Distributed Thinking

This time of year is always busy for Development Services.  By the end of July, we have to install any new systems needed for the start of the new semester in September.  This gives us a month of "normal running" which we can use to fix any unexpected problems, before the students start using the systems in earnest.  Our aim is to give the students the best service possible - ideally they should barely even notice all the IT that is making their life easier. Each year brings its own particular focus for us.  Two years ago, the emphasis was on student administration systems, adding extra functionality alongside the new student record system.  Last year, we were busy integrating IT following the merger of the University and the Edinburgh College of Art.  This year, the focus is on the systems that students actually use directly. Chief among these is the upgrade of the main Virtual Learning Environment.  We have run WebCT for several years.  Now we a...

This week I had several meetings with computing and e-Learning staff from the academic schools.  I find these meetings really useful to learn what matters to people who are using (or in some cases not using) IS systems in conjunction with their own applications.  First up was the Technical Peer Group for the university web site.  Here I gave a short summary of our preliminary investigation of whetheer Drupal would be a suitable CMS for the university's central web presence.  I'll write more about that another time.   We also had a presentation about how the university is adapting to the new law on cookies and privacy.  The meeting finished with a short discussion about getting central university data in order to create staff profile pages on school web sites.  We have yet to provide a supported API for this, so some enterprising school staff have found their own way to access the data they need.  This illustrates why a centrally supported in...

It’s been an ambition of mine, since I started in Applications Division three years ago, to create a set of reusable interfaces onto the university’s core data sets, so that any university systems could have a consistent set of information about our courses, our people, our buildings, and so forth.  We’ve already taken some steps towards this goal.  Now I’m seeking requirements from learning technologists across the university as to what information they might need to provision and integrate their e-learning systems. This is happening under the benevolent governance of the Distance Education Initiative (DEI).  The idea is that a course organiser can select a range of tools for her online teaching course, from a range of those available, with advice from their friendly learning technologist.  The DEI “data hub” will then provision those services with accounts for the people involved in the course, including students and tutors.  If people join or leave the cour...

At today’s meeting of the project board for the Office 365 for Students project, the main topic of debate was when to switch over from the old mail system to the new.  All the technical work is currently progressing well and we expect to be ready by the start of the new semester, so this shouldn’t be a constraint.  The issue is when would be most convenient for the student community. The message from the school and student representatives on the board, backed by the User Support Division, is that we should wait until the new (calendar) year.  At the start of the academic year, students are focussing on settling into their new accommodation and their new courses.  For first years in particular, they will have more pressing concerns than a switch to an new e-mail system.  They will be using the student e-mail system already to receive important messages from the university and we don’t want to disturb this communication path. The next option we considered was...

At the end of March, the University of Dundee hosted a meeting to share their experience of migrating to Office 365.  Representatives attended from several universities and colleges in Scotland, including a group of us from the University of Edinburgh. Dundee have taken a different approach to us.  They have migrated all their staff and students to Office 365 for e-mail and e-diary only.  We are only migrating students (excluding postgraduate research students) and we are giving them access to all the Office 365 services.  Dundee started from a position where their mail service was poor, whereas ours is very good (at least for staff).  So the comparison between the two institutions is not straightforward. Even so, this was a very useful day for us.  Dundee explained how they had handled migrating e-mail accounts and mentioned some of the problems they had to address en route, which was helpful.  Microsoft gave an update on the service provision....

On Tuesday morning, I will be convening the first meeting of the project board for our "Office 365 for students" project.  This is the first time I have convened a project board; I'm more accustomed to leading or managing the project team, reporting on progress updates and issues.  As the board convenor, this time it is I who will be receiving reports, offering guidance and checking overall progress.  It promises to be an interesting experience. It is already helping me understand what the members of a board look for in reports and papers. I should perhaps mention that Development Services are not implementing this project.  As the system is outsourced and in this case all the integration work will be done by the IT Infrastructure division, my section is not directly involved in the project team. Not all our projects have associated boards.  Many projects have a single sponsor, or are quite small and self-contained.  Boards are needed for larger project...

Currently, whenever we deploy a new application on the university's IT infrastructure, we follow a detailed quality assurance process.  This involves several different teams.  The actual deployment is performed by the database/system adminstration team.  If we developed the application ourselves, or if it needed significant integration with other university systems, then the software development or software configuration teams will be involved.  The corresponding support teams will check that they have the documentation and knowledge that they need to start supporting the application once it is "live".  The project mangers co-ordinate everything.  And this is just the teams in Applications Division; our colleagues for whom we are implementing the system will be doing their own checks and making their own arrangements.  So deployment takes quite a bit of effort and time. What we would like to do is to make this process easier, quicker and more reliabl...

