Dave Mastic of Notre Dame, who came to see our digital video production facilities.  He left impressed and said in a follow-up letter, "It's clear to me that you are working with a dedicated and inspired staff who have great ideas, energy and creativity.  You should be proud of all you have accomplished."
3.  And from Dan Mandell of St. Mary's IT Department, "Goshen has the distinction...of being a place we look to for best practices in many
areas."
While we are proud of what  we have accomplished and pleased that other people notice, we are also humble enough to learn from the many excellent things that other schools are doing.  Across the country lots of energy, dollars and creativity go into providing good IT services to students and faculty, so it isn't difficult to find exemplars to model and learn from, even as we model and teach others.
    ITS continues to seek a broader understanding of its stewardship of technology dollars by participating in the annual COSTS Project, a survey of IT costs in Higher Education.  Our ongoing challenge is that while we deliver a world-class technology environment to our students for significantly less than most national liberal arts colleges, we spend significantly more per student on both technology and E&G budget than our official comparison schools.
    ITS also tracks a broad range of IT statistics over time to help us understand the relative growth of technology performance and capacity on campus.  Careful management of the IT environment made it possible to take a year off from computer upgrades next summer, saving the college $100,000 at a critical time in its history.

IV.  Challenges and Opportunities
In the coming year, there will be both significant challenges and significant opportunities.  On the challenge side, the following areas give us concern:
1.  Money.  The whole campus is under financial pressure and ITS is no exception.  The ITS budget for 2002-03 is over $120,000 less than 2001-02, even after absorbing salary increases.  This is not sustainable and will result in deferred maintenance if it must be continued into future years. Financial pressures in other areas also impact ITS, such as the Music Center, where the college was forced to accept sub-optimal staffing levels in the technical areas to compensate for lower than expected endowment income.
2.  Staffing transitions.  Kevin Gross is moving from his position as Netware adminiistrator into the labs and ResNet position.  Helen Mirtova will leave GC in August 2002.  Umesh Balasubramaniam will take her place, leaving a gap in the technical services area of ITS.  While ITS staffing has been relatively stable, this is not something we can take for granted.  Transition in any key area could present significant difficulties.
3.  Security.  Hacker attacks and viruses have become an increasingly serious problem for campuses across the country. The challenge for ITS is to strike a balance between security and functionality, that provides adequate protection to the campus without damaging the academic computing environment.
4.  Jenzabar.  Jenzabar has announced its Internet Campus System, which is ultimately to succeed all its existing products.  While we applaud the basic direction there are concerns about Jenzabar's ability to deliver the right mix of functionality and reliability.  Furthermore, ICS and its underlying technologies are closed, proprietary technologies with a high degree of lock-in, a significantly different direction than ITS has been pursuing.  Helping the campus make a good long-term decision in this area will be a significant challenge.
5. Space in ITS Media.  With the new Central Event Coordinator coming in August, we would like to see synergy between ITS Media, Central Events and Welcome Center.  While placing Central Events in the current non-trad lounge would be an obvious solution, leadership transitions in Student Life have made it imprudent to pursue this path in the short term.


Opportunities for the coming year include:
1.  With the creation of the Central Event Coordinator position, we are well-positioned to fix event coordination and establish a Goshen College Conference and Events Center that makes efficient use of our facilities, generates revenue, enriches campus life and builds good will.
2.  New leadership in College Relations, Admissions and Student Life will bring new ideas, new energy and new opportunities to apply technology in strategic ways.
3.  The new Music Center brings many opportunities for quality event programming, higher quality music recordings, studio experiences for students and staff, etc.  These opportunities are somewhat offset by staffing constraints, but we will make a good faith effort to take advantage of them the best we can.
4.  The technology infrastructure at GC is very strong and our decision not to do equipment upgrades next summer should afford us some extra time to focus on strategic use of the technology we already have in place, though the Windows XP/Mac OS X upgrades will be a large project.
5.  Our use of Linux and Open Source freeware technologies and commodity server hardware will allow us to make some significant progress despite the financial pressures.
6.  Atlanta 2003 represents an opportunity to showcase the college's communications and technology strengths.
7.  The Mennonite.net web content management system represents an opportunity for GC to radically lower the barriers and cost of institutional web publishing.             

V.  Strategic goals for 2002-03
Despite the financial challenges, we expect to have a very strong year in 2002-03. Strategic goals for the year include:
1.  Complete migration to Windows XP and Mac OS X in the labs and offices.
2.  Get a datamart infrastructure in place that facilitates end-user reporting in administrative offices.
3.  Extend the LDAP directory namespace to alumni, friends and prospective students and begin offering services to those constituencies.
4.  Automate the account creation and account deactivation processes, so that these can occur with minimal IT Staff involvement.
5.  Addition of a video-conferencing classroom funded by the Lilly Ploughshares grant.
6.  Addition of a smartcard services infrastructure from CBord, makers of our mealplan management package.
7.  Migration to a new mail and directory server with anti-spam and anti-virus scanning.
8.  Implementation of a content management system that integrates with our enterprise webspace.  
9.  In cooperation with departmental leaders, begin work on technology plans for all departments
10.  Incubate a Conference and Event Center.  Sue Plank has been hired to lead this effort.
11.  Strengthen our admissions efforts through the use of an updated web application form and improved web-based reporting.
12.  Fill high-priority gaps in the campus wireless infrastructure.
13.  Upgrade dorm network connections to 10/100 switched ethernet.

VI.  Looking Ahead.  
Looking five years ahead in field of Information Technology is a daunting task.  Nevertheless, there are certain principles and goals that can be extrapolated out that far with a reasonable level of confidence. My vision for ITS in five years encompasses the following:
1)  GC's IT infrastructure can easily support 2,000+ students. I want to grow the college rather than shrink the IT environment.
2)  ITS is viewed as a strategic partner by all departments on campus; Goshen College is viewed as a strategic partner by the Mennonite Church.
3)  ITS leverages its directory infrastructure and emerging Internet2 technologies to foster collaboration with other institutions, and better serve all its constituencies.
4)  GC favors open technologies wherever possible and models 'sustainable computing' to the church and to the world.
5)  Our application of technology to teaching, learning and administration is as exemplary as our infrastructure. This will involve an increasing emphasis on undergraduate research and publishing.
6)  All our classrooms will offer a consistent, predictable level of technology so that profs can plan curriculum with the expectation that the technology will be available for them whenever they need it.
7)  Our facilities will hum with events and program all year long and will generate revenue that allows us to improve the campus in strategic ways that benefit both students and guests.
8)  We will offer fault-tolerant services that are up 100% of the time and can be maintained during regular business hours.
9)  Students will maintain ePortfolios through graduation and beyond.  
10) We will offer cradle to grave services to our constituencies.

While this vision definitely has technical infrastructure components, strategic use moves to the forefront and the political dimensions of planning and collaboration with departments across campus become the determiners of success. Some schools have moved to a cabinet level CIO position to accomplish their technology objectives. Given the political dimension of the five-year vision, Goshen College may want to consider this direction if we can get the college on firmer financial footing in the coming years. Despite the challenges, I remain optimistic about our chances for future success.  The college's fundamentals are strong and the leadership team coming into place for this fall looks to be very strong.  Information Technology is positioned to play a key role in the renaissance of Goshen College.