Last updated on 08/28/2016
8/27/2016:
For years the UO administration has harassed me over this blog’s policy of honoring Ben Franklin’s Silence Dogood’s precedent of anonymous criticism. But our new leadership is actually encouraging people to submit comments to the Blustain report on IT reorganization anonymously.
However, while the New-England Courant put Ms Dogood’s letters and responses out there for everyone to see, two-hundred and ninety-four years later that is still a bit too revolutionary for the University of Oregon. The comments you submit will only be seen by authorized persons. So if you do use their google form, you might consider also pasting your ideas into the comments anonymously here too, so that your colleagues can see them and respond. I’ll pass it all on to the House of Lords.
Official release of the Blustain report here:
More, and anonymous reporting form here:
8/12/2016: Blustain’s comments on “The Oregon Way” leak out:
Back in 2011, former VPFA Frances Dyke paid consultants from Huron $1.789M to write a report on the VPR’s office that included this definition of “The Oregon Way”:
Thanks to IT consultant Harvey Blustain’s (draft) report, we’ve now got a more expansive definition:
F. “The Oregon Way”
Reorganization will achieve only so much without a fundamental shift in how the university thinks about and manages IT. The IT enterprise needs to escape from the “Oregon way,” a culture of poverty characterized by short-term planning, incremental and tentative investments, organizational parochialism, and diffused authority. In its place, IT has to become a strategic resource characterized by rigorous analysis and planning, coordination, senior sponsorship, and a view to the success of the institution.
The icon of the Oregon way is “pass the hat.” In the absence of institutional funding, budgets for many projects are assembled by contributions from interested units. The process, in addition to calling attention to differences between have and have-not units, has several pernicious effects.
First, “pass the hat” masks the true scale of the project. A budget number based on analysis of total cost of ownership and replacement costs would seem staggering. A smaller number is easier to sell than a larger number, and so there is a common agreement to avoid looking beyond the first installment. Pass-the-hat funding sometimes requires multiple rounds of discussions that can extend for years. If a group decides to drop out, it raises the ante for the others and can create bad feeling.
People who have been at UO a while cited a string of projects that generated initial enthusiasm, got a little traction, and then petered out. Short-term thinking inhibits analysis. With tentative funding and a fragile consensus, the incentive is to get started before the opportunity dribbles away. As a result, many of the fundamental tools of resource management business analysis, requirements gathering, project planning — are missing. If you haven’t done the analysis, you can’t manage resources over the long term. As a result, there is no sustainable funding, one-time monies must be found each year, there is little thought of refresh policies, and there is no support for equipment at end of life.
Insecure and incremental funding inhibits a sense of enterprise. Units cooperate in endeavors because it suits them and cooperation (i.e., continuing to put money in the hat) ends when it doesn’t. They solve their own problems, often in the cheapest way they can, with secondary regard to institutional financial stewardship. These decisions can have long-term effects, because as one IT Director said, “If you give people 300 choices, you have to support them all.”
Distributed funding diffuses authority and encourages inefficient decision-making. Everyone has a say, units can opt out, and no one is in control. No one says, “You can’t do that.” Among my more interesting conversations were those dealing with CIO authority. Does the CIO have the authority, for instance, to intervene in a unit’s decision to pursue a CRM solution? Or to mandate the use of Exchange for everyone? Or limit choices of hardware for standard use?
Opinion was split, but more people in the distributed units said ‘yes’ than I would have imagined. I also found surprising the number of people who expressed a desire for more central direction, mandates and leadership. Perhaps that is something one says to a consultant, but I did sense that many people across the university want to rationalize the use of IT resources even if it means curtailing their freedom of action.
The danger of cultural configurations like the “Oregon way” is that they start as an adaptation to resource deprivation and then become the accepted way of doing business. IT professionals across UO have done the best they can in an environment that has fostered short-term and parochial thinking and in the process they have lost the skills of project management, total-cost-of-ownershio budgeting, and the institutional stewardship of scarce resources.
7/28/2016: Blustain report on IT now out
A UO Matters operative was able to capture the executive summary. If anyone has the full pdf or a link, please send it along.
