![[Comments]](/g/comments.gif){kind=small}
![[Search]](/g/search.gif){kind=small}
![[Home]](/g/home.gif){kind=small}
December 1996
In the mid-1980's, the growing need for desktop support and the desire to integrate voice, video and data technologies became the driving factor in Emory's creating the position of Vice Provost for Information Technology and changing EUCC into the Information Technology Division (ITD).
In just a few years, the campus had moved from a centralized, mainframe-based computing organization to one that supported a variety of desktops, network connectivity, and software. The distribution of computing technology across campus was straining ITD's ability to provide central support -- backlogs for hardware repair and software installation and consulting were reaching 2 weeks or more. Campus-wide surveys that analyzed the state of local computing support told the tale: customer satisfaction was dropping, and in many instances, departments had hired their own "computer experts". Although this departmental expertise varied widely, it had become apparent that ITD's role in supporting office systems had changed forever.
In some cases, ITD employees feared this loss of central control and the possible loss of their jobs. Would the existence of local support mean the dissolution of a central computing organization? What was ITD's place on a campus of more independent and more knowledgeable users?
These questions and concerns culminated in a Division-wide reorganization in January 1995. In a presentation to the entire staff, the Vice Provost articulated his vision of a new and more responsive organization. Among the reasons for reorganization were the overwhelming demand for service and the need to support those persons in their departments who provide front line computing support. In other words, local support people were to be our colleagues and not seen as threats to central computing. Part of achieving these strategic goals was the creation of the Indirect Support Team.
Even before the Team officially started operation, members met with many of the known local support people to see what they wanted from the Team and from the Division as a whole. The request over and over was to improve communication, not only between local support and ITD, but among local support providers themselves.
In the first months after the Indirect Support Team's formation, team members drew up a list of all the university departments and identified which of these departments had local support. Surprisingly, nearly 60 campus units already had staff they considered local support. In many cases, these staff had not been hired as computing experts, but rather had been "assigned" computing support tasks. At this point, Team members interviewed each and every local support provider and began building a WWW-accessible database of local support providers, information about their computing environment, and areas of their expertise.
The biggest beneficiaries and most active users of this organized information have been the staff at ITD. Whether browsing this database to double-check knowledge about a department's local computing environment or using the names of local support people as an authoritative list for granting access to particular servers, ITD staff working in desktop, network, and central server support have found this database of enormous benefit to them.
The primary way to build a community or communities of users is by establishing user groups, which may be "meeting user groups" that actually meet face-to-face, electronic user groups that only "meet" in email conversations, and special interest groups that meet for infrequent and special sessions.
The Indirect Support team has found that some communities work better than others and indeed, there are some indicators of success for a group. It turns out, not surprisingly, that people want to belong to a group that shares similar interests and computing environments. For this reason, Emory's user groups are most often platform-based, meaning a user may be a member of many groups. For meeting user groups, success also depends on the size of the group: it must be small enough for members to get to know each other. An electronic user group must find some way of "meeting" the other members. Less obvious, but also important for the success of a group, is to consider how the members view themselves in regard to their status in the university and their technical know-how.
The formation of a meeting user group requires a great deal of background work. The Indirect Support Team polls the community to get a primary list of people with which to seed the group. Then the Team develops the initial programs, which includes selecting a topic, inviting a speaker, finding a time and place to meet, sending out invitations, and arranging refreshments. These hosting activities are essential to the operation of a meeting group and are an activity that was not managed well prior to the Indirect Support Team.
At this time, the Indirect Support Team is working with these meeting user groups:
Keyword searching of the WWW-accessible database has been set up and a listserv distribution list is maintained with email addresses generated from the database. The list is often used by local support people to share information on current problems and ask questions of their local support colleagues. In addition, telephone numbers from the database are loaded into voice mail distribution lists for the Team which are then used to quickly inform all local support people of central system alarm messages--for example, a failure with the UNIX mail system.
These tools of electronic communication are also used by the Indirect Support Team as a way to centrally and consistently inform the Emory community about ITD activities, other user groups on campus and in the Atlanta area, and of user groups in the forming stage. The minutes or handouts of active user groups, which the Indirect Support Team participates in, are also published on the World Wide Web.
The largest and most public means of informing local support has been the semi-annual conference hosted by the Indirect Support Team. Held in February and again in October of 1996, these conferences each had 130-140 participants. Beginning with a free lunch and keynote speakers such as the University President, University Provost, and the Vice-Provost for Information Technology, participants then attended several presentations during the remainder of the afternoon. February's conference was set up to accommodate both novice and advanced local support by creating a number of sessions conducted by ITD staff on the technologies available to the Emory campus as well as those technologies that were "up and coming". In October, the conference highlighted local support achievements by having local support themselves conduct presentations and demos on projects they were working on. Ranging from "Fax Solution for an Office" to "World Wide Web Publishing", these topics were informative and continued to emphasize the notion that ITD was a central, but not the only, place for computing expertise at Emory.
