Back from a lovely not-quite-a-break: My wife also travels a lot for work, but we had a rare two weeks together at home including a four day weekend. It was great. Our dog thought so too. Now Holly is off in Winnipeg and I'm keeping the lights on at home. The dog wasn't sure about this plan at first, but we're adapting together.
University Systems
I've got some friends reading this who aren't in education (thanks, gang) so it's time for a little Higher Ed IT 101. Bear with me. This is going somewhere, I promise.
With some exceptions, your average university is worried about five major systems and a whole bunch of smaller ones --
Your Student Information System keeps track of which students you have, their transcripts, their grades, their contact information, any special flags (e.g. "this student is at risk of dropping out"), etc.
Your Learning Management System is used by instructors to keep track of classes, lessons, artifacts like PowerPoints or lecture notes, on and on. The more sophisticated systems include all kinds of features for student cooperative work, online lecture delivery, material capture and reuse, and so forth.
Your HR / Finance System keeps track of employees, cuts checks, processes student tuition, and supports the flow of money through the university. A few universities have more than one of these, either to keep the finances of different campuses separate or to track research grant money separately from the day to day operations.
Your Integrated Library System supports your library. In the old days it was essentially a digitized card catalog and circulation system. These days they often integrate with popular research databases, keep track of items in offsite storage, manage resources like library meeting rooms, and much more.
Your CRM (originally "customer relationship management," but most universities cringe at calling students "customers") keeps track of prospective students. Often the development office will have one to keep track of prominent and/or generous alumni and benefactors as well.
And on, and so forth. Research IT support is a topic for another day, as are all the systems needed to support the university as a community -- e-mail and messaging, door access controls, smart building systems, logistics, maintenance, what have you.
Larger universities are used to big capital projects. Think "buildings." (An old friend once referred to some university leaders as having an Edifice Complex.) A building has a depreciation schedule, and maintenance, and a repair budget. It's a big up-front capital cost and a (hopefully) low operating cost. You expect them to last for decades.
For a long time that's been the purchasing model for any of these major IT systems. Massive up-front cost, minimal (hopefully) operating costs. As a university, you select a new system carefully and then expect that it will work for you for the next couple decades. It's a building that you can't see. Or, maybe, you can - just go to the big lab where all the servers live and admire the racks of equipment in their room full of powerful air conditioning.
The cloud service model changes some of that. The big lab where all the servers live now is somewhere else. In theory your up front capital cost is low. Your operational costs to your vendor are higher, but you can save on operational costs in your own department. Your database administration is partly handled by your vendor, for example, and you don't need to maintain the physical equipment any more.
In practice this is more complex than it sounds. For one thing the change management costs from an existing on-premise system to a cloud system can be high. For another, it's rare that you're going to change all these systems at once. Normally you'll have some systems running on older platforms and some that you're upgrading. That means they all need to play nicely together.
(I know of a few universities where deferred maintenance meant that most or all of their systems were due for replacement about the same time. I don't envy anyone involved, most especially their CIOs.)
Microsoft sometimes struggles in communicating with universities because as engineers we don't think the same way. Someone buying a building thinks I need everything I could possibly want for the next twenty years when the doors open. Cloud engineers think of it as an ongoing process, and the building metaphor falls apart. Start with a platform and we'll add features when and as you need them. Except then the customer thinks my building is going to be under constant construction! and imagines permanent noise and dust and occasional water and power shut offs. That's not how it works in cloud - architecturally, we can work on and test new things without disrupting anything that's already working. But it does mean the doorway you expected might have moved.
Getting Microsoft field people and university IT people to speak the same language is one of the more interesting parts of my job.
Mac Postscript
I mentioned I use Macs a lot at home? And Microsoft didn't encourage such behavior back in the day?
For a long time I had a PowerPC-based Mac Pro that I'd bought used off of Microsoft.
Hm, you might think.
The very first version of the XBox was developed on a PowerPC architecture. (Later versions were Intel-based.) This led to a circular problem: you couldn't test games for the XBox because it didn't exist yet, but the XBox needed a bunch of games in order to launch successfully.
So all the developers working on the first round of XBox games, including now-classics like HALO, needed computers to work on. But they couldn't use the Intel machines of the time, because they had the wrong chipset for the new system. Therefore, a bunch of top-flight Microsoft game developers ended up working on high-spec Macs, because they had the right chips for the upcoming game console.
Yes, the irony occurred to us at the time.
At any rate, after a while the PowerPC-based Mac Pros were recycled -- meaning, sold off to interested Microsoft employees. I grabbed one, immediately replaced the failing power supply, and had a beautiful top-spec-when-released Mac Pro for years. With a crossed-out Microsoft asset tag.
I didn't stop smiling about that until I finally had to recycle the old tower. Many years later.
Inspiration
Thinking a lot about my friends in China. It sounds like the effort to contain the coronavirus in China was a good idea that didn’t work. Still waiting and watching.
Next Up
On tap for this week: lots and lots (and lots) of phone calls, plus some compliance paperwork.
My new co-worker Geri Gillespy has entered with a bang: lots of new ideas and fresh energy, a sorely needed boost to our busy team. I'm looking forward to learning from her. (Hopefully we'll get other co-workers to start tweeting more as well.)
Onward. May the path be clear and the journey rewarding for all of us.