Kinda crazy that the academic departments are going to be forced to deal with their services being reorg’d and the research, admin, athletic and development ones are going to be left as is.
It also isn’t clear to me why not one organization? Why divide things between the library and IS?
Looking forward to see the rest of it.
This makes no sense. Where’s the whole report, which shows how and why this makes practical sense, in terms of both services and cost?
Exactly. “consolidation” of the widgets, after all — one IT workers are pretty much interchangeable, maybe with a $200 of “professional development”.
But make sure to keep all the OA’s, no matter how redundant with two IT organizations.
This whole process has been extremely demoralizing. It is quite telling of the situation when I have learned more about this consolidation effort from a leaked picture on a blog rather than from management… On a separate note, quite an interesting choice to place the academic IT under the Library of all places. Curious to know if this will lead to any layoffs.
The full report specifies no layoffs.
Please email the full pdf to [email protected]
I am curious what the cost of the report was. I believe someone on campus could have easily done this and provide very similar suggestions.
No layoffs is good but for how long? Would they trust folks they did not hire for the long term? Are they going to hear our stories and give us a shot to prove ourselves? Is anyone asking these questions?
Harvey’s contract is on the provost’s website. The report cost us $53,000.
Looks like after many years of living high on the hog those $100k a year IT directors are going to actual make campus IT better not just their small fiefdom. Maybe, just maybe, this will end the complete and utter lack of consistent cohesive IT services across campus.
The report makes countless damaging assumptions. The most striking: unlike other humans, IT people will enjoy being treated like interchangeable parts, and will happily stay at the UO when forced to leave their department and colleagues. The second: an individual should only engage in “one” category of work, as defined by a management consultant. The third: workers need to be relocated into a panopticon, instead of getting an opportunity to propose savings, or an incentive to cooperate on innovation and quality improvements.
I’ll bet few people will have to move, departments still need IT staff. Your boss might change though. It’s not so much about moving folks as making sure everyone is on the same page and working toward the same goal.
What is disheartening is all of the secrecy surrounding it. This University is as transparent as a brick of lead. Why are they hiding the report?
It makes sense when you consider that the Library already handles Canvas and CMET already handles supporting the technology in the classrooms and other academically related things.
And the Library took the IT business (and some staff) from IS (aka CC) under WHICH goofy CIO?
IT leaders on campus have been saying almost all of these things for 20 years or more. I’m glad that it only cost $53,000. I’m sure that we could have found some consultants to charge us ten times as much.
It will be interesting to see the full report when it is made available for discussion, comment, and improvement as part of a collaborative, transparent process.
I am curious to see how it addresses the strong personal relationships and deep personal knowledge that develops between IT staff in schools/colleges/departments and their faculty, staff, and student clients. I suspect that schools with functional IT departments would be loath to give up the people who can walk down the hall and fix a problem in person as part of an ongoing, comprehensive technology support relationship.
agreed – every IT committee or oversite process I have been on, and I have been on several, has argued the same thing. Stop being so decentralized to the point of dysfunctionality, isolation, “fifedom empowerment”, and total inefficiency. Its so obvious that we can
do better but apparently very hard to do. Indeed, in this great new world of open source tools, disciplines, etc no longer have to be functionally and emotionally tied to legacy tools – yet we do not leverage this (yet).
It cost us more than $53,000 – I’m told this is the THIRD report on this topic.
It is great that you enjoy strong personal relationships and that it is easy to get problems fixed by walking down the hall but based on other people’s comments this doesn’t appear to the same experience that others are getting. So as usual, instead of addressing the individuals that are causing the problems we will punish all the good people by having upheaval.
Indeed. That is why I used the word “functional” in my comment. There are many places where there is no functional IT support organization. The functional ones could be used as “best practices” models for the poorly functioning units.
Its almost as if the University had countless years with no direction from people in charge, so people had to build their own fiefdoms or else nothing would get done. It is sad that neglectful CIOs/presidents allowed this to continue for so long, but maybe sadder that some IT folks are upset that it might change soon. The current IT status quo is bad for the University, bad for the students, and good for the IT employees. Like Clooney said in Hail Caeser, who benefits?
