Strategic Plan for the Development of Computing Services Centre

K.H. Poon, Director of Computing Services

In the past 12 years the Computing Services Centre, though having undergone a series of changes, has successfully created and maintained a first class computing environment for the community of the University . Up to now we have by far one of the largest and most sophisticated networks, known as CTNET, in the territory. CTNET connects 50 departmental LANs which link up nearly 5000 computers in campus including some 100 network servers of various capacities, 4400 PCs and over 500 Unix workstations. Off campus access to CTNET is provided through Internet and also a modem pool with 250 dial-up lines. Apart from a rich collection of software packages for support of teaching and research, the information systems available on CTNET now offer integrated and diversified electronic information and services from within the campus as well as resources around the world. Information kiosks are also set up in public locations to allow convenient use of these systems outside the Centre and staff offices. CTNET has become the indispensable facility for almost every campus activity.

The Computing Services Centre still operates a large central student terminal and teaching facility which contains 600 workstations and 12 computerized teaching rooms (also called teaching studios), equipped with high quality computer screen projectors. This facility has been very popular and the utilization is extremely high during term time.

Following the decentralized budget policy, departments become autonomous in the development and support of their computing facilities. As a result, the Computing Services Centre is gradually evolving into a service bureau and has to compete with competitors from within and outside the University. Nevertheless the Centre manages to retain its competitiveness in the provision of its services and remains as the primary service provider for almost all departments. The Centre now still manages and supports 90% of departmental LANs and provides training, consultation and technical support to the majority of academic as well as administrative staff.

As information technology will continue to permeate the University community, CSC, as the central academic support centre, must maintain its momentum in the development of campus-wide computing infrastructure and in the innovative use of computing technology so as to retain our competitive edge for the University. Otherwise our University will be lagging behind and gradually be eclipsed by its competitors.

It is envisaged that the Centre will focus on the following areas in the next few years of its development:

Networking The existing CTNET was designed based on the blue-print made in 1990 and is not the most advanced by today's standard. An upgrade project has been taking place to embrace the latest technologies into the network so that it will be able to support high speed multimedia networking as well as adapt to dynamic adds and changes in network connections. It is perceived that in the near future ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) technology will be widely used for carrying data, voice and video, and that there will be no distinction between LANs (local area networks) and WANs (wide-area networks). However, ATM technology is still not fully mature at this point of time and its many standards are yet to be finalized. The Centre will closely monitor such technology and take cautious steps to avoid unnecessary investment and to ensure its costeffectiveness. It is envisaged that Internet will continue to grow at an extraordinary speed and ATM technology gradually becomes mature, all future networks on this planet may become part of the Internet eventually. CTNET will be transformed into an Intranet for seamless integration with the Internet while providing internal information database, groupware application and decision support systems with the necessary security protection. Remote Computing Predicting that demand on computing facilities for study, teaching and research will continue to grow but provision of additional student terminal rooms will not be possible with the limitation of campus space, our development should therefore focus on extending support of remote and roamabout access to the campus network. This will mean to expand considerably remote access facilities in terms of quantities and bandwidth to allow more students to use the network at home as well as telecommuting, and to install plug-in facility in most classrooms and the Library for convenient connections to the network with notebook computers. To ensure the success of this approach we must emphasize the development of access method which should provide a uniform environment for network access within campus and from remote locations. Supercomputing As a result of the trend of distributed computing most of the computer applications in teaching and research nowadays can be handled by PCs and Unix Workstations. The use of central host computers are mostly used as servers to support applications, file services, database, communication, computation, etc. Besides upgrading the desktop machines and setting up of server farms for providing various advanced network services, we also see the need for a supercomputing or massive parallel processing machine. As commonly known, for large scale or computation intensive research work, a high speed computer beyond workstation and compute server level is indispensable. Since other universities in Hong Kong have already possessed computers of super-computing level, we might lose our competitive edge if we fail to do so in the near future. Multimedia Multimedia technology is emerging in almost all areas of computer applications. With the upgraded campus network and also with the significant decrease in cost of hardware and software, we envisage that, in a couple years' time, all our desktop computers would be equipped with multimedia devices. Multimedia software will become the norm rather than specialized applications. Computer presentation, interactive teaching and learning, video conferencing and video on demand system etc. will become the popular methods and tools for teaching. The Computing Services Centre should therefore well prepare itself to support this new environment and also should place more efforts in helping its users to migrate to this challenging era of computing. Public Information Systems Our Centre will continue to develop and enhance our integrated information systems to provide additional services as well as to make the environment more user-friendly. We also expect that our systems will gradually become part of Intranet and be more accessible to users from the Internet world. To be in line with the University's goal of becoming an internationally recognized university, we should not focus only on facilitating electronic communications and information retrieval as at the moment; instead we must aim at building up our information resources locally and make them available to international academics through Internet. Management Information Systems The existing administrative data processing systems of the University were first developed some 10 years ago. Although they have been enhanced from time to time, yet they still remain as software of the older generations. To keep pace with the modern trend we must migrate from the conventional development method to client/server environment and use objectoriented approach. With the maturity of multimedia technology, graphics, voice and video would be incorporated in application systems to further enhance user-friendliness. Moreover, the capabilities to handle both English and Chinese characters for input and output will also be gradually implemented. Apart from moving towards a more open central MIS environment, the Centre will continue to develop the Distributed Departmental Systems (CITYDIS) to facilitate daytoday operations of departments. These departmental systems will be fully integrated with the central systems. External Links & Professional Services The Centre will continue its effort to build its link with other universities as well as industries with a view to enhancing 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 University and the Centre. Quality and Cost-effective Services Computers is now an integral part of the University in teaching, research learning, office automation and administration. It is envisaged that the Centre's responsibilities will continue to increase with time, though additional manpower resources would not be forthcoming in view of the University's vow of "doing more with less". Without the sacrifice of quality, the Centre should aim to adjust the mix of its staff in occasions of natural turnover in order to gain more hands with a reduced budget. Benchmarking is planned in the near future to ensure that our provision of computing facilities and user services is the top of the class. We believe that in the current 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 service to its users.: The existing CTNET was designed based on the blue-print made in 1990 and is not the most advanced by today's standard. An upgrade project has been taking place to embrace the latest technologies into the network so that it will be able to support high speed multimedia networking as well as adapt to dynamic adds and changes in network connections. It is perceived that in the near future ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) technology will be widely used for carrying data, voice and video, and that there will be no distinction between LANs (local area networks) and WANs (wide-area networks). However, ATM technology is still not fully mature at this point of time and its many standards are yet to be finalized. The Centre will closely monitor such technology and take cautious steps to avoid unnecessary investment and to ensure its costeffectiveness.
It is envisaged that Internet will continue to grow at an extraordinary speed and ATM technology gradually becomes mature, all future networks on this planet may become part of the Internet eventually. CTNET will be transformed into an Intranet for seamless integration with the Internet while providing internal information database, groupware application and decision support systems with the necessary security protection.
Remote Computing Predicting that demand on computing facilities for study, teaching and research will continue to grow but provision of additional student terminal rooms will not be possible with the limitation of campus space, our development should therefore focus on extending support of remote and roamabout access to the campus network. This will mean to expand considerably remote access facilities in terms of quantities and bandwidth to allow more students to use the network at home as well as telecommuting, and to install plug-in facility in most classrooms and the Library for convenient connections to the network with notebook computers. To ensure the success of this approach we must emphasize the development of access method which should provide a uniform environment for network access within campus and from remote locations. Supercomputing As a result of the trend of distributed computing most of the computer applications in teaching and research nowadays can be handled by PCs and Unix Workstations. The use of central host computers are mostly used as servers to support applications, file services, database, communication, computation, etc. Besides upgrading the desktop machines and setting up of server farms for providing various advanced network services, we also see the need for a supercomputing or massive parallel processing machine. As commonly known, for large scale or computation intensive research work, a high speed computer beyond workstation and compute server level is indispensable. Since other universities in Hong Kong have already possessed computers of super-computing level, we might lose our competitive edge if we fail to do so in the near future. Multimedia Multimedia technology is emerging in almost all areas of computer applications. With the upgraded campus network and also with the significant decrease in cost of hardware and software, we envisage