Faculty Fails to Effectively Coordinate IT

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) wants to build a bridge to the 21st century.

Two months ago, the Standing Committee on Information Technology called on the FAS to put a computer on every desk by June.

"Every member of the faculty and every member of the administrative staff should have (or at least have convenient access to) a networked computer through which the [World Wide Web] is accessible," the IT Committee's report reads.

"We hope that [this initiative] will encourage people outside the sciences to use computers [and see] how computers can help them," says McKay Assistant Professor of Computer Science Margo I. Seltzer '83, a member of the IT Committee.

The report also provides recommendations for the Faculty's computer needs in areas such as equipment and infrastructure, access to research databases and organizational accountability.

But while the report outlines a vision of the future of computers for the Faculty, it fails to address the financial feasibility of achieving that vision.

The IT committee advocates a decentralized mode of management, calling on individual departments and centers to provide their own planning, training and support.

A two-month Crimson investigation, including interviews with about 100 faculty and staff, found that this move toward decentralized support severely restricts communication and coordination among different departments.

And the decentralization of information technology throughout the College makes it difficult for the FAS to address student computing needs. Students say the University is slow to provide them with network resources and fails to take advantage of the tremendous potential the Internet has to fundamentally alter the nature of education and learning.

Computers on Every Desk

Despite universal acknowledgement that providing every faculty member with a computer is a giant leap forward, the financial feasibility of the plan is uncertain.

Dean of the Division of Applied Sciences Paul C. Martin '53, the chair of the FAS IT Committee, says the report was not meant to address the financial issues.

"We're not saying how to pay for it, we're just saying, 'Let's get it done,'" Martin says.

But computers pose a major spending burden for professors in the humanities.

Interviews with faculty have indicated that science and social science professors generally buy their computers with research grants, while professors in the humanities generally use their own money.

"I think a PC should be a standard piece of office equipment for every faculty member in FAS," says Professor of History William E. Gienapp.

"The University should pay for these PCs for faculty in the humanities and maybe some of the social sciences," he says.

Glancing at two large PCs in her office at the Bunting Institute, Seltzer, the computer science professor, says, "I can't remember when I last paid for a computer."

William C. Kirby, chair of the History Department, says most of the professors in the department have access to computers but paid for them with personal money.

"History professors have a small amount of research funds [from the department], but it's not large enough to buy a computer," Kirby says.

Providing the 2,500 faculty and professional staff with a computer would cost the FAS $1.5 million per year, according to the report. Of the 14 spending proposals in the report, only two--including this one--remain unapproved.

"We will certainly implement as many of these proposal as our resources allow," Knowles said after the October Faculty meeting at which the IT report was presented.

Martin says he thinks the "computer on every desk" initiative has largely been achieved already.

Of the 3,500 faculty and staff, Martin says he has e-mail addresses for 3,000 and that many of the remaining 500 are janitors and professors emeritus.

Planning: Harvard Style

Harvard's strategy for information technology advancement has traditionally been to work from baseline standards.

After installing the backbone of the computer network in the late 1980s and early '90s, Harvard left its use to individual parts of the community.

"The FAS strategy has been to provide basic Internet-compatible service to the entire community," the report says. "Embellishments available with [the network] have been left to the discretion of local units."

Those local units are also responsible for much of the training and support for individual departments.

The Harvard Arts and Sciences Computer Services (HASCS)--the support arm of the FAS--has some support available to faculty members, but increasingly departments are hiring their own staffers to provide departmental support.

For instance, the English, chemistry and psychology departments all have IT contacts.

The more decentralized model has received a boost through the support of Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles, according to sources close to the dean.

But having support handled within departments makes it difficult for IT contacts to coordinate their efforts and trouble-shoot problems together, says Franklin M. Steen, the director of HASCS.

"[HASCS] should play the coordinating role we can play," he says.

Nevertheless, Steen says he supports the more decentralized model, in part because it means departments will be allocating their own resources to information technology, rather than HASCS providing the only resources for the entire Faculty.

But resources are a key question for the departments as well.

