Martin Hamilton's blog

The Future Is Here: It's Just Not Evenly Distributed

2011-12-15T00:04:00.000Z

Here's a capture of my talk yesterday on practical cloud computing for the Loughborough Students Union Computer Society (LSUCS):

(see how quickly I recovered from the Beachball of Doom there :-)

In the presentation I mainly discuss how we constructed my.Lboro, our new "Web 2.0" portal site, and techniques that Computer Scientists may wish to consider when constructing their own mashups. I'll blog some more about my.Lboro in the coming weeks, so consider this post a teaser.

Here's a copy of my slides, courtesy of SlideShare:

The Future Is Here: It's Just Not Evenly Distributed

View more presentations from Martin Hamilton

I didn't really cover my choice of the William Gibson quote about the future not being evenly distributed in my talk, so just a couple of words about that. In my mind this is a byline for things like vendor reluctance to embrace APIs (cf. REST), and about the very limited expertise that exists in some areas - such as SAML and the dreaded "2 Legged OAuth".

I think it's particularly neat that as a hacker you can play with a lot of the Google APIs for free, and use world class tools like PHP, Zend and memcache. Next questions for me are: what University data could we usefully expose, and what kinds of things would people like to do with it? Leave a comment, and let me know what you think...

Making the Most of Google+

2012-01-19T11:54:00.000Z

This is a companion post to my talk withGoogle’s William Florance at the UCISA Using Social Media to Communicateworkshop. We recorded the session, and you can watch it on YouTube via theembedded video below.

I’ve also made a copy of the slides available:

So, what’s the deal with Google+ ?

In a nutshell, Google+ is more than just anew social network. It’s an initiative that cuts across the entirety of theservices Google provides, to take a holistic look at how things can worktogether better and to smooth out some of the bumps in the road that can interfere with communicating and collaborating online. [I could mention “friction” here, but Iwon’t give in to the temptation :-]

I’ve broken out a few of the practicalexamples from the talk in the screenshots below. For instance, here we are usingour Google+ “Circles” to filter the messages displayed in our Gmail inbox:

At first glance this might seem a littlealien, but in my experience it quickly starts to feel quite natural that facetsof Google+ should surface elsewhere in Google’s services. Another Gmail exampleis being able to add a correspondent to one’s Circles without leaving Gmail:

The YouTube home screen has some niceintegration now around the videos that your Google+ contacts have been sharing,and even gives you a button to start a Hangout (video conference) and watch avideo together:

The hot topic right now of course is theintegration of Google+ data into Google search results. For several months nowthere has been a fairly trivial integration that flags whether any of yourGoogle+ contacts has shared or commented on a link, as with this example below:

The big new thing is “Search, plus YourWorld” which takes this approach to a whole new level – as introduced in thevideo below. Perhaps most significantly (and just as Google+ itself is anoptional extra), you can simply switch off personalized search results byclicking on a prominent button.

In the talk I work through some specificexamples of educational applications of Google+, but really the message is thatthis technology has potential wherever communication and collaboration are in the frame. The quality of thetools that Google are providing for free, particularly around videoconferencing, is so good that I think a lot of institutions will findthemselves questioning why they spend tens of thousands of pounds per annum onwhat are in many aspects inferior solutions. [In fairness, it has to be noted that Google+ is not yet part of the "core" Google Apps suite, which is covered by 24x7 telephone support and an SLA]

Now, one might say that with Facebook andTwitter (and perhaps LinkedIn) we already have quite enough social networkingfor one lifetime. This kind of misses the point in that Google+ is about thetotality of Google’s products. As I mentioned in my recent blog posts about the transition to a "Post-PC" future, Google’s Android platform is now seeing some 700,000 activationsper day. Each activation of the new Ice Cream Sandwich release of Android invitesthe user to join Google+. With this in mind, it’s not hard to see that thebaked-in-ness of Google+ is going to result in it having a very large userbase. Here’s a cheesy video that uses a robot with a jetpack to get the message across… !

In terms of institutional social media use Ithink this means that Google+ is going to become one of the key platforms, andperhaps rather more quickly than one might imagine. I would say that now is agood time for institutional web teams, learning technologists and IT staff tofamiliarize themselves with what Google+ has to offer, particularly if yourinstitution is already a Google Apps user.

Finally, just to note that Google are keen tounderstand how people are using Google+, and how they think it could or shoulddevelop. If you have any feedback to add, please feel free to leave a commenton this blog post, or add to this shared Google Doc. There are a few thingsthat keep coming up, such as recording Hangouts and exposing Google Groups as “sharedcircles”, but this is a good opportunity for you to throw a curve ball (orbowl a Googly :-)

PS And while I'm here, a plug for the forthcoming UCISA Using Social Media for Training event where I will be picking up on many of the themes covered in this talk.

A Post-PC Manifesto

2011-11-01T17:46:00.000Z

In the last couple of weeks I have lectured this year's intake of Computer Science undergrad and postgrad students at Loughborough on Cloud Computing - the challenges it poses and the opportunities it creates. If you're interested, please see below for my slides. This blog post looks at some of the issues I raised in a bit more detail, and in a way which I hope will be interesting to both attendees of those lectures and readers from elsewhere on the net. Please do leave a comment and let me know what you think.

There's also an Echo360 lecture capture of my talk, although I'm afraid the audio quality isn't too great. Lots of people with fresher's flu coughing away in the background, and having noisy fun scribbling over my shared Google Doc scratchpad :-)

So, where to begin? Well, like many organizations we're revising and updating our IT Strategy in the light of recent world events, demographic changes, and (in our case) the particular challenges of the higher education environment. For me there is a particularly interesting question about the intersection of cloud computing and the "Post PC" concept.

It's a phrase that is being bandied around with increasing abandon, but what do we mean by Post PC? Here's a snippit of Steve Jobs explaining his philosophy (with a healthy dose of the infamous Reality Distortion Field):

Now contrast with this marketing video for Google's Chromebook product:

And let's hear what Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer thinks of the Chromebook/ChromeOS concept (you might also have seen his reaction to the iPhone's announcement):

So, who's right?

We could say that Steve Jobs was (at least publicly) on a crusade to make your computing experience a productive and pleasant one, though tightly integrating hardware and software. A cynic might say that this was purely a marketing ploy, of course. The continued success of the iPhone and iPad suggest that the world was ready for such a thing - or the Reality Distortion Field _really_ works. As I've blogged before, my own view is that iOS gives us a computing experience that finally feels as though we are living in the 21st Century.

As Steve Ballmer notes, Google are in some ways hedging their bets by promoting both Android and ChromeOS. It is easy to picture that the two may eventually come together, in the form of a version of Android that has local app management (potentially) done via the Google Apps admin control panel, or on which local apps can be disabled entirely for an experience analogous to today's Chromebook. Both "operating systems" are based on the Linux kernel, and Android is widely expected to move to the Chrome browser in its next major revision. However, right now there is much of interest that can be done purely with ChromeOS.

Here is my own personal killer app, the Chrome browser running remote legacy virtualized Windows apps (let's pretend this is via a "pay as you go" cloud service) in browser tabs via Citrix Receiver:

This is a video that I have used in several recent talks. Here's why I think this is a big deal...

1. Post-PC

The PC is dead, get over it. And it’s notwhat you’re thinking – the PC is dead, but not because of the iPad. It’s dead becausePC manufacturers are finding it more and more difficult to put together amarketable proposition that actually makes them any money. The margins on thePC business are so wafer thin that even HP, number one or two in most markets,has been thinking seriously about exiting the business.

This isn't a minority view, either, even the designer of the original IBM PC feels that the PC era is over. To understand just how poor the margins are on PCs, consider this article from the Guardian Technology Blog, from which I've clipped the image below. The green bar is the profit brought in by HP's PC division, roughly $40 for an $800 PC.

Sure, in five years’ time you’ll still beable to buy something recognizably PC like, but that will be a workstation fora power user, not a generic desktop box – something more like today’s Mac Proor Dell Precision. Expect it to cost significantly more than today’s “beigebox”, as the remaining vendors attempt to extract some profit for theirshareholders. Hopefully this will also end the race to the bottom that hascharacterized hardware quality in recent years.

2. Post-Windows

This doesn’t necessarily spell the end forMicrosoft, but it is certainly a world where the significance of Microsoft Windows and perhaps Office is greatlydiminished. Hence the firm’s huge change of direction over the Internet sinceit became clear that Windows PCs would be a clear minority of Internet accessdevices in the medium term. We hear anecdotally that over half of Microsoft’s employees now work ononline services – but is it too little, too late?

Just as the vast majority of Google’srevenue derives from advertising, the core of Microsoft’s revenue derives fromWindows and Office. The expected major downturn in sales will impact veryheavily on the cost of running next generation services (such as Office 365)that Microsoft clearly intend to be the long term replacements for Windows andOffice in terms of revenue generation. [Edit: And there are some odd decisions being taken at the moment, such as the dual mode Metro/Windows interface of Windows 8, and a version of Windows 8 for ARM tablets that won't run your old x86 applications. These may end up hurting Microsoft more than they help it, much like the culled Courier project.]

Will Microsoft manage to survive all this? Wecould say that it all depends on time to market and quality of execution (ofthe new stuff), and speed of decline (of the old stuff). My gut feeling is thatMicrosoft will be reduced to a bit part player, and probably snapped up byanother key player that wishes to integrate Microsoft’s technology more closelywith their own services. My intuition is that this has nothing to do withtiming and quality, it’s simply that Microsoft are now largely perceived as a“tired” brand – remember the ridicule that greeted Bing and Zune? This isironic given that it comes at a time when the firm is doing some of its mostinnovative work, such as the Metro user interface.

At least there is a silver lining for Microsoft if this comes to pass, in that VEDC licenses will still be required for those remote virtualized Windows apps, and don't forget that most Android vendors have reached a settlement to pay Microsoft a fee per device sold. These relationships are shown in the graph below, from an article by Devindra Hardawar in Mobile Beat. At a reputed 1m device activations per day, that's quite a revenue stream.

3. Post-Facebook

My money is on Facebook to buy Microsoft,as the two firms have already flirted in a number of areas (e.g. Docs.com), andOffice365 forms a strategic asset that a cash rich firm could buy rather than having to develop its own equivalent.

Let's say that Facebook buy Microsoft. This will provide them with a truecompetitor to Google Apps, which will become increasingly essential as the firm loses users (and hence potential advertising revenue) to other services such asGoogle+, and has to rapidly devise an alternative business model in order toremain viable and avoid becoming another Myspace.

Is this really going to happen, or am I just perpetuating Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt? Consider "frictionless sharing" through the Open Graph protocol, as discussed in the video below. Is sharing your life to this extent a step too far?

Now consider the uses to which Facebook put the data that you give them:

Still comfortable using Facebook now? It's easy to see why a lot of people have been deleting their Facebook accounts.

With Facebook’s chequered record on privacy, it will not be an obvious platform for corporate communication andcollaboration. Hence I predict that Facebook (another brand which is already being referred to as “tired”) _will_ suffer the fate of Myspace, and in turn its own assets will besold off to one of the three remaining key players.

4. Cloud Computing

If the PC is dead, and Microsoft aremortally wounded, then who curates your IT experience? I suggest that there arethree firms today which will almost completely dominate both consumer andcorporate IT in five years time. They are Apple, Google and Amazon. Thesecompanies have some key characteristics in common, principally a long termvision and strategy, and a focus on execution. The details of their strategies haveto remain a closely guarded secret, of course.

Will a University be able to fulfill all ofits IT requirements though a single one of these suppliers? I think this isunlikely in the medium term (less than say 5 years), because there are a plethora ofthird party vendors of best-of-breed systems in niche areas (or with specialadaptations for the education market) such as Finance, HR, Student Records,Library Systems, Learning Management Systems (aka Virtual Learning Environments or VLEs) and so on. However, there are aswathe of applications around communication and collaboration that Google Apps andOffice365 address right now, and some of them (such as the VLE) are fairly lowhanging fruit.

Consider the recent announcement by Pearson and Google of OpenClass, a Google Apps based VLE. Here's Adrian Sannier from Pearson:

In the longer term (5-10 years) I predictthat there will be significant convergence of enterprise software around cloud platforms such asGoogle Apps. I single Google Apps out in particular because it already has athriving marketplace for third party extensions which hook into the GoogleAPIs. Adding a new application to a Google Apps domain can already be as simpleas clicking “OK” on a web form. Google have a couple of years’ head start overeveryone else on this one. Here's a Google marketing video that illustrates this quite nicely:

5. Bring Your Own

Remember when Apple added support to the iPhone for VPNs, WPA Enterprise, Exchange synchronization and allthe rest? Suddenly your boss was waving one of these things around anddemanding that you support it. And the rest is history… (And of course we’veseen the same thing happen again with the iPad, although it was more immediatelyuseful and usable for corporate purposes.)

Remember when you had a friend or neighbourwho was the IT expert - or perhaps you were that friend or neighbour! Theperson who knew how to recover a deleted file, set up a printer driver,configure the wireless network.

Now we’re all (I exaggerate slightly foreffect) “Home CIOs”, often with as many wireless devices in our houses as asmall business might be expected to have PCs. Have we all suddenly become IT experts?I don’t think so, but our general level of computer literacy certainly hasincreased – at the same time as computers themselves have become easier to useand to maintain.

This trend is at its apotheosis when it comes to the sort ofcurated user experience we see on an iPad, Android or Kindle device. Or a Kindle Android device. Watch this commercial for the Kindle Fire and you just know that this will be the next must have Christmas gift, particularly given the price point that Amazon have set: (And did you notice the bit about apps? This isn't just an ebook reader :-)

But there is a sting in the tail - if the device is (say) a Chromebook or an Android tablet, then we can use our corporate Google Apps accounts, which can trivially be linked with our own identity management systems. The same does not apply if the device is from Amazon or Apple, although Apple have already provided a "Shibboleth-alike" facility in the form of the iTunesU user authentication subsystem.

Conclusions

This might all seem quite negative and threatening, but I don't think it needs to be - provided that we are ready, willing and able to adapt our ways of working to these new paradigms. In my Cloud Computing lecture I identified a number of new opportunities for Computer Scientists around cloud computing, and in reality I think we are about to enter one of the most exciting periods yet for anyone working on Internet technologies or enterprise IT.

You may disagree, but just consider the IT user in the video below. She's been an iPad user her whole life. What will our services and systems look like by the time she starts school? (or college!)

But what do you think? Leave a comment on this blog post and let me know!

Post PC: Dark Clouds and Silver Linings

2012-01-07T23:52:00.000Z

My recent blog post, A Post-PC Manifesto, looked at the seismic changes taking place in the IT industry right now - particularly around the onward march of consumer technology into the workplace. In this post I'll share some thoughts about how IT professionals and the IT department can remain relevant in this new world.

First, though, here's an infographic on the growth of Android that for me puts the whole thing into perspective. If this seems impressive, bear in mind that a lot can happen in a year. Google recently announced they had been seeing over 700,000 Android device activations a day, with over 200 million Android devices out there.

Change is Coming

Just to recap the key themes from my previous post:

Vendors are keen to kill off the traditional PC, a multi-billion dollar business that most of them (Apple being a notable exception) now make almost no money off. Hence the huge interest in new higher margin areas such as tablets and recasting software such as Microsoft Office as online services, with some companies essentially gambling their net worth on projects in this new area - e.g. see RIM's $500m write-off of the PlayBook
User expectations are exceptionally high, based on personal experience of best-of-breed devices (Android phones, iPad tablets etc) and services (Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Google+ etc). Service user technical expertise is at an all time high through the rise of the "Home CIO"
Consider that Microsoft, the corporate IT department's friend, is reportedly close to releasing a port of Office to the iPad, and that the iPad is essentially a closed system curated by Apple. The only other platform graced with a version of Office is OS X. What does this say about Microsoft's own views about the future? (and don't forget Kinectimals)
A handful of large companies are increasingly controlling our online identities and the key services that we use. So much so that the UK Government recently recognised this with the midata initiative - this will link utilities and public services to identities maintained by the Internet big players, and has significant implications for organizational identity management too
Systems and services are migrating from on-premise to delivery as Infrastructure as a Service (you manage the operating system and any packages, but not the physical hardware) or Software as a Service (you get a web dashboard + some APIs if you are lucky). Developers are increasingly using SaaS APIs or cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine (even with its recent price hike) rather than coding against the old standards such as Java, ASP, PHP etc

Any one of these changes would be quite significant in itself, but the combination of them throws into question large areas of what an organization's IT department does, and many of the common job roles and specialisms of today's IT professionals. If like my own organization you are currently updating your IT strategy, this is an exceptionally challenging time.

Embracing the Change

What should we do about it? Here is my (slightly tongue in cheek :-) five point plan for adapting to these new realities. Please do leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Get over it - you no longer control the horizontal and the vertical

IT in organizations will increasingly (but not exclusively) be woven from a fabric of cloud services, vendor APIs and "curated" operating systems (think: Android and iOS). For the reasons outlined above, the days of the organization managing its equipment from the bare metal upwards may be over rather abruptly if the next generation of commodity technology is no longer Windows and Intel based. Whilst high end workstations will undoubtedly still be around for power users, it is unusual for these to be part of a centrally managed fleet - think of the Sun and SGI workstations of yesteryear.
Get up to speed - do a Post-PC pilot

You already have hundreds if not thousands of Post-PC devices, but the odds are that most of them are owned by individuals rather than the organization. Take advantage of this to start a "Post-PC Pilot" that builds on this existing expertise. If you have any regressive policies (such as banning the use of iPads for work purposes), try to have them suspended or removed altogether and work to promote best practice rather than being prescriptive or proscriptive. For instance you might want to advise people that the Kindle doesn't support WPA Enterprise wireless. That doesn't necessarily make it useless on your campus, but it helps the punter to make an informed decision for themselves.
Figure out how you can add value

Consider what value you can add to the iPad experience, and by extension other Post-PC devices such as Android tablets and Chromebooks. For example, automatic delivery of infrastructure settings, and mediated access to legacy (Windows) apps. Citrix and VMware clients are readily available for Post-PC devices, and VMware View has even been implemented in HTML5. However, some retooling might be desirable if your organization has virtualized its corporate applications around Microsoft's App-V technology with the expectation of delivery to a "thick" Windows client.
Review your competencies

Many corporate IT skills that are presently regarded as key competencies are likely to become increasingly less relevant in the Post-PC era. Clearly Microsoft skills are particularly vulnerable if there is no longer a large fleet of Windows systems to manage. However, other competencies will become increasingly important and potentially create new "business" opportunities, e.g. expertise in driving Google and Amazon cloud APIs and networking (particularly wireless) skills. Your organization might even become a provider of cloud services in its own right.
Forge strategic partnerships

I think we will be seeing quite a bit more in a similar vein to the Nottingham/Birmingham collaboration announced last year. Online systems like Loughborough's Kit Catalogue (funded by JISC) will help organizations to publicise details of facilities they would be willing to share, thorough linked/open data, and open up new income streams for institutions. Why spend $$$ in capital costs for an occasionally used supercomputer / scanning electron microscope / anechoic chamber / wind tunnel / ... if you can rent time on one at a nearby University?

Conclusions

For IT professionals the $64,000 question is of course "will I still have a job in a Post-PC world?"

