Ideas and Oh Dears

"we don't support that"

2011-02-24T10:16:00.000-08:00

When I first joined what was then the Computing Service, we had a clear policy on Macs. We didn’t support them. If you turned up with a Mac it was unlikely there was anyone central who could help you. That seemed OK at the time (but that was a long time ago!) Over the years the position has gradually shifted, but we’ve never made this explicit. This cause confusion, and I get queries about it, especially when people see me using an iPad or Macbook myself! So I’ll try and spell out where I see we are now, wearing an Infrastructure hat.

There are some central infrastructural services which are fundamental. Fundamental means that we need to provide these on both Windows and Mac clients (& often Linux/Unix clients too). Off the top of my head, that could be things like wireless, filestore, Active Directory authentication, printing – but we need to define what that list actually is.

Some of these might be straightforward, while others are trickier. Macs haven’t kept up with the latest Microsoft server-side developments. For example, we want to use DFS for filestore, but Macs can’t handle that natively. So we are looking at 3rd party client software for the Mac that might bridge the gap. Infrastructure and Service Delivery will work together for this to happen.

Macs are just the start – before long we’ll be getting requests to print from iPhones and connect to wireless from Chrome OS netbooks too.

More generally (but I’m straying into areas best covered by my fellow assistant directors here): we can no longer simply say “go away, we don’t support that” in a world where people are using Macs, PCs, smartphones, tablets, etc etc etc. It’s just not acceptable to our customers and we shouldn’t do it. If we tried to staff and students would just route around us and self-provide. Cheap consumer IT equipment and cloud services on the web mean that the days of IT Services as a gatekeeper are long gone.

But – whatever we do has to be sustainable. So how can we possibly support everything? The implication is that we can’t offer the same level of handholding that people were used to in a one platform world. So rather than a binary supported/not-supported divide, we need graduated support. We also need to harness other support mechanisms, like self-support (eg user communities, or ‘Just Google It’). AskIT is an experiment to introduce that graduated/self-support mechanism in one particular area.

We need to explain to staff and students what they might reasonably expect. How can we do this clearly? Personally I like the idea of Gold, Silver & Bronze support levels, as I think users would understand these concepts. I expect whatever we do for printing and filestore there will be more rough edges on Mac than on Windows, and the Service Desk will always be more fluent on answering Windows queries. You could describe that as Windows users getting Gold level support while Mac users get Silver.

Does this make sense? All comments welcome…

What makes Bristol special: #1 Venue magazine

2011-02-22T14:51:00.000-08:00

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I've lived in Bristol for the past 16 years, and think it's the best city in the UK in which I could chose to live. Bristol is a creative, artistic, leftfield place, vibrant and laid back all at the same time. There are many statistics I've heard - most of which are probably true. We have more street parties than anywhere else in the country, more festivals, more graduates from the two universities who stay here and settle. But stats are dull, it's the experiences that I remember:

The Cube Microplex - a volunteer run co-operative cinema & arts centre 52 weeks of the year.
Carny-Ville - a mind blowing night of entertainment, performed by a cast and crew of two hundred people, all put together by a group of legal squatters
IgFest - being chased by zombies across the streets of Bristol. Sport, theatre and technology converge. Huge fun, very silly, and yet an important signifier of what all organisations will be doing with the forthcoming Experience Economy.

I could go on and on - MayFest, Bristol Jam, Banksy - but I won't.

How did I find out about most of these? Venue magazine.

It was announced today that Venue, the weekly listings mag for Bristol and Bath, is to close after the next three issues. It's extremely sad news, for the journalists who are losing their jobs, and for the whole city. Bristol will be a poorer place without Venue. Venue was part of the virtuous circle of Bristol's cultural scene. It's existence was proof that Bristol had something special, and could support such a publication. Through existing it in turn helped the flourishing creativity of the city, bringing audiences to new events across the city.

I discovered the news through reading the Bristol Culture blog on my iPad. There's real irony in that - former Venue editor Tom Phillips explains "Sad truth is that, for whatever reason, the sums don't add up - print is on the way out but neither readers nor advertisers want to pay for the internet".

I did immediately run out and buy a copy of Venue - I do most weeks but hadn't in the last seven days. I'll buy two copies of tomorrow's edition (hey, it worked for 6Music).

Perhaps the freelancers and staff of Venue will somehow regroup and reinvent themselves as a monthly or on the net. Perhaps Bristol City Council could scrap the Our City freesheet and use that cash to prop up Venue. Perhaps Banksy or Steve Lansdown could fund it...

What has all this got to do with Bristol University? As universities fight harder to attract students paying up to £9000 a year, the quality of the student experience is becoming supremely important. I think the university increasingly recognises how important the experience of the whole city is within that. I'd like to see much closer links between the university, the council, and local enterprises to bolster this, and show the city at it's best to our students.

In a small way the MyMobileBristol with which I'm involved is looking to do exactly that - ideas like mobile guided walks of the city for university open days. Let's see what we can do...

Just Do It

2011-02-16T01:11:00.000-08:00

In Loughborough at the moment for two related seminars. Yesterday was the first UK Universities Google User Group. A roughly even spilt between people who are already using Google Apps, and people who are evaluating it or considering options. As a representative of the latter group, I chaired a panel on 'Building the Business Case', and got to quiz Aline Hayes of Sheffield Hallam and Chris Sexton of Sheffield on why they adopted Google Apps, and how they made the case to do so. Lots of questions from me and from the floor about worries over security and loss of control, and some very good answers from Aline and Chris. Hopefully a recording of this session, and the others, will be up online soon.

Today is the UCISA Cloud Computing Seminar, so a more general agenda. Yesterday I felt like a bit of a laggard - I was talking to some of the same people I first quizzed 12 months about Google Apps & MS Live@Edu. Some were very surprised we haven't just got on with it! Today I can hold my head up a little higher, giving a 10 minute talk on something we did Just Do - Deploying GetSatisfaction at the Bristol. It's a great online forum / community support tool, and it took us very little effort to get it into service. Some lessons learnt from the experience though, which I hope others may find interesting.

Email & Calendar: The Big Event

2011-02-15T01:48:00.000-08:00

We're at the early stages of a plan to replace the university's email and calendar systems. Last week we held an event to kick this off. 300 Bristol staff and students gathered in the beautiful Tyndall Lecture theatre to see demos from Microsoft & Google, and most importantly ask questions. I was delighted to see so many people turn out, who were obviously interested and engaged. We've had some great feedback since, that people really welcomed the opportunity to get involved.

Involving people at such an early stage was very deliberate. In the past the IT department at Bristol has sometimes been guilty of failing consulting people early enough, and providing technical solutions which are good in what they are, but don't actually do what people need them to. This project is part of a commitment that the new IT Services organisation will do things differently in future.

Why do we want to replace email & calendar?

Because you told you to! It's been the top IT request from staff surveys for some time, and one of the top requests from students. People said they wanted a modern, easier to use email client to replace Mulberry, with email and calendar in one. Something that work on desktops, mobile & the web. Above all, people need far more quota, so you don't have to spend time sorting and deleting your old mail.

What do we want to provide?

For staff: a modern, integrated email & calendar in one. After that, a better way to share and collaborate on documents too.

For students: an email for life service - get an email address when you arrive at Bristol, and keep the same address even after graduation. Great for your CV and for job applications.

For everyone: more quota! Something in the range 7GB - 10GB per person

How can we do it?

We are looking at two products as the top two contenders: Microsoft Live@Edu & Google Apps for Education. Both of these are delivered as cloud computing, or Software as a Service - rather than being run on machines on site at the university, they are run by the supplier in their datacentres, and we access them over the Internet. In the last few years, many other universities have adopted cloud services for their email, originally for student use, but increasingly for staff use too. It's a different model for delivering services, with various advantages. One large advantage is that we can deploy cloud solutions quickly, and once adopted we stay up to date. We continue to benefit from improvements as soon as the supplier makes them, rather than going through long cycles to provision, upgrade, and roll out on site. Although we spend very little on our current email service, in the long term cloud services will be cheaper too, especially when providing increasing amounts of storage.

When will we deliver?

Going back years the university had previous plans to improve our email systems, which didn't get far. This time we know that we need to deliver, and not hang about.

We plan to rollout a replacement email service to new students entering the university September 2011. We think that is realistic and achievable. Soon after that, current students would be able to opt in, then alumni too.

Throughout the autumn term we would run pilots with staff in some small departments. A rollout to all staff would happen in 2012, with the timetable determined by the experience of the pilot.

What happens next?

In a few days we'll be launching a survey for feedback from people who came to the event - we'll email the attendees to let you know when this launches. We're interested to know which you prefer, but it's probably more important to know what your requirements are. That way we can work out whether either or both of the products meet your requirements and make sure we deliver what you need.

In addition there are many crucial factors which didn't really come out in the presentations:

security of our data: data protection, contractual terms. How good are the APIs so we have the ability to get our data back out again?
length of contract available, total costs (while the core of both products is free of charge to education customers, there are extras which could get very expensive)
Reliability - is it solid, has has it got a strong and proven history, are other universities happy with it?
The future of the product - is the supplier committed to it, what support is available?
integration with other systems - stuff we're already running and likely to use in future. Which supplier has the better ecosystem?

We've already done a fair bit of work on these, working with the University Secretary's Office (our internal team of lawyers and data protection specialists). We'll be having further discussions in private with both Microsoft & Google to explore these further. I'm also talking to other universities who have already done this, to learn from their experiences.

Watch this space for more news...

Paddling frantically beneath the surface

2011-02-13T06:46:00.000-08:00

Image via Wikipedia

As many readers will know, IT at Bristol is currently undergoing a large reorganisation. It's a tough but important time for all IT staff at the University. As part of this, at the end of 2010 I was appointed Assistant Director of IT Services (Infrastructure & Operations). Since then I've been very busy, to put it mildly! However in the new role communicating what's going on is even more important than ever, so I'm going to restart blogging with renewed determination.

The Infrastructure & Operations group provide the crucial foundations which keep IT at Bristol running. We look after the networks, the storage, the telephone exchanges. We build the systems to keep your desktop patched, your email free from spam, and a lot more besides. Staff in the group are the architects, specialists & engineers who make all this possible.

But that description makes us sound like backroom boys 'n girls, and that is far from the case. We are also a provider of services to staff and students. The ResNet service within Infrastructure & Operations is a good example of where a service culture keep our focus on what is important to our customers. Our open event this week with Google, Microsoft and 300 staff & students in attendance is another example, and part of a conscious attempt to say we'll do things a little differently in future.

This works for email, something naturally high profile, which everyone uses and on which everyone has an opinion. But much of what we do is invisible to the people who benefit from it. If the University is a swan gliding gracefully across the lake, then Infrastructure & Operations are hard at work paddling furiously beneath the surface. How often are you conscious, for example, of the terabytes of storage underlying everything the university does? Probably not at all - unless it breaks!

So we can be invisible when we are doing our jobs well. That's not such a bad thing, but can lead to our staff feeling underappreciated. So remember us in your thoughts. There's even an annual event, Sysadmin Appreciation Day, on the last Friday of July to give you a handy excuse to do so! But no need to wait that long to show us some love. Homemade cakes are welcome at any time...

Client computing in the future

2010-11-26T00:58:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I attended the UCISA 'Client Computing in the Future' event, University of Huddersfield, 25th November 2010 (#UCISA-client). The first talk of the day was from James Hargraves, Client Platform Services Group Manager at UCL. James' approach really chimed with me, so I took detailed notes.

We used to think of client computing as a desktop computer with a software build on it. That's changing, and the old view is no longer sufficient. Trends changing it include Windows 7, Virtualisation, Macs, App Delivery, Cloud services, Smartphones, Tablets & Consumerisation.

Virtualisation

Three different ways in which you can use virtualisation like techniques for client computing:

Terminal Server (fairly familiar).
VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure). An alternative to terminal server, as your desktop has complete control over the VDI Virtual machine. In theory less contention between users than with terminal server. I got the impression James thought VDI technology too new for production use,, more something to keep an eye on.
Client virtualisation - VM on client machines. eg run Windows on a Mac, or VM for personal use on a work laptop. This lets users install things they want under their own control, but without messing up the locked down corporate image.

Hardware Thin Clients.

Is the promise of hardware thin clients too good to be true? Is the cost of ownership *actually* lower? No, not when you include the cost of the data centre infrastructure. Including that, the cost savings if any are marginal. [This is particularly true at Bristol, where we are struggling for data centre space]. Where are hardware thin clients most sensible? In a new building, where you can design the building with less requirement for aircon due to the lower heat output. Where are they least sensible? For student labs - students are intensive users, and thin clients are unacceptable for students if they can't watch Youtube!

