[2110] in Enterprise Print Delivery Team
Re: Accout Information Page
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David F Lambert)
Tue Dec 18 23:46:07 2001
Message-Id: <200112190446.XAA10888@fort-point-station.mit.edu>
Date: Tue, 18 Dec 01 23:45:30 EST
From: David F Lambert <LAMBERT@MITVMA.MIT.EDU>
To: "Huxley, Bil" <huxley@MIT.EDU>,
Enterprise Printing Delivery Project Team <printdel@MIT.EDU>,
"Emmons, Gillian C" <gemmons@MIT.EDU>,
"Regan, Theresa M" <tregan@MIT.EDU>, "Roach, Roger A" <rar@MIT.EDU>
cc: Tech Support within MIT CAO <CAOTECH@MIT.EDU>,
Bob Ferrara <rferrara@MIT.EDU>
In-Reply-To: Message of Tue, 18 Dec 2001 13:27:00 -0500 from <huxley@MIT.EDU>
Bil,
As has been suggested several times via vmail & email, we believe significant
concerns or issues are best handled interactively in person. Your particular
concern around chargeback could have been resolved with a one minute
phone call to any member of printdel or a simple stop by my office when
you were in W91 for a meeting.
The short answer is that there are NO plans for chargeback. We did not
mention chargeback, and that was an incorrect assumption.
For those who want the gory details please read more below.
On Tue, 18 Dec 2001 13:27:00 -0500 Bil said:
>Hi PrintDel,
>
>As you know, we received the request below from Lynne yesterday for address
>and accounting information for all CAO IPM users. Upon reading this I had
>concerns. I've discussed this request with Gill along with general issues
>both her team and my team have been having since the IPM Service went to
>"production" by the fact that EP1 was migrated from Athena Print Services
>to IPM.
>
>I believe that IS needs to have documented and accessible policies and
>procedures in place before you even consider asking anyone for a Cost
>Object that you can charge to. Going to the web page specified I did not
>find any such documentation. At present I can put any Cost Object at all
>on the web page provided. This includes not only malformed and
>non-existent Cost Objects (e.g. 999999999) but also Cost Objects which I am
>not authorized to spend against (e.g. 1639502). What's the process for
>validating the client for spending authorization?
We would provide the expected rates, policies and prodecures if we
intended to charge for the services. Since we do not plan to charge,
publishing rates, etc. makes no sense.
The purpose for the CO was for usage and trend reports by business function
or unit, and for indirect cost recovery if needed. Validation appeared
unnecessary to us since we are not implementing chargeback. Additionally,
you'll recall from our meeting with CAOTech, the majority (~5) of your
EP1 users do not have spending authorizations on any CO. If we required
a CO *and* validated the spending authorization, those ~5 users would
be SOL. We also checked to see if our configuration of SAP could handle
spending authorizations with a $0 limit and were told that's not possible.
>As part of the policy for charging against client specified Cost Objects I
>believe you'll need to state what the current rates are for various
>services that the client may incur as well as specifying the mechanisms and
>extent of advance notice for changes to your pricing structure. For
>instance, the current rate for EP1 might be $0.00 per page with a six month
>notice to all clients prior to a rate change. CAO does not wish to be
>surprised by either the $ for services we've been using for the last two
>and a half years or by unauthorized individuals charging their services
>against our Cost Objects.
We agree with publishing rates, providing advance notice of rate changes, etc.
However, again, we aren't doing chargeback. Additionally, please note you've
been using W91 printing services for well more than a decade - not 2.5
years - which the IS bottom line has funded. We certainly have no desire
to "surprise" CAO or any other client.
>I believe you should also consider that the clients did not need to be
>responsible for maintaining such information when EP1 was on an Athena
>Print Queue. Perhaps the address could be defaulted to the client's
>primary office address? Perhaps the Cost Object information should only be
>accepted from the Cost Object Supervisor or Addressee?
The team considered using the published address but felt there would
be more visiblity to the option of setting a delivery address by not using
a potentially inappropriate default address. As you know, it only takes
less than a minute to set your address via the browser interface.
Additionally, this only needs to be set once unless the user perfers
a different delivery address for future prints. A one time and one
minute effort did not seem inappropriate to the team.
We would probably agree with your suggestion of restricting the CO
setting to the CO's Supervisor or Addressee if we were actually charging.
>I respectfully request that this should be coming from the on-going
>'service' team rather than a 'delivery' team. Indeed, before IPM went in
>to production service a permanent mailing list and contact info should have
>been set forth to the production customers. Even if the team hasn't been
>established giving the customers a permanent mailing address rather than
>forcing them to transition at some undefined later time would be really
>easily accomplished.
The organizational location & labor funding for IPM servicing is still
under discussion by ITLT. Please recall that the recent rejection of
submitted files was caused by a human error as was noted in an email
from Rocklyn. The plan was to contact each user to step them thru
the process of setting their CO and delivery address *before* the
rejection code was activated. The BLT is the appropriate place for
customer help. However, please be patient as they, too, learn and
adjust to supporting this new service.
We fully agree with moving as much additional IPM work to post-delivery
teams. Plans are already in the works for release 2.
