Georgetown University Technology Investment Plan: A Progress Report: 20002004

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Georgetown University Technology Investment
PlanA Progress Report 2000-2004

• Ardoth Hassler
• Associate Vice President UIS
• Based on a presentation March 6 by
• H. David Lambert
• Vice President and
• Chief Information Officer
• May 29, 2003

Strategic Advantage
Capabilities - Services
Foundation - Infrastructure
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The Plan 2000-2004 Focused on Building a
Competitive Foundation
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Foundation Infrastructure Major Accomplishments
in First 5 Year Plan

• Up-to-date and reliable network service to
  on-campus students, faculty and staff built
  (GUNet).
• (7.4M, 93 complete)
• Reliable computer infrastructure and basic
  services built, i.e. email, calendar, Hoyas
  Online, universal ID system.
• (4.6M, 76 complete)

Strategic Advantage
Capabilities - Services
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Foundation Infrastructure Major Accomplishments
in First 5 Year Plan

• St. Marys Technology Center completed. Houses
  UIS staff, technology classrooms, 24 hour student
  lab. Provides technology services for faculty,
  students and staff.
• (4.9M, complete 1.4M funded by plan)
• ACCESS program now dramatically extends
  capabilities and access to core administrative
  systems through enhancements and development of
  online services. Since the beginning of the
  academic year 744,000 log-ins, 3,150,000 service
  requests.
• (1.4M, 83 complete)

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Foundation Infrastructure Major Accomplishments
in First 5 Year Plan

• Information data-marts liberated data from the
  administrative systems and made it available to
  managers and senior executives laying the
  foundation for improved decision-making and
  integrated reporting.
• (1.56M, 97 complete)
• Creation of CNDLS and deployment of Blackboard
  enhanced the Teaching and Learning technology and
  services to support faculty and students.
• (funding by Provost, UIS and GUMC)

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Foundation Infrastructure Major Accomplishments
in First 5 Year Plan

• Began building a foundation and technical
  infrastructure for Advanced Research Computing.
• Support for UNIX, small computational cluster
• (funding provided by UIS grants)
• Upgraded technology capabilities in 56 classrooms
  across the campus and established a desktop
  computer replacement program.
• (2.1 M 75 from fundraising
• 25 from Provost
• for technology classrooms)

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What has this investment made possible?

• Business process improvement
• Faculty effectiveness
• Student life and learning
• Research competitiveness

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Business Process Improvement

• University Financial Systems
• Books closed in September rather than traditional
  December closing
• The close process is automated
• July reports have correct beginning balances.
• No discrepancies to correct
• Budgets successfully loaded for FY 03.

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Business Process Improvement

• Authorized Staff are able to
• Review Center Status Budget Reports
• (10 online reports)
• Submit Online Purchase Orders
• View or change public directory information
  online
• View Institutional Research Data and reports
  online

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Business Process Improvement

• Open Enrollment for benefits now fully online
• BlackBoard regularly used to facilitate
  communication among committees and special
  project teams
• Previously, a disaster would have caused complete
  business failure. Now, the disaster recovery
  program allows remote operations.
• Employee Access provides complete HR and Payroll
  information
• For example, Daniel Westbrook (Economics)
  printed his W2 form
• while on leave in Vietnam

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Improve faculty effectiveness

• Access class lists and grade information for
  their courses back to 1979
• Review transcripts and degree audits to advise
  students
• Review and approve registration choices
• Submit grades online
• Email one, many, or all members of a class
• Post syllabi, class notes, web links
• Conduct online assessments
• Moderate online discussions

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Faculty

• Joe Neale (Biology) uses online interactive
  tutorials to help
• students with difficult lecture material
• Just as over 270 of his colleagues do, Prof.
  Neale uses BlackBoard and Faculty Access
  services
• Submits student grades via the internet no more
  bubble sheets
• Keeps track of student assignments and progress,
  and advises his students online
• His students use wireless laptops in traditional
  science labs and in group discussions