Apple Macs

Macs are unquestionably becoming more popular. [Figures of 1/4 to a 1/3 Mac ownership by students quoted by various institutions]. Macs are gorgeous! There is nothing you can do to stop people buying them. Luckily, some new technologies make it easier for us to support them. There are options to deliver Windows apps to Macs. And if your data is in the cloud it is as easy to access on a Mac as on a PC.

Application Delivery

OSes don't matter to people, applications do. Apps are what people use. Smartphones have changed people's expectations of apps. Apps from the App Store arrive on your phone within a few minutes. In corporate settings, it takes forever to get an app approved, tested, and deployed! Our application delivery mechanisms need to get quicker. Yes, this will be tough on us, but from the users point of view that is not the point. So how do you do it? Offer an App Store like experience on the desktop. Citrix already have one - the stupidly named Citrix Dazzle. Chose your app, potentially enter an internal charge code if it isn't already licensed, and then it's there. [Maybe within a day, if not within the 5 mins of the phone, but better than the months it can takes us at the moment].

Virtualised Applications

MS AppV (formerly SoftGrid). VMWare ThinApp. Separates the OS from the app. Can allow installation of two versions of the app.

Cloud Based Services

eg Dropbox. How many people here use Dropbox? Lots of hands went up (don't tell your data protection people!). But you use it anyway as it is *really* easy and useful. Whatever we say to users they will continue to use Dropbox. Telling them not to is just ignoring the risk, when we need to manage it. So instead we need to make our corporate personal and shared space as easy to access, and that means putting it in the cloud.

Smartphones & Tablets

There were 4 or 5 iPads in the room, but smartphones were ubiquitous. iPads are still too expensive and there are real challenges at the moment using them in an enterprise environment - manageability, app purchase, support, and getting data on and off them. But these things will be fixed within the next three years, just as access to corporate calendar and email has been fixed on the iPhone [remember three years ago nobody had one of those either].

Consumerisation

An ugly word, but the right word to describe what is happening to IT. Enterprise IT remains a good thing, but consumerisation can't be ignored. Central IT services need to rise to the challenge, not ignore the inevitable. At the extreme, some companies have experimented with saying "just buy your own computer and look after it yourself". Just give the staff a cash budget. This definitely isn't the right solution for all users, but it is for some.

The support dilemma

We need to support a wider range of OSes. We need to support personal devices. Personal devices have always been there, especially in HE, so take advantage of it! It's a challenge. New services don't mean users stop using the old ones! The old ones are still valuable. People use Twitter & Facebook & MSN but still use email. Students are still queuing to use desktop labs. People do everything at once [at times during my travels over the last three days I've been using the iPad, iPhone and netbook simultaneously!]

Implications for staffing

New technology such as virtualisation brings desktop and server infrastructure closer together. This challenges our traditional split between systems and support. Client & desktop should be seen as an area in its own right, with someone taking clear ownership of the whole thing. [Remember users don't care about the systems infrastructure, they care about the client and the apps on it. But traditionally maybe we defined ourselves by the backend systems infrastructure, thinking that is the 'real job' - and in the process neglected the true real job, what is important to the users?]

UCL's response

A group organised around the client, responsible for delivering a common desktop. [Big caveat, this is still a work in progress, and they haven't yet delivered it!] They have a decentralised IT staff, but [will] have a centralised app packaging process available to these staff. Gold, silver & bronze levels of the common desktop.

Areas that need further work

Backup/data integrity
Encryption
Remote wipe of mobile devices
Print consolidation
Green IT (- de rigueur to add this to list, but is it really important? He's a skeptic.)

The future

The future is:

consumerisation and cloud services - embrace these trends
responsiveness, an app store approach to the desktop
recognise that one size fits all doesn't work, especially in HE
tablets and mobile devices will be pervasive, but thick build PCs aren't dead

Show your working (what this blog is for)

2010-11-25T14:44:00.000-08:00

As any regular readers of this blog will likely know, I start a new role on 1st December as Assistant Director of IT at Bristol. In the expectation and hope that this blog will pick up some new readers I thought it a good time to set out what this blog is for.

It is a truism for all IT organisations that they don't communicate well. While there are pockets of good practice I think it has been a particular problem at Bristol. It's true of the IT department with its stakeholders and customers, management with staff, and different teams with each other. It's something we need to get better at, and this blog is part of a personal attempt to do so.

This blog represents my thoughts. It certainly does not represent any 'official' view of the University. Moreover it represents my thoughts at a particular point in time. I am always impressed by passionate but reasoned argument. As John Maynard Keynes said, "When the facts change I reserve the right to change my mind. What do you do sir?".

I think best when I do my thinking out loud. Some colleagues may have noticed this in meetings! I don't believe in the grand master working on a picture in deadly secrecy, putting it behind a velvet curtain, then unveiling it with a "Ta da!" flourish - at which point the patron mentions that he didn't want a painting at all, he wanted a sculpture. Rather I believe in the sculptor working in public. Mold the clay or chisel away at it in full view, draw inspiration from the outside world, take on feedback from whoever is generous to give it. Through this process of iteration we together produce the best possible final result.

As my friend the Physics examiner would say, "always show your working". A conclusion does not inspire confidence unless you show the process by which you arrived at it. As many people wiser than me have pointed out, an open conversation, carried out genuinely, delivers a level of trust amongst colleagues that a top down ivory tower model of leadership cannot.

I use this blog to discuss ideas. They may come from a conversation I've had, book I've read, or conference I've attended. I may not agree with everything the speaker/writer said, but found them interesting and noteworthy, and they started a thought process.

Thinking aloud in this way is for me the process through which half baked ideas are turned into something wholesome. If you don't like something, or if you do, please take this blog in the spirit in which it is intended. Above all, respond and help shape it. I'm available here, on twitter (@nick_skelton), by email, in the office, the corridor, & wherever. I look forward to hearing from you.

Hermit crabs, Astronauts and the rest - what kind of mobile IT user are you?

2010-06-10T06:47:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

Can you see yourself in one of these?

The Swift

Swifts migrate, between their summer and winter feeding grounds. Our swifts commute, between home and campus. They have nests in both locations, a work office and home office set up just the way they like. They don't carry much, and access their files through a VPN or Remote Desktop. But away from the nest they can get lost and frustrated, unable to get much done.

The Astronaut

Astronauts travel far, exploring hostile new frontiers. But they can't rely on any infrastructure in the places they find themselves, and must carry their entire life support systems. They have to worry about everything. A university astronaut might be a botanist in the jungle with their own satellite uplink and electricity generator.

The Nomad

Nomads are the opposite of astronauts - they are defined by what they leave behind, as the environment will provide it. A desert nomad carries little water as they know where the oases are. A digital nomad knows that every town has a Wetherspoons with coffee and free Wifi. They have no need for a heavy laptop with all their work on it. Nomads can be spotted by their lightweight netbook, Blackberry or iPhone. They store their work online and access it from any computer they come across.

The Hermit Crab

Hermit crabs are somewhere between astronauts and nomads. They travel, but have the burden of lugging a heavy bag everywhere they go. It's got the laptop, the charger, the spare battery, and a collection of all those annoying cables, dongles and adaptors that you hardly ever need except the one time you forget them.

The Monk

Monks spend most of their lives behind the walls of the monastery. They contemplate reality without leaving their cell, even if that gives them a narrow view of the world. On the rare occasions when they do venture outside they are calm and serene. They don't need any electronic communication tools as it is all in their head. They give you their undivided attention, free from all the interruptions that plague the modern multitaskers.

Based on the taxonomy of mobile users by Paul Saffo, forecaster and researcher at Stanford

Mobile isn't special any more (and why this is a good thing)

2010-06-09T15:47:00.000-07:00

I read a blog post this morning where Peter Tinson of UCISA turned his attention to mobile learning. Peter doubts that there is value in universities delivering learning resources for mobile platforms. Peter says:

What do students use their smartphones for? I suspect that it is largely for the social aspects of their lives...

I agree. But students also use their laptops primarily for social purposes, and this doesn't stop us providing VLEs. The generation born with the Internet sees IT as a social tool - that's simply what a networked computer is for. Facebook is where it's at, not Microsoft Word. This is great for us. The social purposes give students drivers to buy, carry and use powerful mobile devices. Once they have them the education will follow.

Would they attempt to use their phones for downloading educational material? The anecdotal evidence on network coverage suggests that it is unlikely that anyone would attempt to use their phone for anything complex. Do they use their phones to connect wirelessly where they can? Again I suspect not...

Yes, network coverage is pretty poor, and I agree that students won't use their phone for anything complex. That's why we make it simple. We have a wizard that sets up eduroam for your iPhone - just go to the webpage, enter your username and password once and it sets everything up for you. In future every time you are in range of a wireless signal it will automatically reconnect you.

It is going to take many years for LTE (4G) to come along and replace 3G networks. In the meantime there's Wifi. Most universities have extensive wireless networks in their libraries, coffee shops - wherever the students hang out. At Bristol we're also providing flood wireless to rooms in our residences - a third of them by this October.

The cutbacks as a result of the current economic downturn are likely to drastically reduce the development of innovative learning material. Is the availability of learning material on smart phones something that offers real competitive advantage to an institution to merit investment? I doubt it.

Obviously cutbacks will hit us hard, and we will have to justify everything we do. So look at the best example of a mobile service in universities - Apple's iTunesU. iTunesU is phenomenally successful. 19 of the world's top 20 universities (by Times Higher rankings) have a presence on iTunesU, and millions of their lectures are downloaded.

Why is it so successful? What lessons can we learn from it and apply to other services?

iTunesU is very easy to use
It doesn't need mobile connectivity all the time (podcasts are automatically copied to your iPod/iPhone and can be accessed any time)
It isn't just a mobile service (can be accessed on laptops and desktop PCs too)
It provides a real competitive advantage. Most of Oxford's podcasts are downloaded outside the UK. This boosts their reputation and attracts lucrative international students. What better way is there to showcase your university than to show your best lecturers, for free, online?

I do think there is value in delivering mobile learning. But the way to do this right is to stop thinking about mobile as special. Is a smartphone mobile? A laptop? An iPad? The categories are blurring. Mobile isn't it's own thing, it's just a part of the mix.

We must provide easy access to our learning resources in on whatever platforms our students want to use (i.e. all of the above). Think about the data not the platform. Make it simple, make it cross platform, make it just work. Use commonly supported standards, so you not have to reinvent it for every platform. Don't lock resources away tight, make them easy to get at. And get as many resources as possible out there in public to boost your visibility and reputation.

If we continue to think of mobile learning as something additional and special we will struggle to resource it. Concentrating on the platform may also warp our thinking and lead us to the wrong solutions.

If we think instead about the learning materials, the content, then we are valuing what is important. It follows that we should make it available to all our students, as widely as feasible, irrespective of the platforms they possess.

We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!

2010-06-03T09:36:00.000-07:00

Image by michael_hughes via Flickr

Rejoice! Nick Jones of Gartner is blogging again! And anyone who quotes Douglas Adams is all right in my book...

I don't know of anyone who speaks more sense on the increasingly difficult task of how to manage mobile devices. For those of us in organisations too poor for a Gartner sub his blog is a precious free route that delivers unexpected pearls of wisdom.

Here's Nick:

Roughly speaking the management world splits into two camps: the traditionalists and the realists.

The traditionalists think that this is a battle which can still be won. They have 3 year strategies, roadmaps, user segmentation models, and a pile of technology such as device management tools, HVDs and virtualisation which they throw at their unfortunate users. They (finally and reluctantly) admitted they can’t stop iPhone but they’re busy building walls around what the users can do with it. They’re a bit like the philosophers in the Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy, they want rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty safely corralled within a neatly controlled universe.

The realists appreciate that the entire universe has become an area of doubt and uncertainty; control is no longer an option. Strategic segmentation models to define what facilities users need for their work are futile when new devices and services are emerging every month, the very nature of work is changing to become more autonomous, and adhocracies invent processes on the fly. Users – particularly knowledge workers – are saying: “I need new tools to do my job in new ways, and who cares if I downloaded them from an app store. I’m the one paying your salary and it’s unacceptable for the business to under-perform just to fit your outdated view of the world”. Realists are the inverse of the philosophers, they may implement a few rigidly controlled areas of certainty but they’re the exception rather than the rule.

Like many polarised conflicts neither side is entirely correct, but the world is shifting towards the realists...

The Gartner managed diversity model for mobile IT support has certainly influenced my thinking. I gave my take on it at our Futures Cafe last November. It included one Douglas Adams reference and a lot of restaurants, but not the one at the End of The Universe.

