Copyright 1997 CAUSE. From CAUSE/EFFECT Volume 20, Number 2, Summer 1997, pp. 17-23. 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 Julia Rudy at CAUSE, 4840 Pearl East Circle, Suite 302E, Boulder, CO 80301 USA; 303-939-0308; e-mail: [email protected]
by Marisa Johnson, Julia Leon, and Susan Mistretta
Information technology use at Emory University has experienced exponential growth over the past decade. This article describes Emory's radical rethinking of how information technology users should be supported.
More than twenty years ago, Emory University1 created a fledging computing center to support the growing needs of computing-intensive departments across the institution. Within a few years, the newly named Emory University Computing Center (EUCC) was supporting the mission-critical administrative jobs, such as registration and payroll, and the academic needs for statistical and time-sharing computing at a rapidly growing university.
By 1989, the increasing need for desktop support and the desire to integrate voice, video, and data technologies became the driving factors in Emory's creating the position of Vice Provost for Information Technology and molding EUCC into the new Information Technology Division (ITD). In the early 1990s under the direction of the new vice provost, ITD began studying and implementing a Total Quality program. As part of that effort, staff from senior management to data center operators were trained in facilitation methods, customer service, and decision-making. Task forces and working groups across ITD were formed and began using the principles of focusing on the customer, making decisions based on data, creating a team environment, and striving to continuously improve. The practice of listening to the customer became a priority; no longer was ITD willing to act as the sole center of computing expertise at Emory. Slowly ITD was being "transformed" from a hierarchical to a flatter organization, with more self-directed teams of employees. Although this new-found flexibility to customer requests improved the quality of service, it was not enough to keep up with the number of requests for computer solutions -- Emory had become a community of 15,000 computer users.
Rapid growth was now a fact of life. In just a few years, the campus had moved from a centralized, mainframe-based computing organization to one that supported a variety of desktops, network connectivity, and software. The explosive distribution of computing technology across campus was straining ITD's ability to provide central support -- backlogs for hardware repair, software installation, and consulting were reaching two weeks or more. Campuswide surveys that analyzed the state of support for desktop and departmental computing told the tale: customer satisfaction with ITD was dropping, and in many instances, departments had hired their own "computer experts." Although this departmental expertise varied widely, it had become apparent that ITD's role in supporting office systems had changed forever.
In some cases, ITD employees feared this loss of central control and the possible loss of their jobs. Would the existence of local support mean the dissolution of a central computing organization? What was ITD's role in a campus of more independent and more knowledgeable users?
These questions and concerns culminated in a division-wide reorganization in January of 1995. In a presentation to the entire staff, the vice provost articulated his vision of a new and more responsive organization. Among the reasons for reorganization were the overwhelming demands for service and the need to support those persons in their departments who provide frontline computing support. In other words, local support personnel were to be our colleagues and not to be seen as threats to central computing. Part of achieving these strategic goals was the creation of the Indirect Support Team.
The initial charge of the Indirect Support Team was to put processes and procedures in place that would help local support personnel to be successful and computing users on campus to become more self-sufficient. The division-wide reorganization presented an opportunity to move existing staff into the Indirect Support Team; three employees were offered the opportunity and accepted.
Even before the Team officially started operation, members met with many of the known local support personnel to learn what they wanted from the Team and from the Division as a whole. The request heard again and again was to improve communication, not only between local support and ITD, but among local support providers themselves.
It became apparent that improving communication between local support and the Information Technology Division staff would have to wait until the Team identified and defined who and what constituted the local support community.
In the first months after the Indirect Support Team's formation, the members drew up a list of all University departments and identified which of these departments had local support personnel. Surprisingly, nearly sixty campus units already had such staff. In many cases, these people had not been hired as computing experts, but rather had been "assigned" computing support tasks. At this point, Team members interviewed each and every local support provider and began building a Web-accessible database of these individuals, including information about their computing environment and their areas of expertise.
The biggest beneficiaries and most active users of this organized information have been the staff at ITD. Whether browsing this database to double-check knowledge about a department's local computing environment or using the names of local support personnel as an authoritative list for granting access to particular servers, ITD staff working in desktop, network, and central server support have found this database of enormous and unexpected value to them.
After identifying the names and numbers of local support personnel across the Emory campus, the Indirect Support Team turned toward building a community of local support personnel with an eye toward the central goal of improving communication. The Team decided that the focus in building a community or communities of users would be establishing user groups, which might be "meeting user groups" that actually meet face-to-face, electronic user groups that only "meet" in e-mail conversations, or special interest groups that meet infrequently.
