its in bits

A Note from Bill...

In the last two issues, I discussed aspects of our personal and organizational accountability that I believe can transform IT Services into a model service organization at Stanford.

Over the past several years, the portion of our budgets that funds staff has increased from about a quarter to almost three quarters. I think this is a clear recognition that the key to the organization's success, and Stanford's IT success, is all of you. So I ask that we all keep asking ourselves: How do we "step up" and transform our daily interactions and work habits to better provide the core services that allow Stanford to transform its research and education in the way President Hennessy articulated in his recent message on the Stanford Challenge?

Next week, on October 24th, we will have our first Town Hall of the new fiscal year. I urge you to attend. Randy Livingston will present the larger context of the Business Affairs goals and our larger organization's plans for the future. Please don't miss this opportunity to hear Randy's message directly and discuss with him your ideas and concerns.

The meeting will also include a closer look at IT Service's goals, and how our focus on accountability, annual initiatives, and "Keeping IT Running" come together to provide a critical component for the new millennium at Stanford.

I look forward to seeing all of you at the Town Hall.

- Bill Clebsch
IT Services

Holiday Video

You never know if you have the face, the voice, the look, the style; that perfect "it"-like thing for the annual holiday video. One year, it's all about carts running around campus, and the next year it's ...well, maybe there are certain things you know.

But whether you know or don't know if you're just what the producers of the video seek, but wish to be considered for anything from a star to a singer to a dancer to a musician/composer to a writer to a roustabout to help slap this one together, please send email with any particulars to your video pal, in the near future. Thanks!

- John Klemm
Special Holiday Humor Consultant to the Executive Director

New Satisfaction Survey Process

Since early September, IT Services has been surveying a random selection of campus customers each week about their satisfaction with support services. Here is a recap for the month of September.

During the month, we sent out 582 survey requests. We received 98 responses (we targeted 100 responses each month). A graph of the results is available. For those text-oriented folks, the results are:

On a six-point scale, satisfaction with:
Timeliness: 4.9
Resolution: 4.9
Customer Service: 5.2
Technical Competence: 5.2
Overall Satisfaction: 5.0

In addition to the numerical data, clients are often taking extra time to recognize individuals for good service (and sometimes the reverse). I have been responding to each comment and forwarding the kudos (or brickbats) to the responsible manager for appropriate action.

In addition to recognizing individuals, comments about general support themes have been included. Here's some of what our customers told us in September:

"...problem was not actually within the Stanford IT domain, but they helped me determine that; the fact that the problem was not resolved by Stanford IT was not their fault; the fact that they could help direct me further was great."

"Thank you for conducting this survey. I look forward to being able to provide feedback about more tickets in the future (My HelpSU experiences are not always this good)."

"With IT Services you never know how quickly your order will be processed. It is sometimes a problem with timing but once you get someone, I find that the help is great and they are very friendly and willing to help."

"I feel I've been left with a work-around rather than a solution. Tech said he would get back to me about that, but so far he hasn't."

I believe this new process is really worthwhile and is giving us a valuable new tool for customers to provide us with direct, specific feedback that we can pursue for improvements.

I'd like to acknowledge all the help Kevin Hall has provided in developing this process. Besides setting up the online form and the MySQL database behind the scenes, he's helped with specific instructions for pulling and updating data.

Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.

- Chris Lundin
Client Support; Help Desk Services

Disaster Recovery

(Edited 10/19; 11 a.m.) Work has been underway since earlier this year to gain funding to develop business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities. The funding request to support this initiative will be presented to the Provost's Budget Group this week. Since there is a possibility that the final funding decisions may not be made until March, we also developed an interim approach that allows us to maintain momentum for some modest costs. Randy Livingston approved our interim funding request, thereby allowing us to move forward with certain aspects of the overall work as identified below.

Our short-term and long-term plans include:

1. Implement the Disaster Recovery Phase 1 Initiative (Project Manager: Bill Heiser)
Overall funding for this initiative is pending the decision of the Provost's Budget Group. The interim funding allocated by Randy will support the following activities:

a. Selecting and implementing a Business Continuity Planning tool. This will be a hosted (ASP) solution to provide a tool that facilitates the development and maintenance of Stanford's IT Disaster Recovery plans (including the needed documentation) as well as our Pandemic and Business Continuity plans. The tool selection will be a conducted by a cross-functional team consisting of members from IT Services, Administrative Systems, and the business units.

b. Requirements Analysis and Technical Procedure Documentation. Team members from IT Services and Administrative Systems will work with the business units to identify their business continuity processes and to translate these requirements into application and system requirements. In addition, we will document the technical procedures required to bring up defined systems and applications following a disaster.

When the final funding decisions are made, these outcomes will feed into the Request for Proposal process to select an alternate site vendor.

2. Filesystem Backup Redesign (Project Manager: Steve Loving) Funding for this project is part of the broader Disaster Recovery request being considered by the Provost's Budget Group. The current interim funding is allowing us to proceed with this work.

