University of Michigan: What Presidents Need to Know About the Impact of Networking on Campus Background paper for HEIRAlliance Executive Strategies Report #3 "What Presidents Need to Know ... about the Impact of Networking on Campus" ----------------------------------------------------------------- prepared by representatives of THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN James J. Duderstadt President Douglas E. Van Houweling Vice Provost for Information Technology Donald E. Riggs Dean, University Library Michael J. McGill Director, Network Systems ----------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 1993 by HEIRA The Executive Strategies reports are published by the Higher Education Information Resources Alliance (HEIRAlliance), a vehicle for cooperative projects between the Association of Research Libraries, CAUSE, and EDUCOM. For information about paper copies, contact CAUSE at 303-449-4430, orders@CAUSE.colorado.edu To retrieve this paper electronically, send e-mail to HEIRA@CAUSE.colorado.edu with the message GET HEIRA.ES3michigan ================================================================= What Presidents Need to Know about the Impact of Networks on Campus: University of Michigan Introduction The purpose of this paper is to provide university presidents with a set of expected requirements for the deployment of networked information technology on and among campuses. The University of Michigan is used as the base of experience from which the guidelines are developed. The guidelines are intended to provide university presidents with the basis for making decisions which have the potential of providing significant advances in productivity of teaching, research and related activities. The University of Michigan provides an excellent basis for these recommendations. As a large midwestern public institution, it is also a major research institution which, as the host of the National Science Foundation's NSFNET, has been the focal point for a large number of network innovations. The institution has gone through many of the difficulties associated with the first installation of a network and, as importantly, it has experienced the challenges of upgrading its backbone and is undergoing significant upgrades and replacements of its many local and departmental networks. This paper will provide the reader with a brief review of the information technology environment at the University of Michigan and some of the relevant experiences that have occurred at the institution. The national networking activities which have been hosted by the University will then be described. As with many institutions, the availability of the national network has had profound impacts on the members of the U-M community. Some of these impacts will be explored to identify the implications for the University and its administration. Brief Status of the University's Network Activities Campus The University of Michigan is an institution of approximately 45,000 students just about evenly split between undergraduate and graduate students. The University is actually composed of four campuses in Ann Arbor -- the south, central, medical and north campuses, as well the Flint campus and the Dearborn campus. In Ann Arbor, the central campus is the home of twelve colleges, including the College of Literature, Science and Arts; the University of Michigan Business School; and the Law School. The north campus is separated from the main campus by about one mile and houses the Engineering, Music, Art, and Architecture colleges. The medical campus is the home of the U-M Medical School as well as the six hospitals which comprise the University of Michigan Medical Center. Ann Arbor Campus Data Backbone and Related Services The campus is served by a series of three interconnected fiber optic backbones transmitting 100 million bits per second under the FDDI protocol. The UniversityUs Information Technology Division (ITD) coordinates the backbones and operates the backbone which serves both the central and south campus facilities. The Engineering College operates a backbone serving the north campus, and the Medical Center operates a backbone which serves the medical campus. These backbones support a variety of higher-level protocols including the Internet Protocol (IP) and Appletalk. The dominant local area networks on campus are NovellUs Netware, AppleUs Appletalk and Banyan's Vines. In addition, ITD supports terminal connections via locally developed communication processors that provide asynchronous communication at speeds up to 19,200 bits per second. They have provided reliable communication facilities to the campus for over 10 years. The entire Ann Arbor campus is now being upgraded to a Ethernet connections to meet the demands of the Future Computing Environment now being deployed. Northern Telecom Switches and Voice Services The University provides its own telephone services via two Northern Telecom SL-100 switches. These switches also provide phone service to the Dearborn and Flint campuses. The voice services include Voice Mail and 911 emergency services. The campus provides telephone service to approximately 33,000 customers including students in the residence halls. The system was installed during the 1985-1986 calendar years. During this installation the campus was wired to provide copper wire capacity adequate to ensure upgrades in the foreseeable future. This capacity is sufficient for the Ethernet upgrade currently underway, and may well be sufficient for the next generation of communication facilities. Broadband Network and Video Services The University has a broadband network that has served for television broadcasting services and for a now-replaced administrative data processing application. The broadband network is currently being upgraded to serve both the entertainment and educational needs of the University community. In cooperation with the local cable televisions franchise, the broadband network is being extended to the residence halls. National and State Activities The University of Michigan is the host institution for