Some organizations will undoubtedly seek a drastic headcount reduction off the back of this transition - a transition which may well never happen, it must be said :-)

Should Post-PC come to pass, and (for UK readers) the impact of the new UK HE funding regime not be too great, I hope that Universities (which tend to run their IT operations on a shoestring in the first place) will grasp the opportunity to encourage staff members' professional development so that key roles are better resourced. I also feel that we should be encouraging people to develop in the round through postgraduate courses (cf. the University as a Learning Organization) rather than simply trying to identify the MCSEs and CCNAs of the future.

Take a look at the UCISA CIS Survey, which details the key corporate systems used by UK further and higher education institutions. Does it make sense for everyone in my sector to go out independently to tender for a finance system if half of the institutions choose Agresso? Ditto for student records (SITS), virtual learning environment (Blackboard), and so on. There are a number of fairly self-defining national and/or regional groupings that could take a radical new approach here. Shared services are an obvious outcome, now that the VAT situation has been resolved, although there are still employment considerations around TUPE.

Finally, and at the risk of sounding a bum note - in the move away from the old labour intensive hand crafted IT systems and services to curated Internet delivered commodity services (such as Office365 and Google Apps) and devices (such as the iPad) it is easy to picture the nuances of an organization's character and personality being lost or submerged and a "clone" organization emerging. This could have a disastrous effect on elusive factors such as the constituents of a successful student experience, and is a clear sign if one were needed that radical change must (time permitting!) be very carefully thought through.

I often find myself thinking that the entire higher education sector is being driven more and more by technology into following the path already well trodden by the Open University. It's fitting, then, to close with this OU PR video. Here, I think, is the real challenge - given that we are all increasingly aping the OU, to a greater or lesser degree, what steps do we need to take to assert our individuality and uniqueness? There isn't an App for that...

Bouquets and Brickbats: Stakeholder Happiness and IT Strategy

2011-08-10T12:11:00.004+01:00

In this blog post I'll return to our project to "field test" the JISC Strategic ICT Toolkit, with a round up of results and recommendations. If you haven't come across the Strategic ICT Toolkit before, please see the S-ICT area on the JISC website, and the JISC toolkit itself.

To kick off, here's a Prezi which I produced for the programme meeting in August 2011:

JISC Strategic ICT Toolkit Field Test at Loughborough on Prezi

In engaging with our stakeholders, we had asked a key framing question: How happy are you with IT at Loughborough University? We were pleased that the overwhelming sentiment here was positive (as shown in Figure 1 below), albeit with a implicit message that we could and should aim higher.

Very unhappy ........................... Very happy

Figure 1: Stakeholder Happiness at Loughborough

As a means of stimulating discussion and soliciting feedback, the project piloted the Strategic ICT Toolkit institutional self-analysis tool - initially with IT managers and the group leading Loughborough’s recent Change Academy project.

After this initial round, we went on to circulate a simplified questionnaire (see my previous post) to a larger group of stakeholders. It should be noted that in numeric terms the number of individuals involved was still quite small – around 20 in total. Please see our conclusions and recommendations regarding approaches to scaling up.

The individuals the project engaged with were typically directly involved in formulating and promulgating IT Strategy at Loughborough (e.g. members of our IT Committee), and business owners for recent major projects.

IT Committee, our primary governance vehicle for IT at Loughborough, includes representatives from a range of areas including the University’s Academic Leadership Team (the senior management group), Associate Deans, Administrators and the Students Union Executive.

What did we learn?

Our intuition is that we would have come out as "operational" until quite recently - but some of our recent initiatives have helped to tip the balance towards "strategic", as summarized graphically in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2: Strategic ICT Toolkit Institutional Self-Analysis Result

Examples of these initiatives include:

Strategic leadership - our work around Google Apps, JISC innovation projects, hybrid cloud computing and my.Lboro, our innovative Web 2.0 student portal.
Governance - we are moving to a much more formal model of IT governance, with the University's IT Committee being part of the University's committee structure, and a high level IT Projects Steering Group chaired by the Deputy Vice Chancellor.
Shared services - we initiated the hugely successful EMMAN Shared Information Security Service (ESISS), the first of the HEFCE funded pilot shared service projects. We have also significant experience of sharing services internally, including the Raiser's Edge CRM and our Service Desk system. Google Apps could also be viewed as a shared service, however ownership of it lives outwith the community.
ICT services - Loughborough has long been strong on the key "operational" service elements as described above. However, we have struggled to made headway in some key areas such as server and storage virtualization and IP telephony. Through a new £7.5m capital programme these areas are being addressed, with a complete infrastructure refresh over a four year period.
Communications and engagement - we have been working to break out of our "bunker" and engage more effectively with service users and stakeholders. This effort has included presentations to Faculty Boards and Directorates and other key groups (notably Departmental Administrators) on upcoming developments. We have had very good results from student focus groups on developments such as my.Lboro and Google Apps for students, and will be continuing this approach.

For our project, we surveyed stakeholders on a range of factors, asking which of these had influenced their happiness with IT at Loughborough and whether this was in a negative or positive way. Figure 3 below provides an indicative example. Here we see that IT Services’ assistance with procurement and tendering process is highly valued by most respondents.

Figure 3: Stakeholder view on tender and procurement assistance

We were also pleased to see that areas where we had devoted a significant amount of attention were reflected in our results – for example, working with stakeholders and business owners to ensure appropriate governance of projects, as shown in Figure 4 below.

Figure 4: Stakeholder views on project governance arrangements

The full range of factors we requested feedback on was as follows:

Stakeholder involvement
Business owners leading on projects
Tender and procurement skills
Resourcing, including staffing
Infrastructure services
Project management process
Clarity on requirements and timescales
Communications and information flow
Governance of projects
Transition from project to service
Customer service
Effective issue resolution
Strategic leadership

Given these efforts to improve our performance it was therefore, gratifying that our stakeholders recognised that improvements had taken place. We had also solicited qualitative feedback from our stakeholder group, and a selection of this material is included below for illustrative purposes.

Feedback ranged from bouquets and brickbats to specific suggestions for changes and improvements. For example:

"Greater emphasis on involvement from a wider range of stakeholders particularly academics and administrators.”

"There is improved communication by IT staff with people on campus.”

“There are some very effectively run projects around at the moment - examples being timetabling and iTrent”

(we are currently implementing the Serco Facility CMIS central timetabling system, and migrating to iTrent from MidlandHR)

Stakeholders also observed that in a research intensive University like Loughborough, a “one size fits all” approach could not possibly work:

"There are too many customers for this to be an effective method of operation. There has to be some accommodation for more unusual requirements.”

This is an area where we have developed some innovative solutions, such as our 180 seat triple booting iMac facility (see Figure 5), providing access to OS X, Windows and Linux environments – each with their own centrally managed repository of specialist software.

Figure 5: Triple boot iMac workstations at Loughborough

Immediate Impact

Institutions have historically found it difficult to take time out to reflect on what should go into their IT Strategy, and to assess its success. The Strategic ICT Toolkit project has worked perfectly in highlighting the benefits for all concerned from taking a deliberate pause for reflection from time to time. One of our stakeholders summarised this neatly:

“we are sometimes challenged by the immediacy of projects - which is presumably a reflection on the fast moving nature of IT (which makes strategic direction challenging!) to the detriment of longer term goals”

We will see an example below of an area where the IT industry is moving very rapidly to render obsolete much of what institutional IT has traditionally delivered.

In spite of the initiatives detailed above, several stakeholders indicated in their responses that they felt our processes were perhaps still a little too bureaucratic and that our organization needed to be more agile, if not “lean”. Particular areas that were highlighted in feedback to the project included:

Project Initiation Documents and associated paperwork
Clarity over decision making
Ability to respond quickly when an opportunity presents itself (see below)

In stakeholder feedback there was a clear tension between the department’s mission to provide core services to the members of the institution and the more speculative and “entrepreneurial” activities described above. It could be argued that this is a reflection of the larger discussion currently taking place around the role of Universities and the extent to which they are part of (and should remain within) the public sector.

The field test project also highlighted that at Loughborough we have historically taken quite an ad hoc approach to Enterprise Architecture. In the language of the Strategic ICT Toolkit, this would always prevent us from moving from “Strategic” maturity to have a truly “Transformational” approach to IT. In the words of one stakeholder:

“There is still a lack of clarity on how the various IT systems that we have been purchasing could and should work together”

In practice this lack of an overall Enterprise Architecture is a regularly encountered stumbling block that prevents us making best use of our key corporate systems and services. Whilst our stakeholders might not have been familiar with the principles of Enterprise Architecture per se, we were encouraged by several of them to prioritize this work. We expect to do this in the context of JISC’s Flexible Service Delivery programme.

Future Impact

We identified some key challenges through the Strategic ICT Toolkit field test:

Using IT as a strategic enabler, allowing the institution to be both responsive to events and proactive should an opportunity such as Loughborough’s Olympic hosting role arise (rather than IT simply being a cost centre)
Alignment of IT initiatives to the wider institutional agenda – does it help or hinder a project such as my.Lboro when it is developed “in public” through a process of stakeholder engagement? (versus a “skunkworks” type approach)
The Strategic ICT Toolkit provides a wealth of material to support institutions in developing and evaluating their IT Strategies. Is this type of resource accessible to senior managers who are “time poor” (and perhaps no longer “cash rich”)?

We are also constantly being reminded that we live in straitened times. In IT terms this manifests itself through practices such as “sweating the assets” and downsizing or outsourcing of staffing. At Loughborough we have tried to avoid this, and deliberately invested in both infrastructure and staff progression. However, one of our stakeholders sounds a contrary note:

“Even things like Office Software upgrades cost time and effort for users. Sometimes the old is working fine to the users, even if riddled with bugs and security holes, which means it's not working for IT Services."

Conversely over the last couple of years we have started to see a wholly new model of IT provision coalesce around web delivered services, now accelerated by HTML5, and the ethos of Bring Your Own Computer. This neatly side-steps the old issues around centralized device management and software packaging/maintenance. It replaces periodic major updates with a rolling programme of continuous (mostly small) changes, and has the potential to largely remove the requirement for local file storage on user devices and institutional filestore services - with implications for storage and backup, but also privacy and data protection.

Google’s ChromeOS and “chromoting” technology provide perhaps the most drastic example of cloud computing at work, with virtually no requirement for local IT support, and legacy Windows applications potentially delivered from remote providers on a pay-as-you-go basis via in-built VMware View and Citrix Receiver clients. Needless to say, this new approach has significant implications for IT Strategy. Both institutional IT Strategy and the composition and direction of departments like IT Services will have to change drastically if this “cloud” approach proves to be the dominant model.

Conclusions

We would encourage institutions to both develop an IT Strategy and periodically review their strategy – in particular its fitness for purpose, and alignment with institutional strategy.

The Strategic ICT Toolkit provides a wealth of information on key areas in IT Strategy at the present time, and would make an excellent primer for anyone who finds themselves involved in developing IT Strategy.

At Loughborough the Strategic ICT Toolkit has helped us to identify areas where our strategy has worked well and “more of the same” is an appropriate response. It has also highlighted some areas where we need to work harder, or that have to date been somewhat neglected.

We also have some specific feedback for JISC on the institutional self-analysis tool provided as part of the Strategic ICT Toolkit:

It was clear that the Strategic ICT Toolkit forms an excellent reference source for those involved in implementing and evaluating IT Strategy.
However, in testing the self-analysis component of the JISC Toolkit with a small subset of our key stakeholders, it was noted that the sheer number of questions being asked (91) was overwhelming for some people.
The self-analysis tool would require some customization for particular contexts and stakeholder groups – e.g. choice of language, and de-duplication. “Maturity models”, whilst widely used in industry, had some negative connotations, and many stakeholders were unfamiliar with terms such as Enterprise Architecture.
It is difficult to synthesize the results from anything other than a handful of responses to the self-analysis tool. An online approach to data gathering could potentially simplify the synthesis, and yielded dividends for our own project.
Where a respondent felt unable to answer a question, there was no easy way to discount this from the overall assessment produced by the self-analysis tool. This was not obvious to users of the tool, and had the effect of skewing the result.

In summary, completing the self-analysis template can be a significant piece of work in itself, and there may be other more effective ways of arriving at a similar outcome. One such approach would be to encourage stakeholders (in a workshop setting) to assess for themselves where their institution sits on the various axes used by the toolkit, and for the facilitator to use a flip chart to synthesize the results of the exercise.

Recommendations

As with the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), the Strategic ICT Toolkit is not an instruction manual and should not be treated as one.

The Toolkit may require substantial customization for use in your own institution, e.g. due to assumptions about institutional senior management arrangements, and use of jargon. Even the term “ICT” is somewhat divisive, as this is rarely used in Higher Education circles.

Users of the Toolkit should take care not to develop unrealistic expectations. For example, notwithstanding the Toolkit’s imprecations around Enterprise Architecture, many major software products used by institutions provide no Application Programming Interface and no documentation for their underlying database schema. One market leading product the author is aware of even uses its own proprietary database engine.

We commend JISC and the Strategic ICT Toolkit development team for their hard work developing this resource for the community, and have some specific recommendations that they may wish to consider:

Investigate an online based approach to data gathering and visualization, such as the Google Docs form and spreadsheet used in the Loughborough project.
Consider a drastic simplification of the self-analysis process focusing on the key data being gathered and encouraging reflective thinking.
Consider developing a “digested read” of the Strategic ICT Toolkit, for stakeholders who do not need to know the ins and outs of each of the areas being discussed.
Find a home for the Toolkit and other similar documents in a location that people will not have to explicitly seek out. An obvious option to explore here would be Wikipedia.
It is important for institutions to learn from failures - IT projects can represent significant capital investment, and failure of a major project can have huge ramifications for the institution. The Toolkit would benefit enormously from including an analysis (perhaps suitably anonymized) of some notable IT failures and considering the link to IT Strategy.

ALT-C 2011: Cloud Learning with Google Apps

2011-09-09T17:04:00.002+01:00

In this post I'll pull together the key themes that emerged in our "Cloud Learning with Google Apps" workshop at the ALT-C 2011 conference.

I was pleased that we had some 70 attendees express an interest in this session, making it one of the most popular parallel sessions at this year's ALT-C. Unfortunately we only had seats for 50 people, so my apologies to those attendees who had to stand, sit on the floor etc!

Ross Mahon and Grainne Phelan from Google had already warmed up the ALT-C plenary audience with a five minute elevator pitch describing the key features of Google Apps and encouraging the community to engage with Google. This workshop followed up the elevator pitch, and gave ALT-C attendees the opportunity to both quiz Google and share details of their own educational use of the Google technology.

To kickstart the discussion, we had a a short video (embedded below) from Mark Allen of Ed in the Clouds. Mark's consultancy provides advice and assistance on cloud computing for schools. When watching the video, try to bear in mind that Mark's school pupils are the undergraduates of 2020. Will secondary and further/higher education live up to their expectations? I hope so!

With such a large group, it was always going to be difficult to give everyone that wanted to speak an opportunity. To help steer the conversation, we used a tool from Google that I think will be of pedagogical interest to those who have not previously encountered it - Google Moderator. With Moderator, people can submit topics for discussion and also vote on the submitted topics, as shown below:

And here are some of the most popular topics proposed by the ALT-C audience:

I was very pleased with the results of the crowdsourcing exercise via the Moderator tool, which we treated as topics for discussion rather than "questions for Google" per se. Here is a quick precis of the ALT-C workshop discussion and subsequent conversations:

Virtually everyone attending the workshop was using the Google tools in an institutional capacity
Most institutions represented were using Google services in teaching and learning
There was a high level of awareness of the consumer oriented tools (Gmail, Docs etc), but less around more advanced features such as Apps Script, the Apps Marketplace and APIs
Most attendees had at least a passing familiarity with the more well known Google tools, but were not aware of some recent developments such as the incorporation of Wave style discussions and co-editing in Google Docs, and the availability of educational extensions to Google Apps in the Apps Marketplace for Education
As an artifact of E-Learning historically often being conducted as a separate parallel activity from "mainstream" IT services, Learning Technologists often had limited access to Google APIs, reporting, etc - potentially having a significant limiting effect on the potential for embedding the Google technology in the curriculum
Nevertheless, Learning Technologists at institutions which have "Gone Google" had experienced significant interest in the Google tools from staff and students alike, and staff at institutions making this transition should find it beneficial to develop an in-depth knowledge of the Google services
Some institutions were uncomfortable about the pace of change and would prefer a more leisurely update cycle - Google have taken some steps in this direction via the Scheduled Release option for updates
Google's recent slimming down of its portfolio of products and services had resulted in some services that delegates valued being discontinued or deprecated - it was noted that the core Google Apps services were covered by an SLA and support agreement

William Florance from Google stated that he would like to collect together case studies around educational use of their tools, and will be holding a competition later this year to encourage people to share examples of what worked for them.

Delegates were particularly interested in two new technologies from Google:

Google+ (G+), Google's new social network - with social networking extensions to most Google products also in the pipeline. We are looking forward to testing G+ integration with our Google Apps domains, hopefully this Autumn, and building upon the upcoming G+ API.

The presentation below gives some ideas about how G+ might be used in a classroom context. However, watch out: there seems to be a popular misconception that Circles in G+ can be used as "groups", in the same way that Google Groups can be sharing targets, mailing lists etc. In fact, Circles are personal to the person who creates them, and there is no way to share content with someone else's Circles or to see who someone else has in their Circles.

Chromebooks - Google's "thin client". Chromebooks run only the Chrome browser, on a stripped down Linux installation, with management via Google Apps. Whilst we tend to live on the Web nowadays, there are still a few native applications out there that people need to run once in a while - hence the integration of Citrix Receiver into Chrome, as shown in the demo video below.

I've blogged previously about this intriguing combination of lightweight operating system at the point of use coupled with virtualized legacy applications delivered over the Internet. It's worth noting here that there are other routes to this destination, e.g. the Citrix Receiver app is also available for Android and iPad, and Ericom have reimplemented the VMware View client as an HTML5 web app. Perhaps the post-PC era really is here?

For those involved in setting institutional strategy around IT and E-Learning, this is a very interesting development, and one that I shall return to in my IT strategy posts.

JISC Strategic ICT Toolkit field test

2011-03-24T01:05:00.003Z

In this post I'll pick up on and amplify a few of the themes from the talk that Parmjit Dhugga and I did about the JISC Strategic ICT Toolkit at the recent JISC 2011 conference in Liverpool. But first, a cheezy video that I made to introduce the toolkit... :-)

The Strategic ICT Toolkit is a new resource from JISC, developed by the University of Nottingham Graduate School in partnership with the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education. It follows on from a report by Duke and Jordan that identified significant variation on institutional approaches to IT strategy. Fundamentally the toolkit is an aide to reflective thinking about IT strategy, with a wealth of background material and case studies, and a self-analysis component that you can use to "rate your IT strategy".

Our slides from the JISC conference (in the embedded presentation below) should give you a flavour of what the toolkit is all about:

JISC Strategic ICT Toolkit

View more presentations from Martin Hamilton

So, this is all very well, but what are we doing with the toolkit at Loughborough?

We're taking a look at our IT strategy and seeking feedback from key stakeholders on how well aligned it has been to the overall University strategy. Recent IT developments at Loughborough have been driven primarily by the business process owners - e.g. we have been working closely with the Research Office at Loughborough on the selection of a Research Publications Management System and the subsequent implementation of Symplectic Elements. Similarly, Marketing and Communications led on the project to select a Content Management System, and we have collaborated broadly and deeply on the subsequent work to implement Site Manager from Terminal Four. We are presently reviewing our IT strategy in the light of recent developments, both globally and parochially, and the results of applying the JISC Strategic ICT Toolkit methodology will be very helpful in this context.

