khascall's blog

Last year, I participated in an effort to explore the ESB (enterprise service bus) technology space in a Mellon-funded effort led by Chas DiFatta. The website describing these efforts is now available!

This year was my fourth time attending the IEEE Supercomputing conference.  My experiences at Super are almost opposite from my experiences at most other conferences I attend. At SC, I tend to hear information that I can't immediately apply back on campus (deeply scientific presentations based on highly advanced projects conducted on heavily specialized equipment). I'm surrounded by people whose occupations tend to be substantially different from mine (professors and scientists, grid/cluster administrators and scientific programmers). It sure isn't Educause.

So, what am I doing here? Other than sometimes bumping into my colleagues from the CIC Research Computing Group, I'm here as a trend-spotter and as an observer of the field and of faculty. I speak entirely in that capacity, and I'd like to share with you my highly un-scientific observations for your consideration.

 

Data

Imagine: One fine morning, the boss walks into your office and says "I need your group to be more innovative." Hmm. What does she mean by that statement? How are you supposed to go "be innovative"? What questions do you ask her about this new mandate? Can you do it? Can your staff?

Right after I was made a supervisor, I attended an on-campus seminar on management. The instructor described analyzing staffing in terms of two components: Willingness and Ability. Staff might be Willing, Able, both, or neither, and the course included practical suggestions about how supervisors could address each case. This is a reasonable way to begin, but once you add innovation to the list of departmental goals, these two components are too simple a criteria. Innovation requires a third component. We call it "Spark".

Here's a quick collection of my favorite illustrations of the different forms a podcast can take:

- A way to learn something new: http://www.radiolingua.com -- learn Spanish, Italian, German in weekly classes

- A multi-format delivery of goodies: http://www.makezine.com/podcast -- audio, video, pdf files, all about MAKE'ing stuff. MAKE magazine takes a DIY/hacker approach to every aspect of life and technology, from robots/rockets/games to furniture/food/clothes.

- Another way to blog: http://www.zefrank.com/theshow -- week-daily for a year, Frank blogs whatever is on his mind. New episodes are no longer being producted, but it's hilarious (or maybe that's my twisted sense of humor....).

- An "independent" radio show: http://www.cuisinefromspain.com/ -- a monthly "cooking show", put on by a couple in Spain, one Spanish, one British.

- A source for audio books: http://www.podiobooks.com -- lots of great stories available this way, released on a schedule you specify.

These podcasts are my favorite sources of audio content related directly or semi-directly to what I do every day in the office -- innovation, ideas, management, perspective, etc.

The HBR IdeaCast
This is from the Harvard Business Review -- each episode is generally composed of an interview with an author or researcher about a particular set of ideas or advice about management and business, as well as a short "tips" segment toward the end.

Escape From Cubicle Nation
Pamela Slim focuses on creating a work life that you're passionate about -- for many, this may mean starting your own business or otherwise leaving corporate culture. For me, however, the focus is on creating a work environment that is appealing to people and gives them space to grow inside a larger organization. In addition, I find her reflections on marketing, discovering your own strengths, and developing services to be extremely relevant in an academic IT environment. She has a great blog, too.

Startup Nation

I just finished up a week at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference in San Diego, CA. I came here hoping for a repeat of the rewards of ETech 2006 -- access to the pulse of the emerging tech sector, a six- to nine-month head start thinking about and planning for the technologies that will start to break into widespread public consciousness, an opportunity to talk to people who think deeply about innovation and the future, a refreshment of my own energy for the creation of the better. On these fronts, ETech 2007 delivered -- I'm going back to campus with a number of new technologies in hand, and I'm ready to engage and create and work to shape the emerging world.

Certainly I'm coming home with some practical, look-at-this-soon ideas -- Yahoo pipes as a framework for mashups, Amazon's EC2 hosting model startup projects, a desktop version of Zimbra that can act as an IMAP client, and Adobe's Apollo platform for offline html/flash applications. Further out on the edge of emerging technology, we listened to Peter Biddle and Cory Doctorow debate the future role of Trusted Computing, Melanie Rieback on the future of RFIDs, Andy Kessler on the future of medicine, and perhaps the most viscerally provocative topic, Quinn Norton on "body hacking" -- body enhancing technology.

Last week I attended a Grantwriting course offered by the Graham School -- the Graham School is the continuing education school at the University of Chicago. I am by no means an expert after three days of class, but I did learn from someone with a great deal of experience. The instructor works in development here at the U of C, and did a fantastic job with the course. We had guest speakers, stacks of resources, discussions, in-class exercises, and lots of fun. I picked up so much information from this course, I don't think I could blog about all of it, and I'm not sure it would be useful to other people if I did. That said, I thought I'd sketch out a few elements of vocabulary & jargon in the hopes that others find this useful.

Types of Funding Agents

I was struck by how widely funding agencies can differ -- in structure, in governance, and in expectation. In addition to operating differently based on their type, they also have their own individual organizational culture, like anywhere else. Our instructor compared the process of researching funders to researching for an important job interview -- it's important to know who you're talking to, and what's important to them.

I spent some time today chatting with a colleague about the process we've been following for what might be called "project ingest" -- specifically, when non-IT groups or individuals come to you and say "I have an idea!"....what's next?

I'm in an Academic Technologies department -- I run our projects group. We get some weird and wonderful stuff, filled with unknowns -- so a flexible and creative process that still qualifies as a process is particularly important. Before these get to me, they pass through some kind of filter -- sometimes, the filter is just "the Senior Director says 'Help this person!'", and sometimes, the filter is a group we call START. They support our course management system, and help faculty with short-term projects, particularly ones that can be fulfilled with existing off the shelf products. If we already have something that fulfills most of what they need, they try to fill it that way.

