IT Service for Academic Units: Three Perspectives

This paper was presented at the 1995 
CAUSE annual conference. It is part of the proceedings of 
that conference, "Realizing the Potential of Information 
Resources: Information, Technology, and Services--Proceedings 
of the 1995 CAUSE Annual Conference," pages 8-6-1 to 8-6-11. 
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. To copy or disseminate 
otherwise, or to republish in any form, requires written 
permission from the author and CAUSE. For further 
information: CAUSE, 4840 Pearl East Circle, Suite 302E, 
Boulder, CO 80301; 303-449-4430; 
e-mail info@cause.colorado.edu.


IT SERVICE FOR ACADEMIC UNITS: THREE PERSPECTIVES

James I. Penrod
The University of Memphis
Memphis, Tennessee

Ann W. Wilks-Penrod
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, California

Donald E. Harris
Messiah College
Grantham, Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT

Three institutions vary greatly in the manner in which 
academic departments receive IT services. A central computer 
services unit provides the IT infrastructure at Messiah 
College, a small private Liberal Arts college, and works with 
the academic departments in budgeting and prioritization of 
projects. The School of Education at Cal State Los Angeles, a 
medium-large, urban, public, comprehensive university, has IT 
infrastructure and certain services provided by the central 
administration with one FTE IT technician to augment 
services.  The Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, at 
UCLA, a large urban public research university, provides much 
of its own IT infrastructure and services.  Services and 
strategies are described, differences examined, and critical 
success factors are highlighted.


IT SERVICE FOR ACADEMIC UNITS: THREE PERSPECTIVES


MESSIAH COLLEGE

Introduction and Background

Messiah College is a college of the liberal and applied arts 
and sciences located ten miles southwest of Harrisburg, 
Pennsylvania.  It is a four year undergraduate institution 
with most of its 2,400 students living on campus.  A wide 
variety of off-campus opportunities do exist, however, 
including a semester or year of study at Temple University.

Information technology resources have always been centralized 
for both academic and administrative computing. Like many 
other small colleges, IT services grew out of the 
Mathematical Sciences Department which at Messiah includes a 
computer science major.  Early work in academic computing was 
primarily focused on meeting the needs of computer science 
majors; later it incorporated the Business and Engineering 
Departments, and then the rest of the campus.

Services Provided

For a small residential college, Messiah provides an 
environment rich in technological resources.  The campus 
network backbone incorporates all academic and administrative 
buildings, the Learning Resources Center, and dormitories.  
Ethernet and Novell software are utilized in the system.  In 
total, 10 computing labs provide easy access to over 200 
microcomputers most of which have 386 or 486 processors.  
Many students bring their own computers and are able to 
access the network from their dorm rooms.  For students who 
need more computing power, Pentium 120 MHz systems as well as 
SUN SPARCstation 20 machines are available in a special lab.  
In addition to computers in common labs, the IT staff 
supports many classrooms with 486 machines connected to local 
area networks and the campus backbone which are used with LCD 
panels in instruction.  A faculty resource room also provides 
a place where new technology may be tried out by faculty and 
staff.

Software resources have grown tremendously in recent years as 
more faculty incorporate the use of technology in their 
teaching.  Access to software through the networks comes 
through a common interface menu which is present at network 
login.  Menu choices are given based on the level of access 
provided to the individual account as well as the lab from 
which the login was made.  Because of excessive use of email 
and word processing from labs which includes our most 
powerful machines, access to some programs has been limited.  
Common software provided to most labs includes email 
(Pinemail for Students, HP Desk for faculty and staff), word 
processing, spreadsheet and database applications.  Other 
programs for specific majors includes AutoCAD for 
Engineering, Lumena for Art, and Derive for Math.  Faculty 
are also making more use of software which may come as part 
of adoption of a text for a course.  Thus, Economics faculty 
may incorporate the use of an economic simulation, or a 
Sociology faculty member may use a database that is provided 
with the text in a research course.

