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UTS creates new CIO role

Renai LeMay — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 03:52:58 +0000

news The University of Technology, Sydney, has kicked off a hiring process for a newly created chief information officer position to help it with a substantial investment program associated with its campus located just outside the Sydney central business district.

According to a job advertisement posted online and first reported by CIO Magazine, the successful candidate will have remit to lead an IT operation supporting some 2,750 full-time equivalent staff, 30,500 student and some 200 dedicated IT staff.

“UTS seeks to appoint a Chief Information Officer (CIO) to influence and drive the achievement of the UTS mission and strategic objectives by providing leadership in the development and implementation of information technology strategy, architecture, infrastructure, services and solutions,” the advertisement reads.

“In this newly created position, the successful candidate will lead change by providing innovative leadership and clear direction. They will enhance IT capability, improve collaboration, support stakeholder objectives and develop a high performance team.”

UTS is not known to have previously had a chief information officer. However its IT operations are believed to have previously been spearheaded by its most high-profile corporate IT officer, Peter James, the university’s highly regarded director of IT infrastructure and operations.

James has been the public face of a number of IT-related UTS initiatives over the past half-decade, ranging from the university’s decision to out Cisco networking hardware from its roster and switch to kit from Alcatel, to its decision in late 2010 to sign up for Microsoft’s cloud-based email service Live@EDU for its student population. UTS staff and students had previously been using a platform based on Sun’s ONE email system, but staff were migrated onto Microsoft Exchange in 2009.

James’ LinkedIn profile lists him as still being in his role. Other senior IT staff at UTS include Chris Cahill, the university’s director of IT client services, and manager of application services, Kieran McPherson.

Image credit: Charlie Brewer, Creative Commons

How did you get into IT to start with?

Renai LeMay — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 22:56:39 +0000

blog One of our favourite Australian IT user groups, AUTechHeads, has a nice post this morning from a gentleman of our acquaintance named ‘GiantGuineaPig’ exploring the reasons why he got into the IT industry to start with, and asking others to share their stories. But the path wasn’t always easy:

“After finishing high school, I then had an opportunity to do two weeks work at my Dad’s new place of employment, where he was the systems builder and tester. I was excited to be earning $13 an hour back in mid 1999 but the job was pretty much just building PC’s out of components, installing an image and testing that the basics worked. Again, it put me off being a computer technician, but I had no idea what else to do.”

Personally, I got started in IT because I had always been interested in computers for as long as I could remember. After studying what IT subjects it was possible to at high school, I got a scholarship to study IT at the University of NSW … but like GiantGuineaPig’s career, that didn’t go completely smoothly — I dropped out after two years of my IT degree and worked as a systems administrator for a while, before going to back to uni to study English Literature and become a writer. And now I write about IT :)

How did you get started in IT?

Image credit: Mark Phelan, royalty free

Macquarie IT academics protest cuts

Renai LeMay — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 04:18:52 +0000

A number of senior academic staff within Macquarie University’s computer science department have contacted students directly to warn them of budget cuts that they claim will affect the quality of education at the institution in 2011.

The warning took the form of a email issued under the names of senior lecturers Christophe Doche, Michael Hitchens, Rolf Schwitter and associate professors Anthony Sloane and Dominic Verity to students in the Faculty of Science (which the Department of Computing sits within) shortly after midday yesteday.

In it, the academics warned several teaching positions were slated to be cut by the university in the faculty, including two alone in their computing department.

As a result, the quintet claimed, a number of subjects dealing with fundamental computer science concepts, knowledge systems, computer graphics and operating systems would be “rested” in 2011. In addition, students would get less time in general with teaching staff. “For certain subjects, we will have no choice but to offer less face-to-face hours to students,” they wrote.

A spokesperson for Macquarie University has not yet responded to a request for comment on the issue, however, in a statement issued on 7 December, the university said it remained committed to negotiating fair pay and conditions for all staff.

At the time, the university highlighted the fact that it had come to an agreement with the Community and Public Sector Union, which also has members on its campus.

“Despite being democratically supported by a majority of professional staff who voted on it, the NTEU has decided — for its own reasons — to oppose the approval of the agreement between the University and the CPSU by Fair Work Australia and delay the passing on of benefits to staff,” the university wrote, adding that it had reached agreement on some items in its bargaining with the NTEU, and was offering a 4 percent annual salary increase for academics — which it said was in line with what staff at other universities had accepted.

