Collaboration, Documents Contributed by ECAR, and Case Studies

This case study complements the 2007 ECAR study by Philip J. Goldstein, IT Collaboration: Multi-Institutional Partnerships to Develop, Manage, and Operate IT Resources. Researchers undertook this case study to understand the benefits of multi-institutional development of a ubiquitously needed IT service. By leveraging emerging technology, procurement opportunities, and internal resources, the University of California Office of the President and University of California, San Diego were able to develop a complex disaster recovery solution involving the joint hosting and comprehensive mirroring of each location’s mainframe and non-mainframe computing environments.

This case study complements the 2007 ECAR study by Philip J. Goldstein, IT Collaboration: Multi-Institutional Partnerships to Develop, Manage, and Operate IT Resources. Researchers undertook this case study to understand the methods and practices used to manage ongoing collaborative activity and how the Kuali group partners plan for the sustainability of their collaboration. The case study highlights the collaborative nature of the Kuali Project to meet its goal of building a suite of administrative software, rather than the project’s history, structure, or operations.

This case study examines ways in which the Virginia Alliance for Secure Computing and Networking (VA SCAN) provides a blueprint for higher education institutions interested in collaboratively providing openly accessible IT security resources. VA SCAN is a partnership among five Virginia state higher education institutions and three IT security research programs that provide a repository of IT security tools, training, and consultative services to Virginia higher education institutions. All of the resources are available for free or on a cost-recovery basis. The case study was undertaken as part of ECAR's 2006 study of information technology security practices in higher education, which included a literature review, quantitative and qualitative date from 492 higher education institutions in the U.S. and Canada, input from IT security leaders and specialists, and three case studies.

This case study depicts the formation, characteristics, and organizational success factors of Georgetown University's Advanced Research Computing (ARC) division. In collaboration with university researchers, ARC provides a range of services from computational support to multi-layered, multi-institutional support for research. A companion to ECAR's 2006 research study, IT Engagement in Research: A Baseline Study, this case study describes how Georgetown created a unique, collaborative, shared-cost IT division specifically for university researchers that now provides a secure environment for computational equipment and increases Georgetown's grant and fundraising competitiveness.

In higher education, team-based, collaborative research activities, call for new modalities and methods of investigation. Calit2 is responding to this challenge by creating a next-generation research environment that includes a range of technical and nontechnical systems to foster large-scale, multidisciplinary collaborations in innovative ways. This case study explores the breadth and depth of this extensive initiative, including how Calit2 is experimenting with multiple technological methodologies to support locally based, distributed, and virtual research collaborations.

This multi-part case study examines three higher education examples of collaborations on shared IT services. It focuses on the New England Research and Education Network (NEREN) and a consortium of institutions in Massachusetts that is collaborating on regional networking; an Ohio based initiative led by the University of Cincinnati to provide course management systems to other educational entities in Ohio; and Drexel University as an application service provider to other institutions.

This case study examines how Cornell University took an institutional approach to analyzing and determining how IT services, investments, and costs are shared across units of the university. It addresses questions that include, How can a complex and decentralized university make more effective use of its IT resources? How can the central IT organization influence the behavior of academic units that create, and then jealously guard, their isolated pockets of IT activity? How can an institution measure the full scope of information technology costs and benefits within departments, schools, and administrative units?

This case study examines how the Texas Tech University System developed Projects and Resources for Information Systems Management (PRISM), an IS portfolio prioritization process for allocating resources to align IT projects with institutional goals.