Campus Profile: Columbia University Copyright 1993 CAUSE From _CAUSE/EFFECT_ Volume 16, Number 2, Summer 1993. Permission to copy or disseminate all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for commercial advantage, the CAUSE copyright and its date appear,and notice is given that copying is by permission of CAUSE, the association for managing and using information resources in higher education. To disseminate otherwise, or to republish, requires written permission.For further information, contact CAUSE, 4840 Pearl East Circle, Suite 302E, Boulder, CO 80301, 303-449-4430, e-mail info@CAUSE.colorado.edu CAMPUS COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT Columbia University Founded as King's College in New York City in 1754, Columbia University is the fifth oldest college in the nation. A private, non-sectarian research university, Columbia has fifteen schools, four of which-- Physicians and Surgeons, Nursing, Public Health, and Dentistry--along with Presbyterian Hospital make up the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center (Health Sciences Division) at the Washington Heights campus. The main campus is located on thirty-six acres in Morningside Heights. University affiliates include Barnard College, Teachers College, Union Theological Seminary, and more than a dozen research institutes. Of 19,300 Columbia University students, 11,300 are in graduate and professional schools, 5,500 are undergraduates, and 2,500 are non-degree students. The University's annual operating budget for 1992-93 was approximately $1 billion. Information technology a strategic resource According to Provost Jonathan Cole, Columbia considers information technology a strategic resource in the midst of an information revolution in which it can play a leadership role. "It has been my opinion for a long time that Ivy League institutions have lagged behind other universities in making innovative use of modern technology, certainly for administrative services, but also in the effective use of technology in the classroom." Columbia, he says, is "trying to create a new way of thinking about the use of information for administrative purposes, not only to deliver better services in a more timely way to our students and faculty, but also to be in a position to use the information we generate for planning and thinking creatively about everything from budgets and services to the relationships between faculty and students and how they use their time. Establishing a new culture for using information technology effectively is critical, but not easy to do in an environment where there are 'traditions' and the sense that how things have been done in the past must be the best way since they have met with so much success." Columbia is in the process of completing a massive University-wide strategic planning effort which included a task force focused on information technology and the information revolution, and what it means for the future of the University. Despite the reality of moderate budget constraints, there is a sense that continued strong investments in information resources and technology will be necessary throughout the decade. University-wide technology architecture Strategic initiatives have also been undertaken jointly by several technical services organizations at the University--Academic Information Systems (AcIS), Administrative Information Systems (AIS), Health Sciences Division (HSD) Administrative Information Systems, and HSD Core Resources. These groups share a common vision of "providing seamless and integrated academic and administrative computing" to members of the University community. A series of task forces was charged by vice presidents overseeing these areas to formulate a set of principles into a University-wide technology architecture. The task forces examined the use of technology in four areas: data management, network integration, LAN management, and presentation and user interface[1] The technology architecture task force program resulted in the following guiding principles to achieve the IT vision, with overall focus on integration and connectivity: * From a hardware perspective, the technology will be multi-platform, moving in the direction of truly distributed processing. * From a communication perspective, the principle of a single University network will guide network topology and management, with the deployment of local area networks (LANs) encouraged along with standards for University-wide connectivity. * From an application perspective, an enterprise view of institutional data will govern application development, application code will be separated from data stores, and user interfaces will be separated from a strict application orientation. These principles were presented to and approved by the Information Systems Subcommittee of the University Budget and Planning Committee, a group through which University-wide consensus is reached on information systems policies and strategic directions. Information technology organization Academic computing and libraries at Columbia are the responsibility of Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian Elaine Sloan, while administrative systems are under the direction of Deputy Vice President Michael Marinaccio, who reports to Senior Vice President Joseph Mullinix. At the Health Sciences Division, technology-related units report to Morton Grusky, who is responsible for administrative services for HSD. All of these individuals report either directly or indirectly to the provost. These areas represent the centralized management of information systems and services, but computing and information technology management at Columbia is decentralized as well, particularly on the academic side, where a number of schools have their own technology units and libraries. For example, the School of Law has its own computer systems and research unit, under the direction of Willem Scholten, who is helping to pioneer a "virtual library" for law students and faculty (see sidebar below). It is also the case that some administrative departments--for example, student administrative services under the direction of Deputy Vice President Mark Olson--have their own information systems personnel. When a major technology initiative is undertaken in an administrative area, the area administrator takes ownership of the project, and central AIS professionals "partner" with the department technology professionals, often physically moving to the department for the duration of the project. AIS itself maintains functional responsibility with a concentration on infrastructure. When the project is completed, AIS system staff and technical support move back to AIS, but the system "belongs" to the department and end-user support is provided by departmental systems staff. This is part of the administrative strategy at Columbia, which, according to Mullinix, is to "change business