Here's something I wrote this morning, trying to establish the ground rules for our student laptop clinic:

We are happy to look at almost any hardware at the clinic, doesn't really matter if it is a laptop, netbook or iPad. The deal is:
we commit to look at something, even if we think we can't help we don't dismiss problems out of hand,
in exchange users understand there is no guarantee that we can resolve the issues,
users meet us halfway - they don't dump problems on us, we work with them on it and they learn in the process, and can finish fixing it themselves when we've pointed them in the right direction,
problems are contained within a fixed resource (time and staffing), they don't sprawl. Clinic finishes at 5pm prompt whether problem is fixed or not.

and on our forthcoming GetSatisfaction community support site for Mobile IT:

we have a willingness to engage with problems, and not dismiss them,
users understand we don't have all the answers and can't solve everything,
a contained forum, at a slight distance from the more guaranteed support mechanisms,
we work with users to produce answers together.

Hmmm. Am I being a traditionalist or a realist here? It rather looks as if I too want rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.

Perhaps I'm a pragmatist, recognising that a few such areas are all we can achieve in our current organisational context. If these work and prove themselves, then I may in time win the argument, and we'll let uncertainty take over Life, the Universe & Everything.

IT and the Urban Planner - learning from the planning blitz

2010-04-20T11:53:00.000-07:00

Photo of Lewins Mead by Synwell via Flickr

I love living in Bristol. It's a friendly city with so much life and culture. But Bristol is a vibrant city because of its people, not its infrastructure. It has beautiful architecture alongside monstrously ugly buildings. The city centre is choked by Byzantine one-way systems and gyratories. It has some of the worst traffic congestion and poorest public transport options in the UK. Why?

A mate of mine is an urban planner, so he has the misfortune of listening to me winge about this. After the terrible devastion of World War Two there was a rare opportunity to rebuild our cities. Why, I asked him, did the planners get it so badly wrong?

His answer was to remind me of the context at the time. Think about Britain in the 1950s:

Cities were still in a state of devastion after the war, and in urgent need of regeneration. There was a tendency to want change, and dismiss the immediate past. Bombed out buildings held too many painful reminders. Large grants from central government were available, but only if the money was spent quickly.
There was excitement about new technologies. Concrete made it possible to build tall in a way and at a price which could never have been done before. The motor car was the future, and cities were planned around it. Everyone was captured by this vision. Pedestrians were removed from the ground, exciled to subways or aerial walkways where they would not impede the traffic flow.
Above all, planning was a new profession. In the UK planning as a profession dates back to The Town & Country Planning Act of 1947. Planners were making it up as they went along. They had theories such as Modernism, and influential prophets such as Le Corbusier, but no benefit of experience.

Over time planners came to realise that many of their ideas didn't work out in practice. Concrete looked grey and grim in the British climate. Huge tower blocks were squalid and dehumanising for their residents. Pedestrians prefered to take their chances crossing the road rather than risk muggers lurking in dark subways.

Town planning today is rather different. Planners are not perfect, but they do now consider the human factors. They involve local people in their decisions at an early stage, paying more than just lip service to their views. Cars are no longer prioritised above pedestrians and cyclists. Zoning is out and mixed use is in. The streets come alive with pavement cafes. Sociologists work in planning departments alongside the geographers and engineers.

We are emerging from the global financial crisis but expect swinging cuts to HE and the rest of the public sector. A few relish this, from the viewpoint that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. They might be tempted to sweep everything aside and start afresh. This is what the post-Blitz planners wanted, and arguably they did more long term damage than the Luftwaffe.

How does this relate to IT? Look back again. Lets date the IT profession in the UK to 1957, the year in which the British Computer Society was founded. IT is also a young profession. Like planners, we have had no hindsight, and we made mistakes. We built inhuman systems, where the technology mattered more than the people who had to use it.

The mistakes of planners towered over us all for fity years. Each concrete block is a monument to failed ideas. They act as a constant reminder that we don't we know it all. Planners were forced to learn. In IT our mistakes are easily swept under the carpet, so we repeat them, time and time again. We haven't learnt. Don't like Pine email? Here, have Simeon. No, now we use Execmail. Here's Mulberry. Nothing really changes! We are still rolling out inhuman systems.

Things are getting better in some quarters. Consumerisation is the megatrend sweeping the IT industry, and this has introduced competitive pressures. The best private-sector firms have fast-loading easy to navigate websites. They employ User Centred Design principles to make their services easy to use. They have to. On the web your competitor is just a click away. The firms which don't make things easy don't survive.

In the public sector we have been shielded from this and haven't learnt. We are still building systems that make you tear your hair out, are full of impenetrable jargon, and require a training course before you can use them. We are getting a little better at the externally facing stuff. Our internal systems remain execrable. Do we hold our own students and staff in particular contempt?

How do we avoid this? Learn from experience. Be aware of the heffalump traps and we might not fall into them. Think about some of the mistakes early urban planners made:

Something is better than nothing. Must fill that bomb crater, doesn't matter what with. Got to spend the budget, or it will vanish at year end. This will be familar to anyone in the public sector.

Dismissing the immediate past. Whether it is flock wallpaper or timesharing/thin clients, most generations dismiss their parents solutions but rediscover their grandparents. I'm guilty of this one. I am of the generation that has an instinctive dislike of Microsoft and am inclined to like Google. That is a form of prejudice that can blind me if not aware of it

Overexcitement about new technologies. We are always excited about the technology at the top of the hype cycle. Is Cloud Computing our concrete? Just because we can adopt a technology doesn't mean we should. Consider when it is appropriate, and when it is not. Don't start off by thinking about the technology, think about what people actually need.

Undue reverance for prophets. Perhaps Steve Jobs is our Le Corbusier? Question the established dogma of the future. What does "everyone know", which actually nobody knows?

Paternalistic thinking. Involve those who will live with the systems at any early stage in your planning. Don't think you always know best, be prepared to change your plans in response to feedback. Design on a human scale. Do you even know what the user requirements are? Perhaps you are designing an email system when people really want a to-do list.

Concentrating on grand visions. The theory may be good, but something always happens to stop us getting there. Small incremental improvements actually deliver, the future never arrives. Don't stick to an outdated plan, be flexible. As John Maynard Keynes said "when the facts change, I change my mind".

The IT profession is ten years younger than the urban planning profession. The planners were busy in the run up to the year 2000. Some millennium projects were a success, others were white elephants. That's the stage IT is at right now. Let's improve it over the next ten years.

Two of my favourite films

2010-03-31T03:24:00.000-07:00

Last week I was in Cambridge and attended the first module of the Future Leaders Programme, a leadership development course run by the LFHE. This was hard work, thought provoking, but also huge fun. I'm still in a very reflective mood. In that spirit I thought I'd share reviews of two films I've both enjoyed and learnt from.

Exit Through the Gift Shop: a film 'directed' by the notoriously enigmatic Bristol graffiti artist Banksy. It is currently on (limited) general release in UK cinemas. Banksy remains a shadowy character, and the film isn't really about him at all, although there are fascinating insights into what makes him tick. The subject of the film is Terry Guetta, a filmmaker and artist in LA. Terry comes across as almost deranged, but achieves remarkable success. I left the cinema quite bemused, contemplating quite how he did it. Is it self-belief, hard work, accident, contacts, talent, resources or marketing?

Being There, a 1979 film starring Peter Sellers. Sellers' reserved performance (for which he was nominated for Best Actor in the Academy Awards) is extraordinary. He plays Chance, a gardener, who has
lived a cloistered life behind the walls of his garden until he is suddenly released into the world. Before long he is propelled to the upper echelons of Washington society. Is Chance a Christ-like sage, in touch with values that the rest of us have forgotten, or is he merely a blank slate on which we project our own ideas?

Both films are thought provoking and very funny - see them if you can.

Implications of the iPad: diversification is the new trend

2010-01-28T13:22:00.000-08:00

In one day many words have already been written about the Apple iPad. I won't attempt to describe it here - for that see the walkthrough above, or read Stephen Fry. Instead I'll discuss how technology is developing, as demonstrated by the iPad.

I've owned an iPhone for two years. In December I also bought an iPod nano. Why? I wanted something more lightweight to go running. I don't need the iPhone's large screen when running, and the nano is so lightweight I can strap it to my arm. It has the right form for its function.

The iPad has its place as well. It isn't a phone replacement - I can't put it in my pocket, and I can't even make calls with it. Neither is it a laptop replacement. I could take the iPad with me instead of a laptop for a day or two, but it is missing too much for me to use it as my main computer.

So what is the iPad? It is something different. It's an appliance, not a computer. It is designed around its form factor (think A4 pad or photo frame). It is better than a phone or laptop if I want:

to show my family photos in the living room,
to read a magazine in bed,
to study journals on the train,
to check my agenda discretely in a meeting.

Until now we have thought about convergence in IT. The iPad is evidence that convergence is over. Diversification is the new trend, as computing power spreads through a range of appliances whose form fits their function. It points to a future in which every appliance is a computer on the Internet. We'll use tablets like we use paper. We'll have networked TVs & radios. We'll use walls and tables as displays. We'll have projectors that turn any surface into a computer. The primary user interface will be touch.

Some of these products are already available, albeit with rough edges (iPlayer on Freesat, Pure Sensia radio). Others exist as convincing demos (Microsoft Surface, MIT Sixth Sense). The iPad is here. It is smooth, slick and makes a convincing demonstration of what is to come. It is cheap(ish), has good battery life, and has the right form for its function. Apple's tablet will get cheaper and better each year, while other manufacturers will build them running Windows, Android & Chrome OS too.

Whatever the organisation wants our staff and students will buy and use these appliances. How does the university respond? We must understand diversity and embrace it.

At the moment our starting point is "IT = computers". We provide a desktop workstation for our staff and think that's sufficient for most needs. We expect our students to provide their own laptop and do their work on that. We streamline our business processes, but with client software which only works on one OS. We embrace the web with our portal, but assume it will be viewed on a large screen.

Computers are getting cheaper and are disappearing into the furniture. Access from a phone or tablet will be as common as access from a laptop or desktop. We should stop worrying about issues such as whether the university or the individual buys the device. This won't matter - you will naturally use any computer or appliance you come across. The OS won't matter either, any more than you worry about what OS your washing machine runs. The web will be the new common layer.

Information Technology isn't about computers, it's about information. We must think about:

how we store information, index and catalogue it,
how we share information within and outside the organisation,
How we break down silos and connect up the dots,
how we access information easily but securely,
how we provide the data people need without overwhelming them with trivia.

These are deep, tricky questions. We can glimpse some answers through concepts like tagging, linked data, and the intelligent learning systems we use today for spam filtering.

Imagine a digital dashboard on the web. An evolution of our portal displays timely, relevant information: orders to authorise, todays calendar, and emails ordered by priority. As the dashboard is standards compliant and designed to be used at different resolutions you can view it on any device. You check items from your phone when out and about. In the office and around campus you display the dashboard on your tablet. While you prefer your desktop workstation for composing longer documents you like the tablet's intuitive touch interface for dealing with quick tasks.

William Gibson said that the future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed. The iPad is here from the future, and the rest of it will be along sooner than we think.

Forget Groupware

2010-01-25T09:00:00.000-08:00

JP Rangaswami on his blog Confused of Calcutta decries the way we use email: "ninety per cent of e-mail is generated by the firm and never leaves the firm". JP sees this as evidence that firms are ignoring their customers. He says "whatever we do in the enterprise, we need to ensure that the walls of the enterprise do not keep customers out". It is the stuff which crosses boundaries that is interesting and important.

At least it is possible to email people outside the organisation. In other enterprise systems you can't contact people outside the organisation at all!

My university implemented a calendaring system some years ago. Many academics don't use it. They do however use doodle.com. Doodle lets them schedule appointments with their collaborators in other organisations. Our internal-only calendar system doesn't - so no wonder people won't use it.

Regular readers will know I believe in the importance of network effects. The value of a network grows with the number of connections in the network. Small internal networks became massively more valuable when they were linked to form the Internet, the network of networks.

We need to link our small internal collaboration tools to form the equivalent. To coin a phrase forget Groupware, think Globeware.

Information Literacy and the role of universities

2010-01-18T09:40:00.000-08:00

Image via Wikipedia

What is Information Literacy and why is it important? In the words of Barack Obama:

"Rather than merely possessing data, we must also learn the skills necessary to acquire, collate, and evaluate information for any situation... Though we may know how to find the information we need, we must also know how to evaluate it. Over the past decade, we have seen a crisis of authenticity emerge. We now live in a world where anyone can publish an opinion or perspective, whether true or not, and have that opinion amplified within the information marketplace. At the same time, Americans have unprecedented access to the diverse and independent sources of information, as well as institutions such as libraries and universities, that can help separate truth from fiction and signal from noise."[1]

Information literacy should not be confused with technical IT skills (how to operate a computer). IT skills are important, but Information literacy is fundamental. University libraries have for many years helped teach students to evaluate and assess information sources. This role is now more important than ever due to the wealth of information available online. "Information literacy (IL) is recognised internationally as an essential competence for participation in education, employment and society"[2]

Universities should embrace the goal of educating their students to be critical thinkers. It is almost a indictment of our times that we need to explictly state this. State it we must, least some of the broader purposes of a university education are forgotten.