Another major use of technology for the College has become 
the use of the Internet, and specifically browsing tools on 
the World Wide Web.  Like many colleges, the first use of WWW 
was what has become commonly known as "surfing" where 
activity was not necessarily connected to a teaching or 
research agenda.  While this type of activity still takes 
place and is seen to have value, several professors are using 
the Web as another way to gather data or information that can 
be incorporated into an academic assignment.  Thus, it has 
become common for students to use the Web to locate home 
pages which may lead them to information used in a research 
paper, communicate with someone on a subject of interest, or 
use the Web in presenting a report to a class.  For a campus 
far away from a large city or major university, the Web has 
become a vary valuable resource.

Because of the number and variety of academic resources, 
along with a limited IT staff, technical and developmental 
assistance has been limited.  It has been the approach of the 
IT staff, supported by the administration, to limit the 
microcomputer purchases to a single vendor (which may change 
every few years), and to restrict the variety of commonly 
used software packages available through the network.  In 
this process they have adopted a layered approach to support 
of machines and software. Simply put, there are three layers 
of support: machines and software that are considered the 
standard for the campus, machines and software that may have 
limited use for a particular department, and machines and 
resources that are not considered as part of the campus 
standard and receive limited or no support from the IT staff.  
The level of support determines whether the resource is able 
to be connected to the network, whether training and user 
support is offered, and whether maintenance and upgrades are 
supported.  At this time, these decisions are made by the IT 
staff.

Strategies

For the past ten years, the College administration and 
Trustees have given strong support to the development of IT 
resources on campus.  This may well have come from their 
belief that such resources were vital to the College growing 
and providing quality education than calls from the faculty 
to increase resources.  The direction for development of IT 
resources has continued to come from IT management who have 
stressed the development of hardware and network resources.  
One example of this was the recent construction of a 70,000 
square foot academic building to house the Business, 
Mathematical Sciences and Engineering Departments. In the 
construction of this facility, a substantial investment was 
made to make the building ready to utilize technology whether 
it be in computer, science or engineering labs, classrooms, 
or faculty offices.  In all the development of resources at 
the College, there has never been a charge-back system for 
the use of technology.

While the College is rich in IT resources their use in the 
instructional program has progressed slowly by the faculty at 
large.  Like so many colleges of all sizes, the "first wave" 
of computer users wasted no time in seeing how the new 
technology could be used in the curriculum.  At Messiah, this 
group included a few faculty mostly from the Math and 
Business Departments.  The "second wave" introduced another 
dozen or so from a variety of disciplines who were mostly 
interested in how a particular software program might relate 
to a course that they taught.  We are just now entering the 
"third wave" of users which could bring the total active user 
group of those who are seeking to incorporate some aspect of 
information technology into the classroom to a significant 
percentage of the total faculty.

Why has the number of active users among the faculty ranks 
been so slow to grow and make use of the substantial 
resources available on campus?  Certainly many factors have 
contributed to this situation.  Part is certainly attributed 
to the fact that the responsibility for developing IT 
resources came out of the Mathematical Sciences Department 
which was primarily interested in developing hardware and 
network resources.  It is also partly due to the fact that 
there has never been a senior administrator responsible for 
IT as his or her primary focus.  Another major factor is the 
limited input faculty have had in developing IT resources 
during the most substantial building years.  These along with 
the absence of a strategic plan for academic computing has 
created an environment where there is strong hardware 
infrastructure from which to draw from, but where individual 
faculty must take the lead for the availability and use of 
software resources that they deem appropriate.  In cases 
where their software is not available on the platform put in 
place by the IT staff, they are out of luck.  For first and 
to some degree second wave users all this has been a 
manageable problem; yet, it represents a substantial problem 
for most others on the faculty.

Critical Success Factors

     Former Times:

In their own way of thinking, the IT management and staff has 
always considered themselves to have had a "service 
orientation" to the users.  Certainly their individual 
attention to faculty who came to them has allowed them to 
address specific needs of some faculty.  Yet, the absence of 
an open and managed process for allocating resources has in 
the past made them appear more political than they perhaps 
deserved to be labeled.  Service was seen as more a result of 
"making a deal" with IT management than as result of an open 
and fair process.  The lack of any kind of evaluation 
instrument processed on a regular basis did not allow for 
user input as a group.