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Faculty

• Digital renaissance in art, music and theater
• Prof Bocci (Digital Art and Photography) shares
  and teaches his passion for contemporary digital
  installation art using high-speed networking for
  video
• Prof Bowen (Music) excites students about jazz by
  offering music clips online streamlines testing
  through web tools
• Chemistry students learn visually
• Prof Bates (Chemistry) uses specialized modeling
  software in computer classroom so that students
  see molecular structures

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Faculty

• CNDLS support enables
• Scott Redford (SFS) to create panoramic virtual
  tours of sites studied in an urban planning
  course
• Catherine Keesling (Classics) to place an
  extensive slide collection in BlackBoard,
  allowing students easy access to materials
• Ed Van Keuren (Physics), with CNDLS, is building
  a web simulation that models spherical
  aberrations in optical systems 

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Faculty

• Randy Bass (English CNDLS) received 507,000 to
  develop an online (virtual) faculty development
  institute
• Kathy Olesko (History) is creating a CD with
  student-led discussions to attract prospective
  incoming students

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Students Now have

• Online registration and transcripts
• No more registration lines
• Students studying abroad are able to register
  online
• 75 computer workstations in 24/7 labs
• Additional 150 workstations and email stations
  in academic buildings and residence halls
• Online syllabi
• Engaging technology for classes
• Group learning opportunities

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Students

• Ubiquitous network connectivity where they live
  and learn
• Port per pillow in residence halls
• Wireless connectivity in shared areas
• Network connections in classrooms
• Technology services before they arrive
• Email, pre-registration, etc., available to
  incoming students during the summer
• Georgetown identity for life netid_at_georgetown.edu
  
• Alumni forwarding

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Research

• Cathy Wu, Protein Information Resource
• Built a worldwide database of protein molecules
• 3 programs 1 at Georgetown and 2 in Europe
• 1.1 million protein sequences stored in database
• Project uses new clustered computing resources
  and high speed Internet connection
• Grants 5.7 million NIH grant.
• Additional new grants
• 1.9 million European Bioinformatics Institute
• 162,153 NSF

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Research

• Maxine Weinstein, Center for Population Health
• Uses Open Source data base for project with
  Taiwan
• Service provided by the Advanced Research
  Computing Group
• Can now depend on knowledgeable support for UNIX
  systems and large databases
• Technology availability and support was crucial
  to a new 571,491 NIH grant on Aging

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Research

• Heidi Elmendorf (Biology) and Alan Faden
  (Neuroscience) participate in complex research
  collaborations across the network with colleagues
  in the US and Australia.
• Sandy Calvert (Psychology) is leading the effort
  to understand the impact of the digital explosion
  and was recently awarded 2.45 M from NSF to
  study how interactive digital media experiences
  relate to children's long-term social adjustment
  and academic achievements.
• Miklos Kertesz (Chemistry) now has on-campus
  access to computational resources to calculate
  complex models with access to specialized
  consulting expertise.

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Where implementation fell short of goals

• New file system deployment not accomplished.
  Novell resources still required
• Desktop Replacement Program not yet funded in
  Medical Center and not fully funded in University
  Services
• Data standardization yet to be achieved.
  Problems impacted and slowed Data Warehouse
  progress
• And limit power of executive dashboards
• Better communication of progress to the community
• Production level reliability lagged deployment

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Peer Comparisons

• Where has our investment positioned us among the
  leaders?
• What are the leaders who are spending more doing
  that Georgetown isnt?

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Where is GU among the leaders?

• Replacement cycle mostly funded (desktops and
  servers)
• Three successful major system replacements
  on-time within comparatively modest budgets
• Up-to-date campus network
• Single universal net-id
• CNDLS integration of technology and pedagogy
• Helping to shape the national higher education
  information technology dialogue

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What are the leaders doing that GU is not?

