News and Information Services' Summary of the

Report by the Subcommission on IT Infrastructure

Infrastructure: The Foundation for Our Vision

The time is ripe for the University of Michigan to take the lead in redefining the public university’s core missions of teaching, research, and service, in light of the information revolution. Opportunities exist for developing and using knowledge networks, for transforming the University into a living laboratory where experimentation is encouraged and results are shared widely, for expanding the definition of an educated person in the information age, and for extending learning opportunities to new communities. These are exciting prospects, but none can be achieved without a sound infrastructure that continually evolves to incorporate new information and communication technology and techniques.

As we address our infrastructure needs, we must attend to more than wires, switches and hubs. Broadly conceived, the infrastructure includes:

• Human capital: sufficient numbers of highly skilled professional support staff, and faculty, students and staff, skilled in ICT use.
• Policies, governance, and management for information technology.
• University-wide security and quality assurance.
• Physical infrastructure (building wiring, campus backbone, and external connectivity).
• Advanced technologies and services for emerging technologies.

Essential Improvements and Action

While the University of Michigan compares favorably with other major universities, our increasing dependence on information technology has strained our existing infrastructure, and we are no longer able to provide acceptable quality of service to the University community. This affects our ability to recruit and retain faculty and students, as well as the productivity and effectiveness of all members of the campus community.

If we are to do more than merely catch up, we need to go beyond one-time, piecemeal upgrades to a new way of thinking about information and communication technology as central to everything that takes place in a university. If we act quickly and boldly, we can see great improvements within a year; within three to five years U-M can regain national prominence in information and communication technology infrastructure.

Changes in attitude and organization, as well as basic infrastructure, will be necessary. The ideal is a distributed but coordinated infrastructure support program throughout the University, with the appropriate balance between local provision of services and support and central guidance on standards and policies.

Improvements in physical infrastructure are needed right away. The goal is to guarantee a high level of end-to-end performance, giving faculty and students the ability to move very large amounts of data rapidly from their desktops and labs to other points on or off campus, seamlessly, securely, and reliably. To meet this goal, we must rebuild our networks: in buildings, across campus, and to the outside world through upgraded Internet connectivity and Internet2 capability. Ultimately, no problem should be intractable because of insufficient computing power or network capacity.

In addition, because many of today’s high-end technologies will become tomorrow’s basic infrastructure, the University must continually invest in pilot projects involving emerging technologies—such as wireless networking—so that it is well positioned for large-scale implementation across campus of those technologies that prove successful and desirable.

The commission recommends that the University take these actions:

Human capital

• Through recruitment and in-house training, upgrade faculty, staff, and student skills and maintain those skills at a high level of competence.

• Invest significant additional resources in “side-by-side” IT training and consulting assistance for faculty, graduate students, and staff who use the technology in teaching and research.

• Make a long-term commitment to recruiting, training, developing, and retaining qualified IT staff in the current, highly competitive market.

Policy, governance and management

• Establish, streamline, or otherwise optimize management and governance mechanisms for information and communication technology to ensure that timely, informed, strategic decisions are made for the campus as a whole.

• Provide central guidance in the areas of financial control, legal issues such as intellectual property, security and risk management, adherence to the academic missions of the University, and coordination of overall services.

• Allow for local information technology services to be provided whenever possible through stronger capability and leadership within schools.

• Foster more effective planning and use of resources through continued unbundling of unrelated information and communication technology services and establishment of clear pricing guidelines, overseen by a “Campus IT Pricing and Services Commission.”

Security and quality assurance

• Create a campus-wide security and information assurance office, with appropriate representation from various information and communication technology administrative units, to rigorously and continuously review and assess security policies and practices.

• Establish a crisis response team, with representation from campus service providers, to coordinate University-wide response to potential technology-based attacks or mishaps.

Physical infrastructure

• Beginning soon and continuing until completed, upgrade in-building network infrastructure to support up to 1 Gbit/s connectivity to end-user locations, with minimum desktop performance of 100 Mbit/s.

• Immediately begin upgrading campus backbone infrastructure to provide backbone bandwidth capacity to support target 10Gbit/s aggregate service.

• Upgrade external Internet connectivity and Internet2 connectivity.

• Equip many more classrooms than at present with network access and a significant number of classrooms with multimedia access.

• Maintain and enhance the Media Union—an important resource for advanced experimentation in the use of new media—by keeping its technology at the leading edge and retaining professional experts who can use, demonstrate and teach the skills to apply that technology.

Advanced technologies and services for emerging technologies

• Invest right away in the following pilot projects and initiatives:
  1. A pilot initiative in wireless networking, with the eventual goal of campus-wide installation.
  2. Several advanced prototype demonstrations of services underlying research and instructional applications, such as high performance computing, very large data sets, management of massive, real-time data, collaborative technologies, and visualization and virtual reality technologies.
  3. A pilot “Voice over IP” initiative, taking advantage of technology that allows voice communication (what we now call telephone service) to be carried across data networks based on the Internet Protocol (IP).
  4. A high-performance end-to-end computing and networking initiative to take advantage of the full potential of emerging infrastructure and computing capabilitiles.
• Continue investing in initiatives that involve limited, early use of new and emerging technologies, with an eye to eventual campus-wide deployment.

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