Prioritization of projects has been another weak area for IT 
management.  Being run either through or with close 
collaboration with the Mathematical Sciences Department has 
made many faculty suspect.  Certainly, evidence is clear that 
the best equipment has gone to the computer science labs.  
This perhaps is justified by the applications they are 
running in those labs; however, the fact that this is not 
decided as an open process has been a problem.

Another problem for IT staff has been that much of the 
current infrastructure has been developed during times when 
extra financial resources (e.g., with growth in the Freshman 
class) are available.  Thus it has been difficult to build 
the infrastructure with a multi-year planned approach.

Finally, training and development has been difficult for IT 
staff as the number of students and faculty utilizing IT 
resources has grown while their staff has not.

     Present Times: 

In the past few years at the College, there has been a major 
shift in the management and delivery of IT resources to 
academic users.  For the first time, the responsibility for 
IT has become independent of the Mathematical Sciences 
Department and has been placed with an individual who reports 
to the President.  An active academic user committee is in 
the process of creating a strategic plan and will recommend 
prioritization of budget and IT projects on an ongoing basis.  
The governance document of the institution was changed so 
that the Associate Dean of the Faculty will, by position, 
chair this committee.  This allows for focus on efforts to 
integrate IT into the curriculum. Budgeting is also being 
done on a multi-year basis where a special fund allows for 
maintenance and upgrades of hardware and software.  Decisions 
have also been made to move to software packages for 
applications like email that will not necessitate training 
sessions.  These are some of the factors that are 
contributing toward a successful approach for addressing user 
needs.

Conclusions

In some ways, one could argue that the College has failed to 
address the needs of many of its faculty and students in the 
past by focusing too much on the interests of a few faculty 
and spending too much time and resources on hardware 
purchases and network development.  Yet, there have been 
benefits of a highly centralized approach in creating the 
campus infrastructure.  The campus backbone, local area 
networks, labs, classrooms, and many other IT environments 
now provide a stable environment on which faculty and 
students may build.

The key critical success factors for the future will depend 
to what degree leadership and management for building on 
those resources comes from the broad group of academic users 
on campus, and to what degree senior management sees IT as a 
vital part of the College program.  Should the focus shift 
from infrastructure to applications that address curriculum 
and research interests, then this small college will be able 
to offer something quite valuable to its students.  If 
support is not there for this shift, either by senior 
administration or IT management, then IT resources will be 
underutilized and ineffective in addressing faculty and 
student needs, and substantial financial resources will have 
been wasted.


CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, LOS ANGELES - SCHOOL OF 
EDUCATION

Introduction and Background

Cal State LA is a public, comprehensive, urban campus with 
just under 19,000 student headcount.  The Graduate School of 
Education, one of six schools, has about 2,300 students. The 
Information Resources Management (IRM) division headed by a 
vice presidential level CIO has policy responsibility for all 
information technology projects in the university and 
provides the basic IT infrastructure for the campus. The 
office of Academic Technology Support (ATS), one of the IRM 
units, provides campus wide services to academic departments 
and has 34 full-time positions, six of which are located in 
various schools across the campus.  Administrative computing 
is provided on an IBM ES9000, academic computing is supported 
by a network of Sun servers, a dedicated Unix based library 
system, a multi-processing Sun server with over 1,500 
research databases, and a minisuper computer.  All full-time 
faculty in the university have a networked computer on the 
desktop with access to both academic and administrative 
applications.