As an IT person on campus, I agree with your assessment of the origin of the problem and the perpetuation of it by weak executive oversight. You lost me when you implied that IT employees are happily benefiting from a broken system at the expense of students.
Every IT employee that I work with shares the same frustration that this fractured IT landscape makes it difficult to do our jobs effectively and that something needs to change. I’m of the opinion that the end result will be good for IT employees as well as students, staff and faculty.
I also suspect that the process will be unnecessarily difficult and elongated due to the usual ineptitude and unnecessary secrecy that UO administration applies in these matters. There may be a lot of IT folks complaining in the near future, but not for the reason you stated.
I don’t think you understand what is involved in the collapsing of 29 units into one. The U of O could lose as much as 1 half year of work from these staff. Already many projects have been on hold for 9 months. Now there will be many projects to consolidate. Much navel gazing and likely significant additional exodus. And the people who leave are the ones that are hard to hire.
This process has been handled poorly. They could have simply started with reporting the staffs to the CIO within their unit. This is the kind of thing you do department/college at a time. Which maybe be what happens but everyone one of those units are now frozen. Do I finish this important project knowing it is likely to be torn out?
You thought your IT service was difficult now. I would expect a lot of chaos in the next 24-36 months.
I think you might actually talk to some of the IT employees if you think they have benefited from the status quo here.
On further thought if you changed “IT employees” to “IT directors, middle managers, and Academic mgt that run them” I think you might be spot on.
“Countless years”? Surely not countless (don’t call me Shirley!).
I’m sure someone could count the years from when Don Harris was hired until today. That would be the number of years that IS purged knowledgable staff and continuously scaled back supportive services, pushing other departments to go their own way, and CASit being spawned and its goal of being the new IS for all campus.
No, it was worse before Don Harris was hired. Much worse.
This has been a long-standing structural problem, and it’s interesting to see an almost literal repetition here of past proposals. There is a need for highly qualified enterprise computing people to oversee the structure, the backbone of the campus system. We had a CIO type who did this well–probably to the point of overkill for a UO CIO. Unfortunately, he seemed to have no idea about what really goes on in a university, how faculty use computing resources in research and teaching and in general. The library has always been the place on campus that looked out for academic computing and academic and teaching technologies–and yet it’s adaptations have been a bit funky. (Witness the search pages we go through to find books and documents.) It has been extraordinarily difficult to unify these two approaches. You can see the tension in the exec summary here and you can see the repetition compulsion in the proposals.
It would be dumb to take IT people out of the schools and departments. That is frontline action where, on a daily basis, a lot of good work gets done. And enterprise IT needs to hear from the provinces because it has no clue about what really goes on in classrooms, in the ways faculty use IT resources. The trick is to find the appropriate way to integrate, unify, and yet stay widely distributed.
And yet we need reliable IT. The state of Wifi on the campus is ridiculous. I have been at meetings in which we spent a half hour trying to rig up ethernet to our laptops and tablets (!) because we were in a wifi “shadow.” What a travesty and an embarrassment for the campus.
It’s just very hard for any person or group to see the challenge whole, with an encompassing and a detailed view.
even more long standing is the simple truth that the UO unlike ANY other research University in the country does not have dedicated ICC return from federal research dollars from the VPR – historically that money went to institutes – which was the start of decentralization in the 1980s. At the time, this might have seemed a sensible thing to do. Times change, the UO pioneer spirit does not.
Dog’s point is a very good one. ICC return to computing infrastructure seems largely absent or convoluted. Most ICC definitely doesn’t go to institutes, though.
It not longer goes to institutes at the rate it used to. Historically it went to local compute support for the institutes and this has lead to something else I find rampant.
10% of a professional is worth more than 110% of an amateur – but again, in my view, historically and presently, this is counter UO culture.
Speaking of ridiculous wireless: In my building, which has no classrooms, we have poor wireless access. I was told by central IT that we would have to pay for a service upgrade OURSELVES to the tune of $2,500.
So…. When do we see the whole report?
Additional info from the CIO:
“One of the key points I take away from this report is that many IT
staff members on campus have talents and skills that are currently
underutilized. We will be looking for win-win solutions to better
apply those talents to the benefit of those individuals and the
university. The draft report presents opportunities for you and your
teams.
