Starting a new academic year

We always plan to have the IT systems run smoothly at the start of the academic year. This is the time when many new students first come to the university and find their way around, when personal tutors discuss their students' academic plans, and when the new systems we have implemented over the previous year come into full use.

It is usually this last point that can throw a spanner in the works. This year, we installed a new learning environment, replacing the aging WebCT with Learn 9; we applied the annual upgrade to the EUCLID student record system (which is needed to cope with changes in government regulations, let alone improvements in functionality); we rolled out the first version of software to support personal tutors; we upgraded several databases from Oracle 9 (which is no longer supported) to Oracle 11, and we continued to upgrade our Cold Fusion servers. Although we test each of these systems, we can be caught out when staff and students start to use the systems in earnest.

This year, we had problems on three separate systems - our main database server, our main application server, and our main hosting server. These combined to give less than satisfactory performance. People will mostly seen this as the MyEd portal taking a long time to log them in. The problems had several different roots. The hosting server failed to reboot properly following a network problem, which meant that some MyEd channels were very slow. The database server was slowed by a rogue indexing process related to Learn 9 and also from some other applications using too much memory. The application server seems to have had an unrelated hardware glitch.

Our support teams have worked hard to resolve these problems and keep everyone informed. My development staff have helped to debug some of the issues. The major issues seem to have been dealt with and we should be back to business as usual.

We will also be reviewing the situation to see what we can learn for the future.

Comments

Webinar: Powering your business with Cloud Computing

On October 14th, I will be hosting a Grid Computing Now! web seminar on the topic of Cloud Computing. We have lined up two very interesting speakers who are using Cloud now to make businesses work. Ross Cooney had a good technological solution to sell but couldn't make it economic until Cloud Computing allowed him to pay for his computation only when he needed it. He will discuss the instant benefits and long term impact of cloud computing to the development, competitiveness and scalability of your application. Alan Williamson created the BlueDragon Java CFML runtime engine that powers MySpace.com. He advises several businesses and will give an overview of the different types of services available and how to avoid being locked-in to a single supplier. You can register for this event here .

Business Model Canvas

A Business Model Canvas is a tool for mapping the core functions and capabilities of an organisation. Compared to the Core Diagrams that I described in an earlier post , the business model canvas attempts to present more aspects of the business, starting with the value proposition – a statement of what the organisation offers to its users (in the business world, to its customers). It shows the activities and resources, as Core Diagrams do, but also shows user relationships & channels, and also benefits and costs. I’m not aware of any universities that have used this tool but you can find examples from elsewhere on the web. We are considering business model canvases as a tool for mapping the strategic capabilities of units at the University of Edinburgh. Phil Taylor, our EA contractor, sketched an outline of what a business model canvas might begin to look like for HR: This is only intended to be suggestive: the real canvas would need to result from in-de...

Changing Principles

In EA, architecture principles set a framework for making architectural decisions. They help to establish a common understanding across different groups of stakeholders, and provide guidance for portfolios and projects. Michael Durso of the LSE gave a good introduction to the idea in a webinar last week for the UCISA EA community. Many organisations take the TOGAF architecture principles as a starting point. These are based on the four architectural domains of TOGAF: business, information/data, applications, technology/infrastructure. These principles tend to describe what should be done, e.g. re-use applications, buy in software rather than build it, keep data secure. See for example the principles adopted at Plymouth University and the University of Birmingham . Recently though, I encountered a different way of looking at principles. The user experience design community tend to focus more on how we should do things. E.g. we should...

Distributed Thinking

Search This Blog