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Student Affairs Technology Uncategorized

The 2016 EDUCAUSE MEGA Post

Hey y’all! Here’s my “MEGA POST” for my stint at the 2016 EDUCAUSE national conference in Anaheim from October 25 – 28.

Tuesday, October 25

Wednesday, October 26

Thursday, October 27

Friday, October 28

  • [ KEYNOTE ] Because I Said I Would
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Technology Uncategorized

Preparing for That IT Strategic Planning Project: A Data-Driven Approach

Presenters

  • Jerrold Grochow, CIO-in-Residence, Internet2
  • Sara Jeanes, Program Manager, Internet2

Underlying Ideas for this Seminar

  • Data: facts and statistics collected together for reference or analysis.
  • If you can’t define it, you don’t know what your data says
  • If you don’t analyze it, you don’t know what your data means
  • If you don’t organize and present your analysis, you can’t convince anyone of what it means
  • Data is most valuable when it can be turned into information that can be used for action

Goals

  • Understand what data is important to different constituencies
  • Learn practical approaches to collecting, organizing and presenting that data
  • Start to apply this framework to your own strategic planning projects

What is Strategic Planning all About?

  • Determining where we are now (org assessment)
  • Determining what drives us to the future (drivers & trends)
  • Determining where we want to be in the future (ID strategic issues)
  • Determining how we’re going to to get to that future (develop strategic business plan)
  • “If you don’t know where you want go go, any road will get you there.”
  • “If you don’t know where you are, it’s tough to figure out how to get to where you want to be.”
  • Being aware of external drivers that influence our organization
  • In short: where/what/how, now and in the future

What Makes Data Important?

  • Things that get measured get managed
  • Can be used to look for trends
  • Helps democratize the process by removing emotions
  • Value to the institution
  • Allows for effective SWOT exercise
  • Sets the stage
  • Raises a strategic issus
  • Highlights a trend
  • Distinguishes a constituency
  • Presents a resource concern

Different Types of Strategic Planning Projects

  • Initial plan
  • Revisited plan: why? what changed?
  • Plan update
  • Organizational focus: resources, culture
  • Service focus
  • Technology focus

Strategic Planning Data Planning Framework

  1. Determine type of project and focus
  2. Determine key questions/issues
  3. Assess & define data
  4. Collect data
  5. Perform analysis
  6. Organize & present

Types of Data Needed

  • Skills assessment: what do we need?
  • Who is using our resources, and how?
  • Retention and recruitment: who is leaving and why? What’s their demographic? What are the demographics of the various departments?
  • What’s the data we’ve already got? Staff counts, project portfolio, budgets, etc.

Two Principal Types of Data

  • Primary: data you collect specifically to serve the needs of the strategic planning activity
  • Secondary: data you have (or can get) that was collected for other purposes but that will be useful
  • You are going to have to use data you already have
  • Internal secondary data: operational data, i.e. logs, usage data, help desk ticketing system, admissions data, anything in IR, IPEDS, infrastructure, monitoring, etc.

Operational Data: Service Utilization

  • Definition: how much of a particular service is used by different groups of users
  • Measure: what best shows usage
  • Analysis: trends/patterns
  • Organization/presentation: table, chart, interactive graphic

External Secondary Data

  • What data can you readily get that would be useful?
  • EDUCAUSE Core Data Service, NSSE, IPEDS, census, industry surveys (Gartner, Forrester, McKinsey)

Internal/External can be both primary and secondary

  • Internal: about the organization
  • External: about the environment

How do you collect data?

  • Instrument your systems, surveys, questionnaires, focus groups
  • Sensors

What Kind of Data?

  • Text, numbers, pictures
  • Qualitative
  • Quantitative
  • USE BOTH, to show impact and value

Timing: When Do You Collect Data?

  • Before: to help ID and frame issues, and to ensure the planning process can proceed smoothly.
  • During: as discussion uncovers additional data that would be useful
  • After: to better manage your organization and monitor progress against plan
  • Always: for the reasons mentioned above

How Can We Best Present Data?