References:

[1]
NATIONAL INFORMATION LITERACY AWARENESS MONTH, 2009
BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA - A PROCLAMATION
1st October 2009

[2]
Information literacy strategy development in higher education: An exploratory study. Sheila Corrall, International Journal of Information Management, Volume 28, Issue 1, February 2008, Pages 26-37

The impact of technology on Higher Education

2009-11-19T07:33:00.000-08:00

The piece below was originally written for Insight, Bristol's in-house newsletter for IT & library staff. It explores some themes from my #fote09 presentation, in which I developed the idea of IT department as trusted guide. I'm presenting the essay here in an effort to be more accessible.

Douglas Adams was a great technophile and visionary. In 1999 he wrote how to stop worrying and learn to love the Internet and said:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

In 1993 Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, was released. In 2004 Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, was awarded a knighthood, and topped a poll for Greatest Briton. Douglas was right - it took us about ten years to cotton on to the importance of this new technology. But Douglas went on to explain that we still don't understand the Internet. We're stumbling along, cobbling it together. We don't understand it instinctively. We overemphasise the risks and underestimate the benefits. It will take the generation of digital natives, those who grew up with the Internet, to make the best use of it.

The world has been transformed since 1993. Libraries have been at the forefront of this. In 1993 we had too little information. Now arguably we have too much - the volume of information sources is overwhelming! The role of the librarian is to act as a trusted guide through the maze of good and not so good sources. Teaching people about information literacy is more important than ever.

The instinctive reaction amongst some academics to Google was to decry it. But people used Google anyway - it is convenient and it works. So instead we need to harness the power of the network. If I go to google.co.uk/scholar from within the University then resources the library holds show up in the results, with a "Get it@UoB" link that takes me to the full text. That's working with the network, not against it.

It's fantastic that we are already doing this, but we could be doing more.

We could export our library catalogue to WorldCat, the worldwide catalogue of over 10,000 libraries. It would make our holdings visible to a wider audience, while also benefiting our own staff and students. You can already search WorldCat from a mobile phone - not something we offer ourselves.

We could deposit all our PhD theses, and many of our published papers in ROSE, Bristol's e-print repository. This provides persistent, long-term, reliable storage for papers to reference papers. They show up in any search engine, exposing the research to new audiences. This increases the impact and reach of our research, enhancing our reputation.

These examples harness the power of a larger global network to enhance Bristol. In a networked world we must think globally, not institutionally.

Should we feel nervous? Once upon a time we were in control. People would come to the IT department with requests, and if we didn't like it we could just say no. Now in an Internet-connected world it is very easy to bypass us. Anyone can get a free webmail account from Hotmail. Laptops are cheap enough that people buy them with their own money. You can get network access from your mobile phone company. File storage and processor cycles cost just a few cents a GB from Amazon.

It may be a hoary chestnut, but this threat is also an opportunity. This is an exciting time to work in Information Technology or Information Management. We should be the trusted guide that people turn to. We won't have all the solutions ourselves, but can find them. For every requirement that comes along we should assess it pragmatically, considering the risks and benefits of different solutions. Some things we'll invent or deploy entirely in house. For others we will use a service delivered over the Internet. Often it will be a hybrid between the two. There is a huge amount for us to do with such services: to customise, build on top, integrate, and train people on them.

Just understanding all this is half the problem. You could read Edgeless University: why higher education must embrace technology from JISC. You could read the report from Sir David Melville (former VC of the University of Kent): the Committee of Inquiry into the Changing Learner Experience. Both argue very strongly that higher education must embrace the web and new technology. Alternatively ask a real expert - try one of this years Freshers, who were three when the first web browser was released.

How to learn to stop worrying and love the Internet

2009-11-16T12:51:00.000-08:00

I didn't mention it on the blog at the time, but in October I spoke at the Future of Technology in Education conference organised by ULCC. In How to learn to stop worrying and love the Internet I spoke about how universities must adapt in a global networked world. I covered many of the themes I'm passionate about and try to explore here - network effects, digital literacy, open resources, and thinking outside organisational boundaries.

I've also just heard that my proposal to speak Networkshop 38 has been accepted, so I'll be revisiting these themes in Manchester at Easter, perhaps with a more technical bent to suit the audience. In the meantime the fote video and Slideshare slides are online.

FOTE09 - Nick Skelton: How to learn to stop worrying and love the Internet

View more presentations from University of London Computer Centre (ULCC).

Cloud Computing, Security & Reputation

2009-11-12T10:42:00.000-08:00

I read this piece by Bruce Schneier: IT Security in the Reputation Economy. It's a very interesting argument from one of the most respected IT security professionals around.

Bruce starts with the common position that computing is now a commodity. Price and trust as the two factors driving sales of a commodity. Many IT services are free (for consumers at least, and also in education) so that leaves trust. As IT commodiditizes further providers are incentivized to protect their reputation by improving security to greater levels than their customers would demand on their own. Why? An individual company can afford to lose their own data, but no service provider can afford to lose their customers data, as soon after they will lose their customers.

Thinking of universities as service providers, this makes me think we should give greater protection to personal data (eg student databases) than to confidential data (eg financial reports). More generally it is interesting to reflect on two recent cloud computing stories in this light.

First the disaster which befell Sidekick users. Sidekicks are (or were) a popular brand of smartphones in the US. Users had their contacts, photos, appointments etc stored on Sidekick servers, with only transitory cached copies of the device itself. In a spectacular database failure the data vanished. Originally it was announced that all data had been lost with no possibility of recovery, although some has now been found. It is a major embarrassment for T-Mobile and for Microsoft (who acquired Danger two years ago). Perhaps Microsoft will now redouble their efforts to ensure nothing like that can happen again.

Secondly, Google announced a 'government cloud' to attract US federal government customers. It will operate only from Google data centres in the US. They are aiming for accreditation under the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). There are no customers signed up yet, but it is good that Google are trying to demonstrate their trustworthiness, and in particular are taking public sector concerns more seriously. How about an EU government cloud, Google?

Bruce highlights one problem with his argument - markets only work if customers have accurate information. Therefore service providers have a motivation to hide their security problems. Not good. My problem with the argument is that IT may be a commodity, but not to the same extent as electricity or water. Switching from one cloud provider to another is too difficult. Lock-in, as ever, bedevils the IT industry.

Getting back to universities again: my purely personal view is that the case for moving student email to the cloud is now almost overwhelming, but that the trust issues (are the US/Chinese/French governments reading my email??) are currently too great for us to do the same with staff email. If Bruce is right about the reputation economy expect Microsoft and Google to work hard improving our trust in them. In a couple of years time we may think differently - especially if other Russell Group universities decide to make the switch first.

Should I buy a laptop or a netbook?

2009-11-10T10:14:00.000-08:00

Criteria	Laptop	Netbook
Battery life	2-3 hours	6-8 hours
Screen size	large screen, 13" - 17" (good for presentations, spreadsheets, multitasking, anything at all)	small screen, 9"-11" (OK for email, web, word processing, one application at time)
Weight	Heavy, 2.5- 3.5 kg (heavy enough to notice, too heavy to carry every day)	Light, typically 1.1 - 1.3kg (light enough to carry everywhere and even run for the train)
Processor	High power processor. Few things need a powerful processor, but it is necessary if you want to edit photos, edit video, or play the latest games	Low power processor (fine for everyday use such as word processing, web, Youtube)
Keyboard	Full size laptop keyboard	Reduced size keyboard (90% of laptop keyboard size)
DVD Drive	Built-in DVD drive (can watch DVDs)	No built-in DVD Drive, have to connect an optional external USB drive
Price	£350 - £900	£200 - £350

In summary:

Get a netbook if you value convenience and mobility. The light weight and long battery life mean that you can have it available any time, anywhere. However the cramped screen and keyboard mean that you won't want to use it for long periods, and will turn to a desktop or laptop for prolonged use. My personal favourite netbook at the moment is the Asus eeePC Seashell 1008HA, which has a great combination of weight, battery life, size and slim design.

Get a laptop if you want a workhorse which is comfortable for extended use. It could be your main computer and will do almost anything. You'll use it mainly in a fixed location but it is too heavy to be really portable so you will carry it with you only occasionally. You can use it for long periods, as long as you can find a power socket. Good examples of laptops: The Toshiba Tecra range (for business) or Satellite Pro range (for consumers).

There is a third category: the ultraportable. These have larger screens than netbooks, but longer battery life than laptops. They are not as mobile as a netbook but are more powerful. Until now they've been expensive (upwards of £1000) and aimed at those few top executives who can afford them. Typical examples are the Toshiba Portege range or the Macbook Air. However prices are now coming down, with models based on Intel's new and cheaper CULV (Consumer Ultra-Low Voltage) chip design coming on sale.

Any portable computer will always be a compromise between mobility, functionality, and what you are prepared to pay. The important point is to decide what is important for you.

Unified Communications - a vision from the snake oil salesmen

2009-11-02T03:16:00.000-08:00

I've been reading a report from one of the major IT market research firms on what they (and many others) call Unified Communications. They are refreshingly rude and realistic about the state of unified communications today (everyone is evaluating but nobody is deploying, standards are ill-defined, it is unclear which vendors will end up on top, benefits in hard financial terms are difficult to define). However they paint an overly rosy picture of Unified Communications by 2015.

There is overwhelming marketing hype over unified communications and it obscures how communications works. I prefer to think about Integrated Communications. Today for most people integrated communications means email, address books, and calendar. I might want to use all of those in one interface, but it doesn't mean I'll stop using all my other communications tools.

New communications methods arise rapidly, seemingly out of nowhere - think of SMS, Facebook & Twitter. People adopt a new communications method because other people they want to talk to are already using it, not because it has come bundled with something else. Gradually more communication methods will be integrated into a single interface or available on the same device (a web portal or smartphone). This will happen slowly, as the vendors can't keep up with the pace. We should take a tactical, progressive approach. We will never reach the nirvana of Unified Communications that the industry would like to sell us.

There is remarkably little pushback against the unified communications marketing spiel, but there is some. Nick Jones of Gartner (not the research firm I mention earlier) is as ever insightful and refreshing: see his blog post I hate Unified Communications.

Should universities be OpenID providers, consumers, both or neither?

2009-10-12T08:12:00.000-07:00

JISC commisioned a report on OpenID which was published last December. There were comments at the time, in particular thinking about the differences between Shibboleth and OpenID. Since then many more providers have announced support for OpenID in some form, but I'm not aware of much activity within UK HE.

One criticism is that OpenID providers typically give no guarantee that a user is who they say they are, so we wouldn't want to use it to authenticate resources of real value. However a university could use it as a mechanism for public resources - for example external users could log in with OpenID to comment on a public university wiki.

I think there is more benefit right now in us becoming an OpenID provider. This is a way to "internalise external web services". When experimenting with Web 2.0 services I often find that colleagues are reluctant to try something. An important reason given is that remembering another username and password is a hassle. It's a fair point. We've worked hard to combine internal university services into one single sign on, and expecting different logons for external services is a large step backwards.

Notable services which allow you to log in via OpenID include:

37signals.com - several web services including HighRise simple CRM
Zoho Office - web-based office software
comment on blogs at Blogger (but you still need a Blogger/GoogleID to create a blog)
Log in to Facebook via OpenID (but you need to have created a Facebook account without OpenID first)

Unfortunately that's almost it, out of what I would call notable services. Other organisations make the same judgment as us - there is more value in being an OpenID provider than an OpenID consumer. They don't want to lose the direct customer relationship. It tends to be the less established companies that fully support OpenID. 37Signals produce excellent webapps but are quite a small player. Zoho is also excellent but plays second fiddle to Google Apps. Those are two of the better companies who are OpenID customers. If we integrated their webapps into our portal I'd be happy that they aren't going to disappear overnight, but I would worry about a lot of the others. I worry when looking at the OpenID directory that I've never heard of most of the sites on the list.

None of these popular web services allow you to log in with OpenID:

YouTube
Flickr
Slideshare
Evernote
Eventbrite

Due to the importance of network effects I firmly believe you are better off using the market leading Web 2.0 services. I wouldn't encourage staff or students to use a Flickr clone just because it does OpenID. Building university services that tie in with Flickr itself is more likely to be successful, as that is where the content and users are already.

