Campus Profile: University of Wisconsin/Madison


Copyright 1993 CAUSE From _CAUSE/EFFECT_ Volume 16, Number 3, Fall 1993. 
Permission to copy or disseminate all or part of this material is 
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This article is based on a visit to the University of Wisconsin-
Madison 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.

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Campus Computing Environment

                   UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN - MADISON


Founded in 1849, the University of Wisconsin-Madison is a state-
supported, comprehensive/research university with programs in eighteen 
schools and colleges. More than 40,000 students are served by 2,374 
faculty and 14,000 staff.

Information technology a high priority

In 1989, a report issued by the Future Directions Committee of 
the University emphasized the challenge of furnishing students with 
the knowledge and skills needed for the 21st century. Their report 
acknowledged the role of technology in increasing access to learning 
and in enhancing instruction, concluding that "equipping the campus 
for a technological future and assisting staff in using these tools 
effectively must be a high priority for this institution."

Responding to that priority, the University has created an 
information technology organization at the division level with a 
"chief information officer" at its head; appointed a chancellor who 
sees information technology as key to enhanced teaching and learning 
as well as good administration; and garnered approval from the state 
legislature for an increase in tuition to improve student access to 
computing.

IT planning, organization, and
governance

The Division of Information Technology (DoIT) was established two 
years ago by merging three organizations which previously had reported 
to three different vice chancellors: Telecommunications, 
Administrative Data Processing, and Madison Academic Computing Center 
(MACC). Upon his appointment last year as chief information officer 
and director of DoIT, Mark Luker launched an action-oriented strategic 
planning process (based on the Bryson methodology) that has resulted 
in the identification of several key strategic issues for IT's 
attention: dramatic improvements in computing for instruction; easy, 
distributed access to administrative information; standards that 
enable sharing resources; network access for all faculty, staff, and 
students; and a renewed customer focus in all DoIT activities.

According to Luker, the focus of the strategic planning effort 
was on the gap between what is currently being done and what needs to 
be done to achieve the greatest impact for IT at UW-Madison. Engaging 
the merged organizations in a process that fostered a strong 
acceptance and understanding of DoIT's mission and vision was also an 
effective way to prepare them for the major reorganizational changes 
about to take place. It is significant that the purpose of the 
reorganization is not to "downsize" but to find the most effective way 
to serve the IT needs of the University community.

The campus advisory structure for IT has also changed. 
Previously, separate committees provided advice for academic and 
administrative computing. Now one group--the Information Technology 
Advisory Committee, made up of knowledgeable and concerned faculty and 
administrators--works closely with DoIT in planning and direction-
setting. In addition to ITAC, ad hoc advisory teams are being formed 
to coordinate and plan for specific initiatives. For example, Luker 
brought together key faculty and staff involved in video use and 
development from all over campus to help set directions for this 
technology as a campus-wide initiative.

In UW-Madison's highly decentralized environment, where most 
schools and colleges have their own computing facilities, the role of 
a centralized IT organization, in Luker's view, is facilitative--
providing leadership and coordination to empower college/school 
technology users to contribute to campus-level activities. DoIT is 
also a resource for decentralized computing facilities, offering 
complementary services.

DoIT as a quality organization

Concurrent with IT strategic planning efforts last year was 
DoIT's adoption of a Total Quality Management program. This was a 
natural direction, given the University's strong commitment to TQM.

The goal of the TQM implementation is to improve DoIT's ability 
to deliver strategic value to customers by creating a culture that 
embraces both customer focus and continual improvement. In the past 
year, DoIT has established an overall plan for TQM implementation, an 
important part of which was developing a standard method for 
communicating information, called "cascade communication." A multi-
level training program has been developed, with the ultimate goal of 
training all 400 DoIT personnel. For now, the strategy is to do "just-
in-time-training." This involves forming a cross-functional team to 
improve or redesign an existing process, then training that team in 
the skills needed to carry out their charge. One of the greatest 
advantages of cross-functional teams is that they can move quickly to 
get things done because the communication doesn't have to go up and 
down the hierarchical structure for approval. To date, cross-
functional pilot teams have been formed to improve or redesign 
processes in four areas: help desk, networking, customer moves, and 
effective electronic communication.

