Re: From Decentralized to Centralized

[randy marchany <marchany () VT EDU>]

I haven't seen anyone suggest the following in their comments on this thread
about "centralizing IT". I assume current action plans addresses these
issues.


1. Leave the current IT positions at the depts but the funding for their
positions comes from the central IT group. This solves a support problem
that central IT has always had: no knowledge of how the individual business
processes actually work.

2. Desktop mgt costs. Unless there's a massive replacement of PC, laptops
and desktop servers with "thin" clients (whatever that is), there's still
the question of managing the things. While Active Directory style mgt is
nice and addresses this mgt problem, it's not applicable in all university
settings. Central IT staff will have to support those outliers. This is
particularly true in teaching and research labs where there are specialized
computers that control lab equipment.

3. Virtualization plans. I'm sure current computer capacity at the central
sites is not enough to support the added functions coming in from depts.
Virtualization seems to be a way to provide this extra capacity at a
reasonable cost. The market is somewhat young at the moment if not in the
software technology then in the experience of the system administrators. The
greyhairs who cut their teeth on old mainframe technology will now by back
in demand. IBM VM system programmers, unite! You'll need a number of virtual
host systems since you never want to put all critical functions on a single
host system.

4. Security issues. It's easy to say that centralizing IT processes will
increase security. However, point #1 shows that central IT doesn't know how
the myriad departmental business processes work and that they will decide on
one-size-fits-all approach that will be "efficient" from a management view
but  cumbersome in the office environment. Cumbersome procedures mean that
people will circumvent them and that leads to a decrease in security. Yet,
in order to get a good idea of how business processes actually DO their
business requires a lot of time and $$ and most central IT orgs won't do
that. So, we have an overall decrease in security.

I'm not opposed to centralizing IT but there were valid reasons why
decentralization happened. Things like not providing timely service, not
being responsive to rapid changes, etc. forced the migration in the first
place.

-Randy