So what should we do? I think there is benefit for individual universities in becoming OpenID providers. A mechanism for staff and students to comment on externally hosted blogs under their university ID sounds useful. We could even let students log on to Facebook through their university portal - or would that horrify them?

We could become providers at a national level by creating a gateway between OpenID and UK Access Federation, but which acts the opposite way round to the existing gateway. Should we start to think about reconstructing UK Access Federation on top of OpenID?

Or is all this just too soon - should we sit on our hands a little longer and hope more OpenID consumers emerge?

How to make your social software succeed

2009-08-25T08:34:00.000-07:00

A colleague recently pointed me at Microsoft's Community Clips. It is a community-driven website where users share training videos about Microsoft Office. Why, he wondered, would anyone want to freely document Microsoft's profit-making software?

I was intrigued, so I had a poke around. It didn't look like a vibrant healthy community to me. The most popular featured videos had all been added over a year ago and there was nothing at all within the last 30 days. I then played a few clips. Each video started with a banner "Attention! The Soapbox service will be discontinued as of 31st August 2009!".

No surprise then that Community Clips has the aura of a ghost town. Soapbox launched in 2006 as Microsoft's equivalent to YouTube, and it powered Community Clips. On July 21 2009, MS announced the demise of Soapbox, and on 31st August it will vanish.

A sad story, but despite many such examples I'm sure that collaborative, social Web 2.0 services are here to stay. I expect the audience for this blog will agree with me, but many people within HE remain unconvinced by Web 2.0. If asked I point them at Facebook. Some thought (still think?) it is a passing fad. The hype may have peaked, but at Bristol our student IT survey 2009 shows that more students are using it than in 2007.

Ah, they say, but we did that once. Our organisation tried a project with this social software thing, and it flopped. So it's all a bit pointless isn't it? Well no. Most social software experiments don't work out. I've launched one or two of them myself (so long ResNet Chat!). Suw Charman-Anderson has a great piece explaining why most social software doesn't work out, why this is the normal state of affairs, and not necessarily a problem.

For every success like Facebook, Flickr or Youtube there are another dozen similar ventures that flopped. Why do some fail and others succeed? If you can understand why then you have the best chance of stopping your service becoming another Soapbox.

This fell into place for me through reading Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirkey. Two examples Clay gives are Linux and Wikipedia, and he draws out three rules for social software: the plausible promise, the effective tool, and the acceptable bargain.

Linux and Wikipedia were both announced to a relevant mailing list of like-minded people who might well contribute. They were intruigued by what the project offered, it gave them a plausible promise - something they wanted, but wasn't too ambitious.

Here is Linus' original Linux announcement from 1991:

I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.  This has been brewing
since april, and is starting to get ready.  I'd like any feedback on
things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat
(same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons)
among other things).

I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work.
This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and
I'd like to know what features most people would want.  Any suggestions
are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-)

Linus says "this is just a hobby"! People liked this approach. If it had been a big commercial project people wouldn't have been attracted to join. I give you my labour for free and you exploit it, giving nothing back isn't an acceptable bargain. Group of hobbyists together, sharing under a free software licence, is.

Wikipedia illustrates another point - make it as easy as possible to get started and to use it. This is completely crucial - even a low barrier is too high. Anybody can edit wikipedia, you don't even need to sign up for an account. You must provide effective tools - lightweight, simple, that encourage, not discourage collaboration.

Inspired by Clay Shirkey and others, here are my suggestions for successful social software within a university:

Seed your site with useful, relevant content, so it isn't starting from a blank slate. Content you can't get anywhere else is great if you can manage it. This helps make it obvious why the service is useful.
Announce it simultaneously to a large, relevant group. Promise something useful but not undeliverable.
Make your tool extremely easy and effective to use, so your users can get results quickly.
Use single sign on with an ID most people will already have. Your University ID is great, or perhaps something else from a huge common provider like Microsoft or Google. Use no sign in process at all if you can possibly manage it.
Don't make it too official/corporate/commercial - people need to share ownership of the tool. They won't contribute if they feel they are being exploited and there is nothing in it for them. Students may trust the Students Union more than the university. Consider getting the support of your union and putting the service out under their branding.
Nurture your first few users. The founders of Flickr commented personally on the photos of their first few thousand photographers, to make sure they'd come back.
Build your social software on top of a larger network, in order to benefit from the larger network's beneficial network effects.

I'll expand on this - especially on how you can pick the winners and avoid the losers amongst third-party services - in a subsequent post.

A domain driven design for the University Web

2009-08-05T13:05:00.000-07:00

I wasn't at IWMW2009 last week, but I've been reviewing the conference thanks to a colleagues writeup and slideshare. The highlight for me was How the BBC makes websites (also in a more accessible text version BBC Radio Labs - how we make websites).

In the words of Michael Smethurst, "there's very little original thinking in here. For those familiar with the concept of one web, the importance of persistent URIs, REST, Domain Driven Design and Linked Open Data it'll probably be old news."

Michael is being modest. Personally I was familiar with some but not all of those. Even the most basic concept - having a single, unchangeable URI for an item - is rarely implemented. Bringing them all together makes the BBC Programmes site a powerful demonstration of how to do the web properly. More importantly it is a pleasure to use.

We are currently rethinking the University's web strategy and CMS requirements. To do this step back and think not about the web but about the activities the university undertakes.

What do universities do? They teach and they research. I'll use real-world data in two examples to show what I mean.

First teaching. Here's a course hierarchy:

(this would be clearer as a table or diagram but I'm limited by the tools in this blog)

Course Family: LLB Law
LLB Courses: LLB Law (UCAS course code M100), LLB Law with Study Abroad, LLB Law with Chemistry, LLB Law and French, LLB Law & German
year started the course: 95, 96, 97, 98, etc
Programmes of Study: 1st year, 2nd year, 3rd year
Year One Units: Law of Contract (Unit Code LAWD10008), Law of Tort, Law and State, Constitutional Rights, Criminal Law, Law of Property
Law of Contract Lectures: lectures 1 though 6
Lecture 1: introduction to contract law

The URI for that lecture would be http://www.bristol.ac.uk/courses/law/m100/1999/year1/lawd10008/lecture1

Every level in the hierarchy has a web page with a permanent URI. So every course family, course, year, unit, and lecture has a webpage with a single, permanent URI. Ideally we would have a recording of the lecture but as a minimum each lecture must have a presence, at least a placeholder.

Now look at research. Think about web pages for each of the following (again real world examples)

Department of Computer Science
Computer Science Research Groups: Computer Vision, Cryptography, HARE, Intelligent Systems, Interaction & Graphics
Research Group: Cryptography
Cryptography Staff: Elisabeth Oswald, Dan Page, Nigel Smart, Bogdan Warinschi
Person: Dan Page
Dan Page: list of all publications
Publication: Manuel Barbosa, Andrew Moss, Dan Page, Constructive and Destructive Use of Compilers in Elliptic Curve Cryptography . Journal of Cryptology, 22(2), pp. 259?281. April 2009

URIs for the above would be

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/compsci
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/compsci/groups
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/groups/cryptography
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/groups/cryptography/people
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/people/dan_page

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/publications/dan_page
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/publications/2009/constructive-and-destructive-use-of-compliers

So every department, research group, person, and published paper has a webpage with a single, permanent URL. Even if the paper itself isn't available electronically it must still have a presence.

Note that in this case the urls do not follow a strict hierarchy as they did in the teaching context. Why? Hierarchies change. Right now the faculty of engineering is merging its departments into larger schools. The URIs for the research groups, people and papers should not change. Our internal organisational structure is completely unimportant in the web context. Breaking a web link pushes us lower in search engines, hides our research and damages our reputation. It should be avoided at all costs!

Each webpage should be about an obvious, real-world thing. If it isn't about an obvious thing, split the page up into smaller pages, until the subject of the page is now clearly one thing. Then give each thing a single URI, and make sure it never changes.

Simple really. Now how do we do it?

Mobile Learning: Telling Tales

2009-07-13T10:02:00.000-07:00

On Thursday I attended Mobile Learning: Telling Tales (#mimasmob09), a one day MIMAS event on mobile devices in education. This was an interesting day - lots of frustration but flashes of genius. There are many interesting developments in the field, but few of them are sustainable.

Graham Brown-Martin was very engaging. I always warm to people with a foot in many camps - he's very much the entrepeneur, but also a self described geek with an arty side who ran off to join the circus!

Graham gave a clear explanation of the importance of gaming in learning, as a way to engage learners and experience learning. I've been dismissive of this in the past, as I couldn't see past all the hype over Second Life. I'm still convinced Second Life in particular has little value but Graham's demonstrations of games / virtual worlds for young children were fantastic. I have no idea how we could apply this in a HE context though, and it looks fantastically expensive.

Graham was also very clear in his condemnation of closed VLEs such as Blackboard, and believes that in future the educational technology market will be dominated by consumer industries rather than educational-specific providers. He had a moving anecdote to demonstrate that unless your VLE is accessible on home devices you a disenfranchising vulnerable parts of society.

John Traxler had the wisest words of the session - that we should "stop funding good projects in the hope that they become sustainable, and instead fund sustainable projects in the hope that they become good". Mobile learning currently has two many amateur enthusiasts. It's difficult to scale stuff up. Few if any projects evaluate their pedagogical impact.

We are teetering on the edge of allowing users to provide their own mobile devices, and designing learning around that. This is difficult with mobile platforms in flux. There is no stable infrastructure to build on. [Perhaps the mobile web - HTML - is the best we have?]

Geoff Butters referenced the Demos report Their Space in his explanation of how young people learn [I must read it]. He then described the EU funded Emapps project. This was interestingly conceived, but by the time it was implemented the project was already out of date. Much of the money was spent on devices and mobile data bills. Sadly an example of the unsustainable approach to mobile learning.
Hilary Smith had a very different approach- using childrens' own mobile phones and free tools such as Youtube, blogs and wikis for Key Stage 3 science. I like the approach, but there were huge practical barriers. Too much time was needed to install third-party software no childrens own mobiles. More fundamentally, almost all schools ban children owning mobiles! Many also block sites such as Youtube. The willingness of teachers to cede control or comfort using technology which may let them down was also an issue.

I missed my ex-colleague Andy Ramsden's presentation on QR codes, as I was in a parallel session. I remain to be convinced that QR codes are the right solution to any real problems - the readers aren't built-in to mainstream mobiles, and they are just a bit too geeky! I hope they get leapfrogged by some other technology.

I also missed Stuart Smith's presentation on the hairdressing.ac.uk mobile website, but I like it as a very practical example of the real-world benefits of mobile learning - taking education out of the classroom and into the salon.

Gary Priestnall's presentation on the SPLINT project was fascinating. This used PDAs on geography field trips. I saw for the first time how augmented reality - display additional data overlaying the real world - can be of educational value. I also now understand why Apple have a digital compass in the iPhone 3GS.

James Clay of Gloucestershire College wrapped up the event and gave the best presentation of the day. He is passionate about learning, understands technology, and is an excellent speaker. His presentation really deserves a blog post of its own - but better still watch The Future of Learning on his own blog.

News of the World phone hacking: how did they do that?

2009-07-13T09:24:00.000-07:00

The media was abuzz last week with allegations that investigators working for the News of the World 'hacked' mobile phones belonging to scores of public figures.

How did they actually do it? Graham Cluley, Sophos guesses that they simply accessed the voicemail boxes of the phones concerned. This could be done by a little social engineering. Simply contact the phone provider claiming to be the individual concerned, with a little 'personal' information to convince them. Even easier, try the default PIN code - many people don't change it.

Some suggestions to stop this happening to you:

Change your mobile phone PIN code from the default to something only you know.
Keep your private personally identifiable information (things like your mother's maiden name) secret. That's difficult to do I know...
Do you really want voicemail anyway? Many people find it frustating - often a text is more useful. In that case, just disable it.

On a broader point - mobile phones are one important function which most corporations have already outsourced. Remember the News of the World story when considering outsourcing other services to cloud providers. Obviously similar risks could exist on in house systems, but such problems are easier to fix if in house.

Finally, read confessions of a tabloid hack for a revealing insight into the illegal activities of the press.

Why did JANET Talk fail?

2009-07-09T11:02:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago JANET(UK) announced a pilot VOIP service for UK HE, JANET Talk. The pilot has now finished, and will not be extended to a production service, as there is little apparent demand for it. It was obvious to me from the start that JANET Talk wouldn't be a success. I remember pointedly suggesting as much at the Networkshop session where it was launched. The reason? Network effects - or the lack of them.