Instructional technology support

UW-Madison has enjoyed national recognition for the application 
of information technology in instruction, having won EDUCOM awards for 
outstanding instructional software annually since 1987. The 
Instructional Technology Support group within the MACC organization 
has traditionally provided strong support to faculty on campus wishing 
to use computer applications in their curriculum, including providing 
a showroom and demonstrations of equipment and software; offering 
consulting, design, and technical services; holding technology 
workshops and seminars; and locating project funding sources.

Recently Chancellor David Ward announced the new Instructional 
Technology Grant program to help improve undergraduate education. The 
program will award 25 grants over five years--five grants per year of 
$30,000 each for a total of $750,000. Faculty will review and select 
proposals, while DoIT will administer the program.

Central funding has also been allocated to hire development, 
design, and technical consultants to help faculty make effective use 
of multimedia and two-way video technologies. Pilot projects are 
planned to gain experience using several outstanding existing lecture 
halls and multimedia classrooms and to offer engineering and 
educational administration courses between the Madison and Eau Claire 
campuses using two-way video technology.

Student computing support

Shortly after Luker came on board DoIT began an intense campaign 
to demonstrate the need to improve student access to information 
technology at UW-Madison. Students were heavily involved in this 
undertaking, to the extent that they testified before the state 
legislature in support of a 1 percent tuition increase (which passed 
in July), predominantly for improving student computing access. A 
cross-functional team made up of staff from each of the three DoIT 
divisions is focusing on student computing initiatives. Near-term 
plans include providing e-mail accounts on the network for all 
students, networkingall computing labs (not just those managed by 
DoIT), and providing a higher level of service to those labs.

Current support for students includes consulting services; a 
Microcomputer Information Center offering help in selecting and 
purchasing micros; use of a dozen general-access computer labs around 
campus; use of FINFONE (to check the status of financial aid 
applications from a touchtone phone), EASI (to review or update their 
own student records), and a phone registration system; e-mail and 
access to a Gopher CWIS; and online access to library resources.

Distributed access to
administrative information

According to Jack Duwe, director of administrative computing, the 
Madison campus has been working in a distributed computing environment 
for many years, more recently using client/server technology for 
library and student applications. The University has committed to the 
Open Software Foundation's DCE (Distributed Computing Environment) as 
a strategic direction. DCE allows programmers to build distributed 
applications that use open standard protocols--standards not 
controlled by a single vendor. UW-Madison, along with other Big 10 
institutions, met with OSF representatives in July to demand faster 
DCE implementation by vendors. Another environment closely related to 
DCE, which Duwe believes has strong potential for solving some 
"knotty" distribution problems, is Cornell University's Mandarin 
Project. He is considering moving Mandarin into the Wisconsin 
environment until DCE is viable (one to two years), then migrating it 
into the DCE suite as vendors make products available.

The strategy for legacy systems currently in IMS databases is to 
migrate them to DB2 as they are "touched" for other reasons. If a 
different environment is selected down the road, for example Unix, 
then systems would be migrated there on the same basis. Fortunately, 
the University's legacy systems are functioning well and meeting a 
wide variety of user needs, having been well maintained and enhanced 
throughout their lifetime. DoIT staff use 4th-generation tools such as 
Software AG's Natural and Supernatural and have purchased 
KnowledgeWare CASE tools to improve systems development and lay a 
foundation for improved data administration. Object-oriented 
development has also met with success; last year a sophisticated 
application for residence hall assignment and billing won the 
Computerworld Object Application Award for the Best Object-Based 
Application Developed Using Non-Object Tools.

DoIT's Academic Applications group is working closely with 
Provost Richard Barrows on a project designed to increase the amount 
of course-level data now available to academic planners and make that 
data accessible from desktop computers. Other data access projects are 
geared toward creating a series of "data views" for use with a 
"logical" data warehouse being developed in a client/server 
environment to make data easier to access.