that, in a couple years' time, all our desktop computers would be equipped with multimedia devices. Multimedia software will become the norm rather than specialized applications. Computer presentation, interactive teaching and learning, video conferencing and video on demand system etc. will become the popular methods and tools for teaching. The Computing Services Centre should therefore well prepare itself to support this new environment and also should place more efforts in helping its users to migrate to this challenging era of computing. Public Information Systems Our Centre will continue to develop and enhance our integrated information systems to provide additional services as well as to make the environment more user-friendly. We also expect that our systems will gradually become part of Intranet and be more accessible to users from the Internet world. To be in line with the University's goal of becoming an internationally recognized university, we should not focus only on facilitating electronic communications and information retrieval as at the moment; instead we must aim at building up our information resources locally and make them available to international academics through Internet. Management Information Systems The existing administrative data processing systems of the University were first developed some 10 years ago. Although they have been enhanced from time to time, yet they still remain as software of the older generations. To keep pace with the modern trend we must migrate from the conventional development method to client/server environment and use objectoriented approach. With the maturity of multimedia technology, graphics, voice and video would be incorporated in application systems to further enhance user-friendliness. Moreover, the capabilities to handle both English and Chinese characters for input and output will also be gradually implemented. Apart from moving towards a more open central MIS environment, the Centre will continue to develop the Distributed Departmental Systems (CITYDIS) to facilitate daytoday operations of departments. These departmental systems will be fully integrated with the central systems. External Links & Professional Services The Centre will continue its effort to build its link with other universities as well as industries with a view to enhancing 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 University and the Centre. Quality and Cost-effective Services Computers is now an integral part of the University in teaching, research learning, office automation and administration. It is envisaged that the Centre's responsibilities will continue to increase with time, though additional manpower resources would not be forthcoming in view of the University's vow of "doing more with less". Without the sacrifice of quality, the Centre should aim to adjust the mix of its staff in occasions of natural turnover in order to gain more hands with a reduced budget. Benchmarking is planned in the near future to ensure that our provision of computing facilities and user services is the top of the class. We believe that in the current 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 service to its users.: Predicting that demand on computing facilities for study, teaching and research will continue to grow but provision of additional student terminal rooms will not be possible with the limitation of campus space, our development should therefore focus on extending support of remote and roamabout access to the campus network. This will mean to expand considerably remote access facilities in terms of quantities and bandwidth to allow more students to use the network at home as well as telecommuting, and to install plug-in facility in most classrooms and the Library for convenient connections to the network with notebook computers. To ensure the success of this approach we must emphasize the development of access method which should provide a uniform environment for network access within campus and from remote locations.
Supercomputing As a result of the trend of distributed computing most of the computer applications in teaching and research nowadays can be handled by PCs and Unix Workstations. The use of central host computers are mostly used as servers to support applications, file services, database, communication, computation, etc. Besides upgrading the desktop machines and setting up of server farms for providing various advanced network services, we also see the need for a supercomputing or massive parallel processing machine. As commonly known, for large scale or computation intensive research work, a high speed computer beyond workstation and compute server level is indispensable. Since other universities in Hong Kong have already possessed computers of super-computing level, we might lose our competitive edge if we fail to do so in the near future. Multimedia Multimedia technology is emerging in almost all areas of computer applications. With the upgraded campus network and also with the significant decrease in cost of hardware and software, we envisage that, in a couple years' time, all our desktop computers would be equipped with multimedia devices. Multimedia software will become the norm rather than specialized applications. Computer presentation, interactive teaching and learning, video conferencing and video on demand system etc. will become the popular methods and tools for teaching. The Computing Services Centre should therefore well prepare itself to support this new environment and also should place more efforts in helping its users to migrate to this challenging era of computing. Public Information Systems Our Centre will continue to develop and enhance our integrated information systems to provide additional services as well as to make the environment more user-friendly. We also expect that our systems will gradually become part of Intranet and be more accessible to users from the Internet world. To be in line with the University's goal of becoming an internationally recognized university, we should not focus only on facilitating electronic communications and information retrieval as at the moment; instead we must aim at building up our information resources locally and make them available to international academics through Internet. Management Information Systems The existing administrative data processing systems of the University were first developed some 10 years ago. Although they have been enhanced from time to time, yet they still remain as software of the older generations. To keep pace with the modern trend we must migrate from the conventional development method to client/server environment and use objectoriented approach. With the maturity of multimedia technology, graphics, voice and video would be incorporated in application systems to further enhance user-friendliness. Moreover, the capabilities to handle both English and Chinese characters for input and output will also be gradually implemented. Apart from moving towards a more open central MIS environment, the Centre will continue to develop the Distributed Departmental Systems (CITYDIS) to facilitate daytoday operations of departments. These departmental systems will be fully integrated with the central systems. External Links & Professional Services The Centre will continue its effort to build its link with other universities as well as industries with a view to enhancing 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 University and the Centre. Quality and Cost-effective Services Computers is now an integral part of the University in teaching, research learning, office automation and administration. It is envisaged that the Centre's responsibilities will continue to increase with time, though additional manpower resources would not be forthcoming in view of the University's vow of "doing more with less". Without the sacrifice of quality, the Centre should aim to adjust the mix of its staff in occasions of natural turnover in order to gain more hands with a reduced budget. Benchmarking is planned in the near future to ensure that our provision of computing facilities and user services is the top of the class. We believe that in the current 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 service to its users.: As a result of the trend of distributed computing most of the computer applications in teaching and research nowadays can be handled by PCs and Unix Workstations. The use of central host computers are mostly used as servers to support applications, file services, database, communication, computation, etc. Besides upgrading the desktop machines and setting up of server farms for providing various advanced network services, we also see the need for a supercomputing or massive parallel processing machine. As commonly known, for large scale or computation intensive research work, a high speed computer beyond workstation and compute server level is indispensable. Since other universities in Hong Kong have already possessed computers of super-computing level, we might lose our competitive edge if we fail to do so in the near future.