Leo Damrosch, chair of the English Department, says he would like to hire someone to do innovative computer work in the humanities but has been unable to fund the position.

"Some of us have been pushing for quite a while, but without much success so far, to get a humanities computer specialist who would educate faculty members about what is possible, rather than just trouble-shooting on specific problems," Damrosch says.

Faculty and administrators say the IT contacts only assist with day-to-day problems and do not generally help develop new projects.

"Currently there's not enough staff to do projects with all the everyday stuff we have to get done," says Associate Dean of the College Georgene B. Herschbach.

Faculty and administrators also say there are good reasons to move support out to the departments, rather than have them planned centrally.

"The community is not monolithic. The University is a complicated place," Martin says. "You don't plan what an individual researcher needs, [just like] it would be wrong to ask what should be spent on books."

But even the IT Committee's report acknowledges the drawbacks of phasing out support to individual departments.

"[Information technology] is so tightly intertwined with every University activity that IT activities cannot be intelligently planned and prioritized in isolation," the report says.

Student Needs

Although the committee wants a computer on every faculty desk, the idea of providing students with computers is not receiving the same level of support.

"We didn't provide [students] with typewriters," Seltzer says. "We try to treat students as adults and should let them decide the implications of a computer for themselves."

Administrators say their response is based on pragmatics. Already, 92 percent of students have computers, according to a survey conducted by HASCS last semester.

Student computer users say they would like to see administrators take better advantage of the network and place more information on it.

"Harvard's upper level bureaucracy should try to provide more foundational services," says Daniel A. Lopez '97, the president of the Harvard Computer Society. "One of the things that Harvard can do in a decentralized environment is provide foundational services like the data network--which Harvard put into place but didn't dictate how to use."

The committee report acknowledges that the University has been slow in providing some resources via the Internet.

"While progress is being made in many areas, in others it is regrettably slow," the report says.

Lopez says in particular Harvard should create an authentication system so that the University can provide more sensitive information over the Web. An authentication system verifies that people using a program are who they say they are.

Lopez says that with authentication the College could provide student transcripts and telephone bills via the Web.

But the decentralization in the FAS has made joint efforts for such projects difficult to coordinate and implement.

One of the major present concerns for the IT Committee's subcommittee on student life is putting students' grades on-line, according to Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68.

But coordinating such a project would be complicated given Harvard's bureaucratic structure.

Faculty and administrators would have to spearhead the project, HASCS would have to create authentication and the Registrar's Office would have to coordinate the information, according to various administrators.

"Some of the simplest conceptual things turn out to be embedded in process," says Administrative Dean of the Faculty Nancy L. Maull. "There's nothing more to say; it's process."

Training and Coordination

The decentralized nature of information technology also makes training and coordination difficult.

About two years ago, the Harvard Computer Society held a highly-advertised one-day training program for people interested in using the Web.

Although the event was geared toward students, 300 faculty and staff showed up, according to Lopez.

"Faculty and staff are hungry for this stuff," he says.

Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies Diana L. Eck raised the issue of centralized training at October's faculty meeting, asking whether there is a place faculty and staff can learn how to create Web pages.

Steen told The Crimson that HASCS has a step-by-step guide to creating Web pages on its own Web site, and also advertises monthly training classes for faculty and staff.

For more intensive projects, HASCS has a three-person Instructional Computing Group (ICG), whose purpose is to facilitate the efforts of professors who want to put their classes on-line.

"The idea is to provide a mechanism whereby people in the departments can become proficient and make their decisions," Martin says.

The ICG has been particularly successful in helping large classes set up paper-less classrooms by placing material like syllabi and lecture notes on-line.

Steen attributes the Faculty's lack of knowledge of where to turn for help to problems HASCS has in reaching the community.

"We've tried [to communicate]," Steen says.

But he adds there is a catch-22. HASCS recently finished a project to put documentation on-line, but if users do not know how to access the Web, the documentation does them no good.

According to Rick Osterberg '96, HASCS' coordinator of residential computing support, HASCS is trying to make its function clearer to the community.

"In years past, there was a perception from our user base that here's this secret organization...when they just didn't understand what we were doing," Osterberg says.