In ways that best resonate with the audience, in ways that show importance. For example: “That’s the equivalent of a the cost of a full-time grad assistant” or “IT capital plan == building capital plan” or “system maintenance == building maintenance”

  • Text: quotations, narrative, video
  • Numbers: tables, charts, graphs
  • Pictures: infographics, photos

Institutional Strategic Priorities

  • Understand research and learning/teaching focus areas! This will tell you where senior leadership of the institution wants to go.
  • Understand the financial areas! This will interact with research and learning/teaching focus areas.
  • Understand the technology focus! You’ll be able to explain how this will interact with all the other areas.
Categories
Education Technology Uncategorized

Moving to the Cloud with Amazon Web Services

Presenters

  • Ron Kraemer, VP and CIO, University of Notre Dame
  • Ryan Frazier, Director, System Engineering & Operations, Harvard Business School
  • Sarah Christen, Director of Community Platforms and CIO, Cornell University
  • Mike Chapple, Senior Director, IT Service Delivery, University of Notre Dame
  • Blake Chism, IT Transformation Sr., Amazon Web Services

Resource

Session Introduction

RC: we want to accomplish 1 major goal: roadmap and framework to take back to campus and “deal with the cloud in your culture and your world.”

It’s not perfect, and it’s a lot of work. BUT, it’s better service to our universities if we do it well.

SC: we’re a cloud-first institution. Lots of leadership change since that initiative started. We have 62 accounts under our master contract (master contract signed 18 months ago). Lots of accounts outside our contract. About $300K annual spend outside the IT org…we have a very distributed IT model.

We call the transformation “cloudification.” It’s a partnership with campus IT units. We refactor for most effective use of cloud technologies and containerization vs. “lift and shift.” Central IT must be the expert that campus wants to come to for help. We want to enable, not enforce (we do have SOME requirements to move to the master contract). We understand that if IaaS isn’t better with us, campus will make the move without us. We allow campus technologists to focus on unit differentiators central IT can help with the utilities.

Reqs for Cornell Master Contract

  • Onboarding discussion
  • Attestation
  • Shibboleth for authentication
  • DUO for multi-factor authentication for AWS Console access
  • Lock down root account, escrow with security office
  • Activation of AWS config
  • Activation of CloudTrail
  • CloudTrail logs sent to Security office
  • Activation of Cloudcheckr

What About Researcher AWS Accounts?

  • Easy onboarding without a lot of steps or complication
  • No interference with their research. No overhead (cost or performance)
  • Solutions for export control data and other compliance reqs.
  • Standard network config not always a good fit. “I am an island, not part of Cornell campus.”
  • Technical consultation options: docker, data storage, training, devops support

Today

  • All centrally hosted apps are being moved if possible
  • Infrastructure services are a large part of our on prem inventory
  • Campus units are moving more quickly than our central IT org

Biggest Challenge to Cloud Transformation: RESISTANCE TO CHANGE

RF: I’m director of Infrastructure Customer and Project Services. Initiated cloud strategy and planning when I was in the central IT division.

Cloud @Harvard

  • <2013: Exploration. Very early adopters at Harvard Medical School (research lab), pockets of uncoordinated use, little use within central and school-level IT departments.
  • 2013-2016: Alignment. We got enterprise agreement, direct billing and enterprise support services, laid technical foundations, brought on early adopters, developed cloud strategy.
  • 2016-?: Implementation. Accelerating adoption at all levels, i.e. labs, initiatives, schools, and central IT; shared service roadmaps; early adopters beginning to focus on optimization.

The Case for Cloud

  • Quality, cost, reliability, speed.
  • cloud.huit.harvard.edu
  • Our goal was to have 75% of our infrastructure at AWS by 2017. We’re currently at 31%.

HBX: Can We Deliver the Rich Interactive Experience of the Business School Online?