Services Provided

The Instructional Technology Support group contains 11 
positions and provides administrative office, workstation 
maintenance, user, and technical support services.  The 
Network Information Services group contains 9 positions and 
supports the Instructional Technology Center, small systems, 
and database administration.  Four of the school based 
positions, including the one in the School of Education, are 
in the small systems area.  The Network Operations group has 
10 positions and provides systems development and 
network/distributed systems services.  There are 
approximately 60 student assistants and half a dozen graduate 
assistants in the organization.  The campus backbone is a 
FDDI network.  There are 37 academic computing (three in the 
School of Education) and 10 experimental laboratories 
containing over 1,100 microcomputers across the campus.  All 
of the student machines are 486 class or better; about 15 
percent are Macintoshes.  There are approximately 40 Sun 
workstations in the mix.  An additional 600 faculty desktop 
machines are supported.  About two-thirds of them are 486 or 
better class machines and the remainder are 386 class (again 
about 15 percent are Macintoshes).  The laboratories are 
supported by distributed Sun servers and over 100 software 
packages are provided.  All of the student machines have 
Netscape, access to a wide variety of CD-ROM and other 
bibliographic databases, the automated library system, and 
access to various network servers.  There is a 72 port modem 
pool to support dial-in access.  And an agreement with an 
Internet service provider for 60 hours per month at a nominal 
rate is available to all students.

Strategies

The centralized ATS staff provide overall planning and 
coordination for services and the network, negotiate site 
license agreements, maintain the servers, desktop machines 
and supported software, provide documentation and training, 
run the large general purpose laboratories, provide a server 
based email system, bulletin board, WWW, etc. (in general, 
support the basic infrastructure). The school based 
specialists provide direct support to the faculty, maintain 
local area networks, support software peculiar to a given 
laboratory, and assist in setting up thelabs for special 
classes.  CSLA has a policy of no charge back for academic 
services.

The IRM division was established in the mid-1980s and over a 
six year period installed the campus-wide network, expanded 
from about a dozen labs to almost 40, grew ATS from less than 
ten FTE positions to over 30, moved from a mainframe for 
academic support to the distributed client/server model, 
installed a new RDBMS based administrative system, and 
developed a strategic planning process for campus-wide IT.  
In the early 1990s, the California State University System 
experienced major funding cutbacks resulting in approximately 
a 30 per cent reduction in the IRM operating budget.  Every 
effort was made to keep the academic support intact in ATS 
but some cuts were made and continued growth to keep up with 
the campus-wide expansion of information technology could not 
be maintained.  Between spring 1994 and fall 1995, IT lab 
utilization increased by over 400 percent, library sessions 
increased from about 1,000 to 2,000 per day, in spring 1995 
alone there was a net addition of 125 workstations on the 
network with no additional resources for ATS.  Also in this 
time-frame, due to changes in administrative positions, ATS 
planning and coordination activities moved from working 
closely with Academic Affairs and the academic deans to 
working almost exclusively with the academic deans.

A fall 1995 faculty survey conducted by the Academic Senate 
showed that from 101 respondents, approximately 60 percent 
were somewhat or very satisfied with the Scholars Work 
Environment[1] (the common interface on all networked 
machines which provides access to the various resources) 
versus about 31 percent who were somewhat or very 
dissatisfied.  A question regarding Scholars Mail (the server 
based email system) showed about 46 per cent of on-campus 
users somewhat or very satisfied versus 42 percent somewhat 
or very dissatisfied (n=112).  The same question from 85 off-
campus users showed about 24 percent somewhat or very 
satisfied versus 53 percent somewhat or very dissatisfied.  
Some 55 percent of on-campus Macintosh users were unhappy 
with Scholars Mail and 59 percent of off-campus Macintosh 
users were dissatisfied to some degree.  Of 104 on-campus 
respondents, 60 percent indicated occasional or frequent 
problems encountered in the last quarter.  And of 80 off-
campus users, 62.5 percent reflected some level of problem 
occurrence in the last quarter.

Critical Success Factors

During the initial years of IRM as the network grew, 
additional resources were able to be allocated to support the 
growth.  Also, during this period of time, significant 
efforts were employed to persuade faculty to increase the use 
of information technology in the classroom.  When the budget 
crisis hit, despite the fact that ATS was cut less than any 
other part of IRM, it could not keep up with the continued 
need for more and more services (even though resources were 
reduced, the growth curve having been built for several years 
did not level off).  Indeed, it is feasible that the budget 
cuts may have accelerated the use of technology by faculty 
and students as new and sometimes dramatic resources became 
available on the Internet.

The early success of SWE led to the development of a 
client/server based email system designed to be integrated 
into SWE.  For a variety of reasons, it did not provide the 
same level of service as other email systems with which it 
was compared--this was especially so for off-campus and 
Macintosh users.  