However, it didn’t appear in the email to students that the Department of Computing academics were happy with the progress of the bargaining.

The seriousness of the issue has resulted, the academics claimed, in a delay in some student grades being distributed after the recent end of the university’s semester, as part of a general protest being held by the National Tertiary Education Union, which represents academics and related staff in universities and other institutions.

The NTEU’s web site states that around 150 of its members have imposed bans on transmitting exam results at Macquarie University and the University of NSW, in protest against the inability of the union to reach a collective enterprise agreement with the two universities.

In the email, the Computing academics claimed their conditions had become “worse over the years”.

“Our workloads continue to increase, the security of our jobs is threatened and so is the quality of the education we can provide,” they wrote. “This situation sheds a gloomy light on the current negotiations around the Entreprise Agreement. For 18 months, staffs have been attempting to negotiate with University’s management to improve working conditions so that we enjoy the same conditions as people at other universities.”

“Unfortunately, to date University’s management have consistently refused to negotiate in good faith on the key issues of job security and pay. While 30 other universities have updated their agreements, management at Macquarie have refused to do so.”

At least one bottleneck has been broken, however — the academics noted in their email that as a sign of their willingness to resume negotiations, they had released all students’ results to be processed.

Image credit: Sailor Coruscant, Creative Commons

RMIT loses IT chief to Southern Cross

Renai LeMay — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 02:05:02 +0000

Melbourne’s RMIT University has lost its long-standing executive director of Information Technology Services Allan Morris to rival Southern Cross University.

RMIT’s chief operating officer and vice president of Resources Steve Somogyi confirmed the shift, noting it would allow Morris to take a step up to the CIO role at Southern Cross. The executive had led RMIT’s IT division for the past nine years.

Somogyi praised Morris’ work at the university, saying he had done a “fabulous job”.

RMIT has undergone a number of high-profile technology shifts over the years. In July this year the university finished expanding its new wireless network, while in 2009 Morris was mulling a potential move to thin client desktop technology.

But it hasn’t been all good news over the years.

In 2003, for example, Morris conducted an extensive interview — still available online — about a botched PeopleSoft implementation which was supposed to integrate student administration tasks and the university’s alumni system into one overarching system.

And RMIT has been forced to deal with the closure of key networking supplier Nortel as well — the company was split up and sold off over the past several years.

The university has advertised Morris’ position, saying it was after an “energetic leader” to lead change through continually improvement and upgrade of IT services. RMIT is one of Australia’s largest universities, with more than 70,000 students studying at campuses in Melbourne and Vietnam, as well as online and at partner institutions.

Senior RMIT IT staffer Bernard Broom is acting in Morris’ stead until a permanent replacement is found.

Image credit: Rob Owen-Wahl, royalty free

Cloud email’s Australian thunderstorm

Renai LeMay — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:19:33 +0000

On 11 January this year, Macquarie University issued a statement that left Australia’s IT industry in no doubt as to how the institution felt about its ageing in-house email systems.

“We were spending a significant amount of money each year maintaining our own inferior email infrastructure that, despite our best efforts, was falling further and further behind staff expectations,” said the university’s vice chancellor Steven Schwartz. “That’s money we would much prefer to spend on better teaching and research facilities for our staff and students, or on scholarships enabling students from disadvantaged backgrounds to access a university education.”

The net result of that stark evaluation? Macquarie is currently in the process of dumping its in-house Novell GroupWise email infrastructure and moving 6,000 staff to Google’s Gmail platform; a move that comes after the university already shifted some 68,000 students into Google’s cloud.

Some may find such a switch dramatic and risky. After all, many questions abound about security, privacy and the degree to which cloud computing/vendor-hosted email platforms offer a sophisticated enough platform to be compared with a traditional email solution.

And yet, Macquarie’s tale is a story that is becoming increasingly common in Australian organisations as many re-evaluate just what they want from an email platform, what they truly need or would settle for, and often most importantly, what they’re prepared to pay.

The switchers
Google’s marketing spiel for its cloud computing platform exhorts organisations to dump their legacy infrastructure and “Go Google” with the search giant’s Apps suite — Gmail, calendaring, messaging, an office suite, and web site creation and hosting.

And in Australia (and over the river at our Kiwi neighbour), many organisations have done just that.