process where we can to improve delivery--to distribute as much as we can, eliminate duplication, and get as much work as possible out to the end-line user, especially where there's little value added by central manipulation of data." Reengineering administrative processes The present Columbia administration has strongly supported the concept of reengineering the University's administrative processes, and today Columbia is halfway through a five-year plan that will fundamentally change how the University conducts business. AIS head Marinaccio has identified three major goals for the AIS organization: (1) create a user-oriented/service-based culture to drive the management of Columbia University technology; (2) rewrite all applications within a four-to-five year time frame; and (3) make prudent investments in existing applications to bridge them until they are replaced. To support the first goal, a quality program has been initiated under the direction of Dorothy Marshall, who is training "quality action teams" to improve skills for managing change and the analytical process.The main focus of the quality approach at Columbia, she says, is "reengineering business processes with a customer focus." The key is establishing an entirely new culture in the AIS organization. Robert Juckiewicz, head of software and consulting services, is ensuring that his area will be able to adjust to a changing rolein the new culture, which will require enhanced consulting and analytical skills--especially as they work more with users to help them understand how to use technology to improve their business processes. Juckiewicz has studied the methods used by consulting firms to train their new employees, adapting them to training his staff. Marinaccio understands the importance of establishing a technology infrastructure and data management strategy as a foundation for replacing the University's administrative applications. Key to Columbia's partnership with American Management Systems (AMS), whose student systems software was purchased and fully deployed last year, was the company's willingness to work closely with AIS to jointly build and migrate applications to an open, distributed processing environment. For example, plans call for the facilities management system to be implemented as a client-server application, on a Unix server with both Mac and PC clients interacting with databases on the ES9000 mainframe. One of the most exciting activities to come out of the AIS planning efforts was the creation of a high-level University data model providing two functions: (1) showing where there has to be synergy and integration across the applications data structure, and (2) providing a foundationfor bringing information together for decision-making. A data administration organization infrastructure has been put into place, with strategic-level responsibility residing in the office of institutional research in the provost's office. Acccording to Marinaccio, "AIS has a very rich vision of where we want to go and a lot of new initiatives--from telephony and operations strategies to data management and decision support to new application sets. There's no controversy over where we want to get to, but there's a lot of near-term discussion at the institutional level about what is going to get funded, and what the priorities will be." Electronic information services The past year has seen rapid development and expansion of electronic information services at Columbia, a concept that was barely grasped three years ago when a task force was charged with planning the development of such services. That task force concluded that the University had to provide the infrastructure and support needed to deliver electronic information services, and that critical to that infrastructure was a "data communications network that enables any member of the University community to access, with ease, any service he or she may require."[2] Responding to that vision, which was further elaborated by last year's network integration task force, the University's historically separate administrative and academic networks are being integrated into a single network configuration that will allow easy access to all University computing resources from a single terminal or workstation, using a single communication method. Administrative systems are converting from SNA to TCP/IP protocols, and the fiber optic backbone network managed by Academic Information Systems (AcIS) has become the common physical network for the University, in conjunction with Rolm telephone wiring within buildings. AIS is responsible for operations and implementation of the network, while AcIS, under the direction of Vace Kundakci, is playing the lead role in planning and designing the network architecture and facilitating the delivery of electronic information services, especially through ColumbiaNet, the University's campus-wide information system (CWIS). ColumbiaNet combines academic, administrative, and campus life information into a single interface that can be reached from home or office, through the campus network, or by phone. Offered on the network are a wide variety of information services, from directories, schedules, and course information to academic computing information, student services and activities, and faculty services. The strategy is for ColumbiaNet to be the single interface for all information systems, including administrative ones. For example, accounts payable is now on the menu, and users will shortly have access to the administrative mainframe. Among the most popular services on ColumbiaNet are CLIO (Columbia Libraries' online catalog) and CLIO Plus, the electronic gateway to numerous online catalogs, periodicals indexes, and other information, as well as the library catalogs of other universities. An outstanding example of electronic information delivery at the University is the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center's Integrated Academic Information Management System (IAIMS). Paul Clayton, professor of medical informatics and director of Columbia's Center for Medical Information Services and Presbyterian Hospital's Clinical Information Services, has described IAIMS as "one-stop information shopping." "Our goal," he has written, "is to provide access from a single workstation to clinical, research, and library resources; University and hospital administrative systems; and utility functions such as word processing and mail." Columbia University Libraries recently completed a strategic planning process that resulted in a report focused on "tools of access."