I also want to acknowledge that the kind of change recommended in
Harvey’s report is always a challenge. Several of you have already
voiced concerns and made recommendations to me. Thank you for doing
so. And thanks to all of you for your patience as we work through this
transitional process together.
Here are some updates on that process:
– The report is still in draft form.
– The Provost’s office and President have not yet made a formal
decision about whether to approve any or all of the recommendations in
the report. We will share their decision once it’s been made.
– We are currently in the process of making a few minor adjustments
and clarifications to both the full report and the executive summary,
using your input. I hope to have finalized versions in the next week
or so.
– I will be briefing the Senior Leadership Team on the report on
Tuesday, Aug. 2.
– We plan to provide additional information to the IT community and
the rest of campus soon, likely in early August. In the meantime, if
you hear concerns (or inaccurate information) circulating around
campus, I would appreciate hearing about those and would be happy to
assist in addressing them.
– Assuming the Provost and President choose to adopt some or all of
the report’s recommendations, I plan to work closely with the IT
Directors and other representatives of campus units on the
implementation.
If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to
contact me directly. I very much appreciate your involvement in this
process and all of your input so far.
Thank you,
Chris
J. Chris Krabiel
Interim CIO”
My biggest gripe with these two pages: they are entirely barren of inspiring, imaginative, or people-centric solutions. This is the problem with every professional report about campus, and almost every executive decision — too much reliance on bad numerical models, and not enough reliance on cooperation with people.
There are 33 pages (at least) missing.
Speaking as someone who spent several years in IT (first in IS, then another unit) here…
Some commenters are worried about disruptions to service, or problems this reorganization (if implemented) will cause. But it’s not like there aren’t already problems, or like there aren’t already service disruptions and delays. The current nature of IT at UO is like the ramshackle Mac server running under someone’s desk that I encountered constantly. When things are fragmented and distributed, service is worse, reliability suffers and it’s not always clear where you need to go for what you’re looking for. You end up with poor documentation and “institutional memory” which leads to confusion and dropped balls when that person finally quits. Even while I was working in IT it was sometimes a mess, as an internal employee, just to figure out who to talk to about task X just because of the decentralization. It doesn’t help that many IS employees seemed to be really practiced at pointing away and saying “that’s THEIR job.”
Communication was also a PITA between units–for instance, during my time, a new rule was created to force all other (non-IS) IT staff to first call the general help desk for queries that those staff KNEW could not be handled by students or even help desk supervisors, that they KNEW had to be handled by systems or network services. It was an inane waste of time and I guarantee you it caused slowdowns which eventually impacted the users.
Consolidation and strong support for professional, enterprise-grade organization will help with this. But if the centralization finally occurs, care should be taken to preserve existing structures that work well and implement them under the broader, consolidated model. Units could be reassigned to specific teams to maintain use of their skills. SAIT–residence team. CASIT–“house call” team. Perhaps all unit-specific IT staff (I know biology and geology have some) could be allocated to a specific team too.
Currently the main way all the IT teams coordinate seems to be the deptcomp mailing list and occasional meetings. I would hope that centralization would improve communication and teamwork between teams and employees. Deptcomp is nice, but not when email goes down and half the campus can’t communicate.
So everyone knows IT is less than ideal, and everyone knows obvious fuckups that were broken from the start and never supported. But does IT leadership know or care? Where is the CIO with the balls to put out an org-wide survey asking for honest, critical feedback about what works and what doesn’t work, and then act on it? If the vast majority of IT professionals on campus agreed that yes, SAIT’s domain workstation setup is amazing and yes, NTS is slow and terrible to work with, then we know where the biggest strengths and pain points are for the university.
The whole self-critical “why is our service less than amazing?” approach is missing from the top down.
“Honest, critical” feedback requires an environment where one doesn’t fear for retribution.
Not gonna happen.
Hey, while we’re re-orging our IT folks let’s just go ahead and re-org the faculty too. I mean, they all are pretty much interchangeable: whiny, downtrodden, underpaid… and they all do pretty much the same research-y teach-y stuff. Move them to departments that have more students because I heard there are lots of students out there who are upset because they either didn’t get into the class they wanted or didn’t learn what they needed for the job of their dreams. I mean, what could go wrong?!?
