My department has spent a lot of time over the last couple months looking at the web hosting services that we provide and trying to determine what they should look like. Never mind the fact that the core group of us feel we should be focusing on tools in support of teaching and learning…apparently just providing and supporting Blackboard is enough in that arena. It is our job, now, to recommend and ultimately, I assume, provide a solution (think set of services/applications) to meet an ill-defined set of web content needs across the University. So, I’ve spent the majority of my time recently toying with applications like Drupal and Wordpress as we collectively try to decide what combination we’re willing to support, why and how we plan on doing so.

I’m becoming increasingly frustrated with the amount of time I’m spending administering systems and applications and discussing how to meet such a broad set of needs with a limited (read manageable) set of systems. I haven’t been doing any development, and it appears that time left for development will become less and less as I spend more time dealing with the above.

It occurs to me that web hosting providers offer, more or less, everything our stakeholders may need…beyond what we’ll ever be able to provide and manage. Why, then, am I doing backflips to support a similar, albeit lacking, environment? Wouldn’t our time be better spent working on support of the configuration, integration and extension of some common set of these solutions, and let our clients choose the solution that best meets their web hosting needs? We, then, can focus on institutional services such as learning management systems, financials, event calendars, student portal, etc.

Update: I’ve been discussing this with my colleagues and keep flip-flopping on the issue. We trade some control with local hosting for what I believe may be ease of use and administration with external hosting. Locally we have ultimate choice in architecture and range of applications, but are limited in what we can do by staffing.

The clearest path (right now, anyway) is to focus on the departments and schools most in need of web hosting support and try to meet their needs with a limited set of locally supported solutions. Beyond that, clients will need to consider securing their own resources and solutions and, possibly, looking into external web hosting providers.

I just read a blog post by Matt Asay entitled “Open source and the future of vendor-free IT” that got me thinking about the state of my organization.

The majority of our infrastructure is built around vendor supported, proprietary solutions. While some of our services are hosted on Linux servers (also vendor backed), my understanding is that we default to Windows-based servers when that option is available. I assume a large portion of our budget is spent on licensing silos containing redundant components. For example, we have Onbase, DocuShare, SharePoint, Cascade (WCM), and Blackboard (LMS) supported within our organization and I’m sure there are other similar solutions in place elsewhere in the institution. There is a great deal of overlap here and a limited ability to integrate these solutions. I’m sure I’m trivializing the issues involved, but I strongly believe it is possible to build an infrastructure around best-of-breed open source components to reduce/eliminate the redundancy and greatly streamline data management. I’m not suggesting this is easy, but I believe the organization would benefit more by taking on such a project then continuing to pay several vendors to compete amongst one another.

I generally get the impression that IT decision-makers believe there is something special about vendors, and that institutional IT can’t possibly provide a matching level of service/support. This is certainly the case with the proprietary solutions we use because they are closed and we MUST buy expertise and information. I my opinion, we have done our organizations a disservice by restricting technical knowledge to that exposed by vendors; by paying vendors to become experts and do our thinking for us. Consider the alternative where we use our money to educate our IT staff, to hire open source experts and invest in solutions that can be studied and understood without a contract. Knowing that we’re not the only institution dealing with vendor limitations, wouldn’t it be wiser to partner with other organizations dealing with the very same issues (who are also paying the same vendors) to share cost and collaborate on more effective solutions? There was a recent EDUCAUSE article discussing the importance of social learning that suggests the beneficial growth such a project would have for our IT staff.

Over the course of a day, I constantly find myself wondering why things are the way they are or wishing that I could share my ideas on how I think things should/could be. The wealth of information and availability of social and collaboration environments on the internet typically provide me with eventual, if not immediate, satisfaction of these needs. In some cases, however, this satisfaction cannot be had, and that can be frustrating. While sometimes this is because the answers simply do not exist or that nobody is having a discussion on the topic, it is the times when the information/communication exists but is not shared that are the most frustrating. I tend to get a bad feeling about the parties involved in this exclusion.