Multimedia Multimedia technology is emerging in almost all areas of computer applications. With the upgraded campus network and also with the significant decrease in cost of hardware and software, we envisage that, in a couple years' time, all our desktop computers would be equipped with multimedia devices. Multimedia software will become the norm rather than specialized applications. Computer presentation, interactive teaching and learning, video conferencing and video on demand system etc. will become the popular methods and tools for teaching. The Computing Services Centre should therefore well prepare itself to support this new environment and also should place more efforts in helping its users to migrate to this challenging era of computing. Public Information Systems Our Centre will continue to develop and enhance our integrated information systems to provide additional services as well as to make the environment more user-friendly. We also expect that our systems will gradually become part of Intranet and be more accessible to users from the Internet world. To be in line with the University's goal of becoming an internationally recognized university, we should not focus only on facilitating electronic communications and information retrieval as at the moment; instead we must aim at building up our information resources locally and make them available to international academics through Internet. Management Information Systems The existing administrative data processing systems of the University were first developed some 10 years ago. Although they have been enhanced from time to time, yet they still remain as software of the older generations. To keep pace with the modern trend we must migrate from the conventional development method to client/server environment and use objectoriented approach. With the maturity of multimedia technology, graphics, voice and video would be incorporated in application systems to further enhance user-friendliness. Moreover, the capabilities to handle both English and Chinese characters for input and output will also be gradually implemented. Apart from moving towards a more open central MIS environment, the Centre will continue to develop the Distributed Departmental Systems (CITYDIS) to facilitate daytoday operations of departments. These departmental systems will be fully integrated with the central systems. External Links & Professional Services The Centre will continue its effort to build its link with other universities as well as industries with a view to enhancing 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 University and the Centre. Quality and Cost-effective Services Computers is now an integral part of the University in teaching, research learning, office automation and administration. It is envisaged that the Centre's responsibilities will continue to increase with time, though additional manpower resources would not be forthcoming in view of the University's vow of "doing more with less". Without the sacrifice of quality, the Centre should aim to adjust the mix of its staff in occasions of natural turnover in order to gain more hands with a reduced budget. Benchmarking is planned in the near future to ensure that our provision of computing facilities and user services is the top of the class. We believe that in the current 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 service to its users.: Multimedia technology is emerging in almost all areas of computer applications. With the upgraded campus network and also with the significant decrease in cost of hardware and software, we envisage that, in a couple years' time, all our desktop computers would be equipped with multimedia devices. Multimedia software will become the norm rather than specialized applications. Computer presentation, interactive teaching and learning, video conferencing and video on demand system etc. will become the popular methods and tools for teaching. The Computing Services Centre should therefore well prepare itself to support this new environment and also should place more efforts in helping its users to migrate to this challenging era of computing.
Public Information Systems Our Centre will continue to develop and enhance our integrated information systems to provide additional services as well as to make the environment more user-friendly. We also expect that our systems will gradually become part of Intranet and be more accessible to users from the Internet world. To be in line with the University's goal of becoming an internationally recognized university, we should not focus only on facilitating electronic communications and information retrieval as at the moment; instead we must aim at building up our information resources locally and make them available to international academics through Internet. Management Information Systems The existing administrative data processing systems of the University were first developed some 10 years ago. Although they have been enhanced from time to time, yet they still remain as software of the older generations. To keep pace with the modern trend we must migrate from the conventional development method to client/server environment and use objectoriented approach. With the maturity of multimedia technology, graphics, voice and video would be incorporated in application systems to further enhance user-friendliness. Moreover, the capabilities to handle both English and Chinese characters for input and output will also be gradually implemented. Apart from moving towards a more open central MIS environment, the Centre will continue to develop the Distributed Departmental Systems (CITYDIS) to facilitate daytoday operations of departments. These departmental systems will be fully integrated with the central systems. External Links & Professional Services The Centre will continue its effort to build its link with other universities as well as industries with a view to enhancing 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 University and the Centre. Quality and Cost-effective Services Computers is now an integral part of the University in teaching, research learning, office automation and administration. It is envisaged that the Centre's responsibilities will continue to increase with time, though additional manpower resources would not be forthcoming in view of the University's vow of "doing more with less". Without the sacrifice of quality, the Centre should aim to adjust the mix of its staff in occasions of natural turnover in order to gain more hands with a reduced budget. Benchmarking is planned in the near future to ensure that our provision of computing facilities and user services is the top of the class. We believe that in the current 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 service to its users.: Our Centre will continue to develop and enhance our integrated information systems to provide additional services as well as to make the environment more user-friendly. We also expect that our systems will gradually become part of Intranet and be more accessible to users from the Internet world. To be in line with the University's goal of becoming an internationally recognized university, we should not focus only on facilitating electronic communications and information retrieval as at the moment; instead we must aim at building up our information resources locally and make them available to international academics through Internet.
Management Information Systems The existing administrative data processing systems of the University were first developed some 10 years ago. Although they have been enhanced from time to time, yet they still remain as software of the older generations. To keep pace with the modern trend we must migrate from the conventional development method to client/server environment and use objectoriented approach. With the maturity of multimedia technology, graphics, voice and video would be incorporated in application systems to further enhance user-friendliness. Moreover, the capabilities to handle both English and Chinese characters for input and output will also be gradually implemented. Apart from moving towards a more open central MIS environment, the Centre will continue to develop the Distributed Departmental Systems (CITYDIS) to facilitate daytoday operations of departments. These departmental systems will be fully integrated with the central systems. External Links & Professional Services The Centre will continue its effort to build its link with other universities as well as industries with a view to enhancing 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 University and the Centre. Quality and Cost-effective Services Computers is now an integral part of the University in teaching, research learning, office automation and administration. It is envisaged that the Centre's responsibilities will continue to increase with time, though additional manpower resources would not be forthcoming in view of the University's vow of "doing more with less". Without the sacrifice of quality, the Centre should aim to adjust the mix of its staff in occasions of natural turnover in order to gain more hands with a reduced budget. Benchmarking is planned in the near future to ensure that our provision of computing facilities and user services is the top of the class. We believe that in the current 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 service to its users.: The existing administrative data processing systems of the University were first developed some 10 years ago. Although they have been enhanced from time to time, yet they still remain as software of the older generations. To keep pace with the modern trend we must migrate from the conventional development method to client/server environment and use objectoriented approach. With the maturity of multimedia technology, graphics, voice and video would be incorporated in application systems to further enhance user-friendliness. Moreover, the capabilities to handle both English and Chinese characters for input and output will also be gradually implemented.