At this time of year, the various departments of the university are planning their activities and budgets for next year.  Applications Division provide the IT component of many new projects, so we are asked to estimate how much time and money will be required or a wide range of proposals.  Most of these proposals are at preliminary stages, with only outline ideas of what will be required.  Given this uncertainty, You might ask what is the secret that lets us produce accurate estimates for all these proposals? The truth is: we don't.  Of course, we look at our project record to see how much effort was required for similar projects in the past.  This data gives us a guide to the costs of different types of project, such as software procurements, infrastructure upgrades, and software development.  The data also helps us allocate the expected effort across the different teams that will be involved.  But we often don't know exactly what a project will entai...

A year ago I completed a year-long course run by the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education.  This course brought together 18 IT and library managers from universities across the UK and Ireland, made us look at who we are, what we value and how we work, and then gave us lots of pointers for how to lead our teams and projects more effectively. This week we all gathered for a reunion and for meetings of our "action learning sets".  These sets are groups who help each other with problems we encounter in our jobs.  Sometimes these are practical problems; sometimes they are about relationships with other people; sometimes we just ask the others to help us understand our own thoughts and feelings. I'm blogging about this because everyone in my action learning set has found it hugely valuable to have someone we can talk to who will give us their honest response, in an atmosphere of trust.  The fact that we are all from different institutions mean that our reactions are ...

Martin Hamilton has posted a thoughtful piece about the impact of the current IT trends away from the desktop PC and towards cloud computing.  I've been musing about how these changes might affect us as service providers. The move towards staff and students using their own devices to access our services is well established.  We have a policy of providing services via the web whenever we can, giving people access to our services "anywhere, anytime".  The EASE system provides a single authentication point for common access and is integrated with Shibboleth as well.  There are still university systems that don't fit this model, perhaps because the vendor doesn't provide the option or because a university department has bought their own system without considering the wider picture, but we are moving in the right direction. In some cases, the move towards outsourcing services can make this harder.  The big players all have their own authentication systems and wa...

I've decided to revive this blog, after a three-year hiatus, to post news and thoughts about my current role as Head of Development Services, in the IS Applications Division, at the University of Edinburgh.  My aim is to give some visibility to what goes on "behind the scenes" (or should that be "behind the screens"?) and to reveal the sort of issues that face IT in a Russell Group university. My current job is quite different from my previous role at the National e-Science Centre, which was the topic of the previous incarnation of this blog.  Some issues, such as virtualisation and cloud, are common to all IT jobs these days, but the emphasis of my current job is on support and administration systems rather than research.  One important difference is that I must stress that all the posts here will not represent the official position of the University of Edinburgh in any way. To start off, let me point you at an interesting comparison of the "student ex...

I started a new job at the beginning of the month. I'm no longer working at the National e-Science Centre and that means that I won't be involved with Grid Computing Now! . I was granted a day from my new job to host the webinar on cloud computing with Ross Cooney, but that was my last commitment for GCN!. It's been almost 6 years since I joined NeSC and it was about this time 4 years ago that we were writing the proposal for the Knowledge Transfer Network that became GCN!. Looking back, I the experience has taught me a lot as we evolved the KTN to be most effective. It took a lot of effort to get ourselves recognised - to "build the brand" in marketing speak - and I think the work paid off. Now I have the chance to actually practice some of what I preached. My new position is Head of Development Services in the Information Systems Group of the University of Edinburgh, and one of our goals for the next year or so is to roll out a service-oriented architecture...

The Grid Computing Now! webinar on Cloud computing is now available on the GCN web site . We had to make some last-minute changes because Alan Williamson was unable to join us; so after Ross Cooney finished his presentation, he and I had an extended discussion, including several questions sent in be the audience. It went very well; a couple of times I wondered whether I should bring the broadcast to an early close, only to receive new questions from the audience that kept the debate going. We covered many issues, but perhaps the key issue was when to use cloud and when to keep provision in-house. This depends on measurement and requirements (doesn't everything?). In the case of EMailCloud, Ross estimates that if a server will be kept well utilised for more than 8 hours a day, it is cheaper to run that machine in-house, while using the cloud for peak loads, disaster recovery, and so forth. We went into more detail than that - if you're interested, watch the webinar! We also...