Ah yes,
The Oregon Way
1. Circle your wagons
2. Make sure the wagons are solidly stuck in the Mud
3. Shoot inwards
4. Reload and continue with Step 3
Coining “the Oregon Way” as a pejorative was one of the better marketing plans from Chuck Lillis. He just kept saying it in meetings until those around him started doing it for him. Better than i could have ever thought of, but i guess that’s why I’m just a dumb Oregonian and he has to fly here for meetings.
Well, clearly this Research University is incapable of turning its investigative acumen upon itself — either its own operation, or its administration’s behavior. Instead of science, we get ‘consultant reports’: sketchy, unreviewed guesses about history, culture, and causation — sprinkled with vague and ominous assertions from some school of undemocratic managerial remedies. There’s neither rigor nor open discussion. What a terrible, unenlightened process.
This can’t be a UO report. It doesn’t even pay lip service to Lillis’s favorite buzzword “EXCELLENCE”. And I didn’t see anything about “Diversity”. And it didn’t end with “Diversity IS Excellence”.
Dear Colleagues,
The University of Oregon has been engaged in an ongoing conversation about improving information technology (IT) across campus. Having a robust, efficient, and secure IT system and structure is essential to the UO’s academic and research success and critical to serving students, faculty, and staff.
Over the last year we have conducted a series of assessments, begun developing an IT strategic plan, and started updating our policies. This work shows the UO must transform its IT system so that we have the appropriate infrastructure and staffing model to support our vital academic and research mission.
As part of these assessments, the UO commissioned a report by IT consultant Harvey Blustain, which is available on the provost’s webpage. The report suggests the best way to improve the IT support and operations is to consolidate the university’s fragmented technology resources and put in place consistent policies, procedures, and practices to increase efficiency and decrease institutional risk. Interim Chief Information Officer Chris Krabiel, Dean of Libraries Adriene Lim, and I have reviewed the report and believe it is a promising path forward for improving the UO’s IT systems and utilizing the skills of our many talented IT professionals.
I invite the campus community to read the report and offer feedback using this input form by 5:00 p.m. on Friday, September 30. Interim CIO Krabiel and Dean Lim will be engaging faculty and staff across campus in direct conversations to solicit more input. Additionally, in the coming weeks, interim CIO Krabiel will continue to meet with IT staff to review the report findings, answer questions, take input, and consider next steps. Additional information about the process, timeline, and proposed next steps is available here.
The input received from these discussions and from the comments form will be evaluated and used to finalize a recommendation to President Schill regarding next steps in improving services and further smoothing the transition process.
I thank the many people across campus who are working on this important IT transformation that will help position the UO for academic and research excellence. And I thank you in advance for your input and support of moving the university forward.
Sincerely,
Scott Coltrane
Provost and Senior Vice President
Blustain Report here;
http://provost.uoregon.edu/sites/provost1.uoregon.edu/files/reorganization_of_information_technology_at_uo.pdf
I can’t decide if I should comment via the form or with an exit interview. I think they got the UO way wrong. Crap leadership. Can I sign up for a voluntary layoff?
The report is riddled with harmful assumptions, obviously held in advance by the administrators and their consultants. It’s easy to demonstrate that these unsupported recommendations are incompatible with innovation and academic excellence. Given the massive and unnecessarily deleterious effect this proposal will have upon the university community (there are well-known approaches that do better, with less work) the administration clearly needs to launch a democratic process, in cooperation with the University Senate, which brings research and debate to bear on the topic, to determine a good direction. That’s what a University is supposed to be good at …
Please give some specific examples of unsupported recommendations that are incompatible with innovation and academic excellence.
Is anyone else terrified to leave honest feedback, even anonymously? Look at the memberships of the committees. How could anyone feel safe submitting transparent criticism or information about the inner workings of lib or central IT? I was considering a “letters cut out from magazines” strategy to further obscure my identity but I’m told that magazines don’t exist anymore.
It is hard to let the process know about negligence when the negligent are literally in charge of the employee feedback box and have retribution heavy track records. I suspect that many will not participate in the central units due to real or perceived boots on necks.