Steen says he is currently looking for a director of communications to help solve some of these problems.

Centralized coordination has also been difficult on a University-wide basis.

This summer, Professor of Government Gary King wanted to buy the Current Index to Statistics, biographical software that searches for articles on statistical methods.

One copy of the software program cost $1,500. But purchasing a site license, meaning everyone at Harvard could then use the program, cost $2,200.

King had his money but wanted to find an extra $700 to buy the site license. He tried to find others in the University who would be interested in purchasing the license, but finally settled on buying just one copy of the software.

King then discovered that the University already had a site license for the software he wanted.

"The University already had a site license; it just wasn't centrally managed," King says. "There are a lot of advantages to being at Harvard but it's hard to coordinate and work together."

King told this story to the Faculty at its October meeting to uproarious laughter. "We can't centralize everything to save money and we can't localize everything to make everyone happy," he says.

Seltzer, who is on leave this semester at Radcliffe's Bunting Institute, says she has experienced similar problems.

When she started work at the Bunting, Seltzer says she was surprised to learn that research fellows did not have access to General Software, a package available to students and faculty in the FAS via the network.

Most of the software on General Software is purchased by the FAS from central administration site licenses and distributed to the FAS.

Seltzer learned that Radcliffe is separate from Harvard and, as a result, cannot use Harvard's site licenses.

This rule applies to the rest of the University as well. A site license bought in one "tub" such as the FAS cannot be used in another.

Like other aspects of computing at Harvard, decentralization makes site licensing complex.

"We hold about 20 licenses and they are distributed all over Harvard, not just FAS," says Steen, who coordinates site licenses in the FAS. "We also make use of licenses which other departments or [University Information Systems (UIS)] have purchased."

UIS may help solve these problems, according to Anne H. Margulies, assistant provost for information systems. UIS just created a new position to coordinate site licenses and hopes to fill it, she says.

Behind the Cutting Edge

In addition to its widespread decentralization effort, the University has attempted to remain just behind the cutting edge of information technology.

"The report was very good because it expressed the history of an approach and a philosophy of serving students and faculty first, [and of] being a little bit behind the curve so we can take advantage of other people's advances," Maull says.

For example, Harvard can take advantage of having other universities experiment with the technologies first, rather than being on the cutting edge and possibly making mistakes.

The University has retreated from its position at the cutting edge in the late 80s.

The IT report says some of the wiring of the Yard prior to 1988 will likely have to be redone as network demand increases, because the old wiring can't support the higher speeds that the demand necessitates.

Had Harvard not taken the initiative, it might not have to replace the old wiring, at a cost estimated in the hundreds of thousands.

But some warn that trying to stay behind the cutting edge can be dangerous for the future.

"You've got to be very, very careful with objections to why you don't want to be on the cutting edge," says Professor of Business Administration Richard L. Nolan. "In a blink of an eye, you can find yourself someplace you don't want to be."GraphicShaw Y. ChenHarvard's Information Technology Bureaucracy Information technology is widely decentralized throughout the University, with each school coordinating its own planning efforts. The reorganization of the Office of Information Technology into University Information Systems placed it under the Provost's Office rather than the Office of the Vice President for Finance.

Providing the 2,500 faculty and professional staff with a computer would cost the FAS $1.5 million per year, according to the report. Of the 14 spending proposals in the report, only two--including this one--remain unapproved.

"We will certainly implement as many of these proposal as our resources allow," Knowles said after the October Faculty meeting at which the IT report was presented.

Martin says he thinks the "computer on every desk" initiative has largely been achieved already.

Of the 3,500 faculty and staff, Martin says he has e-mail addresses for 3,000 and that many of the remaining 500 are janitors and professors emeritus.

Planning: Harvard Style

Harvard's strategy for information technology advancement has traditionally been to work from baseline standards.

After installing the backbone of the computer network in the late 1980s and early '90s, Harvard left its use to individual parts of the community.

"The FAS strategy has been to provide basic Internet-compatible service to the entire community," the report says. "Embellishments available with [the network] have been left to the discretion of local units."