In the corporate sector, AAPT revealed in November last year that it had decided to use Google Apps for its 1,300 staff, with the telco’s chief operating officer David Yuile saying the choice was towards a fundamentally new way of working. Just one month earlier it was home loan company Mortgage Choice making the switch, moving 1,000 users onto Gmail.

In July the Postal Service Group of NZ Post shifted 2100 users over. And even the Commonwealth Bank of Australia has examined Google’s offering — as early as February 2007 — but ultimately found the product wanting.

“Absolutely, we’re seeing it every day,” says Google’s Asia-Pacific head of market development Deepak Ramanathan, when asked if Google has swapped out any instances of the dominant corporate email platform, Microsoft Exchange, in non-educational Australian institutions. “We see that the line between the person at work and person at home is disappearing, and we see people demand the same web applications they use in their personal life at work, so this change is happening fast.”

But it’s in the education sector that Gmail has really found its home.

The NSW Department of Education and Training has migrated 1.3 million students to Gmail, dumping one of the world’s largest implementations of Microsoft Exchange to do so. Monash University and Adelaide University are other examples of institutions that have also pulled big numbers for the search giant, with 58,000 and 16,000 students apiece being shifted across.

“Interest in the cloud in general and in Gmail in particular is certainly high in Australia,” says Ramanathan. “At a recent forum we arranged for CIOs from some of Australia’s largest businesses, it was clear that talk has shifted to when and how to migrate to the cloud, given that the event was easily fully subscribed … we were turning people away.”

The flipside for the the search giant, of course, is that so far Google has not yet — that anyone knows of — managed to convert staff accounts in the tens of thousands at any Australian organisation, despite its success in the education sector. And even in that education sector, despite Google’s stunning success, it has had its progress limited by that most unlikely of cloud adversaries — Microsoft.

If you were to make a list of Australian educational institutions who have recently migrated their student base to a cloud email platform, Microsoft’s Live@EDU system would be just as prominent on that list as Gmail — and probably even more so.

Over the past several years, Edith Cowan University, Flinders University, TAFE South Australia, Curtin University, WA Central TAFE, Sydney University and the Australian Catholic University have all migrated their student bodies onto Live@EDU. And many of those institutions have picked Microsoft in the last 12 months.

There is some degree of history repeating itself to be found in the massive wave of Microsoft migrations to cloud email platforms in Australia’s education sector. If you ask corporate workers what they think of Microsoft Outlook, many will reply that they dislike the software, but find it essential for daily use. And, of course, Microsoft has achieved dominance in that field — a 2009 survey by Australian analyst firm Longhaus found 53 percent of organisations surveyed used Outlook/Exchange as their primary email platform.

It’s a similar situation when it comes to the migration to cloud email platforms in Australia’s education sector. A recent protest held by students at Sydney University, for example, focused on the fact that they didn’t like Microsoft’s Live@EDU platform. And the encroachment of Microsoft software into the University of NSW’s traditionally Linux-dominated School of Computer Science and Engineering has been met with open hostility.

But increasingly, Australia’s education sector appears to have taken a strong slant towards Microsoft’s Live@EDU platform over the past twelve months, eclipsing Gmail’s early successes. Of course, the company’s hosted Exchange solution — the corporate equivalent of Live@EDU and part of Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite — does not appear to be gaining as much headway on office desktops. But Microsoft’s strength in cloud email in general is now undisputable.

The rationale
If you’re an IT manager outside the education sector, you might very well be asking yourself why the universities and education departments have moved their students so strongly onto cloud email platforms, when mainstream government departments and private enterprises (with a few exceptions) have so far preferred to maintain their in-house systems.

According to Steve Hodgkinson, the director of analyst firm Ovum’s government practice, it’s all about need.

Universities, he points out, currently are compelled to make a strategic decision on email as their “severely outdated” student email platforms reach end of life. In 2010, he says, any forced decision on email infrastructure would need to closely examine the cloud alternatives due to their advantages compared with the legacy style of in-house platforms.

“To be frank,” he says, “if you were making a strategic decision to change your email platform [in 2010], serious questions would have to be asked if you opted for an in-house solution. There would have to be a strong security driver.”

In contrast, Hodgkinson says, not many government agencies and private enterprises are in the position of being forced to change their email platform. Usually, changes in email platforms come across through mergers and acquisitions — for example, a company using Lotus Notes shifting away from it as it merges with another company using Microsoft Exchange.

“There’s no real case for idly entertaining the case of maybe changing the email system,” Hodgkinson says. “Your back’s got to be against the wall in some way to make you do that.”