Conclusions

The IRM division and the ATS unit developed a faculty and 
student oriented posture over a several year period.  That 
led to the establishment of an expectation level that could 
not be fully maintained when state resources were 
significantly reduced. The situation is made even more 
difficult since the growth in faculty and student usage has 
continued to increase while ATS resources have remained level 
at best.


UCLA DEPARTMENT OF CHEMISTRY & BIOCHEMISTRY

Introduction and Background

The UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, ranking 
ninth in the nation, is comprised of 47 faculty, 15 emeriti 
(with 10 in residence), 61+ FTE administrative/departmental 
support staff (83 headcount), 71 research staff, 69 post 
graduate students, 1,188 graduate students, 2,659 
undergraduate majors and 150 TA appointments.  Annually, the 
Department provides lectures for up to 10,000 students from 
the campus and holds instructional chemistry labs for 7,000.  
This $31M operation is funded through state funds, university 
funds, various gifts and donations and annual contract and 
grant research funding of over $11M.  Of the $31M, $2.5M can 
be considered "operating funds" for the ongoing support of 
departmental staff and support salaries, administration, and 
instruction.  

Organizationally, the Department is managed by the Chair, 
Vice Chair, Executive Committee and Chief Administrative 
Officer (CAO).  Comprising the support infrastructure of the 
Department are Offices of Personnel, Business, Mail and 
Information, Graduate and Undergraduate Offices, Chemical and 
Research Equipment Storerooms, Receiving, Machine Shop, Glass 
Shop, Micro Computing and Electronics Shop, Computer 
Services, Mass Spectroscopy Lab, NMR Lab, X-ray Lab, and 
support units for the various Instructional Labs.

Four years ago, the California state budget began to have a 
very negative impact on the departmental level budgets at 
UCLA.  During the ensuing years, over $800K was cut from the 
operating funds of Chemistry and Biochemistry.  A proactive 
and realistic departmental budget required a thorough review 
of all expenditures and management strategies.  Each item was 
reviewed, sub-budgets for each of the various units was 
instigated for management by the personnel directly 
responsible for each unit.  This process necessitated the 
layoff of many personnel; however, at the same time it was 
recognized we could not operate in a "computer vacuum" and 
new workstations and software, better LANs, and email 
packages were purchased or employed.  Faculty were given one-
time departmental allocations of $1500 each to buy additional 
computers or peripherals to accommodate for the loss in 
secretarial staff.

Services Provided

Central computing at UCLA is supported by the Office of 
Academic Computing (OAC) serving the research community and 
Administrative Information Services (AIS) charged with only 
central administrative system development--not departmental.  
Therefore, it is incumbent on the Department of Chemistry and 
Biochemistry to operate it's own IT infrastructure.  The 
Department maintains a 180-node Ethernet computer network 
with two interfaces to a CISCO router, and an 18-node Token-
Ring network.  Internally the Ethernet network is further 
split into multiple bridged and brouted segments to minimize 
the traffic.  TCP/IP, DECNET, AppleTalk, and IPX/SPX 
protocols are supported on the Ethernet network and only 
IPX/SPX on the TokenRing/Novell 3.11 network.  The 
departmental networking is centered around four LANNET LET-36 
Intelligent Hubs with multi-channel (4 Ethernet, 3 
FDDI/TokenRing, and 2Gbps Hi-Speed) backplanes.  The LET-36 
Hubs containing segment-switchable 10-BaseT modules, 
Brouters, FOIRL modules and Terminal Servers are SNMP-
compliant and are managed through MultiMan Network Management 
System.  Networked computer equipment is manufactured by 
Apple, IBM, HP, SGI, Sun FPS (Cray) and other vendors.  In 
addition to the standard TCP/IP applications, there is a 
Client-Server Electronic Mail system (Eudora 2.1.2), a 
departmental Gopher server, and a World-Wide Web service 
using Netscape.  This infrastructure serves over 400 
networked Apple Macintosh, IBM PC and compatibles, Unix 
workstations and servers, and VAX workstations distributed 
between faculty and staff offices, research labs, teaching 
labs, shops and service areas.  By and large, the Department 
is considered to be a "Macintosh shop."