An elephant in the room...

Loughborough University has an unparalleled reputation for sporting excellence and world class facilities. This has led to both Team GB and the Japanese Olympic team being based at Loughborough for the 2012 Olympic Games. We are expecting that this will increase the University’s population by at least 1,500 people, with implications for the scheduling of examinations, graduation ceremonies and other University business.

In strategy terms we have been considering questions around identity management (will there be an "Olympics user database" that we can draw upon), Internet access, provision of information to visitors through smartphones (perhaps through a generic visitor framework that can be customized for particular events and audiences), cloud based printing, swipe card access control, and a host of other issues.

We are used to dealing with the ICT requirements of visitors to conferences and workshops, and have a well developed system for providing guest wireless Internet access. This is run as a partnership with Loughborough's events spin-off "imago", which operates Loughborough's conference venues. However, this system was not designed for such large numbers of users, and not for guests who will become part of the institution's resident population. We may be able to leverage existing facilities such as eduroam (the JANET Roaming Service) - as it happens, we operate eduroam for the UK education sector under contract to JANET(UK). We have also started to explore the issues around offering commercial wireless using the University's WLAN infrastructure.

Loughborough has also been working on a Leadership Foundation for Higher Education "Change Academy" project looking into efficiency and effectiveness improvements that might come from moving to more of a one-stop-shop approach to providing central support - particularly to students. Historically it has often been the case that Loughborough students have had to visit particular offices and departments for services that could potentially be delivered anywhere. An example of this is booking sports facilities - as part of the Change Academy project this service has been extended from sports facilities to the Students Union reception desk. Plans are also afoot to provide much improved online self-service facilities for students, signposted through our student portal (my.Lboro) and making extensive use of Shibboleth based Single Sign-On. These developments are nicely summarised in the Prezi presentation below:

JISC Strategic ICT Toolkit Field Test at Loughborough on Prezi

For our "field test" project we are initially using the Strategic ICT Toolkit's Institutional Self-Analysis spreadsheet. This asks the respondent to consider a range of questions, and score their response according to the degree that they agree with the statement.

This exercise is repeated for each of several key categories of ICT strategy awareness, including questions on Shared Services, Governance, and Enterprise Architecture. The result is a "radar diagram" that summarises the institution's perceived strengths in each of these areas. Necessarily, each individual will have their own perceptions - what we are most interested in is where views are radically divergent, and areas where people generally feel we need to try harder.

Where are we now?

Blank spreadsheets have been distributed for Loughborough stakeholders to complete, and the first of these have started to be returned. From the initial results it is apparent that whilst we are strong in some areas, such as hosting ESISS (the first HEFCE pilot Shared Service), we have quite a bit of work to do in others - such as Enterprise Architecture. Already it is clear that a valuable additional tool would be a "meta"-spreadsheet which synthesizes the various responses and carries out some additional analysis. It will also be interesting to see whether perceptions vary along with the degree of engagement of the various stakeholders!

My #iwmw11 Takeaway

2011-08-02T12:41:00.002+01:00

I thought it would be interesting and fun to make my plenary session at IWMW11 a bit more interactive than simply me standing up and waffling in front of a bunch of slides. Here's a few words about what I did and how I did it, plus some feedback from the interactive parts of the talk, and a few observations about this year's IWMW event.

What's with those slides?

In the interest of open standards and interoperability I'll also just take the opportunity to note that my slides are an HTML5 document. This works very nicely in Chrome, Safari and Firefox but has problems with Internet Explorer. In fact, on the lectern PC at IWMW (running IE7) it rendered as a blank screen... I would have expected IE9 to work OK, and this leads me to suspect that my HTML is a bit, well, suspect.

I've found that my presentation style has increasingly been shifting from tools like PowerPoint (and Prezi) to showcasing web material. The upshot of this has been that a typical presentation from me has often consisted of me running through a series of browser tabs to illustrate some general point or demonstrate some new facility. Like many of you reading this I came across the html5rocks.com site, and thought "hey, this could be quite a nice way of adding a bit of structure". It also has the added attraction of packaging up my collection of hyperlinks into a vaguely coherent whole.

If the idea of writing your presentation in HTML makes you think back to the likes of LaTeX (or even SliTeX), then don't despair - it's not that hard. For example, here is some HTML:

And here is the end result:

I have to apologise in advance for my choice of styles etc - deep down inside I'm a Web 1.0 kind of guy. It's actually over 18 years since I put up my first web server, which is in some ways quite an alarming thought.

Interaction via Twitter

When you are speaking in front of a group of 168 people as at IWMW, it's difficult to have a dialogue. This is something I do occasionally when speaking at conferences and workshops, and I have a great deal of sympathy for University lecturers trying to work with groups of as many as 250 students on a routine basis.

Like many people, at Loughborough we have been experimenting with technology like the excellent voting handsets from Turning Point. Whilst the voting handsets are pretty neat, I suspect that the most tractable approach to engaging with large groups is through the technology that everyone already carries around with them, smartphones in particular.

In the IWMW context it was clear that the vast majority of delegates were using Twitter already. Delegates typically had one or two Internet capable devices on their persons - in some cases significantly more! So, I thought it would be interesting to experiment with a polling approach with results embedded live on my slides, and using Twitter to share the URL of the poll site. Several such services exist, and TwtPoll seemed particularly well suited for my purposes.

To ensure that there would be something for people to see when I initially ran through my slides (and to avoid the embarrassment of a poll with no responses) I publicised the polls before the day of the talk. As Twitter aficionados will know, a carefully chosen hash tag can be helpful to stimulate a dialgue both before and after an event, and this was invaluable for the "amplified" event I organized earlier this year, the Google Apps for Education UK User Group (guug11).

So here's the result of my first TwtPoll. This asked people whether their organization had a Web 2.0 policy:

In the IWMW context it was particularly interesting to me that some attendees didn't know the answer to this question, and some were "rigorously enforcing" theirs. I followed this up, only to discover that rigorous enforcement in practice meant sitting down for a cup of tea with the person who had transgressed - not quite the Spanish Inquisition that I had pictured.

Should I be disappointed that only 28 out of 168 delegates (17%) bothered to vote? I don't think so - that's a whole lot more engagement than we would have had otherwise, and the nuanced results would be difficult to gauge from a simple show of hands. More importantly, it also stimulated some discussion and broke up what might otherwise have been a much duller presentation!

I also asked people who curated their institutional presence on Twitter, Facebook etc - and in particular what would happen if someone replied to an institutional Tweet. Here are the results from that poll:

Again I was particularly interested in the outlying cases, although it was notable that all the respondents indicated that they had some form of institutional presence on Twitter. In the current climate of "downsizing" and in some cases redundancies, I wondered how many institutions had a single person in the invidious position of having to handle any queries that might come in from parents, prospective students, and so on. It's easy to see how this could cause problems (holidays, sick leave etc), and that "me" could quickly turn into "nobody".

Leading by Example

In my IWMW talk I presented some examples of areas where we have working to gather examples of good/best practice of Web 2.0 at Loughborough. This will include a range of services, such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. My aim is that this work will also take in institutional use, use by departments and research groups, and personal use - e.g. by academics to promote their research and teaching activities.

We are hoping to capture both examples of tricks and techniques that have worked for people, and the lessons that they have learned from the experience. I expect that there will be a mixture of positive and negative feedback. Here are a few indicative examples, some more prosaic than others:

Don't make "friends" with all your students on Facebook!
Remember that Twitter replies are public!
Decide whether you are using the service in a personal capacity (e.g. my blog at martinh.net) or an institutional capacity - very relevant now that we have institutional Live@edu and Google Apps accounts
Know where you stand regarding Intellectual Property rights to any material that you would like to share openly on the Internet
Be sure to check the provenance of any Internet sourced material that you would like to use in your teaching - e.g. Creative Commons licensed content and Open Educational Resources from JorumOpen and Xpert are of particular interest here
Budget for "freemium" type services, and anticipate future expenditure - e.g. Ning subscription model
Have an exit strategy in the event that the site or service you plan to use ceases to trade, e.g. downloading SCORM objects from myUdutu

As we trial Google Apps for staff at Loughborough, the distinction between personal use of the service and an institutionally supported version of the service is very interesting to me. Picking up the earlier example, our staff users are now able to use all 60-odd "consumer" Google services including Blogger and Picasa with their institutional identities. This is exceedingly convenient, however an individual (say) blogging in a personal capacity might well prefer to use a service that wasn't too closely tied to any one institution.

This is a topic that I'll return to as we gather feedback from staff on their use of Google Apps - check out the Google Apps section of my blog, or come to my talk at ALT-C 2011 to hear more.

my.Lboro

I'm also pleased that our student portal site, my.Lboro, has been well received by students, with some 600 users since we soft launched earlier this Summer. my.Lboro aims to pull together a range of information relevant to students in their everyday existence at Loughborough that was previously hard to find or even inaccessible online.

We are starting from something of a "green field" because Loughborough's previous portal work has been quite limited in scale and quite domain focused. As a byproduct, we have been able to take advantage of the best of Web 2.0 technologies. Here's what the my.Lboro site looks like, for anyone who's interested (click to enlarge):

A lot of what we are doing with this site is actually driven by RSS - as we progress in our implementation of the Terminal Four Site Manager CMS, each of the University's departments, research groups, support services etc has the opportunity to curate its own RSS feeds. A few of the existing feeds (including general student notices, Students Union News and Events, Library and IT Services news) are gathered together on the my.Lboro site to form a default set of newsfeeds for students:

I expect that over time we will end up with a range of widgets that display individual RSS feeds in slightly different ways, so that there is some opportunity for differentiation. Here is an early example of another RSS powered widget that we have developed to highlight Professional Development training courses. This one will be particularly relevant as we come to trial my.Lboro with staff later this year:

We have also developed widgets using the APIs provided by third party services including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Google - you may have noticed the Google Docs widget on the full size screen dump above. Here's a sample of the sort of output you will see via our Twitter widget:

If this interests you, keep an eye on my blog for further updates on my.Lboro.

"The Takeaway"

So far, so good - but what did I personally take away from IWMW11?

I have a particular interest in digital literacy (and would note in passing that JISC are starting up a major new activity in this area), and I find it interesting to consider the extent to which technologies that technologists take for granted have permeated into institutional culture. As I said at the start of my talk, my intuition is that most institutions are still feeling their way with "Web 2.0", and that this is par for the course for any technology that is only a few years old.

I'm also fascinated to see the extent to which the neophiles and early adopters amongst us take up a new technology. In my talk I quote Bill Gross, one of the Twitterati, noting that in a month he has acquired as many Google+ followers as he did in four years on Twitter. Are these people all early adopters? Would they have jumped onto any new bandwagon?

In the context I asked IWMW delegates about their use of Google+, with the results shown below. As Sid quickly spotted, this emphasis also helped to make my talk seem bang up to date! This poll had the best response rate, with 38 votes out of 168 (23%), and people clearly valued the ability to share in a granular way. Interestingly, when I repeated this poll on Google+ there was a tie between question E (apprecation of sharing granularity) and F ("but I mostly post public stuff anyway"), so we may be deceiving ourselves to an extent.

Where Google+ is concerned, neophytes might not have been aware that "Circles" are for personal use only - i.e. you can't create an "IWMW" Circle which other people are then able to use. I hope that Google's new found emphasis on social features means that they are able to provide enough glue to link Google Groups with Google+ as a sharing destination. We'll see what happens about that...

Alarmingly, my prediction that Google+ Hangouts would turn into ChatRoulette has already been validated by PlusRoulette.

Outside of my own immediate interests I was very taken by Brian Kelly's demonstration of Bambuser as a way of very cheaply amplifying an event by live streaming using ordinary consumer grade mobile phone technology. See below for a demo produced using Brian's Android phone, which we passed around the room as he talked. I particularly liked the way that the Bambuser video was live streamed, but also available to view after the event. Very nice!

At Loughborough we have a full strength lecture capture system ("ReVIEW", based on Echo360), and have also been active participants in the Steeple community, which is working with the Opencast Matterhorn project to develop an open source lecture capture system. I've often thought that it would be interesting to complement this by encouraging students to record their own take on lectures, and Bambuser makes this sort of thing laughably simple. Caveat emptor, though, and do be sure to check out the sound quality on this recording...

If I had to pick one other highlight from a very exciting and diverse programme, it would be the contributions from Chris Gutteridge and Dave Challis on open data. This is of particular interest to me because of our JISC Kit-Catalogue project, which is developing a system that institutions can use to catalogue and provide an open data feed of their equipment and facilities.

Kit-Catalogue is part of the JISC Greening ICT initiative, although something of an unusual project - the more typical activities are around data centre power and cooling, power management in PC labs, and suchlike. There has been quite a bit of interest both nationally and internationally in Kit-Catalogue, and from some of our strategic partners - who we already share facilities and equipment with. It will be very exciting to see the new possibilities that emerge as a byproduct of this awareness raising, and whether we are able to save money by sharing facilities on (say) a local or regional basis.

I have to leave the last word to Chris, though, and his excellent exposition on finding cookies at the University of Southampton via the Grinder software - and note that I'm not talking about the EU Directive on Cookies here!

PS You'll need to skip 35 minutes into the video

Embedding Web 2.0 (#iwmw11)

2011-07-24T14:15:00.002+01:00

I'll be talking at the Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2011) this week about institutional attitudes to "Web 2.0", i.e. social media, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ etc. As I've written before (about the iPad), the key question is: Are you progressive, or regressive? At Loughborough we are trying to take a progressive approach to Web 2.0 - taking in the feedback from an earlier crowdsourcing exercise.

This material first appeared as a guest post on the IWMW blog - thanks to Brian and Marieke for the opportunity to write for the blog, and to speak at IWMW.

Isn't this a bit old hat?

If you're a Web Manager, Learning Technologist, or all round neophile, then you may feel that Web 2.0 has already been done to death. "Enough of that already" - time to move on to the Semantic Web, Linked/Open Data etc.

However, our institutions are still coming to terms with concepts like the Read-Write Web, and the implications of setting up institutional Facebook and Twitter presences. (And just who _is_ going to reply to all those Tweets from new students asking for advice in the first couple of weeks of term?)

Here's an example that crystallizes a lot of this for me. Groups like IWMW delegates are expected to be familiar with all of the new stuff that's coming up. Would you encourage people to use PeerIndex (below left) or Klout (below right) - or both? And which of the two will still be around in a year's time?

[Obviously I prefer PeerIndex, because it gives me a higher score - even if the numbers are in a smaller font ;-]

So, that's a slightly unfair example - for example, IWMW delegates will probably need to use and understand both in order that they can make a sensible recommendation should someone ask you for a perspective. However, I know from talking to members of my institution that people _typically_ do not have the time or inclination to check out every new website, app, etc.

At Loughborough we've been experimenting with a best practice guide for Web 2.0, using a "traffic lights" style approach, which is the mysterious Wired/Hired/Fired graphic at the top of this post:

Wired - new and shiny, the upcoming thing
Hired - mainstream, a safe bet
Fired - moribund, future uncertain or being withdrawn

[See, I tricked you into reading this far to find out what that was all about!]

Need to Know

Our best practice guide (still under development) features a case study for each featured site or service, with quotes from users at Loughborough and a "What you need to know" section that discusses any wrinkles or nuances that people should bear in mind.

Consider, for example, Facebook - the image below shows our induction page for students joining the new History cohort at Loughborough in Autumn 2011.

We've had really good results from this exercise, but of course there are a few things about Facebook that we need to warn any budding social networkers about - not least of which is that lecturers should think carefully before "friending" all of their students, given the poor granularity of Facebook sharing settings.

Another good example is our JISC and HEA funded Second Life Virtual Printing Press, as shown below:

The feedback we have had from this project has been excellent, but at the same time we need to make people aware of the financial outlay involved in developing for Second Life, of potential alternatives such as OpenSim, and the implications of building models that use large numbers of prims.

Impact of BYO Computing

We have also found from our analytics work that students and staff members now have quite radically different IT environments. The Google Analytics chart below (stats for the last month) shows 35% of our student users running Chrome, 21% running Firefox, 10% running Safari - and just 32% running Internet Explorer. As you may have guessed, Internet Explorer is our standard "corporate" browser. The University runs around 1,000 student PC workstations, all supplied with IE only. Hence the true figure for IE users (on their own equipment) will be much lower than the 32% shown here. For completeness, I'll note that virtually all of the 10% of Safari users were on Macs.

It follows that web related developments (and particularly those intended for students) need to be thoroughly tested in a heterogenous environment. The growth in use of Chrome is particularly interesting given the browser's powerful sync capabilities, and the ability to deploy centrally using Microsoft's system management framework. Student experience is a key driver for us at Loughborough, and if Chrome's momentum continues to build then I expect that we will roll it out as an optional alternative browser within the next twelve months. The same is unlikely to be true of Firefox, at least for the moment.

The chart below clearly shows that over half of the traffic to the site hosting our Analytics script is from laptops. However, once all of the different "laptop resolution" figures are aggregated, we get a figure closer to 75% for laptop use.

Again there are some significant implications for us in terms of web design - just how much scrolling should someone be expected to do, and is the common denominator 768 or 800 pixels screen height? And more broadly in terms of IT Strategy (we are doing some work with JISC right now field testing their Strategic ICT Toolkit) - what is the point of laptop/tablet ownership where central provision no longer adds value to the student experience?

The points I've highlighted above could be quite significant in terms of a third party website or bought-in service. Imagine the embarrassment if your institution bought into (say) a hosted VLE that only worked on Internet Explorer, or was effectively unusable due to assumptions about screen dimensions.

Wrap Up

I'll pull out some vignettes from our draft guidance below, but this is really just to get a bit of a debate going. Please feel free to comment on this blog post or tweet me (@martin_hamilton) if you have any feedback on it, and I'll try to work your comments into my talk. I'll also aim to make my session at IWMW quite an interactive one, so if you are attending the conference please do come prepared with anecdotes, statistics, bouquets and brickbats!

Pros:

Web 2.0 is all about user generated content, e.g. the “citizen journalist”
Web 2.0 is mainstream, with over 600 million Facebook users, 175 million Twitter users and 152 million blogs by the close of 2010
Web 2.0 is already very popular in the Higher Education community for purposes such as collaboration, sharing research results, and engagement
Web 2.0 sites offer the best user experience on the web
It’s a peer-to-peer model rather than producer/consumer (instructor/learner)
Openness and sharing is the default (and sometimes the only) mode of operation
There is a predominant ethos of cut-up/remix/re-use
Spontaneity is the watchword
Services are typically free at the point of use

Cons:

Registration is typically required in order to contribute – although it’s often possible to authenticate yourself using your Facebook or Twitter credentials
Care must be taken to delineate the truly personal, e.g. by creating a separate account for “official” use of a service, and adjusting sharing permissions appropriately
This is the Internet’s frontier – very little is guaranteed and change is constant
It’s essential that you have a “Plan B” should a service you are using no longer be available, or change materially – e.g. backup copies of your work
Some services, such as Google Apps for Education, come with an SLA and support arrangements
...whereas others do not inherently provide even a backup capability

Exploring IT Strategy at Loughborough

2011-07-06T00:30:00.004+01:00

"Institutional maturity" for Loughborough's IT Strategy

I've blogged in the past about a little project on IT Strategy that we are doing with JISC, exploring the potential of the Strategic ICT Toolkit at Loughborough. This is just to give people an update and pull out a few points that have come up during the course of this work.