Merit, Inc., which is responsible for the implementation and operation of the NSFNET national backbone. Merit implemented the backbone in 1988 with support from MCI, IBM, and the State of Michigan. In 1990, Merit contracted with Advanced Network and Services (ANS) to provide the backbone services. The NSFNET is the key component of the national and international Internet. The University has had a close working relationship with the Internet activities, and because it houses the Network Operations Center, has been able to provide the U-M community with excellent access to the Internet. Merit Activities Merit also operates MichNet, which is the Michigan statewide network. Merit developed the asynchronous communications processors now used on the campus for terminal access. Merit is upgrading MichNet to use more powerful off-the-shelf facilities to replace these processors. MichNet facilities provide connectivity for the Flint and Dearborn campuses, which are undergoing technology upgrades similar to those underway on the Ann Arbor campus. Merit was the original operator of the Network Operations Center, and in this role developed with the University a number of network monitoring tools that allowed the effective operation of NSFNET and the University's network. The network monitoring and management have proven to be vital elements in the operational viability of the University's highly networked environment. Related Activities Computer Aided Engineering Network (CAEN) The Engineering College runs a separate but connected data network that serves its specific needs. The network allows for experimentation and adaptation to the specialized needs of the quickly changing technological environment in Engineering. The network is interconnected the remainder of the University by means of a bridge maintained by CAEN and ITD. Information and Networking Services (INS) The University of Michigan Hospitals have for many years maintained a separate computing facility dedicated to the support of the hospitals. The Hospital INS organization provides the network that supports the administrative and clinical functions of the Medical Center. Information Technology and Networking (ITN) Support for the medical and research faculty of the Medical Center is provided by the ITN organization. ITN now runs a series of networks including a backbone interconnected with the campus backbone. Center for Information Technology Integration (CITI) The Center for Information Technology Integration is the unit of the Information Technology Division that conducts advanced development for the Division. CITI has worked to provide the University with a number of advanced facilities for a highly networked information environment. For example, CITI developed (with support from IBM) the Institutional File Server (IFS) which provides the campus with an institution-wide storage facility that supports the UniversityUs distributed computing environment while maintaining the information sharing capability historically provided by the UniversityUs timesharing system, MTS. Overview of the Organizational Structure The University is a highly decentralized institution. The Executive officers of the institution have delegated a great deal of responsibility to the Deans and Directors of the University. In addition, the University has established committees to provide policy oversight and user input to the Information Technology Division. Membership on these committees is representative of the campuses. The Deans, Directors, and Executive Officers of the University, in cooperation with the various committees, provide a very distributed decision making environment. The independence of the decision processes requires excellent communication and shared goals. Where goals are not common, coordination of information technology efforts suffers. Impact of Information Technology Facts and Figures -----Number of Computer accounts There are currently 81,000 Computer accounts, though not all are active. The breakdown of active accounts is: Faculty, student, staff request accounts 32,731 External Users 5,666 Research (self-supported or sponsored) 4,692 Departmental accounts 9,809 Other special accounts 26,978 -----Number and growth rate of IFS accounts Currently there are 3,700 IFS accounts, each with it's own unique name. This number has doubled since January 1993, and is expected to reach 15,000 by the end of 1993. -----Number of Local Area Networks There are 149 local area networks, as of June 1993. -----Number of Conferences and Participants Over 3,500 electronic conferences have been established at the University of Michigan. These include course/instructional conferences; departmental, faculty, staff, and student conferences; and external conferences (non-University user buying time on Michigan Terminal System (MTS)). Conferencing at the University of Michigan continues to grow, often at the rate of a new conference every day. A Few Examples Business by Email Business at the University of Michigan now includes a great deal of electronic communication. Email with the president is routine, and decisions, actions, and requests for information are most frequently sent electronically. The officers and deans all use Email, and many faculty have adopted Email as a integral part of their courses. It is therefore essential that everyone in the university community has the resources necessary to participate. Appropriate network access and the associated applications necessary to support the daily activities are essential. Accomplishing such institution-wide access requires that standards be adopted and adhered to. For example, incompatible mail standards have caused significant difficulty for officers of the University who wished to share financial information. Adoption of a single standard such as the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) helps to avoid these problems. Growth of GopherBlue The national networking activities have led to a startling increase in the number of information resources available. Access to these resources has required users to identify the resource and its