Transcript MS PowerPoint format

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/conferences/ucisa-2008/
Digital Natives Run by Digital Immigrants:
IT Services Are Dead – Long Live IT Services 2.0!
IWR Information
Professional
of the Year
About This Talk
What does the future hold for IT Services in a world in
which ‘digital natives’ are no longer reliant on the services
provided by central services (the ‘digital immigrants’)?
“IT Services Are Dead” it could be argued. But IT Services
have transformed themselves in the past, so maybe we
should be saying “Long Live IT Services 2.0!” But how
should IT Services respond to this transition?
Brian Kelly, UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, UK
[email protected]
UKOLN is supported by:
This work is licensed under a
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
2.0 licence (but note caveat)
About The Speaker
Brian Kelly:
• Works at UKOLN – a national centre of expertise
in digital information management, located at the
University of Bath, UK
• UK Web Focus: a national Web advisory post
• Funded by JISC and MLA to support UK’s higher
and further education & cultural heritage sectors
• Involved in the Web since January 1993
• Currently active in promoting best practices for
Web 2.0
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My Previous UCISA Talks
UCISA 2004 Conference
• Spoke at the UCISA 2004 conference on “What
Can Internet Technologies Offer?” when I
introduced a technologies now known as Web 2.0
UCISA 2006 Conference
• Invited back in 2006 to gave talk on “IT Services
Help or Hindrance”. At the event I argued that IT
Services needed to engage with Web 2.0,
otherwise they might find themselves marginalised
• Positive response – e.g. follow-up
event to IT Directors in the
East Midlands showed a
willingness to transform
IT services
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Today’s Talk …
Great, I hear you thinking …
But now, two years, on my views have developed:
• Rather than using the externally-hosted Web 2.0
services (Google Mail, Flickr, Slideshare, etc.) as
a threat to encourage IT Services to change …
• I now feel they can be used to deliver services in
our institutions
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Today’s Talk … Is Crazy?
Great, I hear you thinking …
But now, two years, on my views have developed:
• Rather than using the externally-hosted Web 2.0
services (Google Mail, Flickr, Slideshare, etc.) as
a threat to encourage IT Services to change …
• I now feel they can be used to deliver services in
our institutions
Don’t be daft – some of you may be saying:
• The services aren’t sustainable –
they may go bankrupt tomorrow
• What about the levels of service,
legal issues, data protection, ...
These are all legitimate issues to raise
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Apply Risks Equally
But let’s apply the risk assessment to the
alternatives:
• What have the UMIST, AHDS, WebCT
and Highwaycode.gov.uk Web sites in
common?
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Apply Risks Equally
But let’s apply the risk assessment to the
alternatives:
• What have the UMIST, AHDS, WebCT
and Highwaycode.gov.uk Web sites in
common?
• They have all been taken over or been
merged with other organisations (or will be
shortly) and services may have been
scrapped or terms & conditions changed
There are risks that public sector organisations,
JISC-funded services, licensed software
vendors, etc. may not be sustainable, may
changes T&C, etc. Web 2.0 is nothing new.
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Being User-Focussed
The Dangers of Today’s IT Environment
• Institutions install / develop software locally – but users fail to
use it
Why? User Issues
• It’s not cool
• It’s different from the tools used socially and they can’t share
resources with friends & family
• It’s not available after they leave the institution
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Being User-Focussed
The Dangers of Today’s IT Environment
• Institutions install / develop software locally – but users fail
to use it
Why? User Issues
• It’s not cool
• It’s different from the tools used socially and they can’t
share resources with friends & family
• It’s not available after they leave the institution
Why? Educational Issues
• Academics who want students to gain experiences of
widely available tools
• Future employers who expect graduates
to be familiar with tools available in
the workplace
• New media literacy with students gaining
an understanding of best practices
for social networks
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Benefits Of Scale
There are issues concerning the costs of replicating
services at an institutional level:
• Installing blog software in every institution
• Maintenance costs, developing support materials,
etc.
