Marie Dence, University of Florida
Douglas E. Hurley, University of Kentucky
Robyn R. Render, University of Cincinnati
Steve L. Smith, University of Alaska
Michael Zastrocky, Gartner Group

ABSTRACT

Five institutions have entered a partnership with the Gartner Group to determine the benefits to higher education of such a relationship. The Partnership is a three-year experiment, during which each institution has access to the entire suite of Gartner products and services for a minimal fee.

Services available to the institutions include: technology-based training materials to provide basic instruction in computing concepts and applications software; all Gartner research advisory services; and IT benchmarking services. The Partnership is now nearing the end of its first year.

In this presentation, four of the institutions (the Universities of Kentucky, Cincinnati, Florida, and Alaska) report on their experiences with various aspects of the program and a senior member of the Gartner team discusses the outcomes to date from the point of view of the service provider.

The services offered to the partners include: technology-based training materials designed to provide basic instruction in fundamental computing concepts and the use of various basic applications software; access to the entire suite of Gartner Research/Advisory services; and benchmarking for various aspects of the universities’ information technology infrastructure. (Note: initially the learning materials consisted of the Gartner Learning materials available through the Electronic Learning Center (ELC2); however these materials are being replaced with similar materials from NETg.) The University/Gartner Partnership is now nearing the end of its first year.

In the oral presentation, four of the institutions (the Universities of Kentucky, Cincinnati, Florida, and Alaska) report on their experiences with various aspects of the program and a senior member of the Gartner team discusses the outcomes to date from the point of view of the service provider. (Note: the 5^th institution in the program is Norwalk Community and Technical College, Connecticut.) For these proceedings, the four institutions each responded to the following three questions regarding the implementation of the program on their respective campuses.

The Research/Advisory services are used by IT organizations and staff in the Medical Center as well as on the main campus. We are currently ramping up a promotional campaign for the new NETg program to be kicked off with the delivery and installation of the new materials. The Gartner Learning materials (ELC2) will be phased out as soon as the NETg courses and software are installed. We have the learning materials along with DataQuest and DataPro, installed on our Intranet. "Talking Technologies" is also being distributed across the campus.

A new training center - Desktop Training Services - has been established to provide instructor-led training as well as for ordering self-study course materials, and for administering tests for credentialing and certification of staff. All faculty and staff are encouraged to take advantage of training opportunities through the training center.

Faculty: Faculty have begun looking at the IT training materials, however none are using these materials in academic courses for the fall 1998 semester. We anticipate increased usage in future semesters.

Staff: We are working with our Human Resource Department to develop a Technology Competency Certification series of IT training modules for staff development. This effort is progressing well; we expect to have the first certificate series in operation by spring semester, 1999.

Students: Students have access to a variety of CBT and Intranet-based courses from Gartner. These materials are available both through the Student Computer Labs as well as from other locations. Student PC Lab staff are trained to provide support for students accessing these training materials via the Intranet or through CBT modules in the labs. Further development and awareness programs to generate more student interest are scheduled for next semester.

Each campus officially introduced Gartner resources to students, staff and faculty in training sessions during our "IT Literacy Week" in September. We continue to hold regularly scheduled seminars to educate our users about Gartner products and services.

• We are currently evaluating the products and will include training associated with this new resource once it is deployed.

• Each of the campuses has ordered Gartner Learning CBTs, which are now being used.

• We have worked with individual faculty members to demonstrate how to incorporate online tutorials and research into their curricula.

• Both faculty and staff, including IT staff, have begun contacting Gartner analysts for assistance.

• We are promoting the use of Gartner research notes, which have been accessed by numerous users.

At the University of Cincinnati, we have taken advantage of several components of the Gartner services. Consulting services have been used by the University Medical Center to support the center’s efforts in strategic planning. Several university technology committees and task forces have used specific Gartner research in a variety of areas such as: Knowledge Management, Network Security, Electronic Mail, ATM and ADSL technologies. The research material has also been used in some graduate MBA courses in the College of Business Administration and the research information is under evaluation by several other faculty. Access to Gartner Research is available to all students, faculty, and staff through our Intraweb site. And about 500 research documents have been accessed via the Gartner Internet. Forty (40) administrators or faculty have registered to use these services.

Implementation of the training materials has progressed slowly but steadily. The Gartner Learning training modules (via the ELC2 services) are installed on the same server as the Intraweb research material. We began our rollout of the training offering by sharing these materials with deans and library administrators. We also distributed courseware to several faculty for their evaluation. Orientation sessions were held; we conducted a session for a faculty IT focus day. Comments from these discussions helped us shape our initial position that these course materials would be recommended as supplementary to course offerings. This has diffused some of the faculty resistance and concerns about depth and quality of the material. Currently, there are 160 registered users on the ELC2. With the transition to NETg, we intend to expand our marketing of these resources.

We are just beginning a benchmarking analysis using the Gartner Measurement services. We will focus this evaluation on our Enterprise Operations Center and our Help Desk function.