The Team found that some communities work better than others and, indeed, there are some indicators of success for a group. It turns out, not surprisingly, that people want to belong to a group that shares similar interests and computing environments. For this reason, Emory's user groups are most often platform-based, meaning a user may be a member of multiple groups.
For groups that meet regularly, success also depends on the size of the group, which should be small enough for members to recognize faces, remember names, and actually get to know each other. A more difficult task is that of an electronic user group that must find some way of "meeting" the other members to ensure reliable communication and a measure of trust among members. Less obvious, but also important for the success of a group, is to consider how the members view themselves in regard to their status in the University and their technical know-how.
As mentioned above, these user groups meet face-to-face on a regular basis to discuss current issues and share experiences. Over the past two years, the Indirect Support Team has formed a number of these groups and plays as active a role as is needed to get a group started-as much as possible, the Team encourages the users to take on the responsibility of planning the agenda for the meetings.
The formation of a meeting user group requires a good deal of background work. A member of the Team chosen to initiate a particular group polls the community to create a list of people with whom to seed the group, then develops the initial programs, including selecting a topic, inviting a speaker, finding a time and place to meet, sending out invitations, and arranging refreshments. These hosting activities are essential to the operation of a meeting group and are an activity that was not managed well prior to the Indirect Support Team's creation.
The Indirect Support Team currently facilitates these meeting user groups:
The primary example of an electronic user group at Emory is the entire local support group, defined and developed as one of the Indirect Support Team's initial activities as described earlier. A Web site maintained by Team members includes, among other things, a listing of all local support pages and keyword searching of this database.
In addition, a listserv distribution list is maintained with e-mail addresses generated from the local support database. This list is often used by local support personnel to share information on current problems and ask questions of their local support colleagues. Finally, telephone numbers from the database are loaded into voice-mail distribution lists for the Team that are then used to quickly inform all local support personnel of central system alarm messages -- for example, a network failure on the campus backbone.
These tools of electronic communication are also used by the Indirect Support Team as a way to centrally and consistently inform the Emory community about ITD activities, about other user groups on campus and in the Atlanta area, and about user groups that are forming. The minutes, handouts, or presentations of active user groups in which the Indirect Support Team participates are also published on the Team's Web site.
Interest is generated for these groups by announcing their formation on a Web page that contains a form for users to register their interest. The names of individuals gathered during this process are used as a listserv distribution list to inform group members when an opportunity for a special meeting or formal activity arises. The Indirect Support Team has initiated three special interest groups: Document Imaging, Mathematica, and Statistics.
Along with building communities of users, the Indirect Support Team is charged with informing the Emory community of technology users about ITD news and activities that may affect them. Historically, the tendency within ITD has been to not inform users of anything until the message is perfectly edited and certain. Too often, this was too late! Through the use of published World Wide Web pages, electronic mail, phone messages, and office visits, the Indirect Support Team has become a focal point for local support personnel when they need information about ITD. The by-product of this two-way communication is a growing trust between the local support community and ITD.
The largest and most public means of informing local support personnel has been the semi-annual conference hosted by the Indirect Support Team. These conferences generally attract 100-150 participants. The conferences begin with a luncheon and presentations by keynote speakers such as the University president, University provost, and the vice provost for information technology, and participants then attend several presentations during the remainder of the afternoon. In February of 1996 and again in March of 1997, the conference was set up to accommodate both novice and advanced local support personnel by creating a number of sessions conducted by ITD staff on the technologies available to the Emory campus as well as those technologies that were "up and coming." In October 1996, the conference highlighted local support achievements by having local support personnel themselves conduct presentations and demonstrations of projects they were working on. Ranging from "Fax Solution for an Office" to "World Wide Web Publishing," these topics were informative and continued to emphasize the notion that ITD was a central, but not the only, place for computing expertise at Emory.
The Indirect Support Team works to empower the local support community by acting as an advocate for local support with regard to ITD procedures and policy issues. With the organization of the local support group on campus, the Indirect Support Team helped to focus the voice of local support personnel, which now carries significant influence and is heard throughout ITD.
There are several large-scale distributed computing environments on campus, representing the University's professional schools, libraries, and affiliates. In these areas a manager and staff provide full-time computing support and, frankly, have earned a more direct communication channel with ITD. The Indirect Support Team facilitated the startup of a special committee for these local support personnel and the top level management of ITD, including the vice provost. Known as the Technology Advisory Committee (TAC), they meet monthly to discuss high-level policy issues as well as ways of integrating services and cooperating on projects.
