The Changing Role of the Computing Services Centre

 

The rapid advancement of computer and communication technology in the past two decades has not been able to bring to our Computing Services Centre considerable benefits. Instead, such revolution has forced the centre to share, even to give up part of its roles as the facility provider and as the source of support and information. It also has transformed the way in which the centre carries out its traditional functions, especially in resource management and information services. Inevitably this situation leads to increasing competition for resource as well as for provision of services to students from academic departments and other service units within the university. To compete, the centre has to organise and operate in ways more like those of business organizations. Sometimes the centre must form alliances with its friendly competitors within the university on activities which were its responsibility originally. In other words, the Computing Services Centre could only survive from now on as both the competitor and the complement of its users.

Before we go on to discuss our new roles in the 90s and beyond, let us take a look on how the information technology and management policy affect the Computing Services Centre in the university today. In general, there are four main driving forces. Firstly, twenty years ago computers were expensive and scarce central resource of the entire university. They were kept behind the thick glass wall and run by highly technical experts. Users had to apply and well justify before they were granted accounts to use a machine. All resources had to be rigidly controlled as budget was so constrained. Since the launch of IBM PC in 1981 and then the arrival of RISC workstations in the early 90s, domination of mainframe and time-sharing computers was broken down. Development of computer technology has been staggering that processing power and capacity has been doubled every couple of years while cost continues to drop at 30 to 40 percent annually. Computers have now become affordable for the university to provide a dedicated machine on everyone's desktop. Secondly, the operating system and the user interface of these desktop computers are so much simpler and friendlier than the time-sharing machines that all complexity and optimum controls for sharing resources become irrelevant in the single user environment. Consequently most users seem to be able to run their computers comfortably with minimum or even no support from the Computing Services Centre. Thirdly, with the advancement of networking technology and maturity of client and server software products, computers of a department or work group can be connected together to form a Local Area Network (LAN) to facilitate easy communication and sharing of resources. The role of central machines to serve such purpose is again being partially replaced. Lastly, perhaps the most severe driving force to this move is the university's radical change to a complete decentralised budget control system. Now each department is allocated an one-line budget and empowered to make autonomous decisions on what and how they want to spend their money as they see necessary. Lacking university-wide IT policy and control, proliferation and incompatibility become inevitable. As a result of such uncoordinated developments, central support becomes increasingly difficult and sometimes even impossible to practise.

The above scenario seems to suggest a very dark future for the centre. This might be true if we were bad at innovation. Since the old system based on yesterday's method and standard cannot be applied well, even tolerably, in today's university, we must plan for drastic transformation in order to keep up with what is and will be required. Accepting this assumption and taking into account of such changing environment of the university today, five primary roles of the Computing Services Centre can be identified. They are facility management, technical support, administrative systems, information services and, new technology and facilities. As part of the university's total effort in achieving its mission, the Computing Services Centre should also play a role in building external connections with other universities and industries, and in providing community and professional services to the society. In the following paragraphs, I will discuss how the Computing Services Centre would play its roles in the context of such changing environment.

The primary roles of the Computing Services Centre are still facility management although the scope and the ways to achieve its tasks are no longer the same. Despite the fact that there are already a large number of student terminal rooms in the faculties, a centrally run student facility is still necessary. Since students may use either central or departmental computers as they see fit, the central facility must be compatible and equipped to the best standard. As a matter of fact, the centre is now maintaining a large student terminal area with some 600 workstations, representing one-third of the total number of student workstations in the university. The facility is open to students from all departments and is used heavily for open access as well as for tutorial classes. Another important facility managed by the centre is the campus network. This includes the backbone infrastructure, central servers, external connections and the modem pool. In addition, there are some 50 departmental staff LANs connected to the campus network. All these LANs belong to the departments concerned but most of them are set up and maintained by the Computing Services Centre as a service to the departments. Such service is very strategic to the success of the CTNET as this will help to maintain the uniformity in the set up of these LANs and hence will ensure their adequate support from the centre. The campus network now serves as the hub for in-campus and off-campus communication, as shared pool of resources and as the express highway for information. The effectiveness and reliability of the network will seriously affect the well-being of the campus life of our staff and students.