[3] The vision proposed was one of a "virtual library"--electronic discovery of and access to information resources over high-speed networks regardless of the location of those resources. According to Sloan, the implementation of the virtual library will give rise to an "access" rather than "ownership" model of collecting, which will change the nature of the access tool. As a result, two priority goals for Information Services are to work aggressively to promote network connections for all faculty members and to ensure that strong support is offered through education and training programs to enable them to fully leverage the electronic resources now available to them. Undergraduate students, as well, are a target for network use. AcIS offers free e-mail accounts not only to faculty and staff, but to all students, and last fall conducted an experiment in a campus residence hall that offered Ethernet connections to forty students, allowing them access not only to the campus network but to the Internet. According to Kundakci, the project was a success and, like so many areas in academic computing, the continuing challenge is to meet the demand for expanding services. In support of teaching A third goal of Information Services is to strengthen the support provided by AcIS for instructional uses of technology. In the past year, a model multi-media classroom and a state-of-the-art Unix workstation lab were established. The Microcomputer Consulting Center provides expert advice on hardware and software selection and problem resolution, and AcIS staff provide consulting and training for faculty and students. Columbia is a founding member of a collaboration of ten institutions committed to "changing fundamentally the ways in which undergraduate engineering education is structured and delivered." The NSF-funded Gateway Coalition project is exploring new technologies and methodologies for instruction. Another notable activity is the soon-to- be-offered HSD degree program in medical informatics. According to Provost Cole, Columbia is taking bold steps to ensure the effective use of information technology to support the academic mission. He predicts that "teaching will become more of a collaborative effort and exploration, rather than the imparting of knowledge from someone at the head of a classroom and the taking of notes by students in large lecture halls." This vision is one that requires investment in information technology and resources for the est of the decade, a commitment Columbia University is willing to continue. ************************************************************************ Information Technology Organizational Infrastructure (FIGURE NOT AVAILABLE IN ASCII TEXT VERSION.) ************************************************************************ "Virtual Library" Goal of Columbia Law Library Early in 1993, Columbia Law Library announced the installation of The Connection Machine System (CM-2 from Thinking Machines Corporation), a highly parallel supercomputer enabling the development of a "virtual library"--electronic access to large-scale databases comprising full text, graphics, images, data, sound, and video materials. Advances in optical scanning allow the project (called JANUS) to convert and store in digital form an exact copy of a document page by page, in a file that can be searched and manipulated by software developed by the project. Software that correctly interprets text that may have been corrupted during the scanning process has also been developed as part of the project. According to Willem Scholten, director of computer systems and research at the law school, "Our goal is to create a library that is completely free-text searchable. Free-text searches using natural language queries are more useful and accurate than keyword searches." JANUS will first serve scholars at Columbia, but eventually will serve international users via the Internet. In its final phase, the project will have established relations with publishers to allow for use of copyrighted materials directly in electronic form, and will have developed programs to track and verify use of licensed materials electronically. The project will also work towards establishing standard formats for scanned materials. ********************************************************************** (Photo caption) Deputy Vice President for Student Administrative Services Mark Olson worked closely with Columbia's AIS organization in partnership with IBM and American Management Systems to develop and implement an image-based financial aid system. According to Olson, this system has dramatically changed the work flow and folder management of what was previously a paper-intensive process. Electronic file folders are created for applicants and are accessible to financial aid counselors online, enabling counselors to spend more time counseling students and less time handling paper. Because the system was developed within Student Administrative Services, area personnel were able to participate extensively in the project, including a thorough review of the business process by which financial aid is delivered. Future plans call for establishing a single central image processing center to serve fifteen distributed financial aid offices at the University. (Photo caption) Medical, dental, and nursing students make heavy use of the computer labs and classrooms at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. Along with the current revision of the medical curriculum, Columbia is developing an "electronic curriculum" to complement and augment the classroom experience. Under the acronym CHIPS (Columbia Health Information PerspectiveS) the Health Sciences Library staff together with the medical faculty are creating an integrated knowledge model of the curriculum within which to organize images, sound, full-text materials, and full-motion video in support of teaching. CHIPS will be network-based and will take advantage of earlier work done under the IAIMS project funded by the National Library of Medicine. ======================================================================== Footnotes: 1 The four reports are available to CAUSE members from the Exchange Library at the cost of reproduction and handling. For information, contact Charlotte Hilligoss (303-449-4430; orders@CAUSE.colorado.edu). 2 The Report of the Task Force on Electronic Information Services is available to CAUSE members from the Exchange Library at the cost of reproduction and handling. See footnote 1. 3 Strategic Plan for Columbia University Libraries Tools of Access is available to CAUSE members from the Exchange Library at the cost of reproduction and handling. See footnote 1. ************************************************************************ This article is based on a visit to Columbia University by editor Julia Rudy. The Campus Computing Environment department of CAUSE/EFFECT regularly focuses on the computing and information technology environment of a CAUSE member institution, to promote a better understanding of how the information technologies are organized, managed, and used in colleges and universities of various sizes and types. ************************************************************************