But if not...well, that's where things get interesting :). 3D Modeling? Custom programming? Experiment with a new software package for teaching? Weird new multimedia installation? Innovative technology extravaganza? Hm..........let's talk.

The management institute is not exactly what Educause claims it is -- it's something better. The advance information I had about the sessions and intended audience of the event had me feeling apprehensive before I actually attended. A number of the sessions seemed to address "the basics" and the intended audience is described as new managers, people new to higher ed, etc.  This is not to say that I think of myself as some kind of big expert on all thing managerial -- but it's no use going to Management 101 when you already passed Management 234. Then again, I'm the sort of person who thinks taking a college math course every few years is good for the soul....

While I think that the experience was beneficial to people with little or no management experience, I think it was those of us who have been "in the trenches" for a while that got the greatest benefit from the week. My fellow attendees may disagree (click that comment button, folks!) -- and if all of us, regardless of experience, think that we're the ones who had the best experience, then so be it. I doubt anyone in Educause will shed a tear of regret over that sentiment ;).


Here's why I think that experienced folks can really benefit from this program:

I have conferences on the brain today. A few I'm considering for attendance in 2006:- iForum- ManageFusion- O'Reilly Emerging Technology- E3 Expo/Learning Arcade- Games, Learning & Society- Labman- CIC TechForum- LISA (05 or 06)- CondorWeek- SupercomputingSomehow I can't see our budget stretching quite this far... It seems that more and more conferences are placing their proceedings on the web at no cost, which I consider a good thing. Now, if only Educause would post my favorite '05 sessions...I'd like to see them again!

I came home with the usual -- pages and pages of notes and to-dos, stacks of brochures about new products, and a bag or two full of vendor goodies. None of this stuff is the real reason to go to the Educause annual conference, though. I go to Educause to re-center myself professionally and to catch the general vibe of higher-ed IT. My observations:
- people seemed optimistic and calm, despite potentially panic-inducing announcements such as the merger of WebCT and BlackBoard. This is in contrast to some years where people have been gloomy or panicked or overhyping.
- major project areas people seemed excited about: digital preservation, collaboration, visualization, continuous/life-long learning, security.
- "the student" as an entity seemed to be validated as a legitimate customer, with habits, preferences, needs, and skills, rather than decried as a bad actor in need of being controlled, regulated, restricted, refocused, etc.

I was ill and heavily medicated, and so I didn't get as much out of the conference as I would have. However, I did notice a few negatives that I should list here, for completeness' sake.
- I found that there were fewer inspirational sessions. Past conferences have had a lot of "leadership" or "management" sessions. I came back without the extra boost of encouragement I was hoping for.

It's summer, which means it's time to break everything we can't touch when classes are in session. We've got entire labs offline: time to play!

Our big experiment with lab technology this summer is going to be a product from Ardence, essentially netboot + management features, for Windows. Our current model is to create and push a build using Altiris -- a product similar to Symantec's Ghost, but which had some key features Ghost didn't, at the time of our purchase. We're pretty happy with Altiris, and we're quite good at using it. Our labs are pretty stable and happy. We have the time we need to complete a myriad of other projects during the year.

It's not really broken...so why fix it? Why are we looking at a paradigm shift?

Over the last few years, we've gotten the process of build development and deployment down to a science -- we've optimized, streamlined, and outsourced until we pared the process down to only the things we specialize in and the things we can't avoid. Unfortunately, the unavoidable process of pushing builds and preparing packages for midquarter updates still requires more man-hours than we'd like to spend, and it's pretty boring work, too. Even if we can shave time off the push process with faster networks and servers, it's never going to be all that speedy to install 10+ GB of data over the network to 200+ machines in 6 locations -- as time goes on, networks will get faster, but builds will get bigger and our number of locations is still growing. It has to be done, and it has to be done over interims, i.e. in 5 days (or less, if anything goes wrong). By 2008, we need to be able to manage builds of 30GB of data and 500+ machines -- in those same 5 days, with the same number of staff.

The other factor bringing us to the table is complexity. Our well-honed security model is defense in depth -- required logins, restricted access to c:, no access to cmd.exe, no right click on the desktop, registry lockdowns, group policies, the whole nine yards. Nonetheless our model is inevitably weakened each quarter as the latest must-have applications (and we added a dozen new items last quarter) require higher priveleges, write access to directory after directory, registry key after registry key. We're beginning to see the impact of this continual need to loosen up our security here and there -- some mysterious instability in some machines late-quarter, problems only reproducible on certain machines, and so forth.

Moving forward, these two factors are rapidly approaching intractibility. Network booting has the potential to break us out of the track we're on -- if updating a build or refreshing it back to its pristine state is as simple as rebooting the machine, and our network performance is sufficient to cover the load, we can cut our development and deployment time and immunize users from the daily damage done by applications which don't respect boundaries.

Ardence may prove to be too expensive to buy compared to what it saves us in time, but we're going to give it a shot. Eventually, something is going to come along that requires more access than we're willing to give to people even under a netboot model, and our only option at that point is likely to be Citrix, which is a solution of an entirely different flavor. But Ardence certainly beats Citrix on price per-seat and capital costs, and almost certainly on staff time. Adding a single point of failure makes me nervous in some ways -- but in reality, we already rely on the network for LDAP logins and Keyserver.

It's summer...let the adventures begin.