• We could reduce costs by providing national
services such as JISCMail
• But won’t the cost saving be greater for
international services. Let’s look at a case study
OU Case Study: Moodle manager spotted
Slideshare was down one weekend & blogged
about the risks. OU Web 2.0 developer tried to
respond, but OU server was down.
Note Slideshare was up before the OU’s server!
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IT Services 1.0 Are Dead!
Summary:
• Initially we were sceptical about Google
• Now we all use it, we run training course on it and
there’s an industry based on it.
• Web 2.0 won’t go away – but there will be some
casualties – just as there will be with conventional
software vendors and indeed public sector
institutions, funding initiatives, etc.
• Future is blended environment for service delivery
• A need to develop approaches to risk assessment,
risk management,
data migration, new media literacy, etc.
To conclude, IT Services 1.0. which only
concerns itself with hosted systems is, dead
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Long Live IT Services 2.0!
What is the future for IT Services in a world in which
our institutions will make use of externally-hosted
services?
Let’s reflect, for a moment, on the strengths of the
UCISA community and UK HEIs:
• We’ve a well-established tradition of working
collaboratively
• We’ve professional bodies (such as UCISA) and
funding bodies (such as JISC) to support
collaborative working
• Collaborative approaches are
scalable because of the size of
country and the numbers of
institutions
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Looking Overseas
Christine Sexton, IT Services Director at Sheffield
University has a blog. In one post she described her
experiences of the Educause 2007 Conference:
Christine is right – the US is too big, too diverse, to benefit from
community activities which can help IT Services exploit the
potential of the social and collaborative Web
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A Tradition Of Collaboration
http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/groups/
tlig/docs/docshare.htm
In the late 1980s & early 1990s I
was a member of ISG & IUIC
One activity was establishment
of a document sharing archive.
It didn’t get off the ground – the
technology was too hard then.
In the late 1990s another attempt
to set up a distributed archive
with a centralised indexed tool
failed, due to the complexities of
managing the indexing software
Broken since demise of Mailbase!
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What I Spent 10 Minutes Doing
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/
events/conferences/ucisa-2008/
List of IT Services docs
still available (but not all
the links work)
I took working links &
added to the Google
Custom Search Engine
I filled in a form, pressed
save - and now we’ve got
a usable service 
DEMO
See blog post on “IT Services - Set Your Documentation Free!”
and user’s response on “It was all Brian Kelly's fault” – “I can't stand the
inadequate institutional search tools I've been forced to use for a decade”
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What I Spent 10 Minutes Doing
List of IT Services
documentation still
available
Used links that worked
& added to the Google
Custom Search
Engine, filled in a form,
pressed save - now
have a usable service

The software isn’t open source, we can’t play with it, develop
it, .. Should we be concerned? Is it a problem if the software
just works and the users are happy?
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How We Can Be More Effective
IT Service departments in UK HEIs have an
opportunity to:
• Build on the strengths of the community
• Exploit the potential of lightweight tools
• Make use of social network services to
develop the IT Services communities of
practices
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How You Can Help
Managers can help by providing a
supportive framework & adopting
policies on openness e.g.:
• Creative Commons licences for
support materials e.g. documents,
slides, podcasts, etc.
• Asking staff to justify local
developments when other
solutions are available
• Encouraging staff to participate in
community activities e.g.
contributing to a UCISA wiki on
best practices – such as wiki
started recently for the TLIG
Communicating With Users event
http://ucisa-communication-workshop.
wetpaint.com/
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Conclusions
To conclude:
• IT Services will need to transform themselves
(yet again)
• If you don’t “the digital immigrants” will still use
the stuff out there
• The “IT Services 2.0” concept summarises a
transformation based on being collaborative and
user-focussed
• IT Service managers have a role to play in this
transformation
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Conclusions
To conclude:
• IT Services will need to transform themselves
(yet again)
• If you don’t “the digital natives” will still use the
stuff out there
• The “IT Services 2.0” concept summarises a
transformation based on being collaborative and
user-focussed
• IT Service managers have a role to play in this
transformation
And a proposed title for a talk from a IT Services
manager for UCISA 2009 conference: “How I
learned to stop worrying and love Web 2.0”
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