The Indirect Support Team's constant and consistent advocacy of the local support position brings the customer's point of view into every internal ITD meeting. One example of this advocacy was the changes to ITD's procedure for users to obtain PPP accounts. Some customers on campus were finding this procedure difficult and unresponsive to their needs; discussions within a small local support group pointed out that a significant process problem existed. The Indirect Support Team suggested that a subcommittee meet to articulate the problem and propose a desired solution. A member of the Team worked with the group to facilitate their discussions and advised them on how to best present their request to ITD. Finally, the Indirect Support Team arranged for ITD's senior management to review the proposal, which was then approved and sent to ITD's UNIX system administrators for further refinement.
Though this example was eventually successful, the Indirect Support Team has determined that it is not enough for the Team to act merely as a go-between for ITD staff and local support personnel -- the Team must bring them together as partners.
Another recent example of the importance of the Indirect Support Team's advocacy of local support issues was the plan between the computing organizations of both Emory's health care system and the University to purchase Novell support for the entire campus. Management teams in both areas had planned to funnel all contact for Novell support through four authorized people. The community of Novell administrators represented by one of the user groups nurtured by the Indirect Support Team saw this as an unworkable solution and, as a group, was able to convince management to purchase the option that allows the campus to provide Novell a long list of authorized contacts. Emory's Novell administrators can now choose to be on this list or not.
Finally, the Team realizes ITD staff might perceive a certain "danger" in empowering local support personnel. By giving out information about ITD and its efforts, the Division can become open to complaints and criticisms from some very vocal people, and these comments can be very uncomfortable for ITD staff, who may have been insulated from this sort of input before, to receive and deal with.
But the Team's experience suggests that this fear is unfounded. For example, the group that manages ITD's UNIX servers has often come under criticism from the math/computer science department. On a particular Friday, the program for the UNIX system administrators meeting was a panel discussion on backup strategies, with panelists from ITD, math/computer science, and a research facility. As luck would have it, on the previous evening ITD's server had had a hard disk failure, compounded by a RAID2 failure. On the day of the meeting, mail was unavailable to most of the campus while ITD restored the information from a woefully inadequate backup tape. What an opportunity for ITD to be buried under criticism yet again! But this wasn't the case. Instead, the group of system administrators from all over the University offered to support the ITD staff in their request for the money needed for additional hardware.
As one might expect, the range of desktop expertise varies greatly among local support personnel. A major component of the Indirect Support Team's work in their second year has been to assess and, if possible, formalize and standardize the training opportunities for local support personnel across campus. Since it is obvious that these individuals must have a basic, introductory knowledge about local networks and the desktop environment, the Indirect Support Team is using this assumption as a basis to begin working with them and the manager of ITD's Short Course program to develop a training and certification program specifically for local support personnel.
The Team envisions that two or three levels of training (introductory, intermediate, advanced) can be developed to satisfy additional training needs of the local support community. Not only will such training improve communication between ITD staff and the local support staff they assist, it will also more clearly define what a local support person can be expected to know and do, and will provide a training- and perhaps a career-development path for local support personnel.
Although ITD reorganized itself and ITD management bought into the notion of supporting local support personnel, the idea was not discussed with the entire University. Therefore, not every department or organization was in a position to hire local support staff and quite often these units didn't see why they should be spending money on something that they thought should be provided free of charge by the central computing organization.
For those departments that express an interest in establishing local support, the Indirect Support Team works closely with them and Emory's Human Resources Division in identifying job requirements, choosing appropriate job titles and grades, and, finally, interviewing likely candidates. In the past two years, several departments have set aside funds and hired their own support staff, bringing the total local support community close to 140 people.
In a perfect world every department would see the benefit of local computing support and fund it. Then all of the support people would network with each other and central computing to get great things done. But this is not a perfect world. At Emory the undergraduate College of Arts and Sciences, which represents over half of the student population, is not positioned to hire and manage local support for the faculty in their departments. Given this dilemma, ITD and the Woodruff Library funded pilot projects that hired support people for the Social Sciences departments.
This model was continued for the 1996-97 academic year, during which six more local support staff were hired -- three for humanities, one for biology, and two for history, philosophy, and economics. Although these local support people formally report to ITD, they are in practice the responsibility of a partnership among ITD, Woodruff Library, and Emory College: ITD provides the salaries, the Library provides a staff person to work with faculty on electronic information resources, the College provides office space, and all three entities participate in the evaluations of the local support person's performance.
In each department's case there is a backlog of basic computing and local network support to be handled. However, in hiring, we look for people who are not only computer technologists, but are also interested in supporting the mission of their particular department. The Team's hope is that they will be able to work with faculty to use information technology to improve teaching and research at Emory.