One example of this advocacy was the changes to ITD's procedure for users to obtain PPP accounts. Some customers on campus were finding this procedure difficult and not responsive to their needs; discussions within the small local support group pointed out that a significant process problem existed. The Indirect Support Team suggested that a subcommittee meet to articulate the problem and propose a desired solution. A member of the Indirect Support Team worked with them to facilitate their discussions and advised the group on how to best present their request to ITD. Finally, the Indirect Support Team arranged for ITD's senior management to review the proposal. It was approved and sent to ITD's UNIX system administrators for further refinement.
Though this example was eventually successful, the Indirect Support Team found that it is not enough for Indirect Support to act as a go-between for ITD and local support. The Team must bring people together to partner.
There are several large scale distributed computing environments on campus, representing the university's professional schools, libraries, and affiliates such as the Yerkes Primate Center. These areas have a manager and staff that provide full-time computing support and, frankly, have earned a communication channel with ITD. The Indirect Support Team facilitated the startup of a special committee for these local support people and the top level management of ITD, including our Vice-Provost. Known as the Technology Advisory Committee (TAC), this group of people meets monthly to discuss high-level policy issues as well as ways ofintegrating services and cooperating on projects.
Another recent example of the importance of the Indirect Support Team's advocacy of local support issues was the recent plan between the computing organizations of both Emory's health care system and the university to purchase Novell support for the entire campus. Management teams in both areas had planned to funnel all contact for Novell support through four authorized people. The community of Novell administrators represented by one of the user groups that the Indirect Support Team nurtures saw this as an unworkable solution and, as a group, were able to convince management to purchase the option that allows the campus to provide Novell a long list of authorized contacts. Emory's Novell administrators can now choose to be on this list or not.
Finally, we realize there is a certain "danger" in empowering local support. By giving out information about ITD and its efforts, the Division becomes open to complaints and criticisms from some very vocal people. This can be very uncomfortable to receive and deal with by ITD members who may have been insulated from this sort of input before.
However, our experience is that this fear is ungrounded. The group that manages our UNIX servers has come under criticism from the Math/Computer Science Department for years. On June 21 the program for the UNIX system administrators meeting was a panel discussion on backup strategies. The panelists were system administrators from ITD, Math/CS, and a research facility. The night before ITD's server had a hard disk failure, compounded by a RAID failure. On the 21st mail was unavailable to most of the campus while ITD restored from a woefully inadequate backup tape. What an opportunity for ITD to be buried under criticism yet again! But it did not play out like that. The group of system administrators from all over the university offered to support the ITD staff in their request for the money needed for additional hardware.
We envision that two or three levels of training (introductory, intermediate, advanced) can be developed to satisfy additional training needs of the local support community. Not only will such training improve communication between ITD staff and the local support they assist, it will also more clearly define what a local support person can be expected to know and do, and will provide a training and perhaps a career development path for local support people.
For those departments that express an interest in obtaining their own local support, the Indirect Support Team works closely with them and Emory's Human Resources Division in identifying job requirements, choosing appropriate job titles and grades, and finally, interviewing likely candidates. In the past two years, several departments have set aside funds and hired their own local support, bringing the total local support community to close to 140 people.
In a perfect world every department would see the benefit of local computing support and fund it. Then all of the support people would network with each other and central computing to get great things done.
But this is not a perfect world. At Emory the undergraduate College of Arts and Sciences, which represents over half of the student population, is not positioned to hire and manage local support for the faculty in their departments. Given this dilemma, ITD and the Woodruff Library have funded pilot projects that have hired support people for the Social Sciences departments that have office space alongside the faculty. This model is being continued at Emory for the 1996-97 academic year during which six more local support will be hired--three for Humanities; two for History, Philosophy and Economics; and one for Biology. Although these local support people formally report to ITD, they are in practice the responsibility of a partnership among ITD, Woodruff Library, and Emory College: ITD provides the salaries; the Library provides a staff person to work with faculty on electronic information resources, the College provides office space, and all three entities participate in the evaluations of the local support person's performance.
In each department's case there is a backlog of basic computing and local network support to be handled. However, in hiring these people we are looking for people that are not only computer technologists, but are also interested in supporting the mission of their particular department. Our hope is that they will be able to work with faculty to use information technology to improve teaching and research at Emory.
A new project for this year as been the promotion of an electronic polling system for local support that asks them for a list of their "hot topics" for the year. Many computing organizations can only guess about what is important for their customers, and often they guess wrong. This system allows the ITD leadership and staff to see exactly what local support will be working on in the coming year and what topics hold the most interest for them. We will use this information to plan specific presentations for the various user groups and the semi-annual conference. In addition, local support will now be asked a series of more specific questions about the "winning" hot topic (which happens to be Remote Access/Telecommuting) that will specify what help or consultation local support needs from ITD to make their work on remote access issues easier and more efficient.