All members of the Department--students, staff and faculty--
have access to email, WWW, Gopher and FTP servers.  The WWW 
for Chemistry (accessed 1,000 times daily from around the 
world) includes complete descriptions of each faculty 
member's research, course listings, departmental calendars, 
and hundreds of other chemistry resources.  The most common 
software and user interfaces used in the Department include: 
DOS/MS Windows, MacOS/Finder, Unix/X-Window System; Informix 
Databases, Netscape, Qualcomm Eudora, Access, MS Word, Excel, 
FilemakerPro, PowerPoint, and ChemDraw.  Online scheduling 
packages such as Now-Up-To-Date are just being evaluated and 
tested.

Technical assistance is provided by two service units: (1) 
The Microcomputer & Electronics Shop (3 FTE) is responsible 
for PC and compatible machine set-ups and initial training, 
repair, maintenance and upgrades as well as laying cable for 
LANs and hookups to the LAN/backbone.  Services are recharged 
by a labor hour rate plus materials: extramural user rate of 
$62/hour and subsidized departmental rates of $56/hour 
(urgent request) and $46/hour (standard requests).  (2) 
Computer Services (2.5 FTE, led by a Ph.D. in Chemistry) 
provides ongoing consultation, documentation, connectivity, 
assistance with program crashes, etc.  For these services, 
the faculty members are charged based on their "use" of 
computers.  Most faculty are considered "small" users and 
charged $650/year while a very few computational chemists pay 
$1250/year.  For specific assistance on new projects, 
recharge rates are set at $115/hour for extramural users and 
the subsidized rate of $75/hour for internal departmental 
users.

It is important to note that the departmental administration 
budget is also charged the same rates as are the research 
contracts and grants for assistance with administrative and 
instructional computing.

     Instructional Computing:

Several courses in the Department are oriented toward 
teaching students about computing in general and specifically 
about various applications of computers in Chemistry such as 
the complete computer-based series of "lectures" (ChemTV=AE) 
developed for the second year Organic Series.  There are both 
advanced undergraduate and graduate level classes dealing 
exclusively with Computational Chemistry (Chemistry 125 and 
245).  The Department maintains the Chemical Calculations 
with Computers (C3[JP1]) Laboratory with 26 microcomputers 
for use by undergraduate students taking any of the Chemistry 
courses.  This laboratory offers software for Molecular 
Modeling, NMR Data Processing, Technical Document 
Preparation, etc.  A suite of programs on the VAX/VMS cluster 
was developed to assist with Student Data Entry, Grading, and 
Enrollment in all lower division undergraduate laboratories.

     Research Computing:

A number of research groups within the Department are 
actively involved in Computational Chemistry.  These groups 
utilize both local computing resources as well as those 
proved by UCLA Office of Academic Computing (OAC) and NSF 
Supercomputing Centers.  In addition to microcomputers, 
workstations, and superminis available to some groups, the 
Department's VAX cluster which consists of six VAX processors 
supports over 200 faculty and postdoctoral/graduate student 
users.  Most users of the VAX cluster are involved in writing 
custom applications, accessing networked resources, and 
communication.  Departmental computers control the operation 
of instrumentation in X-ray Diffraction and Mass Spectrometry 
Laboratories.  Industry-standard RISC workstations are used 
for consoles for the recent generation of the NMR 
spectrometers allowing for remote data processing using the 
X-Window system.

     Administrative Computing:

Through the campus backbone, the Department participates in 
the university supported online administrative systems of 
Personnel, Finance, Contract and Grant Management, 
Purchasing, ASAP (post audit transfer of funds), and Student 
Information Systems.