In this blog post I'll spend a few moments looking at the institutional maturity self-analysis process (as illustrated above), and discuss some of the issues that this and the wider toolkit material have raised at Loughborough.

I'll also note here that my impression has been that the toolkit is most effective when viewed as a website. Some people may find the consolidated PDF more to their taste, but note if printing a copy off that this comes to a grand total of 129 pages. If you feel you need a paper copy, please do think of the planet, and print it 2-up in duplex mode :-)

The toolkit provides a wealth of background material covering the following areas:

Processes for IT strategy formation in Higher Education Institutions
Challenges in the current environment that IT strategy needs to address
Key enablers, including

Strategic leadership (Dearing's Type 42 managers?)
Governance
Communications and engagement
Shared Services
Enterprise Architecture

Case Studies from pilot institutions

The website also provides handy downloadable self-analysis forms (presented as Excel spreadsheets) that institutions can use internally to gauge their "institutional maturity" and for individuals to assess their level of "IT savvy". The institutional self-analysis tool is discussed further below - I'll cover the individual self-analysis in a future blog post.

Institutional Maturity

The primary output of the institutional self-analysis is the radar diagram shown above, together with an overall assessment of the "institutional maturity". Maturity is classified as: (from the Strategic ICT toolkit)

TRANSFORMATIONAL

Agile University
Strong focus on institutional needs
Strong horizon scanning, anticipating and developing institutional needs using aligned ICT
Using ICT to drive business innovation
ICT strategy is highly integrated and aligned with institutional strategy
Strong integrated institutional & ICT governance

STRATEGIC

Not an Agile university but able to deliver against some strategic needs
Mature operational capabilities with high dependence on ICT
Good business alignment between institutional needs and ICT
ICT supports institution at a business process level
Delivers good ICT value when measured against service delivery rather than institutional ICT value

OPERATIONAL

ICT is supporting institution operationally
Reliable and satisfactory performance from IT and IS functions, delivering good service levels
ICT is managed to contain costs
Few, if any, institutional ICT initiatives

It's important to note that this is not an exact science, and the aim of the exercise should be viewed as stimulating reflection and discussion on the strategy. There is no prescribed "JISC way" to undertake IT strategy formulation. In particular it may not be appropriate in all cases for an institution to aspire to Strategic or Transformational status.

In the current climate of financial constraints and uncertainty over funding levels and student numbers, it's not unreasonable for institutions to focus on the most business critical aspects of IT - the "Operational" paradigm. However, there is an implicit assumption in the JISC Toolkit that institutions which are able to achieve Strategic or Transformational status will be best placed to operate efficiently and effectively.

Self-Analysis Process

The JISC project which devised the Strategic ICT Toolkit produced a set of coded questions presented as a spreadsheet. An example of the questions around Shared Services and an institutional response is reproduced below.

Strategic ICT Toolkit Self-Analysis re Shared Services

The reader will note that answers are on a five point Likert scale, with a box for the respondent to add brief supporting comments and documentary evidence.

To fully complete the self-analysis process, a total of 91 questions across six spreadsheet tabs need to be answered. In practice the respondent may not feel able to answer all of the questions, and there is no obligation to provide further information in the free text boxes.

The Picture at Loughborough

At Loughborough my intuition is that we would have come out as "operational" until quite recently - but some of our initiatives in the last couple of years have certainly helped to tip the balance towards "strategic".

Examples of these initiatives include:

Strategic leadership - our work around Google Apps, JISC innovation projects, hybrid cloud computing and our innovative Web 2.0 student portal
Governance - we are moving to a much more formal model of IT governance, with the University's IT Committee being part of the University's committee structure, and a high level IT Projects Steering Group chaired by the Deputy Vice Chancellor
Shared services - we initiated the hugely successful EMMAN Shared Information Security Service (ESISS), the first of the HEFCE funded pilot shared service projects. We have also significant experience of sharing services internally, including the Raiser's Edge CRM and our Service Desk system. Google Apps could also be viewed as a shared service, however ownership of it lives outwith the community
ICT services - Loughborough has long been strong on the key "operational" service elements as described above. However, we have struggled to made headway in some key areas such as server and storage virtualization and IP telephony. Through a new £7.5m capital programme these areas are being addressed, with a complete infrastructure refresh over a four year period
Communications and engagement - we have been working to break out of our "bunker" and engage more effectively with service users and stakeholders. This has included presentations to Faculty Boards and Directorates and other key groups (notably Departmental Administrators) on upcoming developments, student focus groups and Web 2.0 technologies such as RSS feeds. With our new portal site, IT related news and updates are seamlessly blended in and do not have to be explicitly sought out

Readers may interested in a recent talk at the Eduserv Cloud Computing Symposium by our Director of IT, Phil Richards. Phil describes the work that we are doing with our strategic partner Logicalis to build a hybrid cloud solution:

Hybrid Clouds & Mini Pods

View more presentations from Eduserv

So far, so good. However, field testing the Strategic ICT Toolkit for JISC has also exposed a major gap in our current approach - around Enterprise Architecture. To use the language of the JISC toolkit, this is probably the key reason why we are "strategic" rather than "transformational", in spite of all the good work described above.

At present we are only taking baby steps where Enterprise Architecture is concerned, but it is already clear that we need to take a product agnostic approach to integrating our systems wherever possible - as I've described previously when writing about the University API. This is difficult when some of the market leading products that we rely upon (I won't name names to spare embarrassment) do not even provide an API - of any sort, let alone the sort of RESTful API that we are used to from the likes of Google. This is common enough that it would be prejudicial to our business interests to rule out systems that fail to provide an API or even a database schema. In fact, one of our key systems even uses its own proprietary database - undocumented, of course.

This, then, is the reality of Enterprise Architecture for us today :-) However, I think we will make some headway simply by setting the strategic direction and reiterating it periodically when dealing with potential vendors. It would of course be helpful if other members of the community were to echo these sentiments as suitable opportunities arise.

Feedback on the JISC Strategic ICT Toolkit

The JISC Toolkit is an excellent and comprehensive compendium of key reference points for anyone who finds themselves working in IT strategy formulation or governance. Perversely, this sometimes counts against it (certainly in the "full PDF document" variant), as it may be difficult to see the wood for the trees. When collating material in this way my experience has been that an index can be very helpful, although this might be difficult to produce and maintain when both PDF and web formats are being targeted. My intuition is that it is time to embrace the web and abandon the PDF.

In testing the self-analysis component of the JISC Toolkit with a small subset of our key stakeholders, it became clear that the number of questions being asked (91) was overwhelming for some people. Inevitably the more senior the respondent the greater the likelihood that they were "time poor" and would find it difficult to devote enough attention to the self-analysis tool to derive maximum benefit from it. There may also be echoes here of personality types, although I would be hesitant about dragging the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator into the toolkit field test given the problems noted by Malcolm Gladwell. I offer an alternative approach to self-analysis below, for consideration.

Institutions aiming to use the self-analysis portion of the toolkit may wish to spend some time looking at the questions and customizing the tool for their own purposes. Depending on the context that you are using the spreadsheet in, some of the questions might appear to be irrelevant or duplicates of earlier questions. For example, do you have a Senior Management Team and a separate and distinct institutional senior management group?

The radar diagram has a lot of potential in a workshop context - the facilitator can invite participants to complete their own radar diagrams, and then collate the results on a flip chart. I would note that whilst the spreadsheet presentation of the self-analysis has much to commend it, the process of synthesizing the results from anything other than a handful of such responses would be quite painful. In following up this work it might be interesting for JISC to explore using Web 2.0 tools such as the Google Chart API and an online approach to data gathering such as the Google Docs Form. Here is a nice little video showing how forms work in Google Docs:

With hindsight, "maturity" is an unfortunate label to use. It grated ever so slightly with me when we did the earlier JISC PIPaL project looking into CRM at Loughborough, and there is more than a little hint of hubris about it. A future revision of the Strategic ICT Toolkit might benefit from using more neutral language such as "orientation" or "focus", e.g. "Strategic Focus". This may seem like a small thing, but the maturity model terminology is one of the first things that a new user of the JISC Toolkit will be exposed to, and we all know that first impressions are very important.

Finally, I would note that respondents who don't feel able to answer all the questions in a section will inevitably skew the results towards the Operational maturity level. This is because the results shown in the radar diagram are generated based on an absolute scale of the maximum possible number of questions that could be answered in each section - rather than the actual number of questions that have been answered. It's also slightly confusing that some yes/no questions are presented using the five point Likert scale layout, where it is less than obvious which box should be ticked.

Further Work: IT Strategy Consultation

Given the initial stakeholder feedback on the self-analysis tool from the JISC Toolkit, I thought it would be worth spending a little time looking at alternative approaches to gathering feedback on our IT Strategy. The aim of this would be to both inform future IT Strategy developments, and provide a useful input into a future revision of the JISC Toolkit.

The result of this work was a Google Docs Form featuring a much shorter set of questions, and leading up to a free text box where respondents would be encouraged to provide qualitative feedback. A dummy copy of this form is shown below. This approach has been very successful with other surveys that I have conducted recently, including those on Google Apps in UK HE and UK HE Mail Filtering and Archiving. You will note that the Google Docs tools produce attractive graphical summaries of the survey responses automatically - although no radar diagrams, at least for the moment :-)

Initial responses to this approach have been very encouraging, and I am confident that most of stakeholders involved will be able to make a significant contribution. In a follow-up post I will present some edited highlights of this consultation exercise, discuss common themes that have emerged, and reflect on the implications in terms of our IT Strategy moving forward. I will also link these back, where appropriate, to the JISC Toolkit. I am particularly interested in seeing whether we will get any responses that touch upon areas not covered by the Toolkit. [More anon...]

Critique of the JISC Self-Analysis Framework for CRM

2011-06-13T21:41:00.007+01:00

This post summarises some work that I have been doing to follow up PIPaL, our recent JISC project looking into Customer Relationship Management. PIPaL applied the JISC Self-Analysis Framework for CRM to our initial investigation of the potential for an institutional CRM facility. In this post I will pick up on areas where I felt that the Self-Analysis Framework could be improved or further developed. Some passing familiarity with the Framework (or an interpreter!) is advisable.

For the research supporting these conclusions please see my Critique of the JISC Self-Analysis Framework for CRM document on scribd.com. As development begins on the JISC Online CRM Handbook I hope this material will be timely. I'm afraid that the references are largely hidden behind academic publishers' paywalls, though :-(

Scope and Context

My key finding here is that the JISC Framework could do a lot more to draw examples from the education sector and the peer reviewed literature. There is much in the way of prior work in this area, and the findings are readily available. Examples include Svensson and Wood (2005), Driscoll and Wicks (1998), Wolf (2008) and Tierney (1999).

The JISC Framework also makes few allowances for the unique nature of the education environment. Indeed the language of the Framework documents is that of business, and the jargon of “prospects”, “leads” and “sales” is still quite alien to most staff working in Higher Education - for this reason the PIPaL Case Study (Hamilton et al, 2010) refers to “Relationship Management” with no “Customer” prefix. The difficulties of reaching agreement in an environment where all the actors are effectively independent operators should also be noted (HEFCE, 2004).

The key role of Academics in the introduction of a CRM system is not discussed in the JISC Framework, and here the results of PIPaL and the other JISC Relationship Management programme projects may be useful additions to the literature referred to in the JISC Framework. For example, PIPaL found that the vast majority of the institution's commercial exploitation and consultancy leads were generated directly through the activities of Loughborough's Academic staff members and their professional networks.

The scope of the CRM implementation is also crucial – how does an institution decide whether to put a “full service” system in for use by everyone, or a system for use by (say) staff in external facing departments only? Advice and survey/case study results would be very helpful here. The KSA Partnership study (Heywood et al, 2007) offers much in the way of potential source material. The KSA Partnership carried out both qualitative and quantitative research into CRM adoption in the sector, and it is unfortunate that greater use is not made of their results to inform the Framework. This would be more relevant to readers in FE and HE than many of the examples that the Framework uses.

An observation from the literature of some relevance is that to carry out the analytical work required to scope out a CRM implementation, it may be necessary to put into place something that comes close to the functionality of a CRM system (Xu and Walton, 2005). This in itself may be a clue as to why many CRM implementations are reported as failing or being incorrectly specified (Lindgreen, 2004)

Business Process Modelling

The link between the Business Process Mapping and Business Process Re-engineering (Vakola et al, 1998 and Proesel, 2001) is not explicitly stated and there is a clear danger that users of the framework will leap to the conclusion that the Relationship Management system should be implemented around existing processes.

The JISC Framework presents a single approach to process mapping (derived from Fowler, 2003), with an implicit implication that this will always be appropriate. The case study produced by the PIPaL project provides examples illustrating the problems that may arise when a “one size fits all” approach is followed.

In fact there are a range of techniques that may be applied when conducting Business Process Modelling (BPM), as detailed by Huckvale and Ould (1995) and Winograd and Flores (1986). In a future revision of the JISC Framework I would propose adopting a matrix model that allows the consultant to choose an effective tool for a given process mapping scenario (Kettinger et al, 1997).

I am particularly keen on the Value Stream Mapping technique (Rother and Shook, 2003). This approach is particularly attractive as it combines information about the stages of a process where value is added with information about the timescales of the various stages of the process – e.g. time spent waiting, and what for. I have previously blogged about Value Stream Mapping in the IT Service Desk, itself a key area where CRM would come into play.

Value Stream Mapping in the IT Service Desk

Conceptual Underpinnings

A lack of clarity may also be noted over core concepts – the JISC Framework’s descriptions of CRM and its uses tend to be at quite a high level. Business stakeholders and staff affected by the introduction of a CRM system would require additional information about day-to-day practicalities. Some examples may be found in the literature, e.g. Boulding et al (2005) note the effect on consumer behaviour of being monitored and profiled via CRM.

The literature referred to in the JISC Framework tends to reinforce its rather upbeat message about the benefits of CRM technology. However, we do not have to search far to find some cautionary counter examples. Comparisons may be drawn with Facebook’s “sinister” side (e.g. Jones and Soltren, 2005), in the absence of CRM specific literature covering data protection and privacy.

The concept of Customer Experience Management (CEM) is introduced in passing in the JISC Framework, but merits further coverage – there are some obvious quotes which could be teased out from the referenced material, notably Alperin (2005) and Peppers and Rogers (2007).

The concept of “institutional maturity” is presented without any further comment. This makes it difficult for the lay reader to determine whether institutional maturity is something that has been invented for the Framework, or is already in widespread use. My own research has shown that this is a common label (King, 2006 and Cap Gemini, 2005), but failed to identify any literature focusing on the education sector.

In terms of the peer reviewed literature and its relevance to the JISC CRM work, the Complexity Theory perspective on Change Management (Lewin and Regine,1999 and Olson and Eoyang, 2001), nicely contrasts with the Framework's more traditional process and procedure oriented approach to project management. The impact of emergent and episodic behavior may also be relevant. For example, Stacey’s Agreement & Certainty Matrix may be used to illustrate the “co-creation” approach to change management (Zimmerman, 2001 and Stacey, 1999).

The JISC Framework makes frequent reference to the JISC InfoNet infoKit series, but in a generic way that adds no particular material relating to CRM from the literature. Whilst the generic examples are complemented by anecdotal evidence around the introduction of CRM in the public sector.

Recommendations

A future revision of the JISC Framework might benefit from consideration being given to the following:

· The sector’s existing use of techniques such as the Balanced Scorecard and Key Performance Indicators (e.g. HEFCE, 2009)

· The role of Customer Experience Management in the success of leading brands such as Apple and Virgin, if no appropriate case studies can be found for the HE/FE sector (Burton, 2005)

· Greater use of the literature around CRM in Further and Higher Education (e.g. Svensson and Wood, 2005)

· Coverage of the subtle distinctions between “partner” and “customer” relations (Hamilton et al, 2010)

· Inclusion of further material from other JISC projects, including the JISC InfoNet infoPack on Change Management (InfoNet, 2006) and the KSA Partnership Relationship Management study (Heywood et al, 2007)

· Exploration of additional/alternative process mapping techniques such as Value Stream Mapping (Rother and Shook, 2003)

· Greater use of the literature around CRM failures and how these may be avoided - such as by improving engagement with employees (e.g. Bohling et al, 2006)

There should be a wealth of data available about the recent initiative to introduce CRM across local government. Unfortunately key results from the programme appear to have been lost due to there being no Digital Preservation strategy (Farrell, 2010) in place at the time of this work – something to avoid for future projects. The key players in the “CRM National Programme” are well known, and qualitative interviews might help to inform further work by JISC in this area.

The literature suggests that both the mechanistic elements (project and programme management) and the softer (people oriented) side need to be considered alongside each other, and that a time of great upheaval such as the introduction of a CRM system can usefully lend itself to a re-examination of the organization’s “mental model” (Kolind, 2006).

Finally, it has been observed that documents such as the JISC Framework play an important part in channelling research results back to practitioners. JISC potentially have a key role here in terms of fostering deeper engagement between Academics and CRM practitioners.

References

Alperin, B (2005) Customer Experience Management: Competing successfully in Higher Education. Aramark Education Internet publication: http://www.aramarkhighered.com/pdfs/articles/CustomerExperienceMgmt.pdf

Bohling, T, Bowman, D, LaValle, S, Mittal, V, Narayandas, D, Ramani, G and Varadarajan, R (2006) CRM Implementation: Effectiveness Issues and Insights. In Journal of Service Research, Volume 9, Number 2, pp. 184-194.

Boulding, W, Staelin, R, Ehret, M and Johnson, W J (2005) A Customer Relationship Management Roadmap: What is Known, Potential Pitfalls and Where to Go. In Journal of the American Marketing Association, Volume 69, Number 4, pp. 155-166.

Burke, W and Litwin, G H (1992) A Causal Model of Organisational Change. In Journal of Management, Volume 18, Number 3, pp. 523-545.

Cap Gemini (2005) The Benefits of CRM. Local e-Government National Projects Internet publication: http://www.localtgov.org.uk/webfiles/Benefits/CRM%20DOCUMENT.pdf

Donaghy, M (2008) JISC Self-Analysis Framework for Relationship Management. Online publication: http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk/crm-tools/

Driscoll, C and Wicks, D (1998) The customer-driven approach in business education: a possible danger? In Journal of Education for Business, Volume 74 Number 1, pp. 58-61.

Fowler, M (2003) UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modelling Language. Addison-Wesley.
Farrell, S (2010) (ed) A Guide to Web Preservation. JISC Internet publication: http://jiscpowr.jiscinvolve.org/wp/guide/

Hamilton, M, Lad, A, Addison, A and Brown, S (2010) Process Improvement Pilot at Loughborough (PIPaL) Case Study. JISC Internet publication: http://jiscpipal.wordpress.com

InfoNet (2008) JISC infoKit: System Implementation. Internet publication: http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/InfoKits/system-implementation

HEFCE (2004) Effecting change in HE. Higher Education Funding Council for England, report number GMP 201.