The IT department I currently work in doesn’t provide a means to understand why things are the way they are. I’m a software developer. It is part of my nature to constantly question, to seek an understanding of how things work and why, and to look for ways to improve. There are several policies, processes and solutions in place in my organization, but I have a limited understanding why and a limited ability to question or participate (with the arguable exception of the subgroup I’m part of). Without any understanding of the needs driving the decision making behind these efforts, I have no inclination to endorse them, unless they are of clear benefit to me (not a common case). If I, an employee of the very organization driving the policy, can’t embrace it, I wonder what the perception is of our clients?

Jeff Kuhns observes that there are primarily three main causes of such resistance. Policies receive resistance because they are formulated with a:

– difficulty in thinking broadly.
- difficulty in thinking long term.
- the ambiguity of many words and phrases.

When reflecting on my own resistance to policy and mandated/provided solutions, it primarily falls into one or both of the top two categories. In particular, decisions generally seem to favor redundant, proprietary, vendor-driven solutions targeted at specific environments, put in place to solve problems I don’t necessarily have. Of course, this may not be the case at all, or may be driven by factors of which I am not aware. Without an exposure to the decision-making process, however, how can I do anything but remain skeptical?

Jeff continues on the importance of sharing in policy formulation:

The schools with the most success have developed a collaborative approach to discussing and resolving questions, and from that approach a sense of trust has developed among the people who must approve and follow policy. This often requires more time than some desire for any one policy but over time provides for a better and more efficient policy process.

I agree and would stress that the result is not only a more efficient policy process, but one that is more widely endorsed because more individuals have contributed to its success. People are more apt to participate when they are involved in the process. The cost of this involvement is far outweighed by the cost of resistance and ineffeciency when such involvement is not enabled and/or solicited.

There has been some discussion, or at least some acknowledgment, in my organization recently regarding communication barriers. The organization is large and consists of a hierarchy of groups, subgroups and small project teams, each focused on a particular business aspect. My guess is that this organizational structure is fairly typical. Over the past several years, the organization has had to research, implement, support and maintain an increasing number of solutions for our clients, resulting in a steady rise in complexity and workload.

Communication in the organization, from my perspective, is generally localized and private, existing in some of the following forms:

• Closed door conversations
• Direct emails
• Phone calls
• Meetings
• Announcements
• Wiki (not necessarily a forum for conversational-style communication, but that use has been suggested)

The result is a lack of awareness between teams and groups of what other groups are doing. What problems are they working on? What do they do? How can I help? Who can help me? This lack of awareness can be remedied by an effective means of communicating and sharing of processes and information internally and externally to groups at each level. Essentially, there is a need for increased organizational transparency.

I think there are four critical aspects to an effective communication medium for increasing transparency in an organization:

• Easy to use – The barrier to adoption must be minimal.
• Accessible – Users need to be able to participate and/or contribute freely.
• Archivable – Communications need to be archived for reference.
• Searchable – Quickly pinpointing specific communication is essential for usability.

In my participation in the Sakai community and exposure to various other open source projects, if have found that the e-mail discussion list (or mailing list) is an effective, arguably essential, method of communication between project participants and fulfills each of these aspects. While this may be driven by the distributed nature of the projects, I feel that such a solution can similarly be applied to an organization like mine. The distribution, in this case, is not geographical but organizational. Since every organization already uses email for communication to some extent, it shouldn’t be too difficult to implement a communication solution using mailing lists.

As staff become increasingly overwhelmed with project related activities and requirements, overhead resulting from inefficient communication needs to be eliminated. This overhead currently exists in the form of meetings and duplication of effort. How often do we spend time in meetings where the majority of the communication is irrelevant or inapplicable? Couldn’t this time be better spent elsewhere? Are we trying to solve a problem that another group has already solved?

Creating topical discussion lists of reasonable granularity, possibly in addition to project and team based lists, allows for communication to flow across channels on which any interested party can listen and contribute to the discussion. Establishing the best practice that all relevant project and/or process related discussion be held in these lists and encouraging staff to subscribe to lists of particular interest helps to establish a dialogue across group or project boundaries. This dialogue of shared knowledge and interest can, at least in my experience, create a feeling of camaraderie, enhance the shared knowledge/understanding of participating individuals, and, hopefully, increase overall communication efficiency throughout the organization.