Information Technology Services Annual Report, 2000-2001

Michael Sherer, Director of Information Technology

Executive Summary

During academic year 2000-2001 ITS moved the college closer to a mature information technology environment--one that is functional, modern, full-featured, efficient, reliable, and secure. A revised strategic technology plan (completed in March 2001) identifies remaining gaps and lays a framework for addressing them over the coming three years. Success in achieving identified goals will be dependent on availability of staffing, resources and increased efficiencies over that time period.

While maintenance and support of this sophisticated infrastructure will continue to be a challenging task, ITS recognizes that more attention must be given to the strategic use of technology. Increasingly, ITS must partner with departments to identify uses of technology that increase efficiency, improve service, build relationships, advance teaching, learning and research, and otherwise further the mission of the college. It is not enough to be a national leader in technology infrastructure; we must become a national leader in the strategic use of technology.

Increased emphasis on undergraduate research and publishing, mobile and ubiquitous computing trends, increasing importance of the web for academic, marketing and administrative uses, an increasing gap between high-performance and commodity computingÑthese are forces that will shape our strategy over the coming years. Affording an optimal level of funding and support will continue to be a challenge, but one that is increasingly strategic to the mission and operation of the college.

Significant Accomplishments Over the Past Year

IT continues to be a fast-paced field and as in years past, ITS made literally thousands of improvements to the college IT environment. Among the most significant:

1) Assisted with the CMDS/Jenzabar Teams Elite implementation. The new administrative system successfully went live on June 11. While it was clearly a team effort, special recognition are due to team leaders, Tim Yoder and Scott Barge, and to ITS Staff members Gordon Bontrager, Helena Mirtova, Ezra Nugroho, John Glick and DevCorps, whose countless hours played and continue to play a critical role in the success of the project. This system will play a key role in supporting good decision-making, quality service and efficient operation of the college for years to come.

2) Gigabit Network Backbone upgrade. A gigabit fiber network backbone was installed in September and now interconnects all major campus buildings. Also, 700 ports were upgraded to10/100 switched Ethernet.

3) Wireless infrastructure upgrade. Wireless network access is now available in most major academic buildings and in much of the green space on campus. This opens up many new opportunities for employee and student uses.

4) ITS instituted an on-call rotation system to give a semblance of 7 x 24 service with minimum burden on technical staff. The system is made possible by a sophisticated monitoring system that pages the on-call technician when a system or service fails. In many cases, the technicians are able to restart the service remotely. This marks a significant advance in service quality for the campus. The system has also served as a catalyst for documentation and cross-training of staff to a level few IT staffs have achieved.

5) Doubled Internet Bandwidth by adding a second T1 line. The increased bandwidth and the addition of Akamai caching servers allowed GC to largely escape the bandwidth problems that plagued many colleges and universities this past year.

6) Upgraded most technology classrooms on campus to 1700 lumen Sony LCD Projectors. The new projectors are bright enough to provide readable projection in normal room lighting conditions.

7) A new Online Course Evaluation System was used during Spring semester and May Term. The new system significantly lowers cost and speeds turnaround of results compared to the previous paper-based system.

8) 280 Office and lab computer systems will be upgraded during Summer 2001.

9) Upgraded Strategic Plan. During Spring 2001, IT Director Michael Sherer worked with the Information Technology Committee (ITC) to create an updated strategic plan for information technology at GC.

10) Umble Center Systems Upgrade. ITS staff helped design and implement significant AV system upgrades to the Umble Center.

11) Digital PhotoID Card system. GC replaced its old Polaroid-based ID card system with a new digital ID Card system. The new system ties in with administrative data and is significantly more cost-efficient to operate.

12) ITS helped the college move aggressively into digital video. GCÕs Mac lab now hosts 15 firewire-equipped video-editing workstations.

13) Equipped all IT staff with Palm Pilots to prepare for increasing demand for mobile computing support.

Technology Use At GC

Not all progress can be summarized in accomplishments and performance metrics. Stories and anecdotes can often best illuminate the substantial changes technology is bringing to the GC campus. Among them:

• GC Journal students put out a weekly half-hour video broadcast throughout this past year using digital video technology. The show aired after Friday chapel and was rebroadcast over the campus cable system and streamed over the Internet.
• WGCS developed a loyal following of Internet listeners.
• Professor emeritus Atlee BeachyÕs funeral was webcast. Hundreds of people who were unable to attend the service were able to experience this moving event.
• A wireless webcam is chronicling the construction of the new Music Building.
• Pete Oakley of ITS became the first employee to use the new wireless network infrastructure exclusively as he moved between offices in ITS and Student Development.
• Glen Gilbert of the Physical Plant can now control the HVAC system from all over campus using a wireless handheld computer.
• A team of students, faculty and staff trained in the use of digital video equipment provided a daily news broadcast for the Nashville 2001 biennial conference.
• Employees from administrative departments and ITS spent thousands of hours cleaning up data, examining processes, learning new software and demonstrating mastery of the administrative software before going live on June 11.
• Seniors Ezra Nugroho and Reuben Budiardja stepped forward and took responsibility for the operation, maintenance and ongoing development of GC Online after Sr. Database Administrator John Glick left GC in September. Ezra has since joined the ITS staff.
• The Help Desk logged 2,238 support calls this year.
• In April, EMU and Goshen IT staff held a groundbreaking 90-minute teleconference discussing technology infrastructure issues.
• Email kiosks were added to the Leaf Raker and gameroom during the fall and saw active use throughout the year.
• A fourth computerized classroom (one computer/student) was designed and renovated to meet the training needs of the Administrative Modernization project. That classroom, Ad 21, will go into full-time classroom use during Fall semester 2001.
• For the first time, the PC system cost has dropped below $1,000.

Key Performance Indicators

The current administration places an emphasis on being able to measure and benchmark performance. To this end, ITS is longitudinally tracking a wide range of information about the IT environment at GC. Going back to 1997-98, ITS tracks numbers of institutionally-owned computers, student computers, processor speed, disk size, RAM, monitor standards, number of live network ports, network bandwidth, internet bandwidth, along with information about the range of services offered. During that time, staffing moved from 11 FTE in 1997 to 15.2 FTE in 2001. Also during that time the network has grown 400%, there are 100 additional institutional computers and 200 more student -owned computers, a wireless network, dial-up Internet access and a wide range of new services and software to support.

In addition to monitoring the institutional growth of technology, ITS this year participated in the COSTS Project, a nationwide effort to understand the relative cost of technology across higher education. There are now over 100 schools participating in this project and it has provided data for comparing GC with other schools of varying size and stature. We intend to participate in the HEITS salary survey next year, and in collaboration with EMU have created a web-based service matrix for comparing technology choices and relative satisfaction with those choices. While this tool was created for the benefit of the Mennonite colleges, we believe this tool is valuable enough that we may choose to offer it nationwide.

Challenges and Opportunities

ITS will face the numerous challenges and transitions in the coming academic year. Among them:

1. Assisting the campus in its first year in production usage of CMDS Teams Elite administrative software. Projects will include report writing, productionizing CMDS Web, porting key web applications to the new system, identifying gaps and prioritizing related projects.
2. Shifting to a centralized event planning structure. ITS welcomes this shift as an opportunity to increase efficiency and improve service. However, the final form of the form of the change is still being determined at this date.
3. Staffing transitions in the technical area. John Glick, Jay Christner and Gene Crusie left Goshen College in 2000-2001. David Hodges, Ezra Nugroho and Charles Sosbe have been hired and responsibilities shifted accordingly.
4. A transition from Novell Netware file and print services to Linux/SAMBA file and print services. This will require some significant staff retraining, but should be largely transparent to users.
5. Supporting the program and agenda of a new Academic Dean and VP of Marketing.
6. Preparing the campus for major operating system transitions on both PC's and Macs. ITS has begun work on transitioning to Mac OS X and Windows 2000/XP during Summer 2002.
7. Network bandwidth management. The emergence of peer-to-peer file sharing technologies has created new challenges in managing a scarce resource.
8. Financial pressures are impacting the entire college and ITS is no exception. The budget is lean and this means there is little margin of error. Fortunately, there is better administrative system support for financial management in the new academic year.

Strategic Goals/Priorities for 2001-02

Certainly a significant objective for the coming academic year will be to provide uninterrupted, high-quality service during a time of significant staffing transition. Completion of projects and other IT priorities will be dependent on available budget and staffing. Those projects and priorities fall into the following categories:

1. Deferred Maintenance.

Category 3 wiring. Most academic building still have a significant amount of Category 3 wiring from the early 1990's, which is only capable of speeds of 10 Mbits/second. This wiring needs to be replaced with Category 5 wiring capable of handling the gigabit over copper. Significant progress on this goal has already been made this summer.

Classrooms. While not exclusively technology, GC has several classrooms in desperate need of a facelift. These and other classrooms should be brought up to a level 1 multimedia classroom level, with fixed computing and fixed projection.

Cable TV system. The CATV system at GC is due for an overhaul. This goes beyond in-house expertise and much of it will need to be outsourced. Satellite system. Our current satellites are aging and beginning to fail. Their location also makes it impossible to receive certain broadcasts, which are blocked by the library and trees. This also will need to be outsourced.