HEFCE (2009) Participation in higher education continues to widen, Higher Education Funding Council for England Key Performance Indicators. Internet publication: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/news/hefce/2009/pi.htm

Heywood, M, Nixon, I, Bowden, A, Bell, R (2007) Study of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Issues in UK Higher Education Institutions. JISC Internet publication:

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/themes/bce/crmstudyfinalreport20070817.pdf

Huckvale, T and Ould, M (1995) Process Modelling – Role Activity Diagramming. In Business Process Change: Concepts, Methods and Technologies, Grover, V and Kettinger, W J (eds), Harrisburg PA: Idea Publishing, pp. 330-349.

InfoNet (2006) JISC infoKit: Change Management. Internet publication: http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/change-management

Kettinger, W, Teng, J and Guha S (1997) Business Process Change: A Study of Methodolgies, Techniques and Tools. In MIS Quarterly, Volume 21, Number 1, pp. 55-80.

King, S F (2006) Citizens as customers: Exploring the future of CRM in UK local government. In Government Information Quarterly, Volume 24, Number 1, pp. 47-63.

Kolind, L (2006) The Second Cycle: Winning the War Against Bureaucracy. Wharton School Publishing.

Jones, H and Soltren, J H (2005) Facebook: Threats to Privacy. MIT Term Paper, Internet publication: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/student-papers/fall05-papers/facebook.pdf

Lewin, R and Regine B (1999) The Soul at Work: Unleashing the power of complexity science for business success. Orion Business.

Lindgreen, A (2004) The design, implementation and monitoring of a CRM programme: a case study. In Marketing Intelligence and Planning, Volume 22, Number 2, pp. 160-186.

Olson, E E and Eoyang, G H (2001) Facilitating Organizational Change: Lessons from Complexity Science. Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer.

Peppers, D and Rogers, M (2007) Significant differences between customer experience management (CEM) and CRM. Internet publication: http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/answer/Significant-differences-between-customer-experience-management-CEM-and-CRM

Proesel, J (2001) The role of process in CRM: Putting it on paper. ZDNet TechRepublic Internet publication: http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-10878-0.html?forumID=14&threadID=73200&messageID=445865

Rother, M and Shook, J (2003) Learning To See. Lean Enterprise Institute.

Stacey, R (1999) Strategic Management and Organizational Dynamics: The Challenge of Complexity. Prentice Hall.

Svensson, G and Wood, G (2007) Are university students really customers? When illusion may lead to delusion for all. In International Journal of Education Management, Volume 21, Issue 1, pp. 17-28.

Tierney, W G (1999) Building the Responsive Campus: Creating High Performance Colleges and Universities. Sage Publications.

Vakola, M, Rezgui, Y, Mitev, N, Thompson, J, (1998). D3100 Business Process Re-engineering Strategy. CONDOR ESPRIT 23105 Deliverable

Winograd, T and Flores, F (1986) Understanding Computers and Cognition. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Wolf, A (2008) Time to have another go at individually driven learning. In The Guardian, Tuesday 2^nd December 2008. Internet publication: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/dec/02/reintroducing-individual-learning-accounts

Xu, M and Walton, J (2005) Gaining customer knowledge through analytical CRM. In Industrial Management and Data Systems, Volume 105, Number 7, pp. 955-971.

Zimmerman, B (2001) Ralph Stacey’s Agreement and Certainty Matrix. Internet publication: http://www.plexusinstitute.org/edgeware/archive/think/main_aides3.html

Back to the Future - Resource Discovery, Revisited

2011-05-18T22:38:00.000+01:00

This post is prompted by recent Twitter discussions involving some of my co-conspirators from the 1990s, back when I was a digital libraries researcher, web caching poohbah and some-time shambrarian.

We had a particular view that Internet search would (or perhaps "should") evolve along the same lines as the Internet itself - a many faceted distributed and decentralized networked organism, held together by a common web of protocols and interchange formats. This had worked pretty well for TCP/IP, after all, so why not take the same approach for finding stuff?

Bear in mind that WAIS and Gopher were still alive and kicking at this point...

Acronym Soup

Jill Foster's excellent Networked Information Retrieval RFC gives some good background reading on the prevailing ethos of the 90s - a trip down memory lane for some. For the uninitiated - an introduction to a bewildering world of Archies, Gophers, and Veronicas. You can also get a feel for the thinking of the time from the Models Information Architecture diagram below. This was part of an study for the Renardus project which I contributed to back in 2000. MIA begat Andy Powell's infamous DNER diagram and subsequent work on the JISC Information Architecture.

Models Information Architecture - from the Renardus resource discovery study (2000)

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/renardus/wp1/drafts/renardus-11-v02.html

You might note the date here - we wrote this report in the same year that the infant Google announced it had indexed a billion web pages. I'll come back to the elephant in the room in a moment, but first...

The approach I've described above escaped out of the labs, and came to power a number of national services. In the UK the Follett Report had recommended pump priming for a major initiative to support use of IT in libraries and in the mid 1990s a number of projects and services were funded under the resulting eLib programme, led by the redoubtable Chris Rushbridge.

The eLib Years

With some encouragement by Lorcan Dempsey (then of UKOLN) I became fairly deeply involved in the Subject Gateways strand of eLib. This concept was an outgrowth of the Social Sciences Information Gateway (SOSIG), developed around 1994 by Nicky Ferguson, Debra Hiom et al at the ILRT in Bristol, with technical assistance from a mysterious character we shall refer to only as "Jim'll" :-)

The goal of the service was to use expert help to assist people in navigating the minefield of the nascent Internet. This was done through training and awareness raising, and also by using human beings to catalogue "quality" Internet resources that University staff and students might want to investigate. SOSIG users could browse through subject categories or search the catalogue entries. A number of these subject gateways were set up to specialise in particular areas, e.g. OMNI for medical information and EEVL for engineering. These services were brought together in 2006 as Intute (see below).

The Intute Service (2011) - captured for posterity

http://intute.ac.uk

Behind the scenes the Subject Gateways used a small army of experts (mostly librarians) to catalogue websites, in the same way that they might catalogue books in a library. Jim'll and I developed a piece of web based software called "ROADS" to automate much of this work, as described in this paper for D-Lib magazine co-written with John Kirriemuir and Dan Brickley (then of the ILRT), and Sue Welsh (then of OMNI). ROADS was a punt on the likely standards for Internet search and information interchange, based on the IETF's WHOIS++ protocol work. ROADS explicitly permitted metadata from different services to be aggregated, and provided facilities for multiple services to be searched efficiently in a single query using a summary of the indexed data known as a centroid.

From Cataloguing to Indexing

We followed up on this work by integrating the Z39.50 targets beloved of the digital libraries community. The figure below shows the excellent work by Peter Valkenburg (then of TERENA) on a cross-search user interface in our TERENA funded CHIC-Pilot project.

CHIC-Pilot sought to bring together the human assisted catalogue data from the subject gateways with robot based indexes created using the Harvest software and a Z39.50 based equivalent developed by Sebastian Hammer at Index Data and Sigfrid Lundberg, Mattias Borell et al at Lund University. The goal was for people to be able to search a European Web Index of academic sites and also the human assisted subject gateway catalogues through a friendly common front end.

CHIC-Pilot search interface

from Standards in the CHIC-Pilot distributed indexing architecture (1998)

And yes, CHIC-Pilot had its own version of the MIA diagram...

CHIC-Pilot architecture diagram

from Standards in the CHIC-Pilot distributed indexing architecture (1998)

In the UK a number of us had been running regional web indexers using the DARPA funded Harvest software. These "gatherers" crawled their local websites and then exported their indexes in Summary Object Interchange Format (SOIF) to a central indexer and search engine ("AC/DC") run by Dave Beckett (then of the University of Kent). The rationale behind AC/DC is discussed in an article for Ariadne magazine by Dave and Neil Smith (then of HENSA), and shown in the figure below.

The ACademic DireCtory (1996)

The Bubble Bursts

As it happened, our punt didn't work out - WHOIS++ didn't take off, and LDAP became the lingua franca of directory services through its adoption by Microsoft (Active Directory) and Novell (e-Directory). More importantly, these organizational LDAP services were typically firewalled to the Nth degree from the Internet, and the LDAP protocol was only very rarely used for anything other than directory services.

Although the Internet search aspects of the Harvest project died a death after a couple of years of curation as an open source community project, the web caching component of the software drew widespread acclaim and begat both the open source Squid cache engine, and the Netcache appliance from NetApp. I became a heavy Squid user and contributor, with a particular interest in Squid's inter-cache communications protocol (ICP) and then later its cache digest protocol. These two technologies revived the promise of a distributed, decentralised web of services, albeit in a slightly different context. ICP let one cache query another for a URL, and cache digests let a cache share a summary of its contents with another cache, using a lossy summary known as a Bloom filter. We subsequently went on to build meshes of caches spanning whole countries, with Europe being a particular hotbed thanks to the efforts of John Martin (then at TERENA).

Ironically given the vision of the Internet I had become wedded to, my interest in the technology of web caching was to lead to a mini-career as a caching expert running a huge centralised service. This all stemmed from a report on caching on JANET written in 1996 by Andrew Cormack (then at Cardiff). Andrew's report led to the establishment of the JANET Web Cache Service, which we and Manchester Computing successfully tendered for. There followed a period of some five years during which the exigencies of running a production service relied upon by most of the Higher Education sector took precedence over my research interests (Translation: there goes the PhD :-)

Web Caches R Us

This was all happening in tandem with JANET's introduction of charging for international (or more properly, US related) traffic, as a very British way of influencing institutions' use of bandwidth. Consequently, JANET connected institutions had a very strong incentive to send as much as possible of their traffic through the JWCS, and indeed this was the behaviour we saw when we analysed the statistics from the JANET international connections, as shown in the figure below.

Around the start of the new millenium the rise of peer-to-peer filesharing protocols meant that caching was no longer an effective way of policing international charging. And with the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the cost of trans-Atlantic bandwidth had fallen through the floor. The figure below shows the point at which peer-to-peer really started to make its presence felt for us at Loughborough, towards the end of the year 2000. The purple spike is P2P traffic.

It may be interesting to reflect that the JANET caches performed very well in their heyday, due no doubt to the large proportion of static content on the web in the late 90s - remember that AJAX had yet to be invented. An example is shown in the figure below, where the yellow area indicates local institutional cache hits, and the green indicates national (JWCS) cache hits - the red is the remaining web traffic which was either uncacheable material or material not already cached. Of course this principle lives on in quite a different form (user and ISP intervention not required) in the Content Distribution Networks, notably Akamai. I was pleased that one of my last acts as a JWCS person was to put the right people in touch with each other to get a Akamai node installed at ULCC to service JANET users.

The JWCS era was really a formative period for me, and I'm indebted to the folk who were in involved in this work. Thanks again to George Neisser, John Heaton (now sadly deceased), Michael Sparks, Richard Hanby, Andrew Veitch, Graeme Fowler and Matthew Cook for a very stimulating few years.

Now that organizational proxy cache servers are no longer in widespread use, metrics such as those shown above are harder to come by. My intuition is that with the changes in the funding model for higher education in the UK, usage based charging is likely to rear its head again at some point - perhaps through a tiered model of JANET subscription modelled on the 3G data policies in mobile phone contracts.

Back to the Future

So where does this leave my dream of Internet resource discovery?

Whilst the work I've described above is now pretty obscure, I'd argue that it has done a great job of pointing us in the right direction. The ideas and ethos of this era subsequently found their way into many important and influential places, e.g. through Dan's work at the W3C and Joost, Dave's move to Yahoo!, Lorcan's move to OCLC, and Michael's work for the BBC. [I stayed at Loughborough, but this is quite an unusual institution that often has the feel of working for a high tech start-up about it :-]

I had envisaged a distributed and decentralized approach to search, where individuals and organizations would choose to make selected metadata available to multiple aggregators and the punters would use a variety of search and retrieval protocols to target particular collections, subject classifications etc. In many ways the work I've described above prefigured FOAF and social network graphs, RDF, SPARQL and Linked Data more generally (Peter and Dan have a key paper here) - and let's not forget OAI-PMH for Repository folk.

Perhaps more importantly, I had assumed that the inner workings of these services would be largely exposed to the punter, who would be able to mix and match services to their taste. How wrong I was! We can only catch a glimpse of the innards of key Internet services through a lens (Hadoop) darkly, and attempts to carry out relevant research are somewhat stymied by the sheer scale at which the key players now operate. Try to replicate this in a University Computer Science department, and see how far you get! RSS is probably the closest thing to my original vision, and even then (as Pat Lockley has noted) there are a lot of problems around schema consistency and proprietary extensions.

I can take some consolation that in my semi-abandoned PhD research I had a novel idea about using IP multicast in search and retrieval which I've yet to see appear independently anywhere else. Although multicast for IPv4 never achieved widespread deployment, this may something worth revisiting as we finally migrate to IPv6...

Loughborough Shortlisted for Times Higher Award

2011-04-21T22:00:00.004+01:00

I'm delighted to be able to report that IT Services at Loughborough University has been shortlisted for the 2011 Times Higher Leadership and Management Awards "Outstanding ICT Initiative" category. This is in recognition of our collaboration with Google to deliver a state of the art communication and collaboration suite for Loughborough students using Google Apps. We'll know on June 16th whether we are the chosen ones :-)

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank current and former colleagues for all their hard work on Google Apps at Loughborough - in particular Chris Beggs, Garry Booth, Mike Cardwell, Nikki Doyle, Graeme Fowler, Kathryn Latham, Hina Mistry, Vishal Nathu, Lee Preston, Lynne Render and Ricardo Twumasi.

For the curious, I've appended a copy of our submission to the Times Higher Awards... [Much of the text may be familiar if you have already read our Google at Loughborough Case Study!]

Google at Loughborough

Loughborough University and Google have worked together closely during the 2009-2010 academic year to build a groundbreaking new “cloud” based productivity suite for students, in keeping with the University’s reputation for excellence in Student Experience.

Project Goal

Deliver an improved user experience at lower cost with greater operating efficiency

Methodology

Place students at the heart of the process via focus group consultation
Pilot Google Apps with a cohort of “tech savvy” users before full release
Automated migration of users’ email, retaining user names, passwords and email addresses

Key achievements

Hassle free transition with only around 100 Service Desk cases for 17,000 users
Engagement with Google to develop ground breaking alumni service
£250,000 saving on server hardware, cooling and power through moving to a cloud based service instead of refreshing an old in-house email system
Enabling new services – notably 95% uptake of Google Calendar and 70% uptake of Google Docs for collaborative working
Retention of the student’s digital identity on graduation, which would have been impossible to resource in-house (already used by over 5,000 former students)
Broader and deeper engagement between IT and the student body

Google Docs at Loughborough usage stats

According to Chief Operating Officer Will Spinks, the partnership with Google encapsulates the mission to operate with maximum efficiency. “The introduction of the full Google Apps for Education suite has underlined that we can indeed offer an expanded and improved service for our students at a reduced cost. The two need not be mutually exclusive,” says Mr Spinks.

“The feedback from the Google pilot was amazingly positive, and it was clear that Google Apps would be a huge success with students. We pressed the University to give us Google as quickly as possible!” — Robert Hulme, Student Union President, 2009-2010

“We have to work hard to maintain our leading position in this area and so we always look to be at the forefront when providing new facilities and services for our students,” says Vice Chancellor Professor Shirley Pearce.

One of the key outcomes of this work is a whole new service for Loughborough alumni. Ron Gray, Director of Development and Alumni Relations, observes that:

“Our alumni are key members of the community at Loughborough University and we were delighted at the ability to effect a seamless transition from student to alumnus through the use of Gmail. The beneﬁts for graduating students to keep their university email address after they have left Loughborough strongly supports the University’s oft used statement that ‘Loughborough is for Life’.”

Loughborough students have their Google Apps account converted upon graduation into an alumni account. This means that students now retain their data on leaving the institution – including email, contacts, calendars and documents. An alumni email address is automatically created on initial registration, so that students are always able to quote their alumni address in correspondence, job applications and so on. Transition to alumni status takes place transparently through a single API call when the student’s registration lapses. The alumni Google account has been an unparalleled success, with over 5,000 users since its inception.

About Loughborough University

Founded in 1909, Loughborough University is one of the UK’s leading universities, with a reputation for excellence in teaching and research, strong links with business and industry and unrivalled sporting achievement. Today the university consists of 17,000 students, 3,000 staff and over 75,000 alumni and is renowned for providing an excellent student experience, having topped the “Times Higher Education UK league tables for student experience” every year since 2006.

About Google Apps for Education

Google Apps for Education is a free suite of hosted communication and collaboration applications designed for schools and universities. Google Apps includes Gmail (webmail services), Google Calendar (shared calendaring), Google Docs (online document, spreadsheet, presentation, and form creation and sharing) Google Video (secure and private video sharing – 10GB free) and Google Sites (team website creation with videos, images, gadgets and documents integration), as well as administrative tools, customer support, and access to APIs to integrate Google Apps with existing IT systems.

Background to Google Apps at Loughborough

When Loughborough’s email system came up for renewal in 2009, a student focus group was formed to explore the various options. The old system provided only email, but there was substantial demand for a richer platform for the student body to communicate and collaborate.

It quickly became clear that very signiﬁcant expenditure would be required in order to provide a more fully featured system with enough storage to satisfy today’s “digital natives.” This would have been a very hard sell to senior management even before the global economic downturn, government spending cuts, and carbon savings targets.

Having reviewed several options, the student focus group voted unanimously in favour of taking Google Apps forward, and a pilot was launched with 300 second year students in Autumn 2009. Feedback from the pilot was gathered in real-time using Google Docs, enabling the pilot group to view and respond to each other’s comments.

Phil Richards, Director of IT, notes that “In any organisation, there can sometimes be inertia against doing things in a different way. In this case, we were pleased that the pace of our move to to Google was driven by our goal of providing an outstanding service to our student ‘customers’. Strong involvement of students, right at the centre of this project, was the key to moving this work forward quickly and successfully.”

Following the successful conclusion of the pilot, the remaining students were migrated over to the Google Apps platform in December 2009 using Google’s automated tools.

This is an area where there is much interest in the sector, and in February 2011 Loughborough University organized “guug11” - the first Google Apps for Education UK User Group meeting. 130 delegates from 70 institutions attended to learn more about the Google technology and what it could do for them. More information about the event can be found at http ://guug 11.lboro .ac .uk.

Martin Hamilton kicking off the guug11 event

Head of Internet Services Martin Hamilton concludes that “We’ve been working closely with Google on a range of initiatives. Google are like no other large company I can think of, and I view our relationship very much as a partnership.”

Google Apps in UK HE survey results

2010-08-21T00:25:00.006+01:00

I recently carried out a survey of IT directors to gauge the level of interest in the sector in a "user group" to discuss Google Apps for Education or perhaps cloud computing more generally. There were 28 responses, which is quite a good sample size for something like this. As this seems to be something that people are generally keen on, I will aim to organize an initial meeting for Autumn 2010.

Check back for further updates as this work progresses, but first a quick precis of the survey results...