There is one case where organisations have an in-house email system and have their back against the wall anyway, he says: If an organisation is using Novell GroupWise, which is speedily getting left behind in a very competitive market. Hence Macquarie’s speedy switch.

Another reason why organisations switch to cloud email platforms, according to Hodgkinson, is where they have a serious lack of in-house skills. “Don’t use cloud computing for things in your organisation that are already working fine,” he says. “Cloud computing creates new options for bits and pieces that are broken. Some organisations do have broken email systems … they have reached a point where they need to focus their energies on applications that add business value.”

One final motivation for switching is also clear. Education CIOs agree that the sorts of financial arrangements that Microsoft and Google have offered IT chiefs to bring their thousands of students across to cloud email platforms have been just too good to pass up.

The next step
If you accept Hodgkinson’s argument, it’s easy to foresee a future — at least in the medium term — where most large Australian organisations outside the education sector will remain reluctant to switch to a cloud email platform. There’s simply no immediate need, and without that need, as the analyst says, “it’s not something many CIOs would consider lightly”.

However, some argue the decision to migrate to cloud email systems won’t come as a big bang process, but more like a creeping vine.

Longhaus managing director Peter Carr is able to give a number of examples where cloud email platforms — particularly consumer-grade offerings such as Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or the freely available Gmail — are speedily making their way into semi-official use in Australian organisations.

Just last week it was revealed that Qantas was planning to dump its Lotus Notes/Domino staff email system for Microsoft Exchange/Outlook.

However Carr says the far more interesting internal email migration was the decision some time ago to stop providing Qantas flight attendants with an official company email account. Instead, he says, the flight attendants simply provide Qantas’ HR staff with their own personal email address — “Hotmail or Gmail or something like that”. They are then paid an annual fee for their professional use of personal technology.

The reason this system works, according to Carr, is the low volume of official company email Qantas flight attendants need to deal with — just work schedules and so on. Most other official company communications can go through the unions. Effectively, Qantas has outsourced part of its corporate email platform to Hotmail.

It’s a similar situation in emerging nations such as exist in the Pacific Islands.

Carr says many Governments in the Pacific Islands never got around to implementing their own in-house email systems as most westernised countries did in the 1990′s. The reason? Poor infrastructure and a lack of skills meant it was usually easier for public servants to sign up for a free email account from Hotmail or similar, and use it for normal government work.

“You’ll find email servers over there, but they’ve probably got a pot plant sitting on them or something like that,” says Carr. “They’re actually just skipping the middle bit, saying: ‘Screw it, we’ll just go straight to cloud’.”

When you extrapolate this phenomenon into different Australian sectors, you can predict some drastic shifts in employee behaviour when it comes to use of IT systems. For example, Carr highlights the fact that many nurses — essentially low-level public servants — enter the hospital system through doing unpaid practical work during their degree.

“They don’t get paid, so they don’t need a corporate email account,” he says. “They basically show up to their shift. These students will have their own cloud-based email accounts” — Hotmail, Gmail and the like.

As those students transition into professional employment, Carr points out, they will often work casually at multiple hospitals and for nursing agencies. This means they won’t need permanent corporate email accounts and could potentially spend much of their career simply using their personal Hotmail option instead.

“You could probably come up with a list of 5-6 things, which show that it makes no sense for hospitals to come up with collaborative platform and email servers for their support staff,” he says. “It’s a massive cost to take out of the health system.”

Once the business case expands past Qantas to the healthcare sector, Carr can imagine it going elsewhere. “How could they not employ similar policies in counter workers in things like service centres and so on?” he asks. The analyst calls this type of staff “boundary workers”, because they work on the edges of the corporate technology footprint.

Extrapolation
Applying Carr’s analysis to Australia’s education sector, it’s possible that it was so easy for so many institutions to switch to cloud-based solutions like Gmail and Live@EDU because for universities, students are more or less on the boundaries of the their IT infrastructure. They’re not specialised, high-end users. They just get a bulk service that is battened down to cope with potential security breaches and demand.

But this same analogy raises questions about the future of staff email at Australia’s largest organisations. After all, Macquarie University was one institution that proved what worked on the boundaries would work at the centre as well.

Or, to put it in more colloquial terms — what’s good for the goose might also be good … for the gander. It will be interesting to see just how many Australian employees are living the cloud full-time, this time next year.

Image credit: Mek Kormik, Google, Microsoft (respectively)