Those local units are also responsible for much of the training and support for individual departments.

The Harvard Arts and Sciences Computer Services (HASCS)--the support arm of the FAS--has some support available to faculty members, but increasingly departments are hiring their own staffers to provide departmental support.

For instance, the English, chemistry and psychology departments all have IT contacts.

The more decentralized model has received a boost through the support of Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles, according to sources close to the dean.

But having support handled within departments makes it difficult for IT contacts to coordinate their efforts and trouble-shoot problems together, says Franklin M. Steen, the director of HASCS.

"[HASCS] should play the coordinating role we can play," he says.

Nevertheless, Steen says he supports the more decentralized model, in part because it means departments will be allocating their own resources to information technology, rather than HASCS providing the only resources for the entire Faculty.

But resources are a key question for the departments as well.

Leo Damrosch, chair of the English Department, says he would like to hire someone to do innovative computer work in the humanities but has been unable to fund the position.

"Some of us have been pushing for quite a while, but without much success so far, to get a humanities computer specialist who would educate faculty members about what is possible, rather than just trouble-shooting on specific problems," Damrosch says.

Faculty and administrators say the IT contacts only assist with day-to-day problems and do not generally help develop new projects.

"Currently there's not enough staff to do projects with all the everyday stuff we have to get done," says Associate Dean of the College Georgene B. Herschbach.

Faculty and administrators also say there are good reasons to move support out to the departments, rather than have them planned centrally.

"The community is not monolithic. The University is a complicated place," Martin says. "You don't plan what an individual researcher needs, [just like] it would be wrong to ask what should be spent on books."

But even the IT Committee's report acknowledges the drawbacks of phasing out support to individual departments.

"[Information technology] is so tightly intertwined with every University activity that IT activities cannot be intelligently planned and prioritized in isolation," the report says.

Student Needs

Although the committee wants a computer on every faculty desk, the idea of providing students with computers is not receiving the same level of support.

"We didn't provide [students] with typewriters," Seltzer says. "We try to treat students as adults and should let them decide the implications of a computer for themselves."

Administrators say their response is based on pragmatics. Already, 92 percent of students have computers, according to a survey conducted by HASCS last semester.

Student computer users say they would like to see administrators take better advantage of the network and place more information on it.

"Harvard's upper level bureaucracy should try to provide more foundational services," says Daniel A. Lopez '97, the president of the Harvard Computer Society. "One of the things that Harvard can do in a decentralized environment is provide foundational services like the data network--which Harvard put into place but didn't dictate how to use."

The committee report acknowledges that the University has been slow in providing some resources via the Internet.

"While progress is being made in many areas, in others it is regrettably slow," the report says.

Lopez says in particular Harvard should create an authentication system so that the University can provide more sensitive information over the Web. An authentication system verifies that people using a program are who they say they are.

Lopez says that with authentication the College could provide student transcripts and telephone bills via the Web.

But the decentralization in the FAS has made joint efforts for such projects difficult to coordinate and implement.

One of the major present concerns for the IT Committee's subcommittee on student life is putting students' grades on-line, according to Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68.

But coordinating such a project would be complicated given Harvard's bureaucratic structure.

Faculty and administrators would have to spearhead the project, HASCS would have to create authentication and the Registrar's Office would have to coordinate the information, according to various administrators.

"Some of the simplest conceptual things turn out to be embedded in process," says Administrative Dean of the Faculty Nancy L. Maull. "There's nothing more to say; it's process."

Training and Coordination

The decentralized nature of information technology also makes training and coordination difficult.

About two years ago, the Harvard Computer Society held a highly-advertised one-day training program for people interested in using the Web.

Although the event was geared toward students, 300 faculty and staff showed up, according to Lopez.

"Faculty and staff are hungry for this stuff," he says.

Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies Diana L. Eck raised the issue of centralized training at October's faculty meeting, asking whether there is a place faculty and staff can learn how to create Web pages.

Steen told The Crimson that HASCS has a step-by-step guide to creating Web pages on its own Web site, and also advertises monthly training classes for faculty and staff.