Substantial interest in such a group from HE institutions
Overwhelming preference for a face-to-face meeting
Key topics:

Roadmap updates and engagement with Google over issues and enhancements
Integration with identity management / AD sync etc
APIs and systems integration
Institutional case studies / show and tell

Half of respondents had a production Google Apps service or were developing a service
1/3 of respondents were looking at their options and investigating suppliers
HR, VLE and Library systems were the other common SaaS services (>10% of respondents)
Google App Engine was the only PaaS in common use (1/4 of respondents)
Amazon EC2 was the only IaaS in common use (>10% of respondents)

Some of the statistics from the survey are likely to be of general interest, and these are reproduced below along with my commentary. I should mention that the tables and charts below were produced automatically by a Google Docs spreadsheet which the survey form acts as a front end to. I think this is one of the most useful features of Google Docs, as it takes nearly all of the pain out of conducting a survey and collating the responses. Here's a quick video from Google that shows how it works:

Now on with the survey questions...

Which of the following best describes Google Apps at your institution?

Production service	10	36%
Project to implement under way	4	14%
Business case being developed	1	4%
Considering options - not selected a supplier	8	29%
Not actively considering outsourcing	2	7%
Outsourced with another provider	1	4%
Other	2	7%

So, half of the respondents either had a production service in place already, or were in the process of pulling one together. Incidentally, I'll blog separately about the work involved in getting our own Google Apps service up and running, and our students' data migrated. It's interesting to see that a third of respondents were considering their options or developing a business case at the time of the survey.

What topics would be of particular interest to you?

Google Apps for Education product roadmap	23	82%
APIs and systems integration	21	75%
Engagement with Google over issues and enhancements	20	71%
Institutions' case studies / show and tell	20	71%
Google Apps Marketplace applications	10	36%
Google Message Security (Postini)	7	25%
Google Message Discovery (Postini)	6	21%
Google Search Appliance	10	36%
Chrome OS	6	21%
Android	8	29%
Single Sign On (SAML, Shibboleth etc)	0	0%
Identity Management (Active Directory sync etc)	23	82%
Developing with App Engine	7	25%

I had hoped that the responses to this question would help to shape the agenda for the user group meeting, and I wasn't disappointed. It was also good to hear from several institutions keen to share their Google Apps story with the community. I was hoping for more interest in Android and ChromeOS, for the reasons discussed in my blog post on chromoting - but this stuff may be best covered in an exhibition area with hands on demos. It was illuminating to see the level of interest in the Postini products - I had been wondering how visible these were to folk working in Education. Our own initial investigations suggested that Google may need to rethink their pricing model to develop an EDU market for these products.

Institutions were also asked about their use of "Software as a Service", "Platform as a Service" and "Infrastructure as a Service". The results are summarised below...

There are so many cloud hosted Software as a Service offerings that I decided to use the UCISA CIS survey system categories rather than attempt to list individual services.

It was interesting to see that some HE institutions were actively pursuing SaaS solutions in areas that might be considered quite sensitive - such as HR and Payroll.

From the long tail of "other" responses I picked up email and collaboration as the key additional areas. It may be interesting to consider whether the UCISA survey could usefully be extended to cover these and other infrastructure areas - e.g. preferred server, storage and networking vendors.

My feeling on drawing up the survey was that the only Platform as a Service providers in widespread use would turn out to be Google's own App Engine and Amazon Web Services. Hence I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was some interest in Heroku and Microsoft Windows Azure too. What the chart doesn't capture is that several of the institutions were looking into more than one PaaS provider.

Institutions were also asked about their use of Infrastructure as a Service providers such as Amazon with their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. This is an area that has seen a great deal of activity in the last couple of years, with many of the traditional players banking on a move away from on-premise IT.

Both Amazon (with VPC) and BT (with their Virtual Data Centre) are looking at a "hybrid cloud" approach that can use a VPN tunnel to provide Layer 2 adjacency between the customer premises and the IaaS provider's data centre.This makes it much less painful to move applications such as DNS and Active Directory into the cloud, and also potentially provides a route for live workload migration e.g. via VMware's Long Distance VMotion. I'll blog about the potential of the hybrid cloud separately...

It was interesting to see Eduserv's cloud hosting make an appearance. In this vein, Matt Johnson's blog posting on Eduserv's work on OpenStack and the "G-Cloud" is worth a look.

Looking at the responses to these more generic cloud computing questions it seems to me that this is still an area where people are still feeling their way. This is in contrast to services like Google Apps and Microsoft Live@edu, which have already gained significant traction. A cynic might say that these two are special cases, because they are being made available at no cost to institutions for a variety of reasons. Indeed it is instructive to look at the potential costs of an EC2 hosted site as I have blogged about recently.

So, all in all a very useful exercise - many thanks to all who responded, and in particular to those who volunteered to talk about their own experiences (I'll be in touch!)

UK HE Mail Filtering and Archiving Survey

2011-01-19T11:16:00.010Z

In January 2011 I surveyed IT Directors in FE and HE on their approach to email ﬁltering (scanning for spam, viruses etc) and archiving. The results of this survey will feed into a discussion at our IT Committee (IT governance body) later today. 33 responses were received, mostly in the first couple of days. 31 of these were from Higher Education institutions - so this is effectively a survey of mail filtering and archiving in HE only. Read on for an analysis of the responses, qualitative feedback from the respondents, and my conclusions.

At Loughborough our current approach is to use Google's built-in filtering for students and alumni, coupled with in-house filtering on our mail routers with SpamAssassin and ClamAV - and Forefront on our Exchange servers for staff. We also operate a locally developed archiving solution for staff which grew out of a JISC project on records management (see our EDUCAUSE 2007 talk on email archiving by Garry Booth, Graeme Fowler and Carys Thomas) and Kochi, an innovative solution to the problem of targetted "spear phishing" for users' passwords (see Graeme Fowler and Mike Cardwell's Kochi presentation to the UK Network Operators Forum).

Survey Responses

Qualitative Feedback

"Approximately 18 months ago, we moved to Google Mail."

"Considering using Archiving in Exchange 2010 as we roll this out for Staff only. We use Live@EDU for students. Likewise students spam ﬁltering is conducted by Live@EDU. We use C2C Email Archiving and Compliance for staff email archiving"

"We use: Exchange Archiving System from Autonomy"

"C2C ArchiveOne is our current solution we did however purchase CommVault Sympana suite but after many false starts drop this in favour of C2C as the maintenance costs and limitations of CommVault outweighed the capital investment required to change."

"SpamAssassin is used to 'score' incoming messages. Actual ﬁltering is set by user either via Exchange or via client based on spam score. Sophos PureMessage is used on Exchange for internal AV protection (but all email originating from outside the organisation is scanned by ClamAV)."

"We are currently running a pilot service with the aim to role out to all staff once our records management policy has been agreed."

"ICritical is an excellent and ﬂexible product. They do have a hosted archiving option as well which we don't use but are considering."

"We tried EMC emailXtender for about 3 years but our users really couldn't cope with the concept and our records management people weren't too impressed with the product either. We now use exchange managed folders to give some the ability to keep mail for prescribed periods and just provide larger mailboxes as appropriate."

"Staff email is through Exchange and Student email through Google."

"Emails automatically archived after 90 days from EMC Clariion to EMC Centerra and held for 7 years. Automatic deletion from Centerra after 7 years."

"Students hosted by live@edu and we don't provide them with any email services."

"Would be interested to know how many people offer encrypted email."

"MailScanner is a set of perl scripts written and supported by Southampton University."

"Student email has already been migrated to Google and we are intending to move staff email this year and will then be using Postini for archiving."

"Webroot has been excellent for ﬁltering staff mail, though not cheap. Student mail is with Live@EDU so subject to Microsoft ﬁltering. Archiving is a can of worms that we will avoid as long as possible."

"We have outsourced our student Email service onto Google Apps and rely on their inbuilt anti-virus and anti-spam protection. For staff, who use Exchange 2010, all inbound and outgoing trafﬁc ﬂows through both Postini and Forefront."

Analysis

The survey results suggest to me that with the trend to outsourced services for student email (as noted by Brian Kelly), institutions in this position no longer feel it necessary to carry out “heavy duty” mail ﬁltering for student accounts – mostly relying on the in-built protection offered by Microsoft and Google with their services.

Mail ﬁltering is still a current concern for staff accounts – those who reported that it was not were typically in the throes of outsourcing staff email too.

Survey responses validate our choice of in-house tools such as SpamAssassin, ClamAV and Forefront for “defence in depth”. The alternatives with signiﬁcant usage were Webroot and MessageLabs, both externally hosted services.

Just under half the respondents had some form of email archive, suggesting that the true ﬁgure across the community is much lower - people who are operating email archives would be likely to self-select when responding to a questionnaire such as this.

It was notable that several institutions only offered their email archive to certain staff members, and the qualitative feedback implied use by departments such as Academic Registries. The motivation for email archiving was an even split between regulatory compliance and records management.

It may be interesting to compare the results of this survey with the historical survey results reported by my colleagues Garry Booth, Graeme Fowler and Carys Thomas in their paper on email archiving for EUNIS 2007:

Survey of UK Universities, 2003

• 21 institutions responded

• Only general policies were evident

• Respondents were backing up their email rather than archiving it

• No institution was identified which had a well defined email archiving policy

Survey of UK Universities, October 2004

• 26 Universities and Colleges responded

• 22 not archiving email

• 4 in progress

• - Two taking a copy of all email

• - Other two – focus was management of mailbox sizes

Survey of UK Universities, March 2006

• 28 Universities and Colleges responded

• 1 has implemented

• 7 in progress

• 20 not archiving email

• Movement towards installing such systems

• Focus is technical management of storage, not records management

Quest Archive Manager, Symantec Enterprise Vault and C2C ArchiveOne were the only archiving tools used by more than one respondent. One respondent was using the in-built Exchange 2010 archiving system. One respondent reported confusion on the part of end users of their archiving solution - resulting in a move to a system like Loughborough’s, which uses a shared "archive mailbox".

Conclusions

From a Loughborough perspective I concluded that we should retain our in-house mail ﬁltering for the moment – outsourcing is not presently the norm for this function in our community, and it is clear that our approach is popular and well regarded. We have also won plaudits for Kochi, our innovative solution to the problem of targeted “phishing" emails, and losing this capability would be a step backwards.

Informal conversations with potential suppliers around our requirements indicated that of the major players only Google would be in a position to deliver a cost-effective (for our purposes) alternative to our current in-house archiving solution. However, Google’s Postini product (Google Message Discovery) for archiving was not used by any survey respondents. One respondent indicated that they would be moving to Postini in the future. It will be interesting to see whether the take up of the Postini services starts to ramp up in line with the growth in take-up of Google Apps. However, Google Apps for Education is free, whereas Postini is a chargeable product ;-)

Our email archive is presently a single shared Exchange mailbox with over 500GB of email. I think we should retain this, but take a look at how it can be split according to School/Departmental lines for improved performance and availability. We also need to improve communication/clarity over the archive's role for records management, as there is some anecdotal evidence that people sometimes use it as a personal dumping ground for email if they have exceeded their quota(!)

We currently run Exchange 2007 for staff, and are just starting up a project to look at Exchange 2010. This offers a number of enhancements including automatic archiving features for regulatory compliance, “personal archives” as an alternative to large primary mailboxes and PST files on people's hard drives, and greatly improved webmail for users of non-Microsoft browsers such as Chrome, Firefox and Safari. As there were no clear winners from the survey I think it makes good sense that we investigate the Exchange 2010 facilities in the first instance.

Mobile University state of the art

2010-07-01T16:46:00.002+01:00

I was just discussing with colleagues the respective merits of mobile apps, mobile optimised websites (sometimes disguised as apps) and frameworks for building them. It's interesting to take a look around and see what people have done in this space.

A number of institutions have partnered with oMbiel to offer services based on their campusM product. Chris Sexton from Sheffield has a good description of what's offered by campusM. campusM runs as a dedicated iPhone app or a Java midlet for other devices. I expect an Android app to appear soon too.

In parallel, several institutions have developed their own open source mobile projects, notably Mobile Campus Assistant (from the ILRT at Bristol), Mobile Oxford (from the Erewhon project at OUCS), and MIT's Mobile Web. A sample screen from Mobile Campus Assistant is shown to the left.

These systems are much more than mobile optimised versions of the institution's website. They provide key information targeted at the needs of the peripatetic IT user - including staff, students and visitors. Examples of services offered include:

Interactive campus maps with points of interest / gazeteer (and "Friend Locator" in campusM's case)
Institutional news and events feeds
Institutional email and telephone directory search
Personal calendar preview
PC availability in open access labs
Emergency contact information
IT service stats
Bus timetables and running information
Quick links into the institutional VLE for course materials etc, and to download podcasts
Quick access to Library services, e.g. books on loan and renewals
Careers information, e.g. employer presentations
Online payments, e.g. for printer credits
Access to institutional webcams
Access to exam and coursework results

A recent Eduserv 2010 Symposium looked at the state of the art in the "Mobile University", handily summarised by Andy Powell. Mobile support will also be one of the key topics at this year's Institutional Web Manager's Workshop.

So where does this leave us at Loughborough? Much of the information that our peers are providing is readily available here, although it's not presently provided in a unified way via a portal. We are starting up a portal project, which I will be blogging about separately, and clearly there is potential to kill two birds with one stone by producing a site that degrades gracefully for mobile users via judicious use of CSS.

However, people feel a degree of ownership of their apps, and I suspect that we will offer a mobile view of our portal site packaged as an app simply because this is an expectation that our users will have. This is where a cross-platform framework like PhoneGap or Rhomobile may be helpful, by giving us a one size fits all method of developing a mobile optimised site that renders well on all the popular device types and can be delivered as an app. It's probably worth noting that there are other simpler (but not cross platform) ways of turning a website into an app.

This is a theme I'll be returning to as our portal work starts to gather momentum, so check back later for some practical examples of the software discussed in this post.

Taking a fresh look at portals

2010-07-01T23:02:00.003+01:00

One of my current projects is to pull together a student portal for Loughborough. For a variety of reasons we missed the boat and failed to develop such a system back in the Noughties, but I think this is something we can turn to our advantage by learning from other people's experiences.

My view is that our portal (see left for portal concept poster from Ben Spencer in our Web design team) will be mostly about giving people a handy preview of information that's relevant to them, and linking through to systems and services that we already run - rather than imposing a whole new IT system on everyone. One convenient side-effect of this not being a direct replacement for an existing system is that we will be able to introduce it as and when it's ready, thereby avoiding the traditional mad rush to get everything ready for the start of the academic year.

The initial system will be very tightly scoped, and is mostly about us identifying a sensible underlying architecture that we can continue to build on. On launch day we are aiming for something along like this:

Information providers able to update their content via our Terminal Four Site Manager CMS, with the portal pulling in material from specified CMS nodes as they are updated
Widget framework allowing for:

Admin defined default widgets (of which some may be "sticky" and cannot be moved or removed)
User selected widgets from a catalogue
Users able to move, remove and ideally resize widgets

Alerts and notifications framework:

Information providers and IT systems can send targeted alerts to specific users or groups of users, e.g library book is due back, careers fair for finalists
Alerts are aggregated and presented together in the manner of an RSS aggregator (this may well be the underlying technology)
Some alerts may be so important (e.g. emergency messages from the University) that they are displayed in a modal pop-up

Embedded email widget, linking to Google Mail
Embedded calendar widget, linking to Google Calendar
Enterprise search via our Google Search Appliance
News feed widgets with University and Students Union news and events
Modules widget showing active module selections and linking through to Learn, our Moodle based VLE
Library widget, current loans and reservations, making use of the X Server API from Ex Libris and linking through to our Aleph library catalogue
Student finances widget, including printer credits and account balance, and linking through to online payments service for (e.g.) topping up printer credits

Over time I expect that the portal will come to encompass widgets for many other areas particularly around student self service - at present we don't have a system to link people through to carry out many common tasks such as a change of address. This probably won't make it into the initial launch later this year, though.

There are a number of widely used pieces of software that could form the underpinnings of our portal, such as uPortal, Liferay and Sakai. However, I'm conscious that some in the developer community feel that the JSR-168 and JSR-286 "portlet" standards on which these packages are based are no longer the way to go. Consequently I'll be spending some time looking at alternatives.

At the recent TransferSummit conference I had some interesting discussions around this area with Sakai architect Charles Severance, the W3C working group chair Steven Pemberton, and Scott Wilson from JISC CETIS. The Apache Wookie project (instigated by Scott) is particularly interesting in this context. Wookie provides a mechanism for hosting W3C Widgets, with integration into existing platforms including Sakai, Moodle and Elgg. W3C Widgets are simply Zip files containing HTML, CSS, images etc, and driven by JavaScript. Wookie's integration with platforms like Sakai means that we could potentially hedge our bets and be in a position to take advantage of full-blown JSR-168 portlets where these are available, whilst taking a more pragmatic approach for our own development work.

However, it should be noted that there are caveats around authentication in particular with W3C Widgets - at present there is no general agreement as to how to pass on login credentials to widgets from the parent platform. There is some interest in OAuth or IMS Basic LTI (itself built on OAuth) as the solution to this problem. The W3C specification also has some serious competition from OpenSocial, which includes a "gadget" mechanism derived from Google Gadgets. More to come on this topic as we start to build our prototype portal...

Disaster Recovery on a Shoestring

2010-07-19T17:45:00.005+01:00

At Loughborough we're currently gearing up to roll out the Terminal Four Site Manager CMS. We're looking at quite a nice hosting environment, with multiple front end web server VMs at separate locations with Linux Virtual Server for load balancing and failover.

This setup is great for handling problems like localised hardware failures and operating system bugs, but what happens in the event of a catastrophic failure such as the fire that destroyed the School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University? (Ballardian picture above from Dr John Bullas)

I'll blog about our wider institutional emergency planning separately. For this post let's consider what we could do to maintain a Web presence if circumstances conspire to cut off our Internet connection, or there's a major IT systems failure. We live in straitened times, so I'll frame this in monetary terms!

Option 1 - Dedicated server with hosting company (~£6,000/year)

Let's take a look at some sample pricing from one of the market leaders, RackSpace, for a dedicated Linux server. This works out as around £500/month for a fairly basic server (Quad core 2.5GHz Opteron with 2GB RAM and 2 x 250GB mirrored SATA drives, with a monthly bandwidth allocation of 1TB). So, for some £6,000/year we could could have our own DR server in the clouds. However, our actual bandwidth use is of the order of 3.5TB/month peak outbound, so the bandwidth figure would likely be higher. I'll also note that those SATA drives might have trouble keeping up with our peak loads of some 2.5m URL requests/day.

That's if we tried to replicate full our web presence - probably a key question here.

An emergency website could consist of a small subset of the normal presence, and key information has already been identified as part of the University's emergency planning work. However, I contend that it would be difficult to predict exactly which additional information would be needed in an emergency, and that a minimal version of the institutional site would only be appropriate for a very short period. We also need to keep in mind that in a disaster scenario the demand for the website is likely to be significantly greater than on a typical day.

Option 2 - Community based hosting deal (£250/year to £6,500/year)

We'll look at JANET Web Hosting here although there are other community based options, notably Eduserv Hosting. For an annual fee of some £250 per virtual machine the JANET hosting contract with RM provides 5GB of storage on a virtualized RedHat Linux or Windows platform. There are no bandwidth charges for this service and there is no bandwidth quota at present.

However, each additional 5GB of storage is chargeable at a rate of £200/5GB. This is where the discussion about whether to replicate the full site or just specific content becomes more significant. It's interesting to note that Loughborough's 160GB of web content would take the bill up to around £6,500/year, comparable with a dedicated server.