The current Tivoli Storage Manager backup process supports file restores, but does not lend itself to the type of recovery that would be needed following a major disaster. The Storage Team will redesign this process (for those applications included in the Disaster Recovery Phase 1 scope) to support defined recovery targets.

3. Interschool Infrastructure Services (Project Manager: Bill Heiser) This project provides business continuity for key infrastructure services. Phases I and II have been funded and include the following services: DNS, mail queuing, and WWW. Phase III is pending approval and will likely include Directory Services and authentication. Our solution is to engage in a reciprocal hosting agreement with Duke University.

This collection of projects represents the first phase of developing sustainable business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities. The goal is to develop an ongoing program that maintains these capabilities as part of our ongoing operations. We will keep you informed as the projects progress.

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity efforts are receiving attention from many levels of the University. It is an exciting area where we can make a real difference.

- Bill Heiser
Shared Application Services; Disaster Recovery

VoIP Goes Production

After extensive testing by IT Services and Administrative Systems, the "Voice over IP" (VoIP) service, where telephone conversations are routed over our data network, is going production. Recently, the testing was extended to a few key off-campus clients: the Hospital Clinic's Office of Development, LPCH Faculty Practice in Redwood City, and the Stanford Hospital Clinics (SHC) on Page Mill Road. The Security office has completed the security testing and review of the VoIP configuration. A formal Production Acceptance Criteria review was completed this week. Documentation is in place on the web for set usage and service ordering. This documentation includes an awesome "Interactive Guide" developed by Documentation, Design, and Delivery.

There are still a number of key milestones to complete prior to extensive deployment of these services. Since initial service offerings on campus will be in conjunction with the Net-to-Jack/Net-to-Switch services, the VoIP backbone infrastructure needs to be extended to existing buildings serving Net-to-Jack/Net-to-Switch clients. A schedule for this deployment is being developed and will be coupled with the building switch-refresh cycle. Going forward, all new buildings and major renovations will include VoIP services as part of the building projects. One such building is the new Electrical Engineering building going in next to the parking garage. (No, don't blame VoIP for taking our parking spaces!)

Another significant future offering for the VoIP service is the connection of the VoIP backbone with the Hospital's network. Once the fiber connection is complete to the North Campus, a fully redundant connection between the two networks will be made. The network connection will be made here on campus and the North Campus clients will be the first application of a significant deployment of VoIP within the Hospital on the SHC network. Ultimately, this connection will allow us to deploy VoIP sets and services anywhere on the SHC network.

Rolling out any major service with new technology takes an incredible effort by all involved. The list of those who participated in this effort is indeed very long. Thank you all for your many efforts to bring this new technology to be a service offering that IT Services can be proud of.

- Christine Moe
Shared Communication Services; Operations

Technical Job Competency Update

Having completed the initial four work areas of Database, Windows, UNIX, and Storage/Backup Administration, the tech training team will be working on completing positions within Shared Applications by February of 2007. Definitions for Finance and Administration will be done in the March '07 time frame, Client Support in June '07, and supervisor/manager/director positions by August '07. Shared Communication Services will be completed in '08.

Hard copies of the templates were provided to staff for feedback and we will be posting completed documents on the Web for anyone interested in reviewing them. If you'd like to participate in working on the definitions for your area, please send an email to any of the members of the work team. Thank you!

- Dani Aivazian, Bruce Vincent, Nilda Bonet, & Jay Kohn

Courses Web Site Overhauled

On September 21, IT Services launched a completely redesigned and rewritten Technology Support for Courses web site at http://courses.stanford.edu.

The new version's content is made up of submissions received this summer from various campus providers, as well as content adapted from the Computing and Communication web site. The major site overhaul has been implemented by Documentation, Design, and Delivery (DDD) group members Marco Wise, Brian Young, and Dave Ream. Jane Marcus (Client Relations) led the informal project team, which included members from the central on-campus IT providers directly serving faculty.

The project began in February, partly to address confusion over the different class email list options available from SULAIR (via CourseWork), the Registrar (via Axess for Faculty), and our own IT Services Course Support suite. Jane and the DDD group's leadership agreed that IT Services, by way of Jane's cross-organizational facilitation and DDD's editing/production skills, should take on the site's redesign and maintenance.

As an online portal that presents service offerings from many providers, not just our own, the courses site contributes to IT Services' campus-wide service leadership function in the same way as computing.stanford.edu and software.stanford.edu. Kept up-to-date with the help of those whose services it describes, the site has the potential to be a very useful tool for faculty and TAs in all schools and departments.

- Dave Ream
Client Support; Documentation, Design, and Delivery

Information and Technology Open House

This year's IT Open House will be held November 1st, between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., at Meyer and Green Libraries.

There will be demos of new products, vendors from many companies, wizards to answer questions, and lots of prizes (although not for us; as sponsors, IT Services staff aren't eligible to enter the raffle drawings). You can also tour the libraries, learn about the Google Book Search project, and see a demonstration of the book scanning robot.

