[292] in I/T Delivery
Trip report from Tech Ed 2000 conference
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Ferrara)
Sun Mar 19 08:22:48 2000
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Message-Id: <4.0.2.20000319002851.00a87480@hesiod>
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2000 08:14:24 -0500
To: itlt@mit.edu, delivery@mit.edu, owls@mit.edu
From: Robert Ferrara <rferrara@MIT.EDU>
Cc: nicholas.rawlings@yale.edu
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Hello,
This is a trip report on the Tech Ed 2000 conference I attended in Palm
Springs, California from March 6 to 8. My purpose was to collaborate on a
panel contrasting academic and commercial computing practices and
suggesting which commercial practices might best be "imported". This talk
went very well. I was also impressed with the energy level of this well
organized conference and particularly enjoyed the fact that 2 of the 3
outstanding keynote speakers had strong MIT ties.
This conference was originated five years ago by the Community College
system of California and has grown rapidly since then to include people
from a variety of institutions here in and in Canada. There were some 2,500
attendees, 200 exhibitors, and lots of hands-on workshops. The diversity
was refreshing. I met one person who supports IT for all of Manitoba’s
First Nation (i.e. Native American) schools, another at a budding
institution which trains medical assistants, plus many more you would see
at any EDUCAUSE or NERCOMP conference. The next session is in Ontario,
California, March 26-28.
Nick Rawlings of Yale and I were the panelists for one session and our
slides can be found at www.yale.edu/tp now and I'll put up a local copy
soon at web.mit.edu/is/delivery/teched.html. Nick has an extensive
commercial I/T background, including founding the National CSS time-sharing
firm and developing the popular NOMAD query language. He has been involved
in the academic world for three years, about the same as me, holding a
position at Yale which combines elements of the Service and Integration
processes here at MIT. He has been very involved in the Oracle ERP rollout
and in developing Yale’s computing infrastructure. Given that our session
was not located in the main hotel and there were many interesting talks in
the same time slot, we were very pleased with the large attendance and
engagement of the audience. A few misunderstood the title and consequently
our purpose. One fellow in the Texas state system was looking for a magic
bullet for a difficult political situation (a powerful State Senator wants
all computing centralized at a data center in his district). We seemed to
be on track with the majority, however, and there many good questions.
Afterwards, one attendee invited us to give this presentation at a academic
librarian’s conference early next year.
In the beginning of the session, several slides were devoted to comparing
the different missions, supplier patterns, planning styles, and working
conditions of the commercial and academic IT worlds. This provided some
context for the core of the presentation. We then focused on four areas
that we felt the commercial sector offers good models and practices and,
even allowing for cultural differences, represent high leverage, high
payoff opportunities. The four areas are 1) Decision Making, 2) Project
Management, 3) Platform Homogeneity, and 4) Data Administration. On the
first topic, we noted the costs of NOT making I/T decisions, even
suboptimal ones, are not especially appreciated in academia. On the second,
we looked at the continuing evolution of project management as a formal
discipline and outlined the recent efforts at both our institutions.
Regarding the non-homogeneous nature of most university environments, we
discussed ideas of quantifying support costs and helping standardization.
Finally, we looked at the headway data administration and data mining
efforts are making today and cited several commercial and academic
instances where a good effort really paid off.
As mentioned in the first paragraph, the keynote speakers were particularly
good. Nicholas Negroponte of MIT’s Media Lab led off with a gripping set of
observations and predictions about Internet development in the next few
years like the importance of developing countries and the coming wave of
machine-to-machine communication. He also brought home ideas of how people
really learn by doing and how this can be effective at all ages. The next
day was opened by Shirley Jackson, President of Rensselaer and a very
distinguished MIT alumna. She looked at education in networked world,
discussed the “digital divide” that affects some sectors of society, and
displayed some of RPI’s experiments. She was followed by Dr. Jennifer
James, who is absolutely the most entertaining cultural anthropologists
I’ve ever heard. She has a wonderful, humorous way of putting today’s
current social and marketplace confusion in a larger context of human
history. Then she brings this right down to individual young people, and
helps you personalize what they might be feeling. She notes that social
contract with schools is changing, part of the fastest-paced evolution in
our culture. This is all done a very uplifting way, since she believes we
are stepping up to next level of civilization and is very confident in
today’s young people leading the way. I made it a point to go to another
talk of hers and found a huge number of people were similarly motivated.
Of the regular sessions I attending, the one I found most directly relevant
was given By Jerry Neece, Academic Programs Manager at Sun. Jerry talks a
mile a minute, but genuinely wants to engage people and invites
correspondence. His e-mail jerry.neece@eng.sun.com. Jerry’s talk was
nominally about next generation learning platform infrastructures, and here
are some of the prominent bullets from my notes:
*Sun uses competency-based profiling of salesmen. They’ve found different
accounts require different competencies, and have developed custom training
paths tailored to each salesman and her/his accounts.
*Sun’s downloadable audio files reach 71 per cent of employees quickly and
directly. Typically they are monthly “fireside chats” from McNeeley. What
a simple, effective way to reach the workforce.
*Then Jerry quoted Sloan’s Peter Senge “the only sustainable competitive
advantage is the ability to learn faster than your competitors”.
*Sun realizes the shortfall of UNIX sys admins is hurting sales. Estimate
is 70K more are needed.
*Cisco, Oracle, and Sun are planning five huge joint learning centers
throughout the world. At first, they will run parallel curriculum tracks,
but later intend to combine them.
*Sun intends to launch Sun.com, a web learning center that will be free of
charge to accredited schools. Some form of formal certification, like MCSE,
is planned.
*Jerry is, not suprisingly, a Java evangelist. He was in charge of the
rollout and wanted to call it “webrunner”, but was outvoted by younger
members of the project. He pushed BlueJ, a Sun-funded project from
Australia’s Monash University, as a good Java and OO curriculum. It is
downloadable free from Sun’s web site.
*He is also a great believer that Jini-enabled systems will dramatically
change the environment. In the Jini protocol, each of “net appliances”
announce their presence and services offered. In this plug and play
together scheme, they continually and make needed connections automatically.
*Sun is also beginning to push Java-based smart ID cards. A university
could, for example, store a lot of data about each student or alumni, and
use it to authenticate the person for a variety of services.
I have less complete notes from other sessions. Overall, I found this
conference to have a more consistent focus on the technology side of
academia, true to its name and more like the old CAUSE. I’d be happy to
discuss any aspect further with anyone interested. Also, for those who
remember Tom Moebus, who worked in Corporate Relations and ILP at MIT for
many years, you will be happy to know he is doing very well as Vice
Chancellor for Development at UC Irvine, where three of the senior people
are MIT graduates.
Cheers, Bob