location and then figure out how to access the information. There have been a number of tools developed that assist users in accessing information resources. The Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) and Gopher are two of the better known tools. The University of Michigan has multiple Gopher implementations. The University Libraries and the Information Technology Division have coordinated activities to provide for scholarly and other important information to the campus. The Information Technology Division's implementation of gopher is called GopherBlue. Its contents include job openings at the University, weather information, M-Quality program documents and other general campus related information. The use of GopherBlue has increased from no access a year ago to over 200,000 individual accesses per month. Remote Resources Information resources have always been critical to educational institutions. The resources have traditionally been local resources as epitomized by the Library. In the 1970s and 1980s these resources were enhanced by the availability of online information systems such as OCLC, NLM, and Lexis. These resources required large, complex computing systems and were relatively scarce. Today we have over 300 library catalogs freely available on a wide variety of computing systems on the Internet. This dependency on information has not changed. What has changed is the availability of the resources and the means by which we access them. Faculty, staff and students require access to remote resources to be competitive with colleagues at other institutions. Dependence on distance communication The University of Michigan is increasingly an international university with students and faculty throughout the world. It is critical that communication with the individuals remote to the university be maintained. The communication is in a variety of formats including voice, data and video. This in turn requires that facilities be in place to support these communication requirements. Right now, that means that separate facilities to support each medium. However, these formats are becoming capable of being supported by integrated media. For example, the University is now supporting compressed video using standard voice and data communication facilities. Compressed video is now being used on a regular basis for video conferences, and will be used to teach courses in locations as distant as Hong Kong. Integrated Media The campus has also been a test site for an integrated media system developed by Northern Telecommunications that incorporates voice, data and video into a tool available to the individual at the workstation. The system allows the participants to share data while communicating via a video telephone service. This service has shown the importance of having a critical mass of participants to make the service viable. The University's Information Technology Division has also brought together its video network with it data network to provide an integrated multimedia facility. This system, called VIDs, is being used in a variety of instructional environments that incorporate full motion video and computer based instruction. Potential and Futures A New Medium * Integrated Voice, Data and Video The future of networked information will require the increased use of all of the media of communication available to us. The requirement will be for either fully integrated media on a single communication network, or at least the virtual integration of these networks for the user. The requirement for on-demand access to network capacity adequate to serve the needs which will range from as simple as a voice communication to as demanding as full motion video. * Invisible Technology/ Visible Productivity Tools The expected pattern of use of information technology in the future is to be concerned less and less with how the technology works and more and more with the ability of technology to increase individual and group productivity. The tools which are likely to provide the most significant productivity gains are will combine several of today's media. The media technology of the future is expected to be standardized and invisible to the user. The personal computer will take on new forms, and will be a critical element in providing the user with seamless access to formerly distinct media. * Communication, not the Medium The key factor for the future is the ability to communicate, not the medium of communication. The measure of success will not be the quantity of information, speed of communication, nor the breadth of the information resources covered. Rather, success will be measured by the ability to get the job completed in an effective manner. Effective communication requires all of the above criteria but also puts the emphasis on the task being performed and not the means of accomplishing the task. What is required Conceptual * Vision for the Future The single most important factor for the success of a networked environment on a campus is the maintenance of a vision that is meaningful to the faculty, staff and students of the campus. The keeper of this vision needs to be a highly placed officer of the institution with direct responsibility for the information technology environment. The vision provides direction, substance and authorization to the members of the university community. Since the higher education environment is characterized by highly decentralized initiative and decision-making, the vision provides a construct around which those decisions can fit within a broader institutional direction. * Concern for the productivity of faculty, staff and students The individual who maintains the vision needs to keep the interests of the institution and its constituents as the key rationale for the information technology. The introduction of technology MUST have the goal of increasing the productivity and effectiveness of these constituents. * Leadership An important factor in development of information technology and networking on any campus is providing the appropriate leadership which must come from a well placed