Imagine you owned the first telephone in existence. It is completely useless - there is nobody to call. It only becomes useful when someone else bought the second telephone. More precisely, as a telephone network grows, its usefulness increases in proportion to the number of potential connections between people in the network - the square of the number of people.

JANET Talk was only for people in UK HE to talk to others in UK HE. In todays world - a networked, global world - there is no way that a communications service for such a small group of people will be successful. It will inevitably be overtaken by other services with a larger network of users. People will choose to join the larger, more successful service, as that is what their contacts already use.

There are ways you can let a small network benefit from network effects - by connecting it to other networks. The Internet itself came into existence as exactly that - a network of networks. For a VOIP service, the best way to do this is to allow calls to and from the PSTN. Unfortunately JANET Talk was restricted so that you couldn't receive calls from the PSTN. JANET did this deliberately. They don't want to become a public telecommunications provider, as that would potentially open them up to more regulation. It's a very understandable decision from their point of view but sadly it made JANET Talk irrelevant.

Why is this important? Network effects don't just apply to telephones. Everything these days is networked. Web 2.0 is all about social connections & communications. The same factors explain why only a minority of colleagues at Bristol use our calendar service. It's internal only. This is no help to you if if you collaborate with people outside the University. Instead people choose to use Meetup.com - a free, web-based service which individuals adopt of their own accord, with no involvement from the institution.

I've instinctively understood network effects for years. I learnt my lesson launching ResNet Chat. I watched the small, lonely procession of users log in to the chat room one by one, saw the tumbleweed howling through it, and log off, never to return again, while MSN beckoned brightly.

Don't let it happen to you. When planning a new service, see if it has built-in positive network effects. It is doesn't have these naturally, find a way to connect it to larger networks so it can benefit from theirs. If you can't find a way to do this then you are dooming your project from the start. You're better off doing nothing, unless you want to see your service become irrelevant, pushed to one side by a larger, more popular one.

(image of network effects courtesy of Wikipedia)

Keep Calm and Carry On - or not?

2009-06-30T09:45:00.000-07:00

Image by scottroberts via Flickr

I have a t-shirt I'm fond of wearing with the now cult British wartime slogan Keep Calm and Carry On. I'm very fond of this particularly British message, but when is it appropriate? When do we buckle down and carry on as ever? When do we recognise that the world has changed and we need to change with it or get left behind?

It has been both invigorating and depressing to read a new report from JISC & Demos: The Edgeless University: why higher education must embrace technology. This is a pretty bleak wake-up call to HE in general and IT within HE in particular.

"British Universities have world-class reputations and they are vital to our social and economic future. But they are in a tight spot. The huge public investment that sustained much of the sector is in jeopardy and the current way of working is not sustainable. Some are predicting the end of the university as we have known it."

...that’s just the introduction!

Brian Kelly contributed to the report and highlighted the main themes on the UK Web Focus blog. He picks out one striking quote from a participant:

‘This seminar feels a bit like sitting with a group of record industry executives in 1999’.

Napster launched in 1999. It provided quick easy and illegal access to popular music in MP3. The record industry fought and squashed Napster, but other, impossible to control peer to peer filesharing services sprung up in its place.

Eventually legal music stores arrived, notably the iTunes Store in 2003. Rights holders were properly compensated, but the music was encumbered by DRM and wasn't portable between different MP3 players. Consumers were being asked to pay for a worse experience! It wasn't until 2008 - nearly 10 years later - that the industry finally licensed legal, DRM-free MP3 stores for the most popular content.

It's not just the music industry either. Newspapers are currently going through the same convulsions. They misunderstood the web - they thought that websites were an advert for their product, but it was their product. Now they are desperately struggling to find a new business model.

What about UK HE? As a culture we still don't get the networked economy, and are slow to understand the implications. Again from UK Web Focus:

"A few weeks ago the “Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World” report was published. And today we see another report which provides a similar top-down view on the importance of Web 2.0 in higher education. If you encounter resistance to change from senior managers in your institution I’d suggest you beat them over the head with these two report[s] until they realise that Web 2.0 is changing the higher educational environment."

To understand the implications of the edgeless university start with Brian Kelly, or better still read the original report (I've also ordered a paper copy which I'll leave in the Bristol Computer Centre staff room). Other good commentaries are from Sarah Bartlett on the Xiphos blog and Chris Sexton, director of Comupting Services at University of Sheffield.

I'll be following up soon with my take on this, starting with reference to another long-sighted Kelly - Kevin Kelly.

What students (and Vice Chancellors) want

2009-06-26T07:31:00.000-07:00

It's been an interesting week. We've had a visit from the University Vice Chancellor to Information Services, and several thousand prospective students for the University Open Day. Two excellent opportunities to do some market research - to find out what we should be doing from the top down and the bottom up.

For much of Thursday I was fielding enquiries from sixth formers on the Information Services open day stand. The library was the hot topic, with relatively few queries about IT facilities. Those we did get assumed the existence of facilities but probed their extent: "Do you have Internet in all the rooms?", "Does it stop working if everyone uses it at once?", "Is the Computer Room 24 hours?", "Is there always a computer when I need one?".

Earlier in the week I presented some results from our Student IT Survey of 1400 Bristol students. What do students want? I suggested three requirements:

It should just work
It should work with my stuff
It should be the same everywhere

To these the VC added "It should just work all the time", quoting the example of email as an essential service which we can't afford to go down.

I talked about ResNet and our wireless network as like plumbing - essential utilities which we can't cope without and which work (nearly?) all the time. Once novel, they are now mature, unexciting services. Students do still appreciate them - we score very highly for Internet Access in the International Students Barometer.

We then looked forward, at the personal mobile technology students are starting to carry with them - smartphones and netbooks - and the explosion of innovative web services - Facebook, Google, iTunes, Skype, Twitter, etc etc - which set the standards our students expect. The VC was impressed by the pace of change in IT, and our response to it as an organisation. What would we be important in four years time he wondered? Ebooks perhaps?

Has Open Source won the argument?

2009-06-03T09:46:00.000-07:00

"Open Source software has won the argument...it is now generally accepted that the future will involve a blend of proprietary and open-source software" Not my words, but those of a leader in The Economist (a publication more known for a love of free markets than free software).

Why does The Economist like Open Source? Because it reduces the danger of lock-in. Lock-in is an insidious practice which harms customers and leads to monopolies.

"selling software to large companies was sometimes likened to drug dealing, because once a firm installed a piece of software, it had to pay a stream of licence fees for upgrades, security patches and technical support. Switching to a rival product was difficult and expensive. But with open-source software there was much less of a lock-in. There are no licence fees, and the file formats and data structures are open."

I'm a pragmatist on the choice of open source or proprietary software. As an individual I'll happily buy proprietary software if it saves me time or makes my life easier. With an institutional hat on, I'm much more cautious and try to think longer term - what will I get stung for next time? Will I have to buy the whole stack of all the vendor's other products?

True free software abolishes the headache of accounting for all the per user licenses. That's a huge advantage, but sometimes free software just isn't available to do what I want. Next best is proprietary software where the vendor will sell me an easy site licence based simply on head count. That still leaves me worried about data lock-in though. An open source company with a hybrid model - give away the standard product but charge me for the enterprise-ready clustered version - now that's pretty attractive. You'll be using open standards for data storage. Keep your licensing simple and server based (no CALs!). Finally, don't charge too much - but I'm not worried as if you ever do I can take that component out and switch to someone else.

Google Wave: A glimpse of the future

2009-05-31T11:04:00.000-07:00

At yesterday's I/O conference Google previewed an early version of Google Wave:

What is Google Wave? It's a communications & collaboration tool from the team formerly responsible for Google Maps. They set out to answer the question "What would email look like if it was invented today?".

Waves combines previously separate functionality into a tool that looks seamless and genuinely new. It's includes elements of email, instant messaging, wikis & collaborative document sharing. What exactly is a Wave? Start of by thinking of a wave as a threaded rich media email or instant message conversation. These are a few of the features:

Conversations can take place one to one or in groups
Combines asynchronous and real-time conversation in one.
Anyone in the conversation can comment, or amend, in place, in the stream of the conversation
Simply drag and drop documents, pictures etc into your browser to share them with other people
Rewind and look back through the conversation history

Wave is more than just another Google App. It's also a platform, and a protocol.
A platform: Google's push right now is to get developers on board. You can embed rich content like interactive surveys. There will be plugins and bots to extend Wave how you want - rich content like an interactive survey, spellcheck, even translation. You can embed Waves in your website. Getting a large crowd of developers enthusiastic is a great way to make your platform the one that succeeds.

A protocol: absolutely crucially, Google will release the protocol specification and the code for client and server as open source. They say they want to see many separate but interoperable wave servers - it won't just be a Google App. A company could implement their own private Wave server which will talk to other Wave servers in the cloud, or at other organisations (just like SMTP today) . When the goal is a big as defining the next version of email, that's essential, and it is why I'm excited about Wave. The functionality looks excellent, but it would do no good at all in an isolated environment. I can have all the clever communications software I want, but it is useless unless the people I need to talk to have it too. I don't want a proprietary unified communications product which only works within my organisation - I want an open, global tool which everyone uses. Google have the resources to develop the tool, and by opening the standard the ensure that anyone who wants to can use it.

Communicationss & collaboration tools are normally seen as an enterprise requirement, but Google are a consumer company at heart. This will help them do groupware properly. JWZ put it crudely but got it right in his 2005 essay, Groupware Bad: The first question a social software developer should ask is "how will this software help my users get laid?". If you prefer, how will it make it easier for them to do what they want to do - meet and communicate? Good groupware solves problems for people, bad groupware tries to solves problems for organisations that no actual users want. Google grok this. They say "Google Wave can make you more productive even when you're having fun!".

What are the implications? Wave is hugely important in its own right and also demonstrates Google's strategy more generally. The implications look terrible for Microsoft:

Google often say that they can do anything in a browser you can do in a native desktop application. As they put it, "never underestimate the browser". Wave uses elements from the HTML5 spec, which extends HTML further towards rendering complex applications. It's taken over ten years, but finally the web is becoming the platform.
Although the ratified HTML5 spec is some way off, Firefox, Chrome, Safari & Opera already support key parts of it. Internet Explorer doesn't (yet?). If it doesn't, tools like Wave will be compelling enough to shift users away from Internet Explorer to other browsers. Microsoft either need to catch up and support modern web standards fully, or lose market share.
Nobody else is going to propose a next-gen email protocol with Wave in the offing. By open sourcing Wave Google scare off potential competition. Who wants to go head to head with the gorilla? The only company with both the resources and willingness to do so on this is Microsoft. They difference is that Google's money is from advertising, Microsoft's from software. Microsoft can't afford to open source their software to define the next standard - they'd destroy their revenue. Google, can, and just just did. [As a side note, Microsoft purchased Groove, a very Wave-like product in 2005, and then had no idea what to do with it].

Poor Microsoft. On the day Microsoft announce Bing (another attempt to merely catch up on search) Google are racing ahead...

Wave is exciting, but maybe there's too much hyperbole over it already. I'll finish with a few notes of caution:

Wave isn't ready or available yet. So far the developers attending the I/O conference are the only people with access to it. Google suggest that Wave will be available to consumers later in 2009. My guess is that we are at least 12 months away from Wave appearing in the corporate version of Google Apps, or getting the source code to deploy your own Wave server.
It's not clear how Wave fits in a mobile world. Threaded, interactive conversations with rich media work well on a large screen.
Email isn't going to disappear. Although Wave is an attempt to redesign email from the ground up, email is quick, cheap, lightweight, easy, and universal.
Wave doesn't include voice or video communications. In the Googleverse, how does Wave fit in with Google Voice?

A truly unified communications tool should include voice too. Add a few more years for Unified Communications then - by which time our requirements for unified communications will have broadened even further. Perhaps this Holy Grail is as far away as ever - but we've just had a tantalising glimpse.

More titbits from the Student IT survey

2009-03-30T09:37:00.000-07:00

When asked "How important is it that the University provides the following services for students?" The most important service is University email account, with 90% saying this is very important. After that ResNet, Public Computers, & Printing all have 78 or 79% of students rating them very important.

ResNet is the most highly rated service, with 85% saying the service is excellent or good (excluding those with no opinion). After that Laptop Clinics, Portal, Email, Help Desk & Electronic Library Resources all rate above 70% on the same measure.

Out of nine possible suggested new services, the most requested were

Access student filestore from anywhere over the web,
Audio or video recordings of lectures,
An email address you take with you when you graduate.

Awareness of the Student Laptop Clinic, 24 hour Help Desk & IT Skills training is poor (around a third of students know about them)

98% of our students own at least one computer. 91% of these are portables of some sort. 11% of computers are Macs, 89% are Windows systems.

