DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING SUPPORT CHALLENGES A CAUSE95 CURRENT ISSUES SESSION MODERATED BY Norma Holland Indiana University SUMMARY There were about twenty-five people at this session. Nineteen of these turned in evaluation forms. The signup sheet with names, institutions and email addresses was also turned in at the same time. The seating was awkward. Even though I prearranged chairs in a circle and several times encouraged people to sit up front, most people would not and opted to sit in the traditional lecture setting. This made discussion more difficult. The group took a while to warm up, but got into some lively discussion toward the end of the session. I would suggest that the time for these CI sessions is a bit late in the conference and a bit late in the day, but I understand how difficult scheduling is. The moderator opened with an introduction of the issues surrounding distributed support of information technology in higher ed. As the complexity of distributed computing increases on our campuses, so do the challenges of supporting these systems. The number of distributed information systems and associated workstations has grown greatly. Departmental systems, institutional client/server systems, some communicating with legacy systems, and the WWW have all contributed to this growth. There are an ever-increasing number of faculty, staff and students using these systems and needing support and training. Management of the costs, the software distribution, version control, etc. is all more complex in this environment. Diverse hardware and software has to interoperate. New tools and technologies need to be introduced. Issues suggested for discussion were as follows: WHAT ARE VIABLE TRANSITION STRATEGIES THAT ALLOW CAMPUSES TO INTRODUCE DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS INTO THEIR OPERATIONS? There should be an implementation support team set up for all client/server systems. This team should include resources from media, operations, networks, office technologies, information systems and training. This team should meet on a regular basis, prioritize work and raise issues. The team would be available for any client/server project of any size. Getting the information out to the IT staff and to the users is all-important. Procedures would then be in place for project leaders beginning distributed computing projects. One school offered a training program for c/s systems users at no charge to the departments. In introducing a c/s system to the users, basic windows training must be done first before more specific training can be accomplished. WHAT ARE EFFECTIVE APPROACHES IN MANAGING LIFE- CYCLE COSTS OF WORKSTATIONS AND SOFTWARE OVER ENTERPRISE NETWORKS? A new funding model for distributed computing was discussed. Gartner Group had mentioned the possibility of central control of all IT funds, not necessarily by the IT department, in order to make better use of limited resources. Recentralization of servers is an approach some are taking. Control of resources was thought to be an overriding consideration to this approach. Responsibility centered management has been adopted by some schools and is a key factor in keeping control at the department level. We are truly in a transition environment, which is unstable. Each organization will handle this differently. Networking has been a traditional infrastructure resource, for which departments seemed more willing to pay in a central mode. Central purchasing units were involved in most areas to leverage software and hardware contracts. WHAT ARE THE CHALLENGES FOR SUPPORTING FACULTY, STAFF AND STUDENTS IN THIS ENVIRONMENT OF MULTIPLE DESKTOP APPLICATIONS, SOME OF WHICH COMMUNICATE WITH LEGACY SYSTEMS? Access to institutional data still remains as one of the most important needs of the users. Warehousing was mentioned as a step towards achieving this goal. Work previously done by one central organization in a mainframe world is more often distributed out to the departments with c/s systems. The departments find themselves doing work once done centrally and view this as central units pushing work out to their areas. Where is the funding to support this extra burden, both human resources and technical? The department must often either hire a local support person or team up with other departments to share a person. The department must have appropriate workstations and training. One school mentioned the case of a department with technical expertise and understanding of what information technology could do for them. In this case, the central computing organization resisted the departments attempt to do anything but mainframe computing. This group is pushing IT to move in this direction. They have acquired their own servers and want to move ahead. Several schools gave the opposite view of departments resisting moving into a c/s world. The systems they had built on the mainframe worked well for their needs and they did not want to change these. The lack of an institutional strategic plan was viewed as a problem for organizations trying to move ahead. A discussion on remote access was of great interest to this group. Some schools are setting up a separate pool of modems for students only, faculty only, etc. Some courses involve graphic media which require access from PPP dial-in for students working at home. The issue of charging Vs free was discussed with various opinions. The issue of whether schools had a student technology fee in place and where that fee was going was also discussed. Schools wanting to set up such a fee were recommended to get a formal endorsement from the student association and sell students on the value of this...how this fee will improve their lives. Students now are comfortable with technology and can relate to this. Some schools had the technology fee subsidized by Foundation accounts or others. Outsourcing the dialup service and new technologies coming to address remote access were also discussed. WHAT ROLE CAN CENTRAL IT ORGANIZATIONS PLAY IN FACILITATING GREATER SELF SUPPORT ON THE PART OF THE USERS OF DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING? Discussion evolved around the importance of getting users empowered by training and acquisition of tools to help them support themselves. Local support providers in departments are pivotal to success here. Central organizations can concentrate on support of these LSPs and not on support of the end users. The local support providers can be seeded by the central organization by sharing the costs of the position with the department in some preagreed arrangement. LAN, hardware and software training should be standard. End users should have basic training in Windows and navigation of the Web. Higher level training should be reserved for the LSPs in most cases. One school described a Web based decision support system that could capture server and mainframe data and load these to workstation spreadsheet software. Some IT organizations have put together object- oriented systems which they are piloting. All agreed that is it difficult to get started in this environment. You need to grow over a number of years. Support from upper administrations only helps. Automated KnowledgeBase tools were in use at one school. A frequently asked questions and answers database is set up for query by the end users and local support providers. Staff answering calls at the support center look first in the KB for an answer and before the call ends tells the caller how he/she can find these types of answers in the future without calling. Another school had a dynamic Q&A database that builds these as they are being developed during interactions with the users. The KB is difficult to set up, and many schools are using other already developed Kbs for their use. This could be a mechanism for sharing resources. Users here think about using supported products based on where they can get their support. Other schools also had supported equipment lists, one falling into categories of recommended, supported, and non-supported. WHAT IS THE POTENTIAL OF A WWW CLIENT FRONT END FOR SOME APPLICATIONS TO MINIMIZE SUPPORT ISSUES? One school stated a policy of having only Web clients for future c/s systems to help address the support issues.