2. Routine Maintenance.

Servers. ITS will be making a concerted effort to reduce the number of supported server operating systems hosting our services. This means the elimination of VMS and MacOS (KeyServer, RevRDist, Retrospect) as server operating systems, and ongoing exploration of the viability of moving from Netware to Linux for file and print services. Expanding storage capacity is a high priority. The shortage of space is already serious at mid-year. Next year we will do a major storage expansion and will need to rethink our backup and disaster recovery procedures to accommodate hundreds of megabytes of data. Computers. During summer 2001, ITS will finish the migration to a 17" monitor standard. Lab computers will receive memory upgrades and a possible OS upgrade, but stay at current hardware levels. Office systems will be upgraded to Windows 98 or 2000.

Network. Residence Hall network electronics are due to be upgraded to 10/100 switched Ethernet. We need to switch the network architecture from a supernetted structure to a subnetted structure to improve robustness.

3. Gaps

Web Portals. GC has several possibilities for moving forward with web portal services-GC Online our internally developed platform for delivering secure web services, Jenzabar a hosted portal and course management system from our administrative systems vendor, and Blackboard 5, our current course management system.

Security. ITS will implement a firewall

Mobile Computing Strategy. While we have the basic infrastructure in place for mobile computing, this needs to be better integrated into the overall academic and administrative vision for the college.

Disaster Recovery. Up to this point, disaster recovery has meant tape backup of servers. With our ever-increasing dependence on technology for administrative and academic functions, it is clear that we need to go beyond tape backup to implement strategies that minimize downtime in the event of fire, flood, or other catastrophic damage to the server room or network infrastructure.

4. Services

Migration to IMAP email from POP3. This will improve mobility and reduce the burden on our file servers, though it may be more difficult for some users to understand.

Migrate from Netware to Linux/SAMBA for file and print services

Prepare for migration to MacOS X and Windows 2000

Implement a campus firewall (Summer 2001)

Complete implementation of a campuswide virus protection strategy (Fall 2001)

Move to a single userID and password.

Move to a unique userID

Server platform consolidation.

5. Support

Improve ResNet support for incoming freshman

Wireless computing support. For faculty, staff and students to make effective use of the wireless infrastructure, its use will need to be properly documented and promoted.

Distributed learning and web-enhanced learning. Much of the infrastructure for doing DL and web-enhanced learning is already in place. Floyd Saner will be doing some work in this area next academic year.

Help Departments have a successful first year on CMDS Teams Elite.

6. Management

Work needs to be done with Human Resources to ensure that we are able to retain our most highly-skilled employees.

We would like to create an external technology advisory board made up of alumni and friends.

Organizational and budgetary issues will continue to need monitoring.

Finish re-organization of ITS

Successfully transition to a centralized event-planning structure.

Five-Year Vision

When thinking five years out, certain trends in computing can be roughly extrapolated. For example, if current trends continue as they did in the previous five years, our environment will be made up of:

1. PC's running at 8-10 gigahertz with a 1-2 gigabytes of RAM, and 400 gigabyte hard drives at a cost of $500 each
2. A 10 gigabit network backbone with 100/1000 Mbps ethernet-capable clients
3. A wireless infrastructure that covers all points on-campus and supports a proliferation of mobile computing devices.
4. 2-3 Terabytes of network storage.
5. 6-10 Mbps of internet bandwidth

This scenario would occur assuming we continue on a 3-year hardware maintenance cycle for PCÕs and a 5-year cycle for networking equipment. However, we anticipate that there will be opportunities to shift to lower cost computing models than Windows running on PCÕs. Such a shift would be more difficult politically than technically, given end-user investment in the current paradigm.

Other projections:

1. Mobile computing will boost employee productivity, but will drive support and equipment costs higher.
2. The advent of low-cost Linux clustering solutions will allow GC to provide high-availability services that for cost reasons used to be only available to large organizations.
3. Increased power and operating system stability will allow ITS to consolidate services on fewer servers and provide redundant servers for disaster recovery.
4. Most students will carry mobile phones that function as PDA's, pagers, MP3 players, personal stereos, two-way radio, web-browsers and email clients. There is a good chance that these phones be fully voice-activated and will dock so that students can use a full-size monitor and keyboard when at home or in the lab or classroom.
5. Digitizing strategic content and creation of video and multimedia content for distribution on the web will increase in importance and will become the focus of more grants.
6. To remain competitive, we will need to extend a suite of technology-based services to alumni and become more sophisticated about using technology to reach prospective students.
7. Much emphasis will need to be focused on using technology to improve service quality, efficiency, and communicate the Goshen College story.

Summary

Technology continues to be a competitive advantage for GC versus the other Mennonite schools and area liberal arts colleges and universities. This advantage is marketable and becomes moreso as we demonstrate that we provide consistently high quality services year after year. ITS is working with the administration to ensure that technology is in alignment with the institutional mission, that technology objectives are balanced against other institutional priorities, and that services are delivered with maximum efficiency.