Hope to see you there.

- The Editors

A Few Changes in Technology Training

Over the years, the Technology Training group has grown, both in the variety of services it provides and the number of clients it reaches. During that time, the staff have always stepped forward to take on the additional tasks required to meet the increasing demands of offering the service. While this "volunteerism" has resulted in greater service to our clients, it hasn't always resulted in the most logical and efficient distribution of responsibilities. So when long-time Technology Training staffer Phyllis Olrich recently retired from Stanford, the group agreed that rather than just posting the existing job, we'd look at all the tasks currently performed by the group and determine if there were opportunities to improve efficiencies by redistributing tasks, and to expand the service by taking on new responsibilities.

Mary Donoghue continues as the Registrar, assisting clients in signing up for the classes they need. Various class scheduling tasks formerly performed by others in the group will additionally become Mary's responsibility.

John Baltierra remains the group's Lab Manager with responsibility for maintaining the hardware, software, and general environment of our six classrooms. Additionally, John will pick up the responsibility for working directly with clients wanting to rent our facilities for their training needs.

Don Cameron became the Program Administrator. In this role, Don's responsibilities will include service billing, reconciling accounts, maintaining the group's client and internal web sites, collecting and reporting on group metrics, preparing class materials for instructors, hosting the group's Tech Express and Tech Briefing presentations, and providing backup support to Mary and John. Don also brings a handful of tasks from his previous position, which was eliminated as part of this change.

Mark Branom remains our in-house instructor, providing hands-on, Stanford-specific instruction to campus staff and participating in instructional design. Mark's teaching time is supplemented by contract instructors, as needed.

Taking advantage of an opportunity created by these changes, group manager Leni Silberman has decided to move from her management role into a new, part-time role as the group's Curriculum Analyst. Leni takes with her the responsibility for working with instructors to improve course content and materials (including developing new courses), and creating instructional tools (e.g., assessments, training grids) to help students better coordinate their computing skills development. Leni will also be responsible for promoting the group's educational services.

Leni will remain in the manager position until her successor is in place. That job should be posted in the next couple of weeks.

If you have any questions about these changes, please contact me, or anyone in Technology Training.

- Jim Knox
Documentation, Training, Licensing, and Campus Readiness

JavaScript Class

Is there a need for a class on Java Script?

We have a vendor interested in conducting a class on Java Script in the Winter Quarter. The cost for this a two-day class would be $500 per person (STAP fund eligible).

As always, Technology Training is trying to anticipate and meet your IT training needs. Please send feedback about this, or any other training class that you'd like us to consider offering, to techtraining@stanford.edu

- Leni Silberman
Client Support; Technology Training Services

Quarterly Exceptionals

We decided it was time to evaluate our Quarterly Exceptional program. We are not questioning whether we should continue to offer this program. That answer is yes, we will continue to distribute Quarterly Exceptional awards. These awards are an important component of our Rewards, Recognition, and Incentive program.

The reason for the evaluation is that we noticed a decline in recommendations during the last several quarters, so we are looking at ways to improve the nomination process. We will announce changes to the nomination process as soon as they are available.

In the meantime, you are welcome to submit nominations. We know teams are continuing to deliver excellent results that contribute directly to our organization's success. Please take time to tell us about workgroups and teams that deserve consideration for this recognition. We will announce the next set of awards at the February Town Hall.

- Nancy Ware
Planning and Communication

Halloween Hijinks

Let's Do the Time Warp Again!

Yes, that's right, we will be watching Rocky Horror Picture Show on Halloween! Extra points for any person and/or department that dresses or decorates in the Rocky Horror theme. Loud and active participation during the movie will be highly encouraged. Please come join us for popcorn, drinks, and a generally fabulous time at 3 p.m. on October 31st in Turing Auditorium. Even if you don't watch the movie, come by and visit!

- The Halloween Planning Committee

Copyright Talk

Copyright is derived from a 16th-century English censorship law, later transformed by publishers and the English Parliament into a monopoly distribution right. This history differs in significant ways from our modern conception of copyright, which holds that it was invented to give writers and artists an economic basis for creativity. The actual story is somewhat more complex than that, and understanding it is increasingly important today as the economics of distribution are undergoing radical change thanks to the Internet.

This talk will provide a mid-level overview of copyright's history, with pointers to further reading, followed by a brief survey of alternative economic bases for creation and distribution, and plenty of time for Q&A about what this all means for librarians and others in the information sciences.

Karl Fogel has been active as a free/open-source software developer since the early 1990's, and more recently as a copyright reform activist (see http://questioncopyright.org/). He is the author of two books: Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project, published by O'Reilly Media in 2005, and Open Source Development with CVS, published by Coriolis OpenPress in 1999 and now in a third edition from Paraglyph Press. He is currently working on a book about the history and consequences of copyright.

What: The History of Copyright, and Ownership of Information
When: Thursday, 10/19, 2 to 3:30 p.m.
Where: Hewlett 102

-Tom Cramer
SULAIR