IT Services Strategic Vision
This page contains IT Services strategic vision documents. These are an integral part of the IT Services technology direction; they are the specific vision documents for IT Services technology areas, providing the specifics behind the more general technology strategy. In several cases, they contain strategic information from the Administrative Systems technology areas as well, especially where there is significant overlap (e.g. Identity Management, Integration, Authorization). These are short, practical documents, each of which lays out the vision for one service area in around five pages. The technologies addressed in these documents adhere to the technology principles articulated below.
Documents By Service Area
The following documents are complete:
Authentication (Russ Allbery)
Authorization (Lynn McRae)
Backups (Aamir Chaudry & Scotty Logan)
Calendar (Bruce Vincent)
Desktop Management (Tony Silveira)
Directory (Quanah Gibson-Mount)
Email (Russ Allbery & Huaqing Zheng)
Identity Management (Lynn McRae)
Integration (Minh Nguyen)
Networking (Mark Miyasaki)
Storage (Scotty Logan, Russ Allbery & Ross Wilper)
Voice (Christine Moe)
WWW Services (Russ Allbery & Tim Torgenrud)
Windows Infrastructure (Ross Wilper)
As these documents continue to be created and updated, this page will be updated.
Currently on the list as the next set of documents to be created are:
- Server hosting, provisioning, and load balancing
- Server platform (OS and hardware)
The following topics will be addressed once the writeups for the above areas are completed:
- In-building network
- Database
- Development tools
- Monitoring
- Printing
- Unix, Mac clusters (how IT Services supports clusters)
- Billing
- Financial system
- HR system
- Student admin system
- Reporting
- Facilities
- Disaster recovery/business continuance
Technology Principles
The technology that we deploy should be guided by the following seven principles. These principles should be considered included in the strategic plan for every service that we run. We use technologies that are...
- Open Standards
- We use technology that follows proven, open standards with multiple interoperable implementations. We avoid technology that locks us into a single vendor, that prevents easy conversion of data, or that does not allow easy integration with other commercial and open source products.
- Open Source
- We follow the ideals of open source in how we manage technology: we contribute our solutions back to the community, we steer the future direction of technology to meet our needs, and we strive to be an active participant in technological development rather than a passive consumer. Where an open source implementation is available that meets all of our needs, we prefer that solution over an equivalent closed source solution.
- Community Driven
- We strive to be an active participant in technological development rather than a passive consumer. We partner with vendors and the technology community to steer the future direction of technology to meet our needs, contributing our technology solutions back to the community when possible.
- Best Practices
- We follow the best practices of the industry and our peer institutions, recognizing the unique challenges faced by educational institutions. We try to avoid striking out on our own and reinventing wheels, and instead join the community around existing solutions and work cooperatively with other institutions. We work collectively with our peer institutions to influence vendors and develop best practices for higher education.
- Integrated
- We choose technologies that can reuse and build on the existing infrastructure. Divergent implementations of standard technology such as authentication or directory services adds cost, training, and user confusion to projects and should be avoided. We consistently encourage vendors to make their products integrate with existing infrastructure, choose products and technologies based on their ability to do so, and refuse to be lured into isolated solutions.
- Automated
- We cannot afford to have people doing work that computers can do. We cannot scale to support the entire campus if routine tasks must be done manually. Unattended operation, automation of all routine tasks, and automation of deployment and provisioning are top priorities in any technological decision.
- Foundational
- We must focus our efforts; we cannot deploy every useful technology. We will focus on deploying technology that is useful across the largest possible set of users, that can serve as the foundation and building blocks for more specialized services, and that is secure, stable, reliable, robust, well-documented, and easy to integrate with.