Anyone else struggling with this?
It wasn’t going to be “anonymous” originally. I recommend commenting from a public access computer and be careful that your choice of words don’t give you away.
Blacklisting is alive and well and the IS track record of squeaky wheels and those who don’t toe the party (i.e. authority) line are summarily relieved of their duties.
I also struggled with the lack of anonymity of the Blustain survey
my experience on UO committees: Admin will do exactly what they want, either by manipulating the committees (head/membership) or by ignoring them if they don’t recommend what they want.
How does “consolidation” equate to have TWO university computing organizations? Why is half of university computing remaining in the Library?
Here is the comment I sent to the survey:
Thank you for the opportunity to provide feedback.
I agree with Harvey that the current decentralized state of IT at the UO is unsustainable we should get on with centralization. There is no time to wait, web technology is flying by us and we sit stuck in the “dark ages” of solutions because of politics.
As a developer on campus I have seen projects repeated, resources not given, poor solutions implemented and all of that without caring about the university as a whole. At the College of Arts and Sciences information technology (CASIT) department I was lucky to be part of a development team where we cared about our solutions and worked to make them successful and last many years. However to keep going we have to be given resources to be successful. It is my opinion that the start of the Harvey’s interviews is when our college decided that even though they needed our great work and solutions they just did not want to pay for it. It is understandable, the college is in a deficit and it has been stretched thin. The college definitely still needs our work and the solutions and they should get from a centralized source. If they were able to get that in 2009, CASIT would not have needed to exist. So we are here, the CASIT experiment has lasted 7 years, I hope the college takes lessons learned, listen to their faculty and staff and work to make centralization a success. Again, let’s get on with it.
Once centralized the culture of IT has to change like Harvey mentions. As a developer I would like to see the following:
1. Good project management. We need to listen to needs of our faculty, staff, and students and provide a transparent plan to solve them. Every university IT group is guilty of saying this to the client, “if you need that you have to give me FTE”. Why is it the client’s responsibility to give FTE? Funding should be an open and honest discussion but you have to respect the client’s problem and your responsibility as the IT group. Related, we have been decentralized long enough that requests are answered as go ask your IT group to solve it, now with centralization, you cannot use that excuse any more. We need empowered, well-informed project management to wrangle the demands of this campus.
2. Strong leadership and governance, the power to say ‘No’. Decentralization is our own fault. We have to learn from our mistakes and empower the centralized IT groups to say no. What will happen when the college or VP gets an unsatisfactory solution to their request? We have many examples in our effort to centralize IT in the college and I have few from web development. Example 1, German & Scandinavian department not liking the new College of Art and Sciences brand therefore refusing to use it and funding their own design. Example 2, Computer and Information Science refusing to use WordPress to manage their website and instead continuing to maintain their own web servers and asking their undergraduate coordinator to learn PHP code to maintain their website. We need to listen to legitimate concerns and then back up the centralized IT groups management and staff when decisions are made.
3. There should be memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with more groups than just Library and IS. Together with project management we need MOUs with expectations and deliverables between centralized IT groups and the clients we serve. Centralized IT needs to be held accountable to the client. I am part of Drupal Central Hosting Steering Committee. The hosting service lives in IS and it serves many of the application developers all over campus. There are terms and conditions that developers agree to but there is no avenue for developers to hold IS accountable for the service, there is no MOU that IS and the developer agree to. Communications who is under Advancement, manages the home page and I can say that they are satisfied with the service but they had legitimate issues with the service. What protections to they have when the service is not provided? What happens if IS decides to pull the plug on the service? Centralization would change the players of the conversation but a centralized IT should still answer to it’s clients. Clients and service providers should be given protections, safeguards and have checks and balances in place.
I would like to end with saying this, there is good people out there who want to serve their clients and make this university successful. I hope the next phases that transform IT on campus are done with an open-mind, transparent and are honest. You may have an “agenda” and that is okay. I hope you hear us and give us a chance to prove ourselves.
I really cannot see any point in commenting on the IT-reorg. They (administrators) will do what they will, opinions from the trenches mean nothing. We are widgets, our opinions, thoughts, insight have no value. To imply otherwise is lipservice.