UF has deployed the Gartner Learning materials (ELC2). We have made CD and diskette-based courses available for download. We have video courses available for checkout in our libraries. We have just sent out brochures to 42,000 students last week. Fasten your seatbelts. :-) We have launched this training as a supplement to, rather than as a replacement for, credit courses. Some faculty are requiring the completion of certain courses, but mostly this training is recommended but voluntary.

We have the Intraweb, DataQuest, and Data Pro up on the Intranet server. We have Talking Technologies online as well.

We have had one drilldown — on Phones — and are embarking on a second one — on Help Desk Services.

We are planning evaluations for April 1999 and April 2000. Although we will be able to collect some quantitative data from server usage and library checkouts, this will be incomplete. We will not be able to accurately count the number of times folks duplicate downloaded or checked-out materials or order their own copies or to track course completions. We also have courses on our UF Software CD. There is no way to track how many students use the courses from this CD. So, we expect the evaluation to be largely subjective: e.g. Did your department use these services? Were they helpful? What’s good? What do we need to fix? Would you like us to renew?

2. What has been your greatest success?

Our greatest success in the use of Gartner materials has been in the establishment of a staff training center. A newly renovated training center uses Gartner materials as the basis for providing both instructor-led courses as well as independent, self-paced study materials. The training center will also perform IT testing and competency assessment. Our Desktop Training Services website (http://www.uky.edu/IS/Training/) provides users access to the Gartner learning materials and instructs them on downloading from the WEB, checking out a CD, or signing up for instructor-led training. Also, several sites have been set up where students, faculty and staff can check out from our "lending library" all available Gartner training materials (i.e., diskette, CD-ROM, video, etc.) The Gartner multimedia titles will be available to faculty and staff for use in our self-study lab.

• Gartner research has been a valuable tool. In additional to providing excellent technical information, it has reduced the need for UA IT staff to author customized research when requested; pertinent research can be culled from Gartner resources instead. This also carries the authority of having originated from an objective and well-respected source.

• Campuses have developed an easy-to-use student CD that incorporates several of the Gartner Learning tutorials along with customized campus information and useful software.

• We’ve been successful in coordinating this rather challenging project with steering committee members across the state and with our State of Alaska partner. We’ve used weekly audio conferences, the Web, and face-to-face meetings when necessary, to plan, develop and implement the project.

• Before a broad deployment, we introduced the ELC2 as a pilot project to evaluate and aggressively solicit user comments. This was successful in helping us prepare for issues that might arise with the larger rollout.

• The steering committee worked with the state to get a gubernatorial proclamation for "Information Technology Literacy Week" which was used to kick-off the UA/Gartner partnership at each of the campuses.

• After resolving some software bugs, the ELC2 server—installed and maintained

in Juneau—has operated reliably and efficiently.

Research Services has been our greatest success. As the central IT services provider, participation in this program has enabled us to enhance IT literacy by making this wealth of research material available to a broader user base. Since we also have many college/department-based IT providers, this information can be used to form a common base of understanding about a particular topic. And it strengthens our ability to keep our clients better informed about technical challenges and trends.

The use of the Research Services resources in undergraduate and graduate IT-related courses is also very promising. In the remaining two years of the partnership, we intend to explore alternatives for optimum use of these resources in various academic programs.

Our biggest success has been with the training so far. Probably our "best practice" has been the establishment of a one-stop web site which points folks to whatever training or research they want to access.

The principal roadblocks we have encountered have been difficulties in distributing access across campus to Gartner services and materials, and to being able to easily search the research materials. Until we were able to control access through our existing security and account management processes (using our HR and Student Systems), we were not able to proactively market this program across the campus. The lack of a search engine for the research materials has also been a problem. Both of these issues are now resolved and we anticipate greater utilization in the coming year.

• Another significant hindrance has been the lack of sufficient staff support for a project, which is both complex and time-consuming. The project has been added to the workload of a small number of already busy staff members. What else is new?

• Delays in software modifications and upgrades to the existing products (auto batch loading of users for ELC2; a search engine on research materials) has delayed the deployment.

• Research and advisory services are packaged in a way that is difficult for faculty to use. For example, the subdivisions of topics or key words for searching simply don’t work in an academic environment. It needs to be more contextual for our community.

• In spite of the lengths taken to promote the Gartner partnership and educate users, turnout to some campus training events has been less than desirable. We hope to improve this.

• There’s been reluctance and confusion on the part of some faculty, who are not yet willing to embrace the Gartner resources, although overall feedback of product quality has been quite good.

Dealing with academic issues around the use of the training materials has certainly been difficult. Also, Gartner’s position on the use of training materials for continuing education, particularly involving the business community, slowed things down for us. As these matters get resolved, it should be smooth sailing for the training program.

We have not been able to get our arms around the full complement of services available. We are peeling a rich onion. :-) Our biggest roadblock(s) have been difficulty getting the services delivered, the lack of a search engine for the research services, and a lack of coordination of the research and measurement services (problems on both sides here). We feel that these are temporary and will be but educational memories soon.