Cloud Computing & Google Apps

2009-03-30T09:26:00.000-07:00

I recently organised an event on Cloud Computing & Google Apps, with two excellent speakers (Sam Peters & Andrew Charlesworth).

Write up is on the Futures Cafe blog...

Estimating iPhone / iPod Touch owners at Bristol

2009-03-23T04:26:00.000-07:00

How many staff and students have we got at Bristol with an iPhone (or iPod Touch)?

With help from the Student IT Survey and mail server logs (big thank you to the mail admins!) I have some stats:

Number of unique users sending email via Bristol mail servers over a 30 day period, expressed as a percentage of the staff and student populations:

Device	Staff	Student
iPhone	1.6%	1.1%
iPod Touch	0.2%	0.3%
Total	1.8%	1.3%

Respondents to the Student IT Survey March 2009, expressed as a percentage of the 1439 respondents:

Device	Student
iPhone	2.6%
iPod Touch	4.5%
Total	7.1%

What does this tell us, and how do we account for the discrepancy between the figures?

The much lower numbers for email use than ownership suggest that many owners aren't using them for their University email account (but might be using them for personal accounts?)

Ownership of the iPod Touch is high, but email usage is low - perhaps with the lack an always-on data connection this is unsuprising (waiting until you are at the nearest wireless hotspot can be frustrating)

Could selection bias (which students chose to respond to the survey) distort the figures? I have no particular evidence for this, but it is always a suspicion. We true to reduce selection bias by offering an attractive prize draw to respondents - but in this case the top prize is an iPod Touch!

One phone or two?

2009-03-02T09:00:00.001-08:00

How many phones do you want - one smartphone that does everything, or separate devices for work and home use?

Personally I'm firmly in the one device camp, I can't back this up with firm data, but my observations at Bristol are that many employer-issued phones languish uncharged, left behind in the office. They are only used occasionally - when someone knows in advance they'll be off-site for a few days. The same people carry a personal mobile with them.

Think of our different users within a university:

I reckon that most academics want one device. The traditional of the academic for whom work is their vocation plays into this - work & personal life merge.
Our students certainly only have one device (we don't pay for their phones!).
Our estates staff (electricians etc) have particular requirements and definitely need a work phone as they are out on call around the campus.
Our academic-related staff: this is where there is the greatest divide into the two camps. Some people are strongly of the opinion that they want two phones to keep work and home separate, others want one phone and somehow manage to juggle their identities.

Is this a divide between the Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants (of whatever age?).

Leaving aside who owns the devices, I'd like an approach with at least two prongs, as per Gartner's Managed Diversity Strategy:

1. Provide basic low-level support for all devices. For example, we have step by step instructions on how to access our email and Calendar on all major phone platforms.
2. Provide comprehensive support for one specific platform (eg phone preconfigured before you get it, help desk support, perhaps custom applications).

I want to do both, but in the current economic climate option 1 looks attractive while 2 is difficult to justify.

Smartphones: the plethora of platforms

2009-02-23T06:56:00.000-08:00

Smartphones are rather like desktop PCs were 25 years ago. There are lots of competing devices with different OSes - it's exciting or a nightmare depending on your point of view. Gartner's managed diversity strategy provides a useful framework to think about support.

If I'm an individual or an enterprise, how do I choose which platform to adopt? My preference is for the iPhone - it's what I've chosen for personal use, and I think it has business benefits too. Each of the platforms however have different strengths and weaknesses. Several people have recently asked me for advice, so hopefully this summary on the blog will be of use to more.

Blackberry: the standard for corporate messaging. We'd have to invest significantly to add Blackberry Enterprise Server to our infrastructure if we wanted to deploy Blackberries. The blackberry data contracts are also at expensive at £15/month, difficult to justify at a time when we are trying to cut costs. The infrastructure costs mean we'd either have to deploy Blackberries in a big way or not at all.

Symbian: Symbian is now owned by Nokia, who are almost the only firm left making Symbian phones. Symbian runs efficiently on low-end hardware. It's a general purpose smartphone OS but I think Symbian's developing niche will be at the cheaper end of the smartphone market, for people who want a phone with only occasional extras. The Nokia E63 could be a good, cheap phone for business users wanting phone+email. The keyboard makes it a decent Blackberry clone from the hardware point of view. Unfortunately for us the IMAP mail client is lacking - for example it will only store sent mail on the device, not on the server.

Windows Mobile: lots of devices in different form factors, from a huge range of manufacturers. Very open platform for third-party applications. I think of Windows Mobile as a 'general purpose computer' - it will do anything. This makes it a great choice if you really want a laptop replacement (but in that case how about a netbook instead?). Unfortunately the Windows Mobile interface is pretty horrible to use. The best Windows Mobile devices are from HTC, who have developed an easier touch interface on top of Windows Mobile. If you want a Windows Mobile get something like the HTC Touch Pro.

Apple iPhone: revolutionary when first released, the sleek hardware, large screen and touch interface make the iPhone a cut above other options. It is lightweight, slim, and easy to carry around in your pocket, so won't be left in the desk drawer. The user interface and other design factors are crucial to the appeal - you can't underestimate how important this is to the average, non-techy user. It makes the device something people will actually use and benefit from.

The on screen keyboard is a barrier for some:it takes time to get used to but can be quite fast when you've learnt. The email client is fantastic, and the web browser way better than any other smartphone. There are various enterprise tools you would expect (eg remote wipe) but not all would work in our environment. It can do calendaring with our Oracle Calendar, but through a third-party sync app which isn't ideal. This is an example of a more general failing: Apple have a limited SDK for third-party apps, perhaps as an oversight, or perhaps to retain their iron control on the platform. Unfortunately all this comes at a price: the iPhone corporate data contract (£15/month again) is more expensive than other options. A shame that the smartphone designed for the masses is affordable only to a few?

Google Android (so far just the G1 from T-Mobile): One to watch. In theory Android should give the iPhone a run for its money providing easy to use web-centric devices. So far manufacturers have been slow to release models - I don't expect a large range until 2010. Android platform not mature, missing too many features, especially those that enterprises want. Android is likely to remain consumer-centric for some time.

Palm Pre: interesting but still unproven and not here yet. When released it will still take time to reach maturity and feature parity with other platforms.

Digital nomads and multiple identites on the move

2009-02-03T05:51:00.000-08:00

"Urban nomads have started appearing only in the past few years. Like their antecedents in the desert, they are defined not by what they carry but by what they leave behind, knowing that the environment will provide it. Thus, Bedouins do not carry their own water, because they know where the oases are. Modern nomads carry almost no paper because they access their documents on their laptop computers, mobile phones or online. Increasingly, they don't even bring laptops. Many engineers at Google, the leading internet company and a magnet for nomads, travel with only a BlackBerry, iPhone or other “smart phone”. If ever the need arises for a large keyboard and some earnest typing, they sit down in front of the nearest available computer anywhere in the world, open its web browser and access all their documents online."
From Nomads at last, The Economist April 10th 2008

Is the Nomad a good model for our academic and academic-related staff working on the move? I'm sure it describes some - but how many? Paul Saffo describes four categories of mobile worker, Nomads, Cyber-trekkers, Hermit Crabs & Astronauts - defined by how disciplined they are about what they leave behind. Personally I'm not a digital nomad - but I'm sold on the concept and working on getting there.

Having access to information on the move is very useful. But travelling light is more important. People won't put up with bulky, heavy, awkward gadgets. If your smartphone is larger than some critical size it will spend more time sitting in your desk drawer than in your pocket, and then it is of no use to anyone. Every student has a laptop, but most sit on the desk at home and only occasionally are brought in to the campus.

My starting point on mobile IT is that devices must be genuinely mobile. Even better would be for the devices to disappear into the environment. Use the keyboards and screens of whatever room you are in, and access your data in the portal or in the cloud.

Lets say you find the perfect device. The next problem is that you don't want to lug around two phones, or two laptops, and two sets of chargers (one of each for work and the other for personal use). To escape that fate you instead have to wrestle with managing your work and personal identities on the same equipment. This is tricky:

Email identities are the easiest to separate. You can have two email addresses, and read them either in different places or in one virtual inbox (but you'd better remember to choose the right From address).
Calendar is trickier - to stop yourself getting double-booked you need a view of both personal and work appointments in one place. Putting your personal appointments into your corporate calendar isn't a good solution (how do you get your data out when you change jobs?).
Even more difficult is your phone number. You don't want to keep two phones in your pocket, unless you have very baggy trousers! So do you use your work phone for personal purposes? Apart from the cost, there are seemingly insurmountable obstacles with financial and tax regulations. Use your personal phone for work purposes? You won't want to pocket the bill, unless you've got a large bundle of minutes each month. Even worse, it means your employer has your phone number when you're on holiday. If somehow you do combine both into one device, you won't give up either your work or personal number - all those people to notify!

We don't have good, cheap, multi-network solutions for redirecting phone calls. Grand Central looks like the best multi-platform service. Sadly Google appear to have put the service on ice since taking it over (and there is certainly no sign of it outside of the US). One colleague points me towards Advanced Call Manager "It's brilliant" - but only for devices with Symbian OS. Doubtless there are others - all suggestions very welcome...

Further reading:

Dr Carsten Sørensen, LSE
Paul Saffo on Cyber-Nomads: a functional taxonomy of mobile users
Sociology of the mobile phone

What is the future of technology in student residences?

2009-01-28T07:00:00.000-08:00

Bristol's ResNet service started over ten years ago, in 1998. Now we have 100Mbit/sec connections, live multicast TV, and wireless in some areas. One of the primary uses of the Internet is to arrange your social life. Would we have forseen that 10 years ago?

The University is currently reviewing the residences strategy to develop residences which will serve students for the next 30 years. This is an eon in technology terms, but my role in the process is to develop ideas for residential technologies. The following is taken from my report as a member of the residences Facilities Working Group:

Our aim is to provide facilities which are:

Attractive – attract students to study here and live in our accommodation
Convenient – be quick and easy to use,
Good value for money – what the students want, at favourable cost to alternatives
Reliable – high availability
Pervasive – present everywhere, and compatible with any device

The residence is a student’s home and place of work. Students work, rest and play in their residence and we must provide facilities to enhance all of these.
The phrase Digital Native is used to describe the generation of young people who have grown up with the Internet. It is present throughout their experiences:

Social life - arranged via Facebook.
Entertainment - downloaded music and movies.
Work - Google is the first reference tool for any research.
Communication - Texting and instant messaging.

Internet access is supremely important, as it is the pipe through which everything else is delivered. It is essential that we provide high speed, reliable, convenient Internet access in both study bedrooms and public areas. Students responding to the International Students Barometer (ISB), a survey of over 60,000 UK & international students, rated Internet access as the single most important factor of all elements in the living and learning categories. Internet access rates above even such seemingly essential factors as ‘safety’ and ‘good teachers’! Bristol scores very well in the ISB in the IT and Internet Access categories, contributing to our overall above-average score.

What else do we need to provide? We currently offer IPTV. Three years ago 70% of students surveyed wanted such a service. Now it is in place maybe 20% actually use it. Why? It is now a ‘nice to have’ rather than a ‘must have’. The BBC & ITV websites offer live TV directly. Live TV is being superseded by TV on demand. Alternatives have overtaken the service we provided. Similar arguments may be made for Voice over IP (VOIP) services such as Skype having replaced usage of traditional phone handsets in rooms.

There are still some reasons to offer entertainment & communications services ourselves. In particular the university can act as a trusted guide and provide an easy, convenient option. Students and parents may appreciate this guidance and knowing that a service is there. We must remember though the real risk though that whatever we provide will be overtaken. Our student laptop purchase scheme was intended as just such a convenient trusted guide, but gets little use.

What does this leave us? What do we need to provide apart from a pipe to the Internet?

We embed technology in the building spaces.
We provide location specific services
We provide facilities that students can’t provide for themselves (too large, too expensive)
We encourage a productive mix of student-owned and University-owned technologies

We shouldn’t provide mobile phones or laptops to students. These are small, portable, quickly obsolete devices which students prefer to choose for themselves. We should embed power sockets throughout all rooms for charging devices. We must provide wireless everywhere for Internet access on students own equipment.

We won’t provide games consoles, but should provide large flat panel displays and projectors. These are fixed location-specific facilities. In lounges students will connect a games console to a large flat panel for social gaming. In group study rooms students will use a PC and projector provided for presentations and collaborative group work.

We should carefully consider how much technology to embed in student bedrooms. Such technology is expensive and quickly becomes obsolete. Currently the dominant feature in a student room is often a large pinboard covered in posters and photos. In time will the pinboard be replaced by a digital paper display or low energy flat panel? Currently these are prohibitively
expensive, but in five years time?