As mentioned earlier, the staff at the Information Technology Division have been important beneficiaries and active users of the local support database. Keyword searching allows staff to query the database to find specific, though unauthoritative, information such as the number of Novell administrators on campus, the number of users of a specific e-mail client, and the various counts on the number of users with either PCs or Macintoshes. In addition, the creation of an electronic mail distribution list for local support makes it a snap for ITD to send out important and timely announcements of scheduled computer downtime, software upgrades, or special hardware sales.
A new project for the Team's second year was the promotion of an electronic polling system for local support that asks them for a list of their "hot topics" for the year. Many computing organizations can only guess about what is important for their customers, and often they guess wrong. This system allows the ITD leadership and staff to see exactly what local support personnel will be working on in the coming year and what topics hold the most interest for them. The Team uses this information to plan specific presentations for the various user groups and the semi-annual conference. In addition, local support staff are asked a series of more specific questions about the "winning" hot topic (which happens to be Remote Access/Telecommuting) that help specify what help or consultation local support staff need from ITD to make their work on remote access issues easier and more efficient.
By all accounts, the Team has been successful in changing ITD's relationship with local support people. In no small part, this is due to several effective team skills present in Emory's Indirect Support Team.
Experience in the campus computing environment and relationships with people across campus provided the knowledge necessary to get off to a good start. The three members of Emory's Indirect Support Team have this experience. One worked in the library providing local support and for ITD as the initial contact for new customers; another worked for Emory Hospital before coming to the University, and at ITD had been the manager of the maintenance group for the payroll/personnel systems, had worked on a technical architecture plan, and had provided support with customer departments in the desktop environment; and the third worked as a mainframe programmer, the head of the training program, and as a manager with responsibility for the people doing LAN installations and PC database application development.
Since no one understands the job fully, team members have to be flexible enough to define their jobs as they go along, and they must be self-starters. When the Indirect Support Team was formed, there were no role models to follow. ITD management had an idea of what the Team should accomplish, but left it to the Team to determine the methods to use. To get rolling, members wrote a vision and supported the vision with a mission. The mission was refined by adding specific responsibilities and measurable actions for a six-month period. Now periodic tracking is done to measure progress on these actions and at the end of each six months the next action plan is developed. Although the Team is not constrained by its initial planning, this organizing work helped to define the Indirect Support Team in its infancy and at the very least was a valuable exercise in team building and consensus.
The team practices methods for improving service quality in an organization. ITD has been studying the principles of Total Quality Management for several years. Although the Division has had mixed success, the Indirect Support Team embraces the idea of self-directed work teams. Being self-directed means that the team members must organize their activities and:
After nearly two years of working as a self-directed team, there continues to be very little friction. The Team has become a safe place for members to test out ideas, get feedback on sticky situations, and air frustrations. Possible reasons for the success are that Team members are located close to each other in an open office environment and have complementary skills, and three is an easily managed number for a team.
Good facilitation skills related to the quality methods are also necessary. All three Team members have exhibited competence with the facilitation techniques that ITD adopted. They have been trained in structuring different types of meetings to accomplish the sharing of knowledge, identifying group consensus, action planning, action tracking, and strategic planning.3 Since the University as a whole has not adopted these facilitation methods, the Team is often called upon to help others accomplish their goals.
Team members need moderate technical expertise so that they can be knowledgeable enough to understand the issues, but are not so technically oriented that they can't refrain from providing the "perfect" technical solution. The Team's job is not to recommend specific technologies or technical solutions, but to refer to other departments, vendors, and VARs (value-added resellers) for technical expertise.
It is generally acknowledged that standardizing and doing support centrally is a cost-effective strategy. Is there any way that fostering distributed support and the expense of the Indirect Support Team can be justified? Here are a few stories that demonstrate the successes and wins for Emory because of the presence of distributed, local support.
In the spring of 1994 Emory's Law School was not connected to the campus Ethernet backbone, but had allocated money for the connection, for internal wiring, and for some staff to work on jumpstarting and promoting the use of information technology at the School. During the summer, three people were hired who were graduates of the Law School with strong computer skills and no desire to practice law. Within short order, the wiring had been completed, desktops were connected, and the new support staff had established desktop standards for Law School faculty and staff.
There is no magic here. The Law School could have paid ITD for computer support and the Division would have been equally successful. But the three law/computer experts created something that central computing staff would not have envisioned doing-they developed tools to take electronic files of the decisions of Federal Court of Appeals and turn them into HTML (hypertext markup language) documents. They installed their own Web server to share these documents and negotiated with the courts to publish their decisions. Today the Emory Law Web posts decisions by the First, Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, Tenth, and Eleventh Federal Courts of Appeal and is one of the largest publishers of court decisions in the United States. The union of computer skills and discipline knowledge yielded something really creative -- and unlikely to have been delivered by the traditional, central computing organization -- in support of the mission of the Law School.
