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?
"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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I'm Assistant Director of IT Services (Infrastructure & Operations) at the University of Bristol. This blog contains my personal views rather than those of my employer but it is informed by what I do.
I'm a firm believer that IT is all about people, and you need to consider how people behave when designing IT services. I like gadgets, but don't get really interested in technology until it is cheap and popular.
Posts here could cover any aspects of IT, HE and beyond, but I'm particularly interested in mobility, cloud computing, the social web and IT consumerisation.
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