Internally, the Department has had for many years its own 
self-written recharge program to charge contracts and grants 
or faculty for the various departmental shops and sales 
services.  Tapes from this system then are sent to the campus 
financial system for input. In the last four years, each and 
every administrative desk has received a Mac Centris or IIsi 
with Word, Excel, and Eudora as baseline functions.  To some 
degree, this has allowed the Administrative Office internally 
to automate personnel action changes with the faculty by 
attaching files through Eudora email connections.  This same 
capability will allow faculty to have monthly updates of 
grant financial reports.  Excel has also given the Department 
the capability to develop a complete budget system (shadow) 
combining all operational funds and dispersing them to the 
various shops and offices for internal management.

Additional technical software assistance is provided by a 
single administrative staff member for the entire department.  
The programmer who serves as DSA for the Department to the 
Central Administrative Systems, also has ongoing 
responsibility for training Business and Personnel Office 
staff.
     
Service Strategies

Lacking specifically identified funding from outside the 
department for computerization, it is nonetheless the belief 
of the departmental management that Chemistry and 
Biochemistry can not maintain its national standing without 
the very best in computer support.  The Department has been 
considered a leader on the campus in computing for well over 
a decade when the internal VAX based administrative/research 
systems were written and because of the early dedication to a 
user friendly Macintosh environment. Central university 
administrative systems (which prefer IBM PCs) have been 
requested and are finding ways to support Chemistry's 
Macintosh environment [however reluctantly] for the 
institutionally mandated online systems.  As central systems 
improve over time and some reengineering takes place, there 
will be less need for the shadow systems currently in place.  
Internally, the WWW technology can be leveraged to make a 
greater variety of information related to administrative 
functions available to all faculty staff and students such as 
recharge rates and actual use of Chemistry shops and services 
by individual contracts and grants.

In addition to equipment and accessibility, the ease of 
computing is of paramount importance--therefore, it is 
critical to continually employ better software such as Eudora 
email, new user training materials and to make information 
more readily available through client-server technology.

Since the recent past has needed to focus on administrative 
development, it is now the departmental priority to upgrade 
instructional computing.  The C3 Laboratory, for instance, 
has not been able to upgrade its computers for three years.  
Additionally better programming off the VAX system and onto 
the Informix will assist the grading and chemistry experiment 
results reporting currently in place in the instructional 
laboratories especially in the First Year Laboratory Courses.  
Upper Division students using Beckman DU 650 
Spectrophotometers would be better served if these were on-
line speeding up grading time and providing more time to 
repeat experiments that have not worked and to achieve 
quality data.  Graphing programs such as Igor need to be 
programmed to facilitate instruction so that students will be 
better able to analyze the results of their data.  Students 
have been given their own email accounts, yet, there is a 
need for continued expansion of this capability.  Currently a 
new project in development called Virtual Office Hours (using 
WWW) is having a significant impact on the communication 
capability between faculty and students.

Serving the research effort will continue to be a major 
strategy focus.  Improving services such as migrating 
research databases and applications off older less reliable 
and costly systems such as the VAX is needed.  The Department 
must continue to be dedicated to supporting the academic 
endeavors described by one of our leading research chemist as 
simply "four things": (1) Number one is manuscript 
preparation using a variety of software, graphics, and 
computational programs; (2) Communication (which he says is 
beginning to push number one) in a world where collaborators 
may be in places such as Crete and Moscow which have 
"notoriously unreliable postal service" by having not only 
instantaneous email, but also exchanging the formatted 
manuscripts; (3) Teaching, possibly using extensive video 
animation, and communicating with the students via the recent 
development of the Virtual Office Hours project; and, (4) 
Research data acquisition.  While this researcher and others 
like him are completely conversant with the software they are 
using, they feel absolutely dependent on the high quality of 
network connections and hardware support the Department 
provides.