Another department that has benefited from local computing support is Emory's Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP). This small office of fifteen gathers information on available grants and supports researchers in applying for those grants. In the late '80s the office had a full-time programmer on staff whose focus was providing tools for data management. In the early '90s he left and OSP decided not to replace him, but instead to buy computer support from ITD. During that period they were able to maintain their database applications and network their computers, but saw no real gain in integrating the technology with the departmental business.
Just over two years ago, OSP again hired a computer professional. They found someone with database skills who was interested in exploring other areas of computing and information technology. Of special note was that part of his initial training was working at all the other jobs in the department so that he could understand the business completely.
One benefit of having a departmental computing professional is the obvious increase in productivity of other staff members. OSP's local support person has facilitated this by proactively suggesting tools that meet their needs, by resolving problems immediately, and by taking care of the myriad things that need continual attention -- virus protection, backup, security. Another key result of his efforts is the use of information technology to make the services of OSP available to researchers throughout the University.
When local support personnel were asked by the Indirect Support Team what is important to them, they identified three areas in which the Team has been beneficial:
Community. Most often, local support personnel mention the user groups as being very effective in assisting them in their work. Communication among local support personnel has greatly improved since the Indirect Support Team began its work.
Central resource. The Indirect Support Team also connects local support people to the resources they need. For example, the Team helped find a single point of contact in ITD to answer a local support person's questions. With the help of this contact, she has been able to assist her department in installing a network and implementing a local e-mail solution.
Empowerment. Finally, local support personnel use the Indirect Support Team to, as another support person says, "back us up." She attributes the cohesiveness among the local support staff to the efforts of the Indirect Support Team and is able to point to specific decisions made by ITD's leadership that were affected by the opinions of the local support community.
Overall, the Indirect Support Team has provided local support staff with a communication network that both ties them to ITD technical experts and puts them in touch with each other. Local support people use this communication to find answers to problems, get advice on products, and explore issues of common interest.
Particularly important are the relationships that have been fostered among local support personnel that have helped to alleviate the demand on ITD's technical experts. Equally important is the fact that local support people have a different perspective on the technology than do the ITD experts. Whereas the Division's perspective is more focused on the design of the technology, local support has a more practical view that focuses on how information technology is actually useful. There are times when talking with one's peers makes sense and times when advice from a technical expert is needed. Our local support people have access to both.
Because Emory is a large community with remote sites, computing support staff don't run into each other at the water fountain. Effort has to be spent to foster communication, or when it is needed it won't be there. Managing user groups, facilitating conferences, and maintaining the tools for communication has to be a stated part of someone's job. It cannot be left for someone to do when and if s/he gets around to it.
There are several reasons why the partnership between the Information Technology Division and the local support community has been mutually beneficial. ITD's support staff are able to concentrate on the difficult, non-repetitive problems while looking to preventive and more strategic support strategies for the future. In addition, the different perspectives brought to computing support by both partners have made an impact on decision-making. The more practical view of computing that local support personnel hold is instrumental in ITD's making balanced and useful strategic decisions for the direction of information technology on the campus.
Lastly, the partnership succeeds because three positions have been dedicated to focus on building and maintaining it. In the future, these same three staff may be assigned other jobs or spread throughout the organization, but for now it is acknowledged that someone must be dedicated and accountable for this work. Building partnerships is not a casual task, but a recognized and ongoing responsibility at Emory University.
1 Emory University is a private, Methodist-affiliated university with more than 11,000 undergraduate and graduate students. In addition to Emory College, the University encompasses a graduate school of arts and sciences; professional schools of medicine, theology, law, nursing, public health, and business; the Yerkes Primate Research Center; and Oxford College, a two-year undergraduate division.
2 RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is one way of creating a fault-tolerant storage system and encompasses six levels, ranging from byte-level striping to block level and parity data striping.
3 These refer to specific constructs that have been developed by The Institute of Cultural Affairs, which is a world-wide private, non-profit organization whose aim is to develop and implement methods of individual, community, and organizational development
The authors of this article are the Indirect Support Team at Emory University.
Marisa Johnson ([email protected]) has consulted with new faculty, written technical manuals, trained hundreds of staff on computing applications, and provided Web content and design.
Julia Leon ([email protected])
has done systems analysis and design, database design and administration,
technical architecture design, and Web applications development.
Susan Mistretta ([email protected])
has been involved in computing in education since 1970. For the last ten
years, she has been working with microcomputer installations and applications.
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