Re: From Decentralized to Centralized

[Gary Bristol <gbristol () OU EDU>]

Concerning point number one, your assuming in your statement that the IT
personal at the Departments are not going to be incorporated into the
resultant Centralize IT organization, it is much better if they were
incorporated, plus the fact that you then usually get more coverage for
support as you will end up with more than just one person that knows how
things work.  Your also assuming that Centralized IT means Centralized
funding.

Your points also seem to be based on the fact that Centralized IT
management means no Desktop support, which is not the case.  For any
Centralized IT to work they need a desktop support organization that
takes care of the needs of the customers.Centralized IT just doesn't
mean centralized Server support.

If you do have Centralized Funding for Centralized IT then you are
seeing an additionally expenditure at the Departmental level for IT that
would be covered by the Centralized Funding.  If not then the personnel
would come over to the Centralized IT with the funding and they would
also gain in learning about additional Technologies and the functions
that are provided by Centralized IT, thus also providing a path for
Knowledge improvement and upward mobility.

Virtualization, you seem to be assuming that Central IT would not be
already running Virtualization and are not already familiar with it
technologies and or usage. Virtualization is not a new technology it has
been around for several years. In fact the virtualization has moved out
of the Mainframe arena into easily adaptable rack mountable solutions.
With deployment of additional servers and services being made easier and
easier.

randy marchany wrote:
> 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

--
Gary L. Bristol
CISSP, RHCE
University of Oklahoma
200 Felgar St, Suite 226
Norman, OK 73019

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