[949] in I/T Delivery
Budget update + Delivery Council Notes from 11/19/2002
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Ferrara)
Tue Dec 3 14:13:27 2002
Message-Id: <5.1.0.14.2.20021203132545.02331e10@po11.mit.edu>
Date: Tue, 03 Dec 2002 13:26:12 -0500
To: delivery-mtg@menelaus.local
From: Robert Ferrara <rferrara@MIT.EDU> (by way of "Jagruti S. Patel" <jag@mit.edu>)
Cc: rferrara@mit.edu
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Hello,
Here are the notes from the 11/19 Delivery Council. Thanks to Jag for
getting most of this. I also want to report on yesterday's and
today's FY2004 Budget meetings. There is a definitely a squeeze in FY04,
but the situation is not as dire as the bleakest scenario that I mentioned
as the far end of the scale. The others in ITLT have been able to help a
lot and Jim and Angie have an orderly process for addressing unbudgeted
needs. The last two days have been spent getting everything on the table,
classifying proposed cuts & needs, and developing all needed aggregate
numbers. That has gone well. The actual budget will be assembled at an all
day December 2 meeting. I'll be around a lot Monday & Tuesday if people
want more detail.
Attending: jag, rferrara, ljr, mca, thg, thorne, tomt, wdc, khiggins
Away: msnow, mjv
Timetable
- JDB has to get a budget into Curry for 2004 on December 6
- By end of November 19, JDB needs Delivery's proposal, ITLT on Thursday &
friday
- Curry has said he needs a lot of help (3%-7% cuts, focusing on 7%) for
IS, Facilities, CAO and other departments
- Academic people are suffering as well
- Between now and end of the fiscal year, if someone chooses to leave it
allows some wiggle room.
- Budget for Delivery is $3.6M, almost all people.
- WinAthena is unfunded except by "1 year checking account" carryover, and
that is a Delivery responsibility for the moment. Bob is working ITLT
people to address this.
ROUNDTABLE
- Looks like we'll be doing a COFHE Enrolled Student Survey in the Spring
for up to 20-25 schools
- Working on projectizing work around mailman and out-of-office service
- Kelly Yu moved over to TNS fully; Jan 7 to begin discussion for TNS systems
- Credit card adding new merchants, student groups hosting Jan/Feb career
fairs, Tech Review coming on board. Conference Services coming on board
for some smaller conference. Working with Alumni on SmartTrends
- Linguistics Society of America annual conference at different
schools. Hosted at MIT in 2005, Registrar's Office does not want to be
involved. Card Office helps with conferences now (registration
logistics). Generating MIT ID to allow registered people into dorms.
- Conversion of warehouse to bigger machine and Oracle 8.1.7.x. Will have
both versions running and updated for two weeks and then convert older one
to a test machine. Aren't taking advantage of Oracle 8 features at the
moment, would like to. Will likely go to Oracle 9 in the Spring as the
move to Sun happens.
- November 4 had world wide launch of DSpace. Chuck Vest and Hal Abelson
spoke at the launch. DSpace code available on SoureForge. A number of
projects starting up, e.g. CMI starting a DSpace. Proposal in the works to
make this OKI compliant. http://www.dspace.org/
- November 19 is drop date - no more Athena releases until after exams.
- If anyone tries to buy IBM machine for Athena, the part # is disabled,
but IBM will continue to ship until Athena qualifies new hardware.
- WinAthena deployments going well, Bldg 37 room will be used by a class
after Thanksgiving. WinAthena machine in W92 in director's area, also
going to put at least one in N42 (suggested 286).
- Working with Theresa on WinAthena deployment for Treasurer's Office,
maybe including an Exchange server
- Container documentation will be moved into
http://web.mit.edu/is/athena/windows
- XP and AFS do not work together in WinAthena - doesn't have the profile
management, Kerberos management tree breaking again. May have these issues
worked out by end of December.
- Plop going away at the end of the year.
- Holiday party still on, but cut back by 30-40% (December 12)
BUDGET REDUCTION PROPOSAL
- Bob and Ken have worked on a list of potential items, can talk about it
one on one
- WDC working on research with Sun to create a SolarisAthena platform. Not
money in the bank.
- Marshall looking at external funding for Kerberos development
- EAST hopes to have paying customer next year (Parking Office), also want
to put MBTA passes online
- JDB needs hard savings, not potential savings.
1. We need some way to charge people for departmental work to start
competing with consultants, competing for the application business. Needs
to go across teams. Charging is tricky ground - got out of the business
since it ended up being tricky. We don't have the discipline to know what
we offer for free and what we charge for. We consult for free to
consultants who then charge the Institute for their services. NIMBUS
(budget application? Triple the initial cost. Consultant came in and
confirmed to the MIT architecture.) Pushback on should IS just be working
on departmental projects vs infrastructure projects (parking vs HR
implementation). Infrastructure should be transparent - the least glory.
2. Chargeback for WinAthena - wrong behavior at first. Have to talk about
it, but it's a failed economic model and the negative incentive is too
much. Suggest doing it for servers and containers, not the client
machines. Incremental costs on value-added - advanced services we charge
for. Need the loss-leader.
3. Athena / Cluster endgame - when laptops take over. May only be 3 years
now. DUSP said the value added was specialized HW/SW on the cluster
machines. Messy installation / configuration, fancy hardware, access to
db. For bread and butter things, maybe don't need it. % of existing
cluster usage? Clusters end-game is about individual ownership - paradigm
shift of Athena install which used to be tightly configured. WDC has
end-game plan in mind. Stop buying new machines, go to owner
model. Capture when to take the hit. Postponing cluster renewal by a year
- already on the table, between $300K-$650K.
4. Less client-side Athena stuff. How many times do we need a new mail
client? Most of the costs have been occurred. Gnome 2 is coming out and
there is some testing to be done. Cannot skip a release, since badly
broken stuff gets fixed every two months. Need the big and the small
releases. Will need to build our own Mozilla binaries. Not too much time,
it's the lowest cost way to get from A to B. Doesn't really belong on the
list.
5. Cross platform team - not reality, but lots of exchange. May be
something that happens and discussions will happen in the future.
There is definitely bad news, but Bob will share that individually, not in
the large group. Not so bad that we're cutting a significant portion of
the staff. Curry seems to be buying into OKI, and that would need money to
keep it going. Institute has to make its choices.
Reality is we're going to lose a few people unless the picure is unusually
bright in other parts of the organization, e.g. equipment budgets down
(like delay SAP HW upgrade).