Option 3 - Reciprocal arrangement with peer institution (~£3,500/year)

At the recent Institutional Web Managers' Workshop 2010, UCL's Jeremy Speller spoke about emergency communications. In addition to some trenchant observations about the potential of technology such as Twitter in an emergency, Jeremy noted that there would be some logic in institutions working together on a bilateral basis to host backup servers and services for each other. There is a degree to which this already happens with infrastructure services such as DNS secondaries and NTP peers for time synchronisation. Some organizations have already gone further. For example, we have a long standing agreement with several other institutions to come to each others' aid in a disaster situation. The expectation is that this would be likely to include everything from technical assistance to Internet connectivity and server hosting.

At first sight, this reciprocal option might seem like the most cost effective route to take - most of the infrastructure is already in place and paid for, after all. However, if we are talking about a physical server then this will need to be networked, powered and cooled. It's often observed that these ancilliary costs can exceed the price of the server hardware. For our purposes a suitably spec'd enterprise class server (e.g. HP DL380) could bought for around £8,000, with an expected five year lifespan. So, let's call the total cost £16,000 over five years, or some £3,500/year (£7,000 if you consider both institutions). In a bilateral agreement such as this both parties would ultimately be contributing a four figure sum, even if this was difficult to quantify due to the vagaries of utility charging, power metering etc.

Of course this figure could be reduced by re-using old hardware or using cheaper hardware, but there would be a concomitant increase in the costs to both institutions of dealing with with failures. Staffing costs associated with a flaky system could easily dwarf facilities costs for server hardware and hosting.

The above notwithstanding, momentum in the industry is very much towards server virtualization. This potentially offers much lower ongoing costs for hosting, and many institutions have already virtualized large proportions of their server estate. However, one would expect that dedicated cloud hosting providers would enjoy the best economies of scale and be able to pass these on to their customers. Let's see how this could work out in practice... [And don't forget that we are only expecting to run our DR website live for a few days while normal service is restored!]

Option 4 - "Best of breed" cloud hosting (£100 to £5,500)

Cloud hosting tends to come in one of three flavours:

Software as a Service, such as Google Apps, Microsoft Live@edu and Salesforce.com - typically a subscription service delivered via a website
Platform as a Service, such as Google App Engine or Microsoft Windows Azure - giving you an API to write against for hosting your application in the cloud
Infrastructure as a Service, such as Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or Rackspace Cloud - giving you a virtual machine from a library of operating systems and preconfigured appliances. Typically you are charged on a pay-as-you-go basis for bandwidth and CPU capacity, though you often have the option of pre-paying for anticipated usage at lower rates

For this blog we'll assume that access to the underlying operating system is required in order to run scripts and manage the more complex aspects of the web server config. This leads us in turn to Infrastructure as a Service. We'll use Amazon EC2 as our example for this one.

A "small" EC2 Linux instance specification has enough storage (160GB) to be comparable with our main web server, although it may be resource constrained in other areas - 1.4GB RAM, CPU resource equivalent to a single core Xeon clocked at 1.2GHz. This costs $0.11/hour while it's active. It's presently free to upload material to EC2, but outgoing bandwidth at our typical usage rates would be charged for at $0.18/GB. So, if we had uploaded all 160GB of content to an EC2 instance, and had to run off this site for DR purposes for about a week, our bill would be some $18 for CPU usage and $160 for bandwidth (assuming around a quarter of our monthly 3.5TB data transferred) - or just over £100 at current exchange rates.

Now for comparative purposes let's imagine that we wanted to run our web server off EC2 full time, 24x7x365. It's possible to pay Amazon upfront for a "reserved instance", which dramatically reduces the cost per CPU hour. If our peak time bandwidth requirements were maintained, the total for this would be around £5,500/year, so comparable with (if not slightly cheaper than) a more traditional hosting approach. [All that's missing from the picture here is an academic discount rate ;-]

I'll note in passing that exchange rates could change dramatically, in our favour or against us, and that the true picture for Amazon is a little more complex - e.g. for persistence, storage would likely be done via Elastic Block Store. The Amazon offering is also particularly interesting given the recent availability of the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, which allows you to host institutional IP addresses in the cloud via an IPSEC tunnel between Amazon and your organization.

We'll be aiming to trial some of these options in the near future, so watch this space for further developments...

iPad naysayers have it wrong

2010-07-23T23:54:00.003+01:00

OK, so that's a provocative title for this post, and let's face it - much of the hyperbole surrounding the iPad is cringeworthy. But spend a bit of time looking at what people are doing with the technology, and an interesting picture emerges.

First off, here's Penguin Books CEO John Makinson demonstrating the work that his team has been doing to reimagine their back catalogue for the iPad, and create new "books" that fully exploit its capabilities: (note that these are Apps, not "conventional e-books" in EPUB format)

Next up, Flipboard, an App that creates an interactive newspaper for you based on public newsfeeds and a mash up of your friends' Facebook and Twitter posts: (no paywalls here ;-)

Now let's up the stakes... The popular contention is that the iPad is a device intended for passive media consumption. But wait, what's this?

In this video Franz.K demonstrates Aurora, an iPad app that effectively replaces an entire class of device, the Yamaha Tenori-On (MIDI controller capability notwithstanding). This ability of touch screen computers with fluid user interfaces to become "universal devices" has been much remarked upon, and other examples can be readily found - e.g. Korg's iElectribe.

Time to turn the volume up to 11 now, with a demo of RJ Voyager for the iPad. This is a wholly new way of making music that takes full advantage of the large multitouch screen as a control surface and Internet connectivity to download new "scenes":

But surely there's nothing new about touch interfaces? Products like the HP TouchSmart PC have achieved some market penetration, and the "tablet" form factor has been around for a long time. Clearly a very large part of the success of the iPad is down to Apple's canny approach to building upon the ecosystem of developers and apps that has coalesced around the iPhone and iPod Touch, and the evolution of touch technology from resistive screens that had to be used with stylii to the modern capacitive multitiouch paradigm. Perhaps more than anything, though, the iPad finally gives us Star Trek technology - the kind of computer we feel we deserve for the 21st century.

The Educational Bit

So what conclusions can we draw for educators? If the evidence of the iPhone is anything to go by, there is a distinct possibility that next academic year's intake of students may well forego laptops in favour of iPads - or tablets from other vendors.

It's already been widely noted that the absence of Flash support (Frash notwithstanding) for i* devices will cause problems with many learning objects created with a Mac/PC audience in mind. Joshua Kim notes that:

My first attempts to get all the content that can play through a browser and an LMS to play correctly on an iPad (curricular articles and videos) resulted mostly (and disturbingly) in failure.

This may actually be a blessing in disguise, by helping to steer people towards an open standard approach to learning objects based on HTML 5 and open video codecs such as WebM. However, widespread adoption of the iPad might well lead to the orphaning of large volumes of Open Educational Resources - produced in most cases at the taxpayer's expense.

It's interesting to consider different Higher Education institutions responses to the iPad - Jodi Harrison sums this up nicely in a blog posting:

The first camp, the early adopters, is rushing to adopt the device on a massive scale. Many are considering whether to provide an iPad to every student and faculty member. At least two institutions, Seton Hill University (not to be confused with Seton Hall) and George Fox University, plan to provide an iPad to every student later this year.

The second camp, the skeptics, wants nothing to do with the device. Some institutions, including Princeton University and George Washington University, are banning or limiting the use of the device on their campus networks until Apple provides fixes to possible connectivity and security bugs.

Ask yourself whether your institution is progressive or regressive? :-)

[Princeton have previous form here, having carried out a Kindle trial and concluded that the device wasn't ready for prime time for serious educational use]

Of course many institutions have scaled back PC provision for students on the assumption that they will mostly bring laptops. With that in mind, I'll leave the last word to John Naughton, describing the experience of editing a book using Pages on the iPad:

Later, I import a draft chapter from my current book project into Pages — and find that it’s stripped out all the footnotes, rendering the document entirely useless. I can’t work on it on the iPad in other words. Bah!

Magical!

Chromoting and what it means for you

2010-07-29T00:32:00.006+01:00

My talk from JIF2010, in pictures

This is just to amplify a few of the points I made in my talk today in the "Thunderbolts and Lightning" session at the JISC Joint Innovation Forum conference at Royal Holloway. The graphic at the head of this posting was kindly produced by the good folk at Meeting Magic as a summary of the session.

The concept of the sessions was to look at the emerging threats and challenges facing institutions. I chose to think more in terms of new opportunities and how we might take advantage of them.

Let's begin by following on from my recent posting about the iPad. The conceit here is that the iPad has taken off because it meets most people's needs, most of the time. Whether or not you agree with this, it turned out that lots of people did want a big iPhone :-)

It may be worth reflecting on whether this owes more to an improved user experience through multitouch, or a reduction in the number of frustrating failure modes associated with a more complex device.

So, will Steve Jobs be on stage this time next year announcing a 27" iMac running iOS?

[Perhaps! However, the rumour mills are always cranking this kind of thing out...]

Of course Apple are by no means the only player in the newly rejuvenated information appliance space. Google's Android is probably the key competitor, and with devices from the likes of Dell and Toshiba it is now clearly viewed as a mainstream option.

If we peek into our crystal ball, what is the role of the IT department in a world where information appliances and software have usurped the traditional role of the "PC"? There may be a lesson here from Google's other operating system - ChromeOS. ChromeOS is an even more radical reconception of what people need from computing devices. Put simply, ChromeOS replaces the normal operating system desktop and applications with the Chrome web browser. Until recently this might have been of limited interest, but with the possibilities opened up by HTML5 (including offline storage), it's now looking much more interesting. As Mikel Manitius notes in a blog posting, ChromeOS is Google’s Secret Enterprise Thin Client:

So if an Enterprise can either move its most common applications into the cloud (or better yet, build it that way from scratch), the next logical step is to replace the old legacy desktop. Those applications that can’t be given a web-based interface for whatever reason, can just be encapsulated through browser-based terminal emulation or remote display.

The key word here is "chromoting". This is still a little sketchy at the time of writing, but it appears to be Google's solution to the problem of legacy apps that are not delivered as a web service. Chromoting provides access to apps running on another machine, in a similar fashion to a remote desktop session, but delivered through the Chrome browser.

Initial discussion of chromoting has revolved around the consumer scenario that a ChromeOS user will have a PC whirring away in a corner somewhere running legacy Windows apps that they occasionally need access to. I contend that a more likely scenario for enterprise and education users is that the apps will be hosted in the data centre or the cloud. This raises some interesting possibilities such as renting apps on a pay as you go basis - why buy AutoCAD if you only need it for a month? There may also be significant potential for efficiency gains and cost savings by sourcing apps from a mixture of internal builds (for specialist software) and external sources for off-the-shelf packages.

It's perhaps worth noting that there is very little new stuff involved here - application virtualization is already well established, with large scale use of systems such as Microsoft App-V, Citrix XenApp and VMware ThinApp. These packaging technologies form the back end to desktop virtualization systems like VMware View and are used to drive the bulk of today's conventional thin client deployments.

Sticking with Google as our example, it's not hard to picture a future where mainstream apps will be delivered via the web (perhaps increasingly through the Google Apps Marketplace), with legacy apps being chromoted. In this scenario the Google Docs general purpose storage could easily become the "home drive" for data from chromoted apps. There are multiple potential income streams here building on top of the Google Apps infrastructure that make this an attractive business model.

If the developments I've outlined in this blog come to pass, they would be hugely beneficial for the service user - rapid provisioning of new apps, availability of multiple versions of apps, automatic cloud based backup, no DLL/versioning/patchlevel conflicts, "disposable" hardware, and so on. However, the potential for disaster is also high unless sufficient care is taken to ensure that the approach taken is sustainable.

To get the mix right, I think a change of emphasis would be required from central IT services - this is probably best phrased as "adapt or die", melodrama notwithstanding. This change would see a reduction in effort devoted to areas such as servers, storage and corporate desktop support. In would come a new focus on the likes of APIs and systems integration and Linked Data - and providing technical assistance to the legal team during contract negotiations! My feeling is that this work would be significantly more rewarding (and challenging!) than that which it displaces.

This theme of "commodity" oriented work giving way to "complexity" oriented work in order to maximize added value is one that I will return to from time to time in my blog posts.

Google Apps for Alumni - 1,000 users in our first week!

2010-08-08T09:48:00.007+01:00

I recently blogged about Loughborough's Google Apps for Alumni service, which has just gone live for this summer's leavers after an initial pilot with alumni from previous years.

I'm delighted to be able to report back that in the first week of full operation, over 1,000 people have used the alumni service!

This is great news, and I'd like to thank all those involved in the project for their hard work and perseverance - in particular Taz Siddeeque, Henry Chambers and Chris Peel from the Loughborough Students Union Executive and Richard Barber from our Development and Alumni Relations Office. From IT Services, Graeme Fowler, Nikki Doyle, Kathryn Latham, Chris Beggs and Lee Preston have provided invaluable assistance and support. Most of all, though, Tim and Dan from Google, for their work on the Google Apps multidomain support, and simpleSAMLphp developers Andreas Solberg and Olav Morken from UNINETT - we couldn't have done it without you!

Let's just recap on why this is a big deal - in previous years, leaving students would have had their University IT presence completely destroyed when their IT account lapsed. This is common practice in the education sector, and was a necessity due to the limited resources available to us. However, student feedback indicated that the IT deregistration came at perhaps the worst possible moment - and caused severe stress at a time when people were least prepared for it. From our own point of view in IT Services, summer and winter graduations would invariably be accompanied by a flood of requests for expired accounts' data to be restored and accounts reactivated for a period. By an unhappy coincidence these have also been our busiest times for development work. So, bad all round.

The situation has changed completely now, because we are in a position to convert an expired student Google Apps account into an alumni account without loss of data. It may sound like hard work, but the heavy lifting is done by Google. All we have to do is post an XML fragment like this via Google's Provisioning API:

This API call moves the user's Google Apps account from our student domain to our alumni domain, preserving the associated data - including email, calendar, contacts and documents.

The missing link in all of this is the simpleSAMLphp software developed under the auspices of the Feide federated identity management project in Norway and subsequently widely taken up as a lightweight implementation of the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). Google Apps uses SAML 2.0 for single sign-on, which for our students translates behind the scenes to LDAP authentication against our Active Directory.

For alumni users we have hacked simpleSAMLphp to query the Google accounts database if the LDAP authentication fails. I had initially thought that we might achieve this through Shibboleth, but then I looked at the Shibboleth source code! I'd contend that simpleSAMLphp is much more tractable/hackable, and indeed the simpleSAMLphp experience has been so encouraging that we are currently looking at what we need to do to make it play nicely with the UK Access Management Federation.

The initial feedback that we have been receiving on the alumni service has been extremely positive, and I think it's particularly telling that people seem to be starting to take the new service for granted already :-) I saw something similar a few years ago when I led the project to implement the campus wide wireless network at Loughborough, but this took a little longer (two to three months) to reach the same stage of acceptance and expectancy. For me the message here is that this is how things should always have worked!

[To find out more about the Google Apps for Alumni service at Loughborough, please see our Alumni FAQ]

Intrinsic motivation - from Magic Trackpad to @psychemedia

2010-08-14T01:06:00.005+01:00

In a recent talk at TEDGlobal 2010 in Oxford, Clay Shirky (above) discusses a very interesting topic - intrinsic motivation. The critical section starts at around 6 minutes into the video, so watch this if you don't have time for the whole thing. The talk is about the larger (and also quite fascinating) concept of "cognitive surplus", which Shirky illustrates with some examples of the power of Internet mediated grassroots activism in a post-TV era. And yes, he does have a book out :-)

So, what's this all about? Let me frame it like this... Why is it that companies like Apple and Google consistently produce exceptional ideas, products and services? How can other organizations best learn from these firms?

Intrinsic motivation is all about doing things because they interest and stimulate you. This is in direct contrast to extrinsic motivation, which is principally about doing things because you have been instructed or coerced to - often with some implied threat of punishment for failure.

Probably the key text in this area is "Effects of externally mediated rewards on intrinsic motivation" by Edward Deci, from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1971. You might struggle to find this online, though. Deci also co-wrote a widely cited book Intrinsic motivation and self-motivation in human behavior, which you can peek at via Google Books. In a recent paper looking back at 30 years of research into this area, Deci and Richard Ryan observe that:

The most basic distinction is between intrinsic motivation, which refers to doing something because it is inherently interesting or enjoyable, and extrinsic motivation, which refers to doing something because it leads to a separable outcome. Over three decades of research has shown that the quality of experience and performance can be very different when one is behaving for intrinsic versus extrinsic reasons.

This theory helps to explain why activities that used to be fun and rewarding in themselves (such as programming computers) can turn almost overnight into chores - e.g. "you have two weeks to recode the user interface before the pitch to the angel investors". In a situation where extrinsic motivation is the norm, tasks and goals are typically imposed externally by management and there is little opportunity for self-direction. Let's picture that the latter approach is taken to extremes, leading to demoralization and poor productivity. In an extrinsic culture this would likely lead to rounds of performance reviews, layoffs if targets are not met, and so on.

I think the continuing success of companies like Apple and Google (and there aren't many companies like them!) is due in a large part to tapping into intrinsic motivation in their staff, with new hires and acquisitions only made if they fit into this mindset. Much has been made of Google's famous "20% time" for personal projects, which gave rise to the likes of Gmail, Google News and Adsense. I'd contend that the culture of intrinsic motivation actually runs much broader and deeper. In my experience working with Google over the last few months this happens in a number of ways, e.g. by letting staff choose projects to work on, encouraging people to take personal responsibility for the results, and working in small project oriented groups rather than a top down hierarchical structure.

We've been doing some work with Apple recently too. I don't have similar visibility of their inner workings yet, but my feeling is that for all the public perception of control freakery, something similar is at work. For example I don't envisage a top down directive that "we must make the conventional mouse obsolete by Christmas 2010 in order to maintain our 'thought leadership' image". Instead picture a talented engineer producing a prototype of the Magic Trackpad from some parts that happened to be lying around and saying "hey guys, I took the trackpad out of the Macbook and made it standalone - do you think there's some mileage in this?"

Incidentally, if you've not seen the Magic Trackpad already, here's a video from Apple (from the OS X System Preferences control panel) that works through the built-in gestures... This in itself is pretty neat, but it gets even better if you use something like Andreas Hegenberg's BetterTouchTool freeware to add your own custom gestures and actions. After a stint on the Magic Trackpad, an old style mouse will probably seem rather quaint, but also somewhat limited and constraining. Of course I'd have to note here that free and open source software like BetterTouchTool (BTT is free but not open source) is another good example of people acting on their intrinsic motivations, in some cases profitably. Eric Raymond has some interesting thoughts on the role of patronage, which are quite relevant here.

Of course we can't talk about Apple without keeping in mind that they have a charismatic leader par excellence in the form of Steve Jobs. Is it possible to have one of these new-style organizations without an exceptional leader? There may be a clue here in that Google has three... :-) To get an idea about what drives Steve Jobs, his strength of character and his personal presence, watch the commencement (graduation) address he gave at Stanford in 2005:

Now let's move on to look at what happens when developments that are happening at Internet speed collide with the more sedate world of academia.