champion. At the University of Michigan the champion for many of the technological innovations has been the Vice Provost for Information Technology. As the title implies, he has been assigned the responsibility for much of the technological direction of the campus, with oversight being provided by a number of bodies. The champion of other campuses may differ, but in each instance institutional recognition of the legitimacy of the champion either by title or by direction is critical. * Cooperation with other institutions trying to achieve the same goals. Seldom is any institution capable of standing alone in the information technology environment. The University of Michigan was fortunate to be able to work with significant governmental and corporate partners, as well as a number of cooperating educational institutions, both as it developed its own networks and as it developed the current NSFNET infrastructure. The relationships have allowed the University to expand its range of expertise, created critical masses of needs and capabilities, allowed for significant economies of scale, spread the risk, and provided for mutual benefit. Pragmatics * Substantial Networking Facilities No information technology activity is likely to succeed without significant networking facilities. The important factor here is to never underestimate the networking requirements, and not try to outguess the technology. The range of applications and facilities that are now available in a distributed computing environment are significant and growing. The distinctions between the traditional voice, data, and video technologies are disappearing, and the expectations of many faculty, staff and student members of the community are that these will be integrated for them in order to enhance their productivity. Each step in the integration requires additional management sophistication, applications integration, and increased communication among the distributed components. Traditional means of supporting networks may no longer be appropriate. Voice systems which depend on usage fees are foreign and contrary to the data communications environment which has relied upon purchasing capacity irrespective of use. Video, when it is actually purchased, is often on a subscription basis. Integrated networks, therefore, present a challenge to all three models and require creative thinking. It is important to be realistic about the costs of a technologically intensive environment. Distributed environments are more expensive to manage but actually use the resources of the campus more effectively. The resources available within a unit of the campus often directly incur the costs associated with meeting their own needs which may be more effectively decided at the local level rather than centrally. * Access to National Networking Facilities The advantage of a networked computer environment is the range of resources that are available to any of the users of that environment. Many of these resources are national resources available over the Internet. NSFNET is one of the most important components of the Internet. Access to the Internet is readily available in nearly every part of the United States and throughout the developed world. While this access has been inexpensive for most educational institutions, the recently announced new architecture for the NSFNET and different funding models will phase out the Federal subsidy for the national backbone, which accounts for about ten percent of the current cost of an institutional connection. The requirements from the faculty, staff and students are unlikely to do anything except increase with the advent of new media and applications. Thus, it is incumbent upon the university president to maintain a close vigil on national and state legislative and regulatory activities that may negatively impact the ability of his/her institution to afford to participate in national or international networked information activities. The higher education community will need to be vigilant to protect its interests as powerful commercial and political forces influence the network's evolution into the future. * Distributed Computing and Information Resources The computing and information environment of the future is distributed. That is, the information resources will be located where they are most logically created and/or maintained and users will access that information from their workstation. Each userUs workstation will be fully interconnected to resources which provide information, high speed computing, specialized resources including applications, and required resources such as directory and authentication services. The user in the distributed environment will see a broader range of resources and will lose the concept of location or distance. Interconnection and access provided by the network will be critical factors in enabling this distributed environment. * Libraries and Related Information Services The university library is still the most significant repository of scholarly information. Its resources will increasingly be viewed as a networked resource with larger and larger percentages of the library's holdings available over the network. Today these resources are often only available as catalog information and the user is expected to come to the library to make use of the full material. Electronic journals, full text and structured electronic documents are quickly changing the expectations of the users of libraries. The university library is being challenged to not only maintain compatibility with the changing technology of the campus environment, but also to alter its collection and distribution patterns to provide the services increasingly expected by the members of the campus community. It is also important to recognize that the university library has become one of the information providers rather than THE information provider. The coordination of these resources and the development of partnerships that will enhance the intellectual environment of the community is a greater challenge due to the changed technological environment of the campus.