Critical Success Factors and Conclusion

A proactive service orientation, maintenance of creative 
problem solving units, and strong backing for the computer 
support staff are absolutely critical to successful systems 
implementation.  The Department can not afford to ignore the 
computing program and must do whatever is in its power 
financially to make the systems more available and more 
easily utilized by its clientele. Recent developmental work 
was essentially planned and carried out under the direction 
of the Chair, the CAO and the lead Programmer in consultation 
with various departmental units and faculty.  While such 
initiatives as those enumerated above are good, there must be 
a sustained overview of policy and planning conducted by a 
departmental committee representing an integration of 
research, instruction and administrative computing interests.  
At the beginning of the major budget cuts to the Department, 
a Computer Committee was put in place to review systems from 
both the administrative and research perspectives; however, 
this committee enjoyed only about one and a half years of 
good use except for some ongoing review of recharges.  It is 
suggested that this committee be reconvened on an ongoing 
basis with responsibility to strategize on future system 
implementations which are in the continued best interest of 
the Department.[2]


GENERAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

Common Critical Success Factors

A service orientation: In sometimes very different ways all 
three organizations have emphasized a customer and service 
orientation.  What is perceived as a service orientation 
depends very much on the culture and past expectation level 
of the campus.

Currency of the IT infrastructure: All the institutions have 
made significant on-going efforts to maintain an up-to-date 
IT infrastructure which enables faculty and students to have 
access to networked desktop machines, common software, the 
Internet, and other IT resources available through the campus 
or regional networks .  It is absolutely clear that such an 
infrastructure is crucial for the utilization of IT in the 
classroom.

A prioritization process: Again in very different ways each 
unit has developed a prioritization process that reflects the 
culture of the place and allows the most needed services to 
be given the highest priorities.  It is important that not 
only this occur but also that perceived priorities be taken 
into consideration and dealt with in the user community.

On-going education, training, and support for the individual: 
Each of the organizations has done this to varying degrees.  
There is a direct correlation between the level of support 
for activities of this type and the on-going level of 
satisfaction demonstrated by the user community.

Change management: As the infrastructure matures, the 
external environment exerts pressures, and the expectation 
level evolves, IT management must adjust and realign 
strategies to meet new and perceived needs if it is to 
receive good marks from faculty and students.  Once more, it 
is as important to deal with perceptions as it is to react to 
reality.

Standardization: Each IT unit has initiated a set of 
standards which enhances ease of use, decreases maintenance 
efforts, lessons training, and enables the infrastructure to 
be more easily upgraded.  This strategy is one not easily put 
into place in an academic environment but when established it 
seems to be valued by almost all.

A steady stream of on-going funding: This is inherent from 
all of the above.  It is not a given in many IT environments.  
Often allocations are made for one specific thing without 
regard for other consequences, or cuts in one area are made 
without regard for the impact elsewhere.  If the 
infrastructure is expanded but support services are not, the 
result will probably be a perception from the user community 
that support services have been reduced.


CONCLUSION

Goodman, Sproull and associates have said "...that technology 
is a socially constructed reality.  This means that 
individuals or groups assign meaning to technology, which in 
turn provides direction for selecting information, retaining 
information, and making inferences about the relationship 
between technology and the environment.  This socially 
constructed model is critical in understanding the use of a 
new technology, changes in processes or outcomes, and 
subsequent modification of the technology."[3] It is the 
belief of these authors that the validity of this statement 
is illustrated by the examples contained in this paper.

Certainly there are physical things that must be done if an 
institution is to have an IT infrastructure that is well 
regarded by its faculty and students.  However, the physical 
infrastructure alone will not bring satisfaction to the users 
of it.  Attention must be paid not only to the services 
offered on how to use the infrastructure but also to the 
organizational culture and climate in which the 
infrastructure is utilized.  Too often those of us in IT 
management roles do not pay enough attention to the socially 
constructed reality of the technology we supply.

10/31/95 (JP)


[1] Donald Carder and James Penrod, Providing Access for The 
Scholars Work Environment (SWE), Proceedings of the 1994 
CAUSE National Conference, (Boulder, CO: CAUSE, Nov. 30-Dec. 
2, 1994), III-5-1.

[2] Gratitude is given to the following individuals from the 
UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry: Max 
Kopelevich, Programmer IV, for the explicit system 
descriptions herein and to Professors Christopher S. Foote 
and Kendall N. Houk and Academic Coordinators Marian Dietrich 
and John Mouser for evaluative remarks.

[3] Paul S. Goodman, Lee S. Sproull and Associates, 
Technology and Organizations. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass 
Publishers, 1990) p. 259.

[JP1]



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