Standards

The University of Wisconsin System's Information Technology 
Management Council (ITMC), made up of IT directors from all UW 
campuses, established a standards committee, currently chaired by 
Duwe, that has proposed the following standards for the UW System:

  *  Campus-wide information system (CWIS)--Gopher
  *  Electronic data interchange of student records--SPEEDE
  *  Electronic communications--TCP/IP
  *  Interoperability--OSF's Distributed Computing Environment (DCE)
  *  Information retrieval service definition/protocol specifications 
for library applications--Z39.50

Believing that establishing a technology architecture for UW-
Madison is just as important as systemwide standards, Luker has formed 
a group of high-level representatives from the campus's schools and 
colleges to look at campus technology overall and propose standards 
for interdepartmental access.

Network access for all

DoIT considers the campus network the most important service it 
provides. While those who are connected are very well served, work 
still remains to meet the goal of providing network access for all. 
According to Tad Pinkerton, associate director of DoIT, this means the 
network must go to every building, reaching every floor with Ethernet 
connections, and eventually connecting to a workstation on every desk. 
More than 100 buildings and 12,000 devices are connected to the 
campus-wide Ethernet.

Faculty, staff, and students have access to a variety of 
resources on the network through WiscINFO, the campus-wide information 
system running on Gopher servers. In addition, a new desktop version 
of e-mail called POP mail was recently implemented; all faculty and 
staff have free e-mail access, with students scheduled for the same 
this fall.

UW-Madison is an active participant in regional and state 
networks, having been a charter member of CICNet and WiscNet. The 
latter is made up of the sixteen components of the UW System plus many 
private and community colleges. WiscNet has helped many Wisconsin 
colleges connect to the Internet by applying for funding from NSFNET's 
"connections program."

On the national and international level, the campus is one of 
five sites selected to participate in the ARPA-NSF Gigabit Testbed 
Program (called the Blanca Project). According to Professor Larry 
Landweber, head of the Madison testbed and vice president of the 
Internet Society, researchers are interested in the resource 
allocation issues that arise when you go from 45 Mbps to nearly 800 
Mbps, and in how to provide the level of service required by different 
network "conversations" in this powerful environment.

The telecommunications organization provides telephone service 
subcontracted by Wisconsin Bell (one of the largest Centrex systems in 
the country, with 24,500 lines) and is responsible for the 
intrabuilding and interbuilding cabling plant, which includes 31,000 
voice/data outlets. ISDN is used for videoconferencing, and currently 
a pilot project testing ISDN dial-in feasibility is under way with 
support of Ameritech and Wisconsin Bell. A pool of dial-in lines for 
direct access to the campus data network is also in the planning 
stages.

Library partnership

Automated catalog and circulation services are provided through 
the Network Library System based on an IBM RS/6000 server and a 
mainframe NOTIS system on the campus network, and an extensive 
collection of CD-ROMS has been networked to make resources much more 
readily available and convenient for faculty and students.

In the past, the library's relationship with central computing 
has been one of user to service-provider, but that is rapidly 
changing. According to Kenneth Frazier, director of the General 
Library System (GLS), a solid partnership has formed between GLS and 
DoIT. He and Luker meet often to discuss the libraries' plans for 
expanding electronic access to information and how IT can help to 
support those plans. A written contract between the two organizations 
has been signed, defining a set of common goals and each 
organization's responsibilities for meeting them. The first major 
project of the partnership is building a model computing lab which 
will be DoIT's responsibility to manage, while being housed in the 
main library.

Luker sums up DoIT's strategy for the future thus: "We've focused in 
the past on the technology implementation; it's time now to look at 
the people and processes that are the key to achieving the greatest 
impact for information technology."

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Photo caption:

The recentlycompleted Grainger Auditorium in the College of 
Engineering will be one focal point of new instructional initiatives 
at UW-Madison. As an example, a team of faculty from engineering and 
from the math department are meeting to redesign the math curriculum 
for engineers to take advantage of recent developments in 
visualization and interactive learning.

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DoIT's strategic plan andTQM implementation plan and the ITMC's 
standards proposal are available to members from the CAUSE Exchange 
Library in both paper and electronic form. For information, e-mail 
orders@cause.colorado.edu or call Charlotte Hilligoss at 303-449-4430.

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An Interview with UW-Madison Chancellor David Ward

Q: Would you agree that information technology is a transformational 
agent, especially with respect to its potential to change the way we 
teach and learn?