• Large-scale research computation
• More academic integration of technologies (tools
  and content)
• Business process automation and deployment of
  decision support tools (e-commerce, work flow)
• More aggressive replacement of legacy
  administrative systems (coupled with extensive
  business reengineering)
• Digital Libraries and scholarly information
  management
• More extensive employment of the web as an
  information tool

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Community Response

• 85 of GU Seniors responding to COFHE survey feel
  technology improved during the past 4 years
• Senior satisfaction rose 15 in 2002 survey,
  although GU is still well below the median of
  COFHE schools
• 78 of freshmen in 2002 use technology in 2-5
  courses
• 90 of freshmen find e-mail services easy to
  access
• 80 of faculty indicate satisfaction with
  HelpDesk services

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Community Response

• Campus Technology Moves Forward
• Over the past few years, Georgetown has made
  important and steady improvements to the
  technology services available to students.
  Looking back four years to the first launch of
  our present e-mail client Webmail and comparing
  it to the dusty, text-based Pine system it
  replaced, it is easy to see just how far things
  have come. Led by University Information Systems,
  this campus has been quickly transforming into a
  technologically sophisticated learning
  environment, though there are still a number of
  areas where efforts for improvement should be
  concentrated.
• The Hoya Editorial Tuesday, January 14, 2003

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Realignment of focus for the next planning cycle
5 Strategic Advantage 60
35 Capabilities Services 35
60 Foundation Infrastructure 5
First 5 Years
Next 5 -10Years
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Priorities Competing for Resources in the next
Planning Cycle

• Protection of current investments
• Network telecommunications infrastructure
• Server infrastructure replacements and
  maintaining network services
• Mail, calendar and NetID

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Priorities Competing for Resources in the next
Planning Cycle

• Protection of current investments
• Assuring high availability/reliability
• Information systems
• Financials migration to version 8
• Course Management System
• Maintaining and enhancing teaching and classrooms
  technology

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Priorities Competing for Resources in the next
Planning Cycle

• Legacy replacement choices
• Student System
• Human Resource/Payroll
• Development
• Enterprise file systems

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Priorities Competing for Resources in the next
Planning Cycle

• Compliance and regulatory requirements
• HIPAA
• SEVIS
• IRB
• GLBA

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Priorities Competing for Resources in the next
Planning Cycle

• Growth of information access strategies
• Continued support of data warehousing, data
  standardization and administration
• Enterprise web
• eCommerce
• Automated and integrated business services

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Priorities Competing for Resources in the next
Planning Cycle

• New investments in research
• Research computing infrastructure
• Advanced scientific computation and large
  databases

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Priorities Competing for Resources in the next
Planning Cycle

• Teaching and learning resources and support
• Continual growth in incorporation into classes
• Inclusion of handhelds, especially in the Medical
  areas
• New graduate programs that are compute-intensive
  are being considered
• Scholarly information resources and the Digital
  Library

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Priorities Competing for Resources in the next
Planning Cycle

• Integration of new and emerging technologies
• Wireless communication
• Optical computing and communications
• Research grids
• The technology not yet invented

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Priorities Competing for Resources in the next
Planning Cycle

• unfunded mandates
• Greater demands from tech savvy Administrators,
  students and faculty

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Strategic AdvantageExamples of important
strategic questions

• How can we assure that Georgetown graduates
  continue to be leaders in a world that is
  increasingly impacted by rapid advances in
  information technology? Do we provide instruction
  in all the right fields and do we provide the
  instruction we need to in all fields?
• Can Georgetown provide more effective leadership
  in a region whose economy and political culture
  are increasingly focused on information
  technology?

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Strategic AdvantageExamples of important
strategic questions

• How would information technology play a critical
  role in the success of Georgetowns new
  non-residential teaching and service
  opportunities in the US and around the world?
  How do we incorporate effective assessment?
• With the emphasis in federal research funding
  shifting to large scale, collaborative efforts
  emphasizing complex simulations and large
  databases, can we achieve research restaging
  goals without more investment in research
  technology?

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Strategic AdvantageExamples of important
strategic questions

• Where and how can information technology
  contribute to lowering costs of administrative
  support, allowing Georgetown to continue to
  compete at a high level with lower costs ?
• How will scholarly communication and our
  libraries be impacted by the digital explosion
  the Internet has fostered?

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Next steps

• Feedback from the executive committee of the
  cabinet
• Goals
• Process for new plan
• Generated charge for the new plan
• Return to executive committee of the cabinet for
  review and approval
• Launch new planning process
• Executive, faculty, and board leadership engaged
  in defining strategic targets for IT
• Technologists, librarians, senior business and
  academic administrators, and advisory committees
  do the detailed planning and priority setting