One of the most interesting developments over the last couple of years has been the explosion of interest in Linked Data, which is all about opening up data sets (such as MP's expenses) and figuring out how to create mashups by combining data from different sources. The information in question can range from common office document formats such as Excel spreadsheets through to SPARQL targets and the Semantic Web.

Open University lecturer Tony Hirst, aka @psychemedia is a leading figure in this movement, frequently invited to conferences and workshops to speak about (and demonstrate) its potential. Tony's work is widely cited, notably by the curators of data.gov.uk and The Guardian's Open Platform. Returning to our theme of intrinsic motivation, Tony's day job is as a robotics lecturer - his mashup activities could easily be thought of as moonlighting. Tony has no formal peer reviewed academic publications relating to his work on Internet technologies, in spite of being an internationally recognised authority in his field. His work is highly interactive and difficult to appreciate offline. This video will give you a flavour of it:

For me this raises some interesting questions around how to measure concepts like "impact" and "significance" in the new world that we find ourselves in. It is clear that Tony has made a huge contribution to the area by pushing the technologies to their very limits, illustrating how data from disparate sources can be brought together to create a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts, and exposing the cracks wherever they show.

So how would your organization recognize and reward (or even attempt to "manage"!) someone like Tony? Of course we can't all be Google, but a useful first step is undoubtedly some level of self-awareness of the power of intrinsic motivation and the results that it can deliver.

And what are the implications for the academic community when the old mechanisms of peer reviewed research publications, citations etc start to break down? How do we figure out someone's impact and significance?

Perhaps this is the future... :-)

Baked beans or dogfood? Find out, with talking barcodes

2010-08-17T00:47:00.005+01:00

Let's imagine that you can't see to find out what's in that tin you just took out of the cupboard. This isn't a hypothetical scenario if you're visually impaired. Rice pudding, baked beans, or dog food? Doesn't bear thinking about, does it? Later on in this post I'll offer a simple solution for Android devices, but first here's a bit of background...

I have an interest in assistive technology, and for the last few years have been attending Sight Village to geek out on the latest gadgets for blind and partially sighted people. Historically there has been a running theme of hugely expensive software and/or hardware packages to do things like screen magnification and screen reading. This year I felt that things were substantially different - the buzz was about apps for iPhone and Android, and it was telling that there were lots of iPads in evidence. I think Apple have a particular mindshare here because of their Voiceover extensions to iOS:

My experience of screen readers and magnifiers under older Symbian and Windows Mobile devices has been pretty dire - memory and CPU hogging, and prone to crashing the device due to being only tangentially integrated with the operating system. To add insult to injury these packages have tended to be extremely expensive due to the limited size of their market. The move with Android and iOS to support accessibility from the ground up is very encouraging. Let's see what sorts of apps it makes possible...

Here's a very powerful example. SayText is free OCR and text-to-speech software for the iPhone:

But let's head back towards baked beans and dog food... At Sight Village this year there were several systems for labelling things and then using a reader to identify them. The RNIB's PenFriend is probably the most impressive of these. You might expect that this uses RFID tags, but it's actually based on optical recognition. This makes the labels effectively disposable as the unit cost is very low. Here's John Godber from the RNIB explaining how this system works:

The PenFriend was pretty impressive to play with in real life, but I found myself thinking that many of the items you would be interested in (e.g. CDs/DVDs and food packaging) already have an optical tag on them - the humble barcode (UPC). This took me back to my first adventures with barcode scanning on mobile phones. Google Googles for Android is probably the most impressive app in this category, as it will scan bar codes, carry out on-the-fly OCR of text, translate text into other languages, and carry out a Google search. Here's a video of Hartmut Neven from Google demoing recent enhancements:

I found myself thinking that a paired down version of this could be very handy for a visually impaired Android user. Enter the Scripting Layer for Android (SL4A), which exposes the underlying Android APIs to a range of scripting languages. This makes the barrier of entry very low indeed for doing interesting things with your device. Now you can write trivial Python, Perl or Ruby scripts that use geo-location, accelerometer, compass, speech synthesis, speech recognition, scan barcodes with the camera, and interact with the Internet. Here's a video demoing some simple Python scripting on the phone itself:

The SL4A community has helpfully put together a large number of tutorials, including this nice example of barcode scanning for books from Google's Matt Cutts:

import android
droid = android.Android()
code = droid.scanBarcode()
isbn = int(code['result']['SCAN_RESULT'])
url = “http://books.google.com?q=%d” % isbn
droid.startActivity(‘android.intent.action.VIEW’, url)

This six line script is all it takes to start up the Android barcode scanner, look up the UPC code and then carry out a Google Books search in the Android web browser. Unfortunately if you turn on the Android TalkBack screen reader, it insists on reading out everything it comes across, including the URL of the Google site being visited.

So, here goes with talking barcodes!

This script is a quick and dirty hack to scan a barcode, search the Google Products database for the barcode, pull out some interesting attributes (title, price, description etc) and speak them.

import android
import urllib2
import re

from htmlentitydefs import name2codepoint
name2codepoint['#39'] = 39

def unescape(s):
  return re.sub('&(%s);' % '|'.join(name2codepoint),
    lambda m: unichr(name2codepoint[m.group(1)]), s)

droid = android.Android()
droid.ttsSpeak("Ready to scan bar code")

code = droid.scanBarcode()
barcode = int(code.result['extras']['SCAN_RESULT'])
print "Barcode: ", barcode

url = "http://www.google.com/products?q=%d" % barcode
handler = urllib2.urlopen(url)
response = handler.read()
handler.close()

# clunky code to pull out the interesting bits - was hoping to use xml.dom.minidom instead
rtitle = re.compile(r'<h3 class="result-title">.*</h3>', re.M|re.S).search(response)
rattrs = re.compile(r'<p class="result-attributes">([^<]+)</p>', re.M|re.S).search(response)
rdescr = re.compile(r'<p class="result-desc">([^<]+)</p>', re.M|re.S).search(response)
rprice = re.compile(r'<span class="main-price">([^<]+)</span>', re.M|re.S).search(response)

output = ""
if rtitle is not None:
  output = re.sub(r'.* >(.*)</a></h3>', r'\1', rtitle.group(0))
if rattrs is not None:
  output += re.compile(r'<p class="result-attributes">(.*)</p>', re.M|re.S).sub(r'\1', rattrs.group(0))
if rdescr is not None:
  output += re.compile(r'<p class="result-desc">(.*)</p>', re.M|re.S).sub(r'\1', rdescr.group(0))
if rprice is not None:
  output += re.compile(r'<span class="main-price">(.*)</span>', re.M|re.S).sub(r'\1', rprice.group(0))

print unescape(output)
droid.ttsSpeak(unescape(output))

With a little more finessing I think it should be possible to replace the crufty regular expressions with callouts to the Python DOM library. I should mention that the HTML entity decoding above is courtesy of dluce's posting to Stack Overflow. A Python guru could probably replace most of this with a couple of well chosen one liners.

Ironically, whilst the Google Products database search did just fine with a bunch of books and CDs, it didn't match my test case tin of baked beans. I think a useful next step would be to link the script up with the barcode database provided by upcdata.info, as a database of last resort. This loses the immediate potential for comparison shopping that we get through the Google database, though. I like to picture a blind person at the supermarket being asked if they need any help - "Thanks but I'm OK. Think I'll get this from the local shop down the road, my phone says it's cheaper there" :-)

Now it's over to you to think of some other applications for SL4A, like this nice example of onboard rocket telemetry gathering...

Reflections on #IWMW10 and "amplification"

2010-08-29T12:10:00.010+01:00

Martin Hamilton at IWMW10 from UKOLN on Vimeo.

Here's a slightly cheesy video interview with me from the recent Institutional Web Managers Workshop at Sheffield, filmed by live blogger Kirsty Pitkin from TConsult. In it there is the implication that events like this are worth their weight in gold, and the statement that I have had the equivalent of tens of thousands of pounds of free consultancy from IWMW10 alone.

All fine talk, but let's spend a moment deconstructing this... The highlight of IWMW10 for me was that I became aware of an open source product that will save my institution around £50K over a three year timeframe. In my view this alone amply justifies the £350 conference registration fee. I also consider the event to be a masterclass in "event amplification", which I look at further below.

Events like IWMW provide great opportunities to get together with like minded people and share experiences. Just now we are gearing up to launch a student portal (though it will probably have a jazzier name), working out a tractable approach to the mobile web, reviewing and updating our web infrastructure, and assessing the impact of disruptive technology such as the iPad. And I didn't even mention the economy... The key thing is that we're not the only ones - these are topics of common interest.

But... you can't always attend an event that you would like to, and you can only be physically present at one parallel session (at a time!) Here's where amplified events come in. This is all about using the power of "Web 2.0" tools to engage with a wider audience, more deeply than through a simple video stream, and with a feedback loop. The latter ensures that remote participants can play a part in an event, and provides a handy backchannel that delegates can also use to share ideas and information. Brian Kelly's slides below take us through the origins of this approach, and provide feedback on some five years of practical experience:

What Can We Learn From Amplified Events?
View more presentations from Brian Kelly.

At IWMW10 Brian gave an impassioned plea for Web teams to use the tools of their trade to communicate, solicit feedback and generally stay relevant and involved. Thinking beyond the core Web team's activities, I thought it would be interesting to try this approach out with some of the projects that I'm involved with, hence this blog. The combination of blog postings and the amplification tools discussed above is particularly attractive to me because it means that I can relate the work I'm doing to an existing conversation (e.g. using the #iwmw10 hash tag in reference to this particular event), and also reach out to an audience beyond my immediate colleagues and team members.

Now for a note of caution... Non-Disclosure Agreements, tender confidentiality clauses and the like mean that there are certain areas that are off limits at any point in time. For instance, just now I am party to several discussions under NDA, involved in a couple of tenders and also conducting some quite sensitive initial conversations with potential partners. In many ways this mirrors the situation we see with e-Learning objects sequestered in the VLE (please note that I am not an e-Learning expert :-), and academic publications embargoed for months or years as part of journal publishing arrangements.

So, after having blogged for two months I thought it would be interesting to take a look back at how well this has worked. Is there anyone there? Have I managed to reach a wider audience? Has there been a dialogue? And what about my chosen techniques for "amplifying" my blog postings? Let's have a look at some statistics for my blog, courtesy of Google Analytics and Google AdSense. These may also be interesting as a convenient illustration of the sort of data that service providers like Google are collecting about your browsing habits.

First off, my blog pages have now been viewed over a thousand times. This is no great shakes in advertising terms, and according to AdSense I shouldn't give up the day job just yet...

Google Analytics shows the expected peaks in page views as a new posting is promoted, and also provides some interesting insights into the behaviour of my readers... For example, 77% of them read only the posting itself, 70% have never been to the site before (or cleared their cookies, changed browser etc), and on average people spend just over a minute reading my posts...

What's that, just over a minute? Averages can be misleading, so let's drill down to that one:

Aha! So when there is a new blog posting people are spending some three to five minutes reading it - that's perfect. The average is probably a bad metric for low volume sites, as it's skewed by all of the people dropping by to see if there is a new posting, or finding the site by mistake.

But who are my readers? They're from the green countries on the map below...

Bit disappointing that there haven't been any visitors from Greenland yet :-( One to watch for the future!

Let's look at the top countries and the proportion of page views they account for...

Will the knowledge that there is interest in my blog from outside the UK change my approach? It may be interesting to look back in a few months time to see if the US and Canadian readers in particular have exerted a discernable influence, or whether there's a noticeably international feel to the postings. But what about the UK readers - is there a pattern here?

It probably won't come as a surprise that one of the two big red circles is Loughborough, where my home institution is based. There are quite a few Loughborough folk in my LinkedIn and Facebook networks, and in my Twitter followers. Interesting that the other big one is London though...

Now let's pause for a moment to consider the ramifications of this - a reasonable assumption would be that the work that I am blogging about is principally intended for a local audience, and that this would form the lion's share of my readers. In fact only 182 out of 858 site visits (21%) could be directly identified as coming from Loughborough. I think this nicely validates Brian's point about the potential of wider engagement through modern Web tools, and the principles of "amplification". The other 79% of my readers can't all be Loughborough folk coming in from home or their travels.

But are these just casual passers-by, or am I building a community of interest here? It's interesting to see that around a third of my visitors are returning to the site...

But where are my visitors coming from... ?

I have tended to promote my blog postings by sending the URL to Twitter, and posting to LinkedIn and Facebook. My understanding is that anyone following these links will show up in the "Referring Sites" section (Twitter itself presently accounts for 8% of referrals), whereas the "Direct Traffic" refers to URLs entered directly into the browser. Perhaps my 858 visits aren't all they appear to be, if 45% of them are actually indexing robots, spam merchants, security scanners and the like!

Finally, let's have a look at the platform breakdown for readers of the blog. At Loughborough our standard corporate desktop uses IE running on Windows XP. Is that typical of my readers?

As far as visitors to my blog are concerned, IE in all its flavours accounts for a mere 17% of visits. Of course IE is effectively Windows only nowadays, so it's interesting to see the combined stats for Firefox (29%) and Chrome (28%) here.

Looking at visitors to the site by operating system, I was struck that iPad, iPhone and Android together enjoy a 14% share of site visits - clearly it's worthwhile spending a little time to ensure that the blog is usable for these folk.

I'll come back to the blog stats from time to time to see if there are any trends (or surprises!) emerging, but I hope that the info I've presented here will help to get across Brian's message that there is value to taking a little time out to try get your message across to a wider audience. If you've not looked at Google Analytics before, then I hope the small sample of the available stats that I have presented here has whetted your appetite. You can apply Google Analytics to any web site, not just a blog, and your site doesn't have to be hosted by Google.

I've not written here about the comments I've received on my blog postings, but they are much appreciated, and I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank you, my small (but select :-) readership for your readiness to engage and your helpful contributions.

The Incredible Disappearing Portal

2010-10-20T12:09:00.005+01:00

I’ve blogged in the past about our project to create a student portal at Loughborough this Autumn. This post is intended to provide a quick update and also to explore some of the architectural issues that have arisen.

In a previous post I introduced the concept that a portal did not necessarily equate to “a portal system”, i.e. a dedicated piece of software. This is a theme that I want to pick up on here. If we had been putting a portal in a few years ago, then we would almost certainly have surveyed the market and looked at packages like uPortal, Sakai and Liferay. Why not simply put one of these systems in now?

Here's why...

The world has changed sufficiently through the evolution of HTML, CSS and Javascript that I contend these now provide most of the underpinnings that we need to construct an engaging portal site. Whilst a full blown portal system would in theory offer us benefits through standardization and re-usability, the reality is that Java JSR-168 portlets are not readily available from our suppliers (I checked!), and we have a number of bespoke systems or databases that would require custom development in any case. It's also the case that our skills are more in PHP and Perl than Java. So my overall conclusion was that a “traditional” portal system would be a huge distraction and probably slow the whole project down considerably.

I’d also have to echo some of the comments from IWMW10 delegates about the perceived “clunkiness” of these systems (see Owen Stephens' summary) to people who are used to fluid Web 2.0 interfaces that make heavy use of jQuery based effects. Of course we could retrofit this stuff, but my feeling is that this would be misdirected effort which would be better spent on opening up more systems to the portal, providing open data feeds etc.

That said, there is a question in my mind around the degree to which people expect to be able to customize a portal site. Our students presently have iGoogle as their landing page, and I expect to effectively supplant this with the portal site. Will students expect to be able to theme the portal site to the Nth degree, embed their own choice of widgets, and so on? I don’t plan to take iGoogle away, but equally I don’t (yet) intend for us to offer our widgets as iGoogle gadgets and offer a huge choice of themes - think online banking rather than Yahoo or iGoogle. Student focus group feedback will be invaluable on this one.

After an intensive development period, we now have a portal prototype that can be demonstrated to people. It clearly needs a bit more spit and polish, but we now have most of the phase 1 features implemented. After the remaining snags are sorted out I will be sharing the URL with a few people for feedback. It will be very interesting to see if there is a viral spread in usage. This approach proved invaluable in our wireless network rollout and the move to Google Apps, and provided much in the way of useful feedback that enabled the services to be tuned prior to formal launch.

So, without further ado - here's how it's looking at the moment!

Loughborough student portal prototype

You will see that we have email and calendar feeds from Google, module information from our student information system, with click through to our Moodle VLE, library loan information from Aleph and balances for our VMC cashless card payment system and Safecom charged printing. Clicking on the Printing History link brings up your recent print jobs in a "lightbox" (using the excellent ColorBox), which is a trick that I expect us to make more use of.

However, one bit of this isn't working yet - the Notifications box on the top left of the page is still static HTML. I'll blog in the next few weeks about how we plan to fill that with targeted alerts and notifications.

Personalisation

This is done by embedding a small PHP fragment in any page that will have personalised content. The conceit here is that any page on our website can potentially have personalised content and that the widgets being created for the portal can be reused all over the place rather than being orphaned on a site which you have to visit in its own right.

Behind the scenes a library routine is called which looks up your user name (you will have authenticated by this point) in our Active Directory via LDAP and caches the attributes returned by the directory for later use by widgets. At the moment we are doing this on a page by page basis, but I expect that we will move to storing the attributes (probably as an encrypted cookie) to improve performance.

The conceit behind this project is that the portal is simply a regular website that has embedded widgets, which in turn can take advantage of information about the user’s identity to personalize the information that they display.

Widgets

The “widgets” themselves are not formally specified in the sense of JSR-168 Java portlets – they are simply calls out to embed additional content. Widgets could be written in PHP and embedded using something like PHP’s require_once() mechanism. Equally a PHP callout such as system() or an IFRAME can be used for this. This approach is well suited material being included as library items in a Content Management System such as our Terminal Four Site Manager CMS, or authoring software such as Dreamweaver.

I was keen that the initial selection of widgets that we committed to develop would be written in a range of languages and take a range of different approaches behind the scenes. This proves the concept that the portal site is essentially technology neutral. At present the prototype is written in a mixture of PHP, Perl and Python. For best performance (this will have to perform smoothly with in excess of 30,000 sessions/day) we will want to avoid calling out to external interpreters to keep the page render time down to a minimum. I think this means that the default widgets people see will end up being entirely PHP based.

University API

We are close to having everything we need for the initial student portal launch, but I expect us to develop further RESTful APIs as the requirements for the next phase of the portal firm up - perhaps eventually culminating in the much discussed but as yet apocryphal “University API”. Our portal effort will begin with a read only view of key data, but as time goes by I expect us to start providing interactive widgets that update back end systems, and to experiment with mashing up multiple data feeds for visualisation purposes.

My view is that the portal (and there will be only one, just displaying different widgets depending on your role) will use the following technologies, in preference order:

APIs where they exist, e.g. Google ATOM feeds and 2-legged OAuth mechanism, SOAP API for our Mifare based card system, our library's home grown RESTful API, and so on
Direct database connections where an API is not available (still surprisingly common with bought-in packages) - presently we have a mixture of MySQL and ODBC for MS SQL Server
IFRAMEs to embed the results of code that executes on other systems - probably the solution for most of our Oracle Web Reports and Apex code
Screen scraping as a last resort, i.e. pull the results of fetching a URL then massage them for presentation

Time for a REST

As the portal becomes established I see us moving more and more towards RESTful APIs and away from the other approaches, which are fine for bootstrapping but not really sustainable. Here's a great example of constructing a RESTful API around the del.icio.us social bookmarking site. More on this topic anon...