Apart from moving towards a more open central MIS environment, the Centre will continue to develop the Distributed Departmental Systems (CITYDIS) to facilitate daytoday operations of departments. These departmental systems will be fully integrated with the central systems.
External Links & Professional Services The Centre will continue its effort to build its link with other universities as well as industries with a view to enhancing 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 University and the Centre. Quality and Cost-effective Services Computers is now an integral part of the University in teaching, research learning, office automation and administration. It is envisaged that the Centre's responsibilities will continue to increase with time, though additional manpower resources would not be forthcoming in view of the University's vow of "doing more with less". Without the sacrifice of quality, the Centre should aim to adjust the mix of its staff in occasions of natural turnover in order to gain more hands with a reduced budget. Benchmarking is planned in the near future to ensure that our provision of computing facilities and user services is the top of the class. We believe that in the current 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 service to its users.: The Centre will continue its effort to build its link with other universities as well as industries with a view to enhancing 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 University and the Centre.
Quality and Cost-effective Services Computers is now an integral part of the University in teaching, research learning, office automation and administration. It is envisaged that the Centre's responsibilities will continue to increase with time, though additional manpower resources would not be forthcoming in view of the University's vow of "doing more with less". Without the sacrifice of quality, the Centre should aim to adjust the mix of its staff in occasions of natural turnover in order to gain more hands with a reduced budget. Benchmarking is planned in the near future to ensure that our provision of computing facilities and user services is the top of the class. We believe that in the current 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 service to its users.: Computers is now an integral part of the University in teaching, research learning, office automation and administration. It is envisaged that the Centre's responsibilities will continue to increase with time, though additional manpower resources would not be forthcoming in view of the University's vow of "doing more with less". Without the sacrifice of quality, the Centre should aim to adjust the mix of its staff in occasions of natural turnover in order to gain more hands with a reduced budget. Benchmarking is planned in the near future to ensure that our provision of computing facilities and user services is the top of the class. We believe that in the current 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 service to its users.

[Issue No. 8]

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