  • LET’S TRY
  • Move fast – 90 days to build, implement and launch application and registration system, < 1 year for complete course platform
  • Run independent of HBS IT – minimize impact on eisting services, enable new approaches to new needs
  • Be able to scale up or down rapidly – prepare for success or failure of the experiment

AWS Service Mix

  • 17 VPCs, 23 ELBs, 135 EC2 instances, 345 EBS volumes, 18TB instance storage, 4 Redshift Clusters, 18 RDS DBs, 30+ TB loaded via snowball, 78 TB object storage
  • Storage is a very small part of our spend (data transfer is 1%)
  • EC2 is about 58% of our spend

Notre Dame’s Journey to the Cloud

Why move at all? For us, we were sitting on an aging data center infrastructure. A capital investment – particularly cooling – had to happen if were going to continue. Tech demands from students, faculty and administrators outpaced our time and budget. In 2012, emergency communications were a critical concern.

2012

Originally we moved the web site as part of an emergency mitigation effort – “can we move the site in the event of an emergency?”

  • www.nd.edu
  • 3 web servers
  • load-driven autoscaling
  • Geographic diversity
  • It was really an easy move for us

2013

  • 435 web sites
  • 4 million monthly views
  • db as a service
  • ElastiCache

Cloud First

  • In 2013, we began having conversations about “why don’t we move everything over?”
  • We wanted to take advantage of what the cloud offers: 80% by the end of 2017; we’re at 59% today.
  • SaaS first, then PaaS, then IaaS, then on-prem.
  • Setting a goal created “a line in the sand,” that made it real for our people.

What We Learned

  • Rethink technical roles. NOBODY IS GOING TO LOSE THEIR JOB! However, you might not be doing the same job three years from now…
  • We were a very siloed organization prior to the cloud move. As a result of our move, those silos are breaking down.
  • Rethink security processes and tools (this was hard for us). We’re not mapping THINGS 1-to-1, we’re mapping OBJECTIVES.
  • Leverage automation – we’ve used ansible
  • Practical financial engineering. Our data center manager is now the guy who is our financial expert, who gives us insight into our costs. We’ve standardized on regions, instances (T2 class – about 3/4 of all our instances), use of reserve instances, etc.
  • Make a few choices and just go with them!

Cloud Transformation Maturity Model

  • Project Stage: limited knowledge, executive support, inability to purchase, limited confidence, no clear ownership or direction.
  • Foundation Stage
  • Migration Stage
  • Optimization Stage

Blake Chism from AWS: we developed this model to help you figure out where you are in the process. We’ve found that for most of our customers, procurement conversations are getting easier, but they’re still a challenge. If the central IT team helps take ownership, it can help organizations move forward more effectively, i.e. central IT not perceived as “being in the way.”

If your team has good processes now, your move will be much easier.

Project Stage

No matter what, you need to have a business case, a reason why you’re doing it. The roadmap helps describe how you’re doing it. Governance models evolve, and you get better at understanding them. Services change, and you need to have a plan about how you’ll integrate them (or not).

POC are much easier because if it doesn’t work, you can simply shut it off and you’re only out a few bucks. Try things out!

During the Project Stage, establish a “Cloud Center of Excellence” or “Cloud Competency Center” to get the organization moving in the right direction.

Foundation Stage

Lack of a detailed organizational transformation plan can be a challenge. Do a staff skills gap analysis to help you here.

Migration Stage

Should be as short as possible to get over the hump of hybrid and duplicate hosting. All-in will allow you to BEGIN doing new and exciting things. Imagine a space where the default state of, say, development environments, is OFF. All in is just the end of the adoption journey.

Were your enterprise systems like LMS, SIS, HR, Financials and the portal viewed as special and treated differently from smaller apps? Have you moved them yet?

  • Cornell: our KFS (Kuali) finance moved first (we dockerize ours) high availability on file shares was an early challenge (EFS – Elastic File Services are out now)
  • Harvard: IdM was first, we do Peoplesoft now, Oracle e-business is happening now
  • ND: ERP and LMS  – do not separate db servers and application servers!