Advocates of web 2.0 suggest that we can access nearly all of the services we need from web suppliers. We can edit our documents, store our photos or company data, and run our applications. It sounds great - but what happens when the web is unavailable? Over the last few years I have travelled quite a bit and I've often found myself in places with no wifi connectivity - or at least none at a price I'm willing to pay. So I value having a copy of my data on my laptop, so that I can carry on working. I've put forward this argument at a couple of events recently. At an excellent session on Web 2.0 and science at the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting , the response was that 3G coverage will soon be sufficient to give us access almost everywhere. The next generation will take it for granted, the way they take GSM talk coverage for granted already. I have to admit that this scenario seems quite likely, although of course there are still places that don't even have talk co...

I’ve just attended a panel session on Cloud Computing in Newcastle, which gave several points of view on the uptake and applicability of Cloud. The discussion covered Sofware as a Service (e.g; SalesForce, EMailCloud), Platform as a Service (e.g. Google App Engine, Arjuna) and Infrastructure as a Service (e.g. Flexiscale, Amazon EC2). The optimistic view, taken by the majority of the panel, was that we are on a journey towards cloud computing becoming the norm for business computing. Duncan Mactear of 4Projects sounded a more cautious note; his company provides SaaS for the construction industry but does not use cloud; instead their servers are hosted in a third-party data centre. To which Tony Lucas of Flexiscale pointed out that 10 years ago, similar companies weren’t even using hosting services. Sarat Pedirela of Hedgehog Lab, an ISV, pointed out that the appropriate infrastructure will depend on the type of application. Currently, Hedgehog use cloud for non-critical application...

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 .

I've been asked to publicise the following event. The Technology Strategy Board has arranged an Information Day for Wednesday 22nd October to outline the various R & D Competitions being planned over the next 9 months. This Information Day will provide delegates with an opportunity to find out about the activities of the Technology Strategy Board and gain an understanding of the application process for Collaborative R&D Competitions as well as find out about other Technology Strategy Board activities. The event, being held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Central Birmingham, will open at 09:30 for a 10:00 start and will close at approximately 16:30; a full agenda will be available shortly. To register for this event please click on the following link and complete the on-line registration form For more information on the Technology Strategy Board please visit their web site

This is a reminder that Grid Computing Now! is running a competition to find uses of grid technology to reduce human impact on climate change. The competition is open to anyone who is 18 or over and resident in the UK. So get your thinking caps on and submit your best ideas! The topic is deliberately wide, as is the interpretation of "grid", to allow a wide scope for proposals. The deadline for entries has been extended to Friday October 17 . This extension is particularly intended to give more time to university staff and students who wish to enter. The initial proposal just requires 1,000 words describing the proposed solution. See the competition web page for background information and details of how to enter. There are two tracks, one for IT professionals and the other for everyone else (including students).

I was pleased by our workshop on research opportunities this week. Our speakers met several people who were interested in their work and might contribute to taking it further. It's hard to measure the outcomes of these events, because the collaborations that we are aiming to catalyse may take months to firm up and then may take much longer to produce actual results, but the first impressions are positive. Some of the networking happened outside the workshop itself, of course. That is the advantage of face-to-face meetings; sometimes all you need is to bring the right people together for the first few minutes. Also, you can follow serendipitous links, such as when a colleague pointed me at the workshop on declarative data centres that Microsoft Research Cambridge and HP Labs organised earlier this year. I think the UK is building a critical mass in data centre management and I hope this can be encouraged to the point where it becomes a viable industry. Beyond our workshop, ther...

This week will see the annual conference for UK e-Science , which for historical reasons is called the e-Science All-Hands Meeting. I have organised a knowledge transfer workshop for the Tuesday afternoon, with the aims of presenting research opportunities for e-Science in the UK commercial and public sectors. We have four excellent speakers lined up. Mark Ferrar is the Director of Infrastructure Architecture for NHS Connecting for Health in England. Mark is interested in opportunities for using the processing power available to the NHS to improve clinical outcomes, for example by running HPC models and diagnosis applications. Liam Newcombe is tackling the question of "Green IT" in data centres. This is a big topic in the industry, because energy prices are rising and carbon accounting is being deployed. Liam has developed an open-source integrated model of data centres for the BCS and the Carbon Trust. He is looking for collaborators to further improve this model. A...