The three members of Emory's Indirect Support Team have this experience. Marisa Johnson worked in the library providing local support and worked for ITD as the initial contact for new customers. Julia Leon worked for Emory Hospital before coming to the university, and at ITD had been the manager of the maintenance group for the payroll/personnel systems, had worked on a technical architecture plan, and had provided support with customer departments in the desktop environment. Susan Mistretta worked as a mainframe programmer, the head of the training program, and a manager with responsibility for the people doing LAN installations and PC database application development.
When the Emory Indirect Support Team was formed, there were no role models to follow. ITD management had an idea of what the Team should accomplish, but left it to the team to determine the methods used. To get rolling, the Team wrote a vision and supported the vision with a mission. The mission was refined by adding specific responsibilities and measurable actions for a 6 month period. Periodic tracking is done to measure progress on these actions and at the end of each 6 month the team develops the next action plan. Although the Team is not constrained by its initial planning, this organizing work helped to define the Team in its infancy and at the very least was a valuable exercise in team building and consensus.
ITD has been studying the principles of Total Quality Management for several years. Although the Division has had mixed success, the Indirect Support Team embraces the idea of self-directed work teams. Being self-directed means that the team members must organize their activities and:
After nearly two years of working as a self directed team, there continues to be very little friction. The team has become a safe place for members to test out ideas, get feedback on sticky situations and air frustrations. Possible reasons for the success are that members are located close to each other in an open office environment, members have complementary skills, and three is a easily-managed number for a team.
All three team members have exhibited competence with the facilitation techniques that ITD adopted. They have been trained in structuring different types of meetings to accomplish the sharing of knowledge, identifying group consensus, action planning, action tracking, and strategic planning. (These refer to specific constructs that have been developed by The Institute of Cultural Affairs.) Since the university as a whole has not adopted these facilitation methods, the team is often called upon to help others accomplish their goals.
There is no magic here. The Law School could have paid ITD for computer support and we would have been equally successful. But the three law/computer experts created something that computer people would not have envisioned doing. They developed tools to take electronic files of the decisions of Federal Court of Appeals and turn them into html (hypertext markup language) documents. They installed their own Web server to share these documents and negotiated with the courts to publish their decisions. Today the Emory Law Web posts decisions by the First, Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, Tenth, and Eleventh Federal Courts of Appeal and is one of the largest publishers of court decisions in the United States. The union of computer skills and discipline knowledge yielded something really creative and unexpected by the traditional, central computing organization in support of the mission of the Law School.
In 1994 OSP again hired a computer professional. They found someone with database skills who was interested in exploring other areas of computing and information technology. Of special note was that part of his initial training was working at all the other jobs in the department so that he could understand the business completely.
One benefit of having a local computing professional on staff is the obvious increase in productivity of other staff members. He has facilitated this by proactively suggesting tools that meet their needs, by resolving problems immediately, and by taking care of the myriad of things that need continual attention--virus protection, backup, and security. The other major result of his efforts has been the use of information technology to make the services of OSP available to researchers throughout the university.
The Indirect Support Team has provided these local support people with a communication network that both ties local support to ITD technical experts and puts them in touch with each other. Local support people use this communication to find answers to problems, get advice on products, and explore issues of common interest.
Particularly important is the relationships that have been fostered among local support people that have helped to alleviate the demand on ITD's technical experts. Equally important is that local support people have a different perspective on the technology than ITD experts. Whereas ITD's perspective is more focused on the design of the technology, local support has a more practical view that focuses on how information technology is actually useful. There are times when talking with one's peers makes sense and times when advice from a technical expert is needed. Our local support people have both.
Because we are a large community spread over several blocks with remote sites, computing support people are not going to run into each other at the water fountain. Therefore direct effort has to be spent to foster the communication, or when it is needed it won't be there. So managing user groups, facilitating conferences, and maintaining the tools for communication has to be a stated part of someone's job. It cannot be left for someone to do when and if he gets around to it.
Communication among local support has greatly improved since the Indirect Support Team began their work. Marie Lott, who provides support for Genetics and Molecular Medicine, says she "knows a good chunk of people on campus doing stuff like we are; I wouldn't be able to succeeded without [a] local support [community] in place.
Finally, the partnership succeeds because three people have been dedicated to focus on building and maintaining the partnership. In the future, these same three people may be assigned other jobs or spread throughout the organization, but it is recognized that someone must be dedicated and accountable for this work. Building partnerships is not a casual task, but an recognized and ongoing responsibility at Emory.