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The Oxford University ICT Strategy Programme: CIO Briefing Workshop, 25 January 2006

Background to the Workshop

The Learning from Others workshop has been organised by Work Task G, the work task responsible for External Consultation. Speakers have been invited from the universities of Chicago, Cornell, Manchester and Warwick.

The invited speakers were:

Mark Clark (Manchester)

"Opportunities and Challenges in IS Arising from Merger"
Presentation as a PDF document (259kb)

Sunny Donenfeld (Cornell)

"IT Workforce Planning at Cornell University"
Presentation as a PDF document (290kb)

Greg Jackson (Chicago)

"Scale, Scope, Style, and Structure for IT at the University of Chicago"
Presentation as a PDF document (1500kb)

Tracy Mitrano (Cornell)

"IT Leadership and Governance through Policy"
Presentation as a PDF document (255kb)

... and from Oxford, the ICT Director (Acting):

Paul Jeffreys (Oxford)

"Introduction to, background and latest news from, ICT Strategy Programme"
Presentation as a PDF document (407kb)

Feedback and notes from delegates:

John Ireland (Oxford, Colleges IT Forum)

Comments and thoughts on the presentations

About the Speakers:

• Mark Clark is Director of Manchester Computing which provides high-end or specialist computing services and in-depth support to the University of Manchester, and in addition provides a wide range of high profile external services to the UK and international research and learning communities. Professor Mark Clark graduated from Aston University with a BSc and an MSc before going on to gain his PhD from CNAA in 1981. Mark held the post of Director of Information Systems at the University of Salford for six years and prior to that he was Director of Computing at the University of Essex. Here he also held a Senior Lectureship in the Department of Electrical Systems Engineering, where he researched and taught in the area of networks and computing systems.
• Sunny Donenfeld is the Director of Distributed Support at Cornell University, reporting to the Office of the Vice President for Information Technologies. The Director of Distributed Support is charged with helping improve communication, coordination, and integration across Cornell's large and decentralized IT environment. A primary responsibility of the position is coordination of the IT Managers Council, made up of one representative from each college and major administrative unit, and the Vice President's senior team. Prior to joining OIT in 2004, Sunny served as the IT Director for Campus Life, an $80M enterprise unit at Cornell. In Campus Life, Sunny led a team of application developers and programmers, Oracle database administrators, and desktop and server support professionals supporting the department's vision to provide a superior living and learning environment for students. Before moving to Ithaca, Sunny held various roles of increasing responsibility within Information Technology Systems and Services, the central IT organization at Stanford University.
• Greg Jackson is Vice President and CIO, reporting to the President, overseeing information technology at The University of Chicago. Greg's CV includes four years as Director of Academic Computing at MIT, where he was responsible for general oversight and coordination of Athena and other central academic computing. At MIT Greg taught a freshman seminar called The Murder Mystery: Science and Art. Before coming to MIT Greg spent about fifteen years on the Stanford and Harvard faculties, where he taught statistics and other quantitative social-science research methods. His research back then focused on how financial aid influences college choice and on University decision making. Greg is also active in numerous information-technology efforts nationally, such as the Seminars on Academic Computing, EDUCAUSE, the Common Solutions Group, the CIO groups from Ivy+ and CIC institutions, Internet2, National LambdaRail, and various corporate advisory bodies. As a result of these, Greg travels too much, but only rarely to interesting places (such as Oxford?).
• Tracy Mitrano As Director of Information Technology Policy Tracy facilitates the development of policy for the network infrastructure for the entire Cornell campus community. Of late, the primary focus of that work has been in the area of information security, but we address a variety of other issues such as institutional conventions for domain names, privacy of the network and electronic records and accessibility to the web and other information technology devices. To this work Tracy brings a doctorate in American history and a juris doctor degree. She is an adjunct assistant professor in the Information Science Program at Cornell University, teaching a 500 level course called "Culture, Law and Politics of the Internet." As a part of the outreach functions of the office Tracy speaks nationally on matters of public and institutional networking policy including the impact of government electronic surveillance on the missions of higher education and the politics of digital copyright. In January Tracy formally assumed the role of chairperson of the InCommon Steering Committee, the administrative arm over Shibboleth, which participates with other network federations such as Shibboleth Development and Support Services (UK Trial Federation).
• Paul Jeffreys

  is the Oxford University ICT Director (Acting), and previously was Director of Oxford University Computing Services. He is also Director of the Oxford e-Science Centre, co-Director of the e-Horizons Institute (within the James Martin 21st Century School), and a professor of computing. Earlier positions held include being Director of the Central Laboratories Research Council's e-Science Centre, and Head of the Particle Physics Department's Computing and Resource Management Division at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. Earlier, he was an experimental particle physicist working at the European a ccelerator centre, CERN, in Switzerland. Paul holds a BSc in Physics, and a PhD in Particle Physics. He is a professorial fellow at Keble College.

About the Workshop Sessions:

• Opportunities and Challenges in IS Arising from Merger

  The talk will cover the issues relating to the strategy, governance and structures to support IS services. It will be a very personalised view and inform the planning at Oxford. Manchester has used opportunities arising from merger to rethink strategy and support models. The scale of change and change management is enormous as is the investments; all major systems are in replacement and being driven forward with high expectations of a return on that investment. Governance is more critical than ever, clear strategy is required and services must deliver cost effectively.

• IT Workforce Planning at Cornell University This talk will cover Cornell University's Workforce Planning (WFP) initiative and provide an overview of the IT functional area's strategy. Most of the talk will be focused on two critical outcomes of the IT WFP effort: the unit plan response to the IT WFP recommendations, and the creation of the IT Managers Council, an important component of the IT governance model at Cornell.
• Scale, Scope, Style, and Structure for IT at the University of Chicago

  Greg will spend a little bit of time on the University proper, a fair bit on the range and size of the IT enterpise (which is quite highly centralized in most respects), and then talk about the current organization of the central IT group, how it fits into the broader University structure, and how and why those have evolved as they have.

• IT Leadership and Governance through Policy This talk will address five main points about IT policy in higher education:
  1. Definitions and significance of law, policy and ethics
  2. Governance models for policy development
  3. IT Policy Frameworks
  4. Golden rules of policy process
  5. Exercising leadership through policy
• Introduction to, background and latest news from, ICT Strategy Programme

  Oxford has embarked on an adventure - to develop an IT Strategy, bottom up, employing a team from across the collegiate University. Fundamental issues of subsidiarity, ICT priority and governance are under review. The talk will offer a brief introduction, explain the ambitions of the exercise, and present emerging themes.

Aditional Background Information:

• Developing an Institutional Perspective on the Information Technology Function: The Case of Cornell University
• Cornell University: Information Technology Roles and Responsibilities
• Cornell University: IT Workforce Planning Recommendations

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