Council members attending: Agee, Anderson, Barbour, Casey, Craig, Denning (chair), Finkelstein, Gillotte, Grotophorst, Herberg, Hill, Hubbs, Hutchinson, Kaul, Martin, Perry, Rosenzweig, Segerson, Sevon, Weinberger, Wood, Wray. (Council members absent: Behrman, Lanasa, Pullen, Zoltek)
Guests and representatives: McCourt, J Wray (for group web site), Parr (for Deborah Keene).
(1) Joy Hughes briefed the group on its purposes. The motivation for its formation is that GMU resources for IT are not sufficient for all the IT demands of the GMU community; we need to become much smarter about the systems we deploy, the standards we adopt, and the priorities we set. This group represents the most IT dedicated, IT savvy, and organizationally savvy people from the GMU community and can advise the VP IT on how to do this. This groups will be concerned with:
- enterprise-wide
architectures to help GMU accomplish its missions with more efficient
use of IT
- identifying
GMU community consensuses and areas of concern regarding IT architectures
- recommending priorities, collaborations, and architectural approaches
Because this
is an advisory group, it will not commission or run pilot projects
or experiments. However, it can recommend such, and some of the
managers of IT units can undertake the pilots or
experiments.
The group can also recommend and sponsor special meetings and workshops to deal with particular problems -- e.g., the brainstorming group that met at the President's house a few years ago regarding the email architecture.
The group can provide advice on special problems affecting the campus -- e.g., the bandwidth and accessibility of GMU networks through Internet service providers.
The group can sponsor technology demonstrations from vendors to help educate the group and GMU community on available technologies. (Vendors would be briefed that any presentation they make is for education of the group and does not affect any procurement processes that might occur in the future.)
The initial focus of the group will be on the GMU web architecture. A later focus might be a standard default desktop for workstations.
(2) Peter Denning
briefly discussed his role as chair of the group. He will help focus
the discussions and spin off working groups to consider specific
issues. He will call periodic meetings of the whole group, at which
the findings of working groups can be discussed and integrated.
He will work to develop a presence for the Council on the GMU campus,
to build its influence and to encourage GMU community members to
communicate with TC members regarding IT architecture issues and
suggestions. He sees the Council as a major voice for GMU IT customers.
(3) We went "round the table" with each person describing their concerns and interests that bring them to the Council. There is quite a bit of diversity in the group and many perspectives.
(4) We launched in to a discussion of issues surrounding the GMU web architecture. Toward the end of the discussion, Denning summarized the five areas of concern that were brought up by various speakers:
1 - Functionality: the utility of the GMU web to its customers especially external customers who seek to locate offices, staff, programs, people, and other GMU resources.
2 - Identity: the group is concerned that GMU present a mature, professional, innovative, and well organized public image via the GMU web; identity is especially important given GMU's youth and ambitions.
3 - Sharability of GMU materials: GMU course materials are already available on the public web but are not organized so that people can easily locate the ones that would help them; GMU does not get public "credit" for its open source policies (as does MIT).
4 - Workflow and commerce: the GMU web should support more of the transactions that students engage in while they work through their degree programs.
5 - Authentication: there are no authentication services to assist in controlling access to sensitive systems and data, or with authorizations on web-enabled workflows.
We discussed
functionality at the greatest length. The group favors guidelines
coupled with support services over mandated standards (and "unfunded
mandates"). The group believes that the community will accept
"structural mandates" (e.g., linking to databases, choosing
host names and URLs) but not "style mandates". The group
is concerned with achieving unsurpassed
quality of navigational services. The group is concerned with integrating
databases with web enable services.
(5) Everyone indicated a primary and secondary interest in the five issue areas listed above. Denning will compile this and propose five working groups to examine these issues.
(6) Denning will meet with the web group to discuss the design of a Council web site.
(7) Denning will meet with University Relations to discuss the public image of the Council.
(8) Denning
said on closing that the best strategy for the group at this formative
stage is to brainstorm the issues, bring forth as many ideas as
possible, identify breakdowns, and express
concerns. Through a series of working group meetings and Council
meetings we can then reach a consensus on recommendations.