There will still be an important role for University-provided PCs and printers in public areas. Students own laptops are unreliable. Students appreciate well-maintained hardware that just works. We need to think about different forms of public computer provision, not just the traditional PC lab. Again we should encourage the mix of personally-owned and University-owned technology. Can you send photos straight to the printer from your cameraphone? Can you connect to the scanner from your laptop? Can you connect your iPod to a public PC to download a podcast of yesterdays lecture?

How to write

2009-01-27T09:55:00.000-08:00

Writing is tough. Writing clear, easy to understand prose is difficult. I'm very concious of my writing skills (or lack of them?) and think hard about how and what I write. Maybe I think to hard and that becomes a barrier to writing at all, if the lack of recent updates to this blog is any indication...

I have a checklist pinned above my desk taken from the University of Bristol Writing for the web workshop (checklist on page 11) much of which applies to writing for any medium.

I also have an old copy of a self-taught course from the Plain English campaign. This was a chance discovery I found when clearing out an old filing cabinet. Miraculously I can still find it when I need it - it has survived my often arcane filing system.

This post was prompted by my colleague Martin Poulter's post Good Practice in Writing which contains some excellent guidance on writing clearly. I'll add a few of my own tips:

Write to a strict word count or space limit. Write something as a paper leaflet - the space limit will force you to be concise. Then rewrite the sprawling website to the same standard.I try to keep email newsletters to 250 words (many would say that is itself too long).

Look for ambiguity. I know what I meant, but could someone interpret it differently? If that email is going to 5000 people then someone will. Read what you write with a fresh eye. How would someone with a different cultural background or English as a second language read it?

The guidance from many RFCs to be liberal in what you accept and strict in what you generate works well for natural language too. Think about that principle when reading what others have written - force yourself to read the better meaning from something ambiguous, and you'll avoid many unnecessary flamewars.

A vision of students today

2008-07-16T13:46:00.000-07:00

I love this video from Michael Wesch and his students at Kansas State. If you haven't already seen it, definitely worth watching. Thanks to Les Watson for first pointing it out to me.

Nick's top Google tips

2008-07-14T14:35:00.000-07:00

I'll admit - I'm just like everyone else. Despite the wealth of electronic scholarly resources available to me, Google is my top research tool.

I do have various tips and techniques I use to get what I want out of Google. These aren't revolutionary but in case they are useful, here are a few:

Restrict search to .ac.uk or .edu websites

I often use site:.ac.uk or site:.edu - why do I do this? I'll generally get a good result. I work at a university and I'm interested in what others are doing. That's just relevant to me, but more broadly universities are full of very intelligent cutting-edge researchers who openly share their ideas. Finally there isn't much web junk (eg comment spam and affiliate websites) in the academic domain.

Restrict search to ppt filetypes

ppt are powerpoint files. Use filetype:ppt to only view presentations. Why do I find that helpful? Again, you don't get much spam in presentations. Even better - presentations are short. I'm lazy, I'm in a hurry - I just want the key ideas. That's what you get in a presentation.

Try combining both of these: for example put "user centered design filetype:ppt site:.edu" into Google and you get the presentation I recommended in my last blog post. That wasn't how I originally found it though - I used my third technique:

Search by name or email address.

Follow the person rather than the idea. In literature searches people are used to searching by author name, but they don't do it so often on the web. If you find one person with a good idea and follow the links you could find a whole community.

(Incidentally - if you've never searched on your own name or email in Google, do so now before your future employer or date does. But that's another story...)

Convenience trumps quality

2008-07-14T13:55:00.000-07:00

Another conference I was at last week was the JISC/CNI Meeting 2008 in Belfast "Transforming the User Experience". Again more on this soon - I've had too many interesting events recently to digest and write them up.

One strong strand that came out at JISC/CNI was that university libraries spend a huge amount on electronic library resources, and have online catalogues and search systems for all of those resources - but people don't use them. What do people use? Google. Maybe Google Scholar.

This is a real shame, as there are lots of high quality resources out there locked behind the subscription wall which Google doesn't see - but it seems universal. One speaker said "even the academics who complain of students using Google admit when pressed that they rely on it themselves!"

Why? It's just human nature. As another speaker said "convenience trumps quality. Every time. So we have to make quality convenient"

How do you make things convenient? Simple and Quick are good places to start. Simplify, simplify, simplify. Don't expose too many options, bells & whistles by default.

User Centered-Design & User Experience

2008-07-14T13:14:00.000-07:00

Several colleagues from Bristol recently attended a training course on User Centred Design from a local Bristol firm Pure Usability. I wasn't there but think I missed out on an excellent day. I'm hoping to read some of the notes from it.

On the same day of the course I was attending the Oxford Podcasting Open House at Wadham College (more about this on the blog soon). Also there was a whole team from Berkeley, including Judy Stern, whose job title (according to my notes) is User Experience / User Interface Designer. Interesting job title I thought...

Doing some research into this I found two concepts, with definitions taken here from a presentation by Allison Bloodworth & Ian Crew at Berkeley: User-Centered Design in IT: the Low-Hanging Fruit.

User-Centered Design (UCD)
a design philosophy and a process in which the needs, wants, and limitations of the end user of an interface or document are given extensive attention at each stage of the design process

Goal: to make the user's interaction experience as simple and intuitive as possible

User Experience (UX)
the overall experience and satisfaction a user has when using a product or system

Goal: meet user goals and tasks while satisfying business and functional requirements.

UX and UCD are a great way to describe at least 90% of my viewpoint "designing IT services by first understanding how people behave". I've been talking about this for ages but without the right words. Having the right vocabulary should make in much easier to be articulate about it in future :-)

There's lots more to read in Allison & Ian's presentation, explaining why this important and introducing tools to improve usability of products and services. Fro even more info (I always like a reading list!) they give these books:

“The Inmates are Running the Asylum” – Alan Cooper
“The Design of Everyday Things” and “Emotional Design” – Don Norman
“Usability Engineering” – Jakob Nielsen
“Don’t Make Me Think” – Steve Krug

CIOs Present & Future: Google event at the Science Museum

2008-07-07T04:01:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday I attended this Google event. It was an interesting format - attending were a mixed group of university students, and people working in IT. The event was rather grandly titled 'CIOs Present & Future'. I wasn't either, and was unsure whether to be more flattered if mistaked for a student or a CIO...

It wasn't all sales, but the main thrust was to explain the concept of Cloud Computing and Google to pitch their Enterprise services, especially their email, calendar & collaboration offering Google Apps (free of charge for education customers). I have been quite cautious about Cloud Computing. I am though a firm believer in the consumerisation of IT, and designing IT systems with an understanding of how people behave. These were two themes that came up throughout the event. I had several 'Yes!' moments - nodding enthusiastically to what the speakers were saying.

We started with Robert Whiteside (Head of Google Enterprise UK & Ireland) & Dave Armstrong (head of Marketing Google EMEA). Dave talked about consumerisation. Consumer technology innovates faster than enterprise technology (the iPhone was quoted as the classic example).
In the enterprise market, tools and user interfaces for traditional enterprise apps have often been constructed based on business processes (as they should be) but with no consideration of the 'human factor' - how people actually behave. Ease of use of user interfaces is a good example, but it's more than that. For example, people don't like to laboriously assign lots of metadata when creating a document.

User satisfaction for consumer technology has overtaken user satisfaction for business technology. What are your users saying?: "why can't I do this as easily at work as I can at home?". Can we benefit from this?

People are the same person at home and at work.

On the Internet, products win based on the number of mouse clicks - the 'democracy of the mouse clicks'. Those that don't get the human factor right don't survive, as people move elsewhere. Google study features in public beta, looking at logs of how people use them, and refine, enhance or scrap them accordingly.

The Big Switch by Nick Carr was mentioned several times as the tome to read on Cloud Computing. I've bought a copy, half way through so far.

We then had several of Google's customers speak. Rob Ramsey of Taylor Woodrow came first. Taylor Woodrow have bought into Google Apps in a large way. He says it made sense for them as they have a very mobile workforce. The key to successfully deploying it was to find the real wins for people. A big one was the ability for people to have separate personal and work calendars, but view them joined together in the same environment.

Barbara Colledge, Dean of Partnerships for Students of Leeds Metropolitan University was next. Leeds Met have deployed Google Apps for all their students (but not for staff). They were the first UK university to deploy Google Apps (SOAS have since done so as well, and others such as UWE have deployed Microsoft Live).

Previously at Leeds Met student mail was little used, as the quota was small and it didn't meet student requirements. The benefits in going with Google are

enhanced service,
brand association,
environmentally sustainable,
constant innovation (frequent new features),
additional tools

They went live with a trial of 3000 students in January and then extended it to all 30,000 students in September. Leeds Met have a history and culture of partnerships, and don't mind the risk of not doing everything in house. They did have concerns about privacy and data security. These came from staff - the Students Union were completely behind the plan. They resolved those concerns by getting the lawyers to consider it carefully.
Leeds Met now have a limited pilot for staff, but are unsure about whether to deploy for all. They are also planning to introduce email for life for alumni - this is a big attraction.

Paul Cheesborough, Telegraph Media Group finished this section. They surved their staff and found that 9/10 believed they would be more productive if allowed to bring their own home computer into work. They are now piloting a new approach with Google Apps.
Don't underestimate the frustrations of a limited email quota - this is a huge problem for people! Email is a touchstone issue which affects everyone (like car parking)
Google Sites collaboration features are another big win
Major attractions for the business are

lower costs,
more innovation (features)
Open APIs to customise for the business

The Telegraph haven't adopted Google Apps wholesale yet, but are at the point of making the decision.

Summary of my personal thoughts on Google Apps? More impressive that I had expected. Worth exploring further. A better fit for student use than for staff use. There are huge concerns around data protection - look at it in conjunction with Guidelines for Using External Web Services from University of Edinburgh.

We finished the first session with Dave Cliff (from the Computer Science department at Bristol!). He is trying to improve UK CS courses to produce graduates who have the skills to manage the increasingly complex 'systems of systems' which IT produces. This was interesting stuff, but not so relevant to the rest of the event. Along with The Big Switch, he also recommended Technological Revolutions & Financial Capital by Carlota Perez for a historical view of how technology develops.

After the break we had workshop sessions with a mix of the student and industry participants. The topic was 'what are the top 5 challenges facing the CIO of the future?' Our group (after interesting debate from different viewpoints) came up with:

The transition from CTO to CIO. It is less about managing infrastructure than about managing information - making it both secure & available.
Focus on people, look at how they work and provide technological solutions to enable them to work more effectively
The ability to change
Become more involved in the actual business decisions, not just IT
Navigate increasingly complex compliance issues (eg data protection)

Update 14th July: A quick note in response to some comments off-blog.
I am enthusiastic about the consumerisation of IT and user-centred design/experience design. I am not enthusiastic about cloud computing (getting a third-party, eg Google, Microsoft or whoever to host services for you in their data centres). 'Cautiously interested' would be a better description.

After reporting an event with case studies from happy Google customers, to redress the balance somewhat it's worth looking at those universities who have evaluated cloud computing and decided against it.

One view from Oxford University Computing Service:

"I think outsourcing of an institution’s e-mail to a third party is fraught with problems. Probably the same could be said about documents. Maybe one role for Google Apps is to use it in addition to what you currently provide, perhaps for use on specific projects."
[I think OUCS originally looked at Google Apps for calendaring]

UC Berkley established a committee which produced a report UC Berkeley:
Exploration Of Partnership Opportunities For Campus Collaborative Tools

"the general consensus of the committee is that the campus should not contract with either vendor [Microsoft & Google] for the provision of email, calendaring and/or web storage services at this time. Serious concerns stand in the way of the campus adopting such an approach. On balance, the potential for realizing cost savings and increased functionality from outsourcing these campus services to Google Apps for Education or Microsoft Live@EDU are not sufficiently compelling to overcome those concerns." [the major concerns were around privacy & accessibility, these were described as showstoppers by some people]

"In the near to medium term (12-18 months), the result of the committees findings is that the
campus should continue to improve existing messaging services..."

"In the longer term, the committee feels that it is important to continue to track the developments in this field... As with any service offered by the campus, we need to continually evaluate if the services we offer are provided in the most cost-effective way and continue to meet the evolving needs of the campus community. Additionally, the capabilities envisioned for the collaborative tools Microsoft and Google (and others) are developing beyond the email, calendar, and file sharing space are potentially quite compelling, and may offer considerable value to the campus community."

Finally some news stories from just the last month:

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/08/docs_and_spreadsheets_goes_down/>
<http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/07/court-ruling-will-expose-viewing-habits-youtube-us>
<http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/google-tests-using-your-search-data-to-tailor-ads-to-you/?ref=business>