AWS Cloud Adoption Journey

ALL: we use our AWS solutions architects extensively, and we’ve relied on AWS consulting almost exclusively for our migrations. These interactions have helped to accelerate our staff learning, because our staff are the ones who will need to maintain it long-term.

The professional services unit can help you figure out the high-level ecosystem you need for your particular situation. Enterprise support services is a bit pricey, but it’s useful in many cases.

SC: at Cornell, we created a 100 day training program that includes getting Amazon Solutions Architect certification. This is a good way to assure a certain level of competency. Some schools are using our model for training up their people, and they’re also using it as a way to network and learn new things, i.e. get names of people at other institutions that are going through the same problems.

Building the Roadmap – “Cloud Adoption Framework”

More details here: https://aws.amazon.com/education/movingtothecloudworkshop/

Organizes and describes the perspectives in planning, creating, managing, and supporting a modern IT service. Provides practical guidance and comprehensive guidelines for establishing, developing and running AWS cloud-enabled environments.

Don’t try to use all the components at once! Have your Cloud Center of Excellence (or whatever you choose to call it) do it in sprints by taking five or six of the elements and working through them.

In the private sector, the push to move to the cloud typically comes from the top. In higher ed IT, the push to move to the cloud typically comes from below. What we’ve often done is break off a small part of our budget, and use it to fund an “engineering SkunkWorks” where we can do the POCs and get staff buy-in. If the “where you do computing versus how you do computing” equation doesn’t click in your leadership’s minds, you’re going to have a hard time going anywhere.

Categories
Student Affairs Technology Uncategorized

Student Affairs and Social Media

Warning:  I’m about to sound like a curmudgeon.  I’ve held my tongue (so to speak) on this topic for several years now, but Eric Stoller’s post today in Inside Higher Ed was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  And to be clear, this has nothing to do with this specific post, or with Eric personally.  I’ve never met Eric, and I find many of his posts thought-provoking and entertaining.  I just had to put what I’ve been thinking about into words.

Maybe I need to broaden my online reading horizons, but whenever I see posts about technology in student affairs, nine times out of ten it’s about social media.  Social media and leadership.  Social media and identity.  Social media and the admissions process.  Social media and emergency notification systems.  Social media and campus climate.  Social media and why you’re missing the boat if you’re not on the latest platform.  Enough already!  Without a doubt, social media is important, and there are interesting ramifications for students with this new “permanent record” that we older folks haven’t come to grips with yet.

Many rising stars in the student affairs profession are brilliant at using social media as a platform for self-promotion.  An irrepressibly upbeat attitude coupled with a positive message goes a long way in this field.  If you have an EdD, you’re probably also an unstoppable force of nature and you don’t give a damn what I think.  Popularity contests don’t bother me.  What bothers me is the implicit connection being made that somehow social media IS technology.

That’s wrong, and it really grinds my gears.  Mastery of social media is not the same thing as mastery of technology.

Legions of IT pros in student affairs support an incredibly diverse range of systems, services and infrastructure.  Most of them work behind the scenes and don’t draw any attention to themselves.  It just so happens that the things they work on aren’t perceived as being as sexy as “SoMe.”  But the systems they manage are an integral part of what makes a university run.  And if any of those systems fail, boy howdy.

What makes social media interesting as a technology (at least to me) is that they’re platforms designed from the ground up AS PLATFORMS.  They’re easy to integrate with and can “talk to” virtually any system you can shake a stick at.  But this isn’t what student affairs social media evangelists talk about.  They instead use it as a fulcrum to leverage against current hot topics in the field.

I usually don’t complain without bringing some sort of solution to the table, but in this case I’m annoyed and need to vent a bit.  Maybe the quiet techies need to speak up more and participate in standards-making bodies.  Maybe they should be more active in (gasp) social media.  The only thing I can say for sure is that I’d really like to see the student affairs social media evangelists slow their roll a smidge.