For more intensive projects, HASCS has a three-person Instructional Computing Group (ICG), whose purpose is to facilitate the efforts of professors who want to put their classes on-line.

"The idea is to provide a mechanism whereby people in the departments can become proficient and make their decisions," Martin says.

The ICG has been particularly successful in helping large classes set up paper-less classrooms by placing material like syllabi and lecture notes on-line.

Steen attributes the Faculty's lack of knowledge of where to turn for help to problems HASCS has in reaching the community.

"We've tried [to communicate]," Steen says.

But he adds there is a catch-22. HASCS recently finished a project to put documentation on-line, but if users do not know how to access the Web, the documentation does them no good.

According to Rick Osterberg '96, HASCS' coordinator of residential computing support, HASCS is trying to make its function clearer to the community.

"In years past, there was a perception from our user base that here's this secret organization...when they just didn't understand what we were doing," Osterberg says.

Steen says he is currently looking for a director of communications to help solve some of these problems.

Centralized coordination has also been difficult on a University-wide basis.

This summer, Professor of Government Gary King wanted to buy the Current Index to Statistics, biographical software that searches for articles on statistical methods.

One copy of the software program cost $1,500. But purchasing a site license, meaning everyone at Harvard could then use the program, cost $2,200.

King had his money but wanted to find an extra $700 to buy the site license. He tried to find others in the University who would be interested in purchasing the license, but finally settled on buying just one copy of the software.

King then discovered that the University already had a site license for the software he wanted.

"The University already had a site license; it just wasn't centrally managed," King says. "There are a lot of advantages to being at Harvard but it's hard to coordinate and work together."

King told this story to the Faculty at its October meeting to uproarious laughter. "We can't centralize everything to save money and we can't localize everything to make everyone happy," he says.

Seltzer, who is on leave this semester at Radcliffe's Bunting Institute, says she has experienced similar problems.

When she started work at the Bunting, Seltzer says she was surprised to learn that research fellows did not have access to General Software, a package available to students and faculty in the FAS via the network.

Most of the software on General Software is purchased by the FAS from central administration site licenses and distributed to the FAS.

Seltzer learned that Radcliffe is separate from Harvard and, as a result, cannot use Harvard's site licenses.

This rule applies to the rest of the University as well. A site license bought in one "tub" such as the FAS cannot be used in another.

Like other aspects of computing at Harvard, decentralization makes site licensing complex.

"We hold about 20 licenses and they are distributed all over Harvard, not just FAS," says Steen, who coordinates site licenses in the FAS. "We also make use of licenses which other departments or [University Information Systems (UIS)] have purchased."

UIS may help solve these problems, according to Anne H. Margulies, assistant provost for information systems. UIS just created a new position to coordinate site licenses and hopes to fill it, she says.

Behind the Cutting Edge

In addition to its widespread decentralization effort, the University has attempted to remain just behind the cutting edge of information technology.

"The report was very good because it expressed the history of an approach and a philosophy of serving students and faculty first, [and of] being a little bit behind the curve so we can take advantage of other people's advances," Maull says.

For example, Harvard can take advantage of having other universities experiment with the technologies first, rather than being on the cutting edge and possibly making mistakes.

The University has retreated from its position at the cutting edge in the late 80s.

The IT report says some of the wiring of the Yard prior to 1988 will likely have to be redone as network demand increases, because the old wiring can't support the higher speeds that the demand necessitates.

Had Harvard not taken the initiative, it might not have to replace the old wiring, at a cost estimated in the hundreds of thousands.

But some warn that trying to stay behind the cutting edge can be dangerous for the future.

"You've got to be very, very careful with objections to why you don't want to be on the cutting edge," says Professor of Business Administration Richard L. Nolan. "In a blink of an eye, you can find yourself someplace you don't want to be."GraphicShaw Y. ChenHarvard's Information Technology Bureaucracy Information technology is widely decentralized throughout the University, with each school coordinating its own planning efforts. The reorganization of the Office of Information Technology into University Information Systems placed it under the Provost's Office rather than the Office of the Vice President for Finance.