A: I think in the last decade of the 20th century, there will be two 
areas where how we do higher education will have to change. One is how 
we learn--we now know that the classroom itself will not be the only 
place where education occurs in a formal sense. The second is how we 
take better advantage of decentralized administration--we know that 
decentralization is good, it empowers people, but the connectivity is 
still very weak. I think both in transforming a learning environment 
from the classroom and in better integrating how we run a 
decentralized operation, the enabling character of information 
technology has, really, hardly been touched. I do think it's a very 
important means to a new end. I'm convinced that the reason it was not 
treated as important five, ten years ago is that we did not fully 
understand the need to change the learning environment, nor did we 
realize how weak our coordinating abilities were. I think it's 
awareness of the structural problems that now makes us realize we have 
a new means.


Q: What do you think are some of the barriers to adopting these new 
paradigms, and how can we overcome them?

A: There would be two main barriers. One would be an attitude toward 
students that, in a sense, puts a lot of the burden of learning on the 
student. In community colleges, institutions that are largely dealing 
with students who feel challenged by their experience, there's 
pedagogically a more indulgent style of dealing with students, so 
anything that will help will be adopted. I think in universities, 
there's still an element of Darwinism, that is, it's kind of a 
survival of the fittest--you prepare yourself for the next step, and 
part of your education is how you survive in a challenging 
environment. So perhaps instructional technology is seen as not quite 
necessary because the burden of failure, if you like, falls on the 
student.

A second barrier would be the faculty culture, which I think is 
very individualistic, and therefore a systems approach has been very 
difficult. There have been many exciting developments in instructional 
technology by individual instructors, but its systemic effect is not 
easily changed--although I do believe that is beginning to alter.


Q: If technology can also change the administration of higher 
education, especially in decentralized structures, how can we make 
that happen?

A: There again you have to state the problem before you make use of 
the means. I think the problem is that right now we organize our data 
in two different ways. One is to meet the needs of a kind of 
accountability that's largely driven by the outside, but frequently 
that accountability doesn't actually get at precisely what we do and 
how well we do it. It's kind of a remote measurement that seems to 
make either legislators or others interested in accountability feel 
better. But those of us on the inside are not completely sure how much 
weight to give these data sets, so for us the incentive to use them is 
not great.

The second thing is that we're organized vertically, and 
departments remain sort of a sacred unit of organization. They 
themselves are often protective of their own data; they want to yield 
data in ways that will be to their administrative advantage. So as 
long as data, in a sense, is seen as a veneer rather than as a set of 
observations about customers and about critical processes that will 
benefit everyone, then the incentive to create coordinated data 
management systems will remain very low. So, again, we've got to 
change an attitude before we can start creating data systems that will 
be helpful to us.


Q: With UW-Madison having such a decentralized culture, why have you 
created a highly centralized, CIO organizational structure for IT?

A: It is a very challenging change that goes against the tradition of 
a vertical organization. I saw my challenge as provost four years ago 
being the lead patron of horizontal structures. I was interested, if 
you like, in a matrix organization, and tried to make the people who 
had a vested interest in verticality somewhat secure, even though 
ultimately there would be tradeoffs. There were two major committees 
reviewing the organization, and it was for some time controversial. 
Even when we went ahead with it, the power of the individual and the 
money that this new unit might consume remained an anxiety for some. 
So far we are optimistic about the change. While there is skepticism, 
it's a healthy skepticism, not negativism or obstructionism.


Q: Can institutions make the necessary investments for information 
technology to become "transformational," especially in times of 
financial constraints?

A: First of all, I think that when you look at revenue flows to state 
universities, what we're going through now is not new for many states. 
There's been a shift of revenue flows from state sources, to some 
degree, to tuition, but certainly to federal and private funds and 
contract funds with business. So while it's true the states are 
squeezing us, and they are very concerned about tuition levels, there 
are other flows of funding. My view is that states are also squeezing 
us to be accountable for the value added, not necessarily just to cut 
us. So I'm optimistic that very directed proposals to improve the 
university can in fact be obtained, either through very modest changes 
in tuition, from the private sector through gifts, or from specific 
grant proposals. It's not just simply sitting back and saying, "If 
there's no new state money, we can't do this." I think it's a much 
more complex picture than that.

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