Frankly, I doubt this post will resonate with anyone.  Hardly a surprise, given my massive double-digit readership.  Maybe I should take the hint and use social media more effectively << sighs >>

Categories
Technology Uncategorized

If You Build It: The Power of Design to Change the World

Presenter

Emily Pilloton, Founder and Executive Director, Project H Design

 

Project H Design was created out of a sense of frustration.  Emily began as an architect and after 3 years, was “totally over it.”  She was designing doorknobs and lighting fixtures and found it extremely dull.  It was disconnected from what the things that made her fall in love with architecture in the first place:  getting dirty and solving interesting projects with other people.  Project H is in it’s 8th year.  MacGyver was Emily’s first crush, not just because he’s cute, but because he solves problems in unconventional ways.  Her two grandmothers were very strong and creative women (and librarians!), who invested a lot into their professional practices.

Experience More Important Than Content

We have a responsibility to create learning experiences for our young people that are meaningful.

My partner and I were invited to a failing school district to use design “by any means” to help it succeed.  The results of this was Studio H, a class that takes place during the school day for which students earn credit.  Students create something that is architectural that has a public benefit.  The first project was to build a farmer’s market, which in Windsor, North Carolina was a revolutionary idea.  Now, a big part of architecture is to sell your idea to stakeholders.  This brought people together that would normally not speak with each other…a big win.

Constraints

  • $50,000 construction budget
  • Construction crew of teenagers
  • Hurricane zone
  • Flood zone

Construction

Construction began on the first day of summer.  When everyone else was going out on Jet Skis, my students showed up every day in extreme heat and humidity.  Labor law in South Carolina says that children under 17 cannot operate power machinery on a construction site.  As a result, we had only one student who could operate the chop saw.

RESULT:  this project created 4 new businesses and 17 full-time positions!

STUDENT QUOTE:  “I want to come back here with my kids someday and tell them that I built this”

Seeking is More Important Than Knowing

A constant state of inquiry is important to moving forward.  Our next project was done in Berkeley, California…pretty much at the opposite end of the spectrum from our first project.  Students here come from pretty much everywhere and span the range of experience.  These children wanted to build a library as their class gift back to their school.

The students wanted their library to be a space for discovery, not reference.  How to build a library that is meaningful to all 108 students in the 8th grade?  We use building blocks built by a CNC Router to build modular shelving, tables, etc.  While the project feels unfinished and uncomfortable to Emily, because it doesn’t feel finished.  However, it’s exactly what the students wanted.

Student quote to Emily about her unease:  “In algebra, X is the unknown.  The X-Space is where we go tot discover the things we don’t know.”

We is Greater Than I

I’m super-introverted and don’t like to work with other people.  However, I know that collaboration is important to creativity.  I’ve found that collaboration is less about democracy and more about trust.  The next project we worked on was to build two “tiny homes.”

I had my students build about 100 different models.  We did precedent studies that made students think through all the different reasons why they should include different design elements into a project, like space, lighting, flow through, etc.

We purchased trailers and reinforced them.  The day that we raised the walls was my favorite day.  25 teenagers had to work together to get it set up and squared together.  The students really wanted to use pallets, which I can tell you was NOT easy to work with.  The homes turned out beautiful!  One was auctioned, and one was given to a an organization that supports the homeless.

STUDENT QUOTE:  “I gave someone a place to live.  Oh, and I got an A in this class and know how to build a house.”

Curiosity is More Important Than Passion

Passion is big, often difficult to quantify, and hard to access for some.  Curiosity, on the other hand, is incremental, approachable and generates more creativity.

  • Learn to use a set of tools
  • How do you use this to express your own ideas
  • How do you use this to apply yourself to build something bigger with other people

STUDENT QUOTE:  “I’m a 10 year old girl and I know how to weld.  What can’t I do?”

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