Another key and traditional role of the centre is technical support. It still remains as an essential function of the centre since most departments, except the few laboratory based departments who have the resources and expertise to become self-sufficient, have to rely solely on the central service. This would cover hardware and software installation, update and maintenance, consultation and software training. To be in line with the university's emphasis on research, the centre should also focus on its support to research work. This would need a higher priority for developing university's resource for research and to participate actively in research projects of its users. The centre should not only concentrate on maintaining the environment for students to do their homework and projects, it should also strengthen its computer literacy programme to ensure all students are equipped with basic computer skills and be able to effectively use centre's facilities. At the same time, the consultation service in the terminal area should continue to render assistance to students in solving their problems encountered there.

Administrative systems refers to the development and maintenance of data processing systems for administrative offices and library. After over ten years of effort, most of the administrative routines and procedures have been automated, yet all these systems have to be updated continuously to meet the changing needs as well as to catch up with new technologies. Given the recent quality movement of the university and the new wave of re-engineering, it is expected that the demand for change or revamp of the existing systems will surge. The dilemma is that the centre is continuously under pressure to reduce its staff. Any solution requiring additional resource would be impractical to pursue. To tackle such a problem we must consider a critical review of our development strategy : we should reorganize our development team with an aim at achieving higher efficiency; we should employ latest technology such as client and server tools to increase our productivity; and where possible, we should try to outsource available software and services to cut cost and save time etc.

Information age has come to the university. Providing good computer systems and services to facilitate communicating, retrieving and storing information electronically is essential for achieving the university's goal in building an electronic campus. Development in this area would involve an in-house development of some mission critical systems but the majority of our effort would be on the system integration side, whereby suitable and available software packages would be introduced and integrated into the existing environment. As the result of several year's continuous development, a comprehensive set of information service facilities have been established and become the integral part of our campus life. It is envisaged that, apart from the increasingly extensive use of Internet and World Wide Web, Electronic Forms, Video Conferencing and Video On Demand systems will soon be introduced to complete the university's information infrastructure.

To retain our leadership of innovative use of IT in the education sector, the Computing Services Centre would monitor closely new developments in the computer field and identify suitable technologies for adoption in the university. To do this the centre would continue to carry out evaluation of potential new products and utilize all the available channels to disseminate related information within the university. While the centre strikes to ensure the university-wide facilities to be most up-to-date, the centre would also take up an active role in advising other departments on their development of computer facilities.

The centre would continue its effort to build its link with other universities as well as industries with a view to enhance the centre's abilities to serve its users. At the moment, we already have several cooperative projects with a few universities in Hong Kong as well as in China. We envisage this development will continue and be strengthened in the future. In the past, our participation in providing community and professional services has been relatively inactive. In future, we shall focus more in these areas as we see that these are equally important for the image building of the centre.

From the discussion above, we can see that in such an increasingly harsh competitive climate, the centre must continuously examine its roles, retire the old practices and procedures, abandon outdated principles and adopt a new set so that the centre can be flexible enough to adjust quickly to the changing conditions, lean enough to beat its competitors, innovative enough to make its service and environment technologically fresh, and dedicated enough to deliver maximum quality and service to its users. What we can envisage is that a 20th-century university Computing Services Centre should maintain a core of professionals and highly motivated staff. Since their salaries must be sufficient to retain them against challenge from the competitors, their team size are likely to be small, but each has to see that his or her responsibility have to expand to cover far more activities than at present. Otherwise, the finances will not balance. Of course, the alternative is for the Computing Services Centre of the university to close down its service or to be eclipsed by its competitors gradually.

Computing Services Centre City University of Hong Kong ccnetcom@cityu.edu.hk