>Dave will recall that he and Tom Dalton did a presentation to the available
>direct reports of Jim Morgan's at one of Jim's weekly meetings on
>6-June-2001 here in E19. At that time it was explicitly stated that "cost
>will hit the IS bottom line for now". Dave and Lynne will also recall
>meeting with CAOTech in E19 on 20-August-2001. At that meeting it was
>stated that charges may be a future consideration but would not be part any
>near term implementation. So this request for Cost Objects comes as a
>surprise of some concern to all of us. Now it would appear that you're not
>only talking about moving this service from E19 to W91, but also preparing
>to charge for the reduced level of service.
Again, no charging is planned. Below you'll find a response I composed
to address some questions Theresa had re funding sources for this service.
Most of this is covered in our business model which has been available
on our project web pages for longer than I'd care to remember.
Regarding the "reduced level of service" from moving E19 to W91, please
note our existing aggregate throughput capabilities on a weekday is 129K
simplex pages. With the E19 printing equipment moved to W91 our daily
maximum throughput increases to 216K simplex pages. That's a 70% increase
in maximum throughput using the existing equipment but with the 24x5
labor available in W91. However, we certainly acknowledge the reduced
turnaround we expect for short jobs. Truly short jobs are probably
more appropriately printed on your own departmental printers.
>I hope I am mistaken in my interpretation of the minimal data that I have
>available to me, and if so that will be readily rectified by documentation
>:) I hope you find these comments constructive and helpful.
FYI - the general user documentation should be available on the web
within the next few days. You'll find it from
http://web.mit.edu/is/services/list.html#printing
>Please let us know how you wish to proceed on these matters
>
>Thanks,
> Bil
>
>At 12/17/2001 01:04 PM -0500, Lynne E. Durland wrote:
< original email deleted to save bits >
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Date: Tue, 18 Dec 01 08:07:06 EST
From: David F Lambert <LAMBERT@MITVMA.MIT.Edu>
Subject: Re: 300 DPI v. 600 DPI and test printouts
To: Theresa M Regan <tregan@MIT.EDU>
In-Reply-To: Your message of Tue, 18 Dec 2001 05:48:53 -0500
Theresa,
Most of this is covered in our business model documentation. I don't
mind sharing some of the highlights here which might make for a quicker
meeting - at least it gives you some info ahead of time to consider.
Despite some nervousness on the team's part re scalability, we are
following Jim's suggestions for funding. Here are a few key points:
1) ASOP already funds MF based printing.
2) Use the existing ASOP funding for print which migrates from the MF
to IPM. Monthly GL is a good example. I'm waiting for Rocklyn to
produce current MF based data for level setting of old vs new printing.
3) ASOP would eat or give back 'small' cost variances as it does now. Note
print volumes, capital expenses, etc. vary each year.
4) Negotiate with new customers which have significant print volumes for
additional ASOP funding. Alumni might be a good example. They already
have budgets for printing. We'll do it at less cost. They're anxious
to get of of the printing business. They've said their willing to pay.
Try to negotiate a one time transfer of funds into ASOP from them.
5) If print volumes rise enough (read: cost increase) that ASOP cannot
handle the additional costs, ask Curry for additional funding.
6) If print volumes rise enough that ASOP cannot handle the additional
cost and Curry does not provide additional funds, implement chargeback
for the new customer. Jim really does NOT want to implement chargeback
unless there are no options.
Jim, Roger, Bob, Cecilia, FTL and printdel were the decision makers on
the funding chunk of work. Clearly, Jim set the course.
I don't envision us providing a CO. It would be up to the customer to
choose an appropriate CO - that's their decision not our "guess".
Our current implementation considered and allows for the use of
multiple COs for a single kerberos id. When printing for project X,
set the CO to the appropriate CO. When printing for project Y, reset
your CO appropriately in IPM.
Regarding rates, as noted above, we expect we will not "charge" but
rather, use an appropriate current rate for indirect cost allocation
purposes. We expect the rate to be reviewed annually due to cost variances
affected by volumes, capital expenditures, etc. The rate will fall in the
same range as the current MF rate - about $.05/page.
There is no limit other than mentioned above. For example, if Morgan
decides to triple the monthly GL report volumes, we would see this
from the level set exercise and discuss the additional required funding
with him. If he failed to provide the funding, we'd ask Curry. If
Curry rejects the request, we would have to invoke chargeback.
Regarding confirmation for CO authorization, we envision the service
to be used by large volume & well known central departments. We'll
spot check these users through the accounting data to insure the COs
they're using make sense. This is less than ideal but we did not want
to cripple small users of EP1 or others from using the new service who
do not have CO authorizations.
I don't envision charging for EP1 usage. Again, these reports were
printed on the MF in the past. That implies ASOP already provided
the funding for paper & DOST labor, and as you noted, OCP funded the
capital cost of the actual printer.
FSS1 is a bit of an anmonaly since it sits outside the data center and
is defined to IPM solely in support of the central printing needs of
CAO. I suspect the h/w and material costs are in the noise.
Hope this helps.
-Dave
On Tue, 18 Dec 2001 05:48:53 -0500 tregan said:
>Hi Dave,
>
>As you already know, this dimension is new to me and possibly, I just
>overlooked these agreements and how they have been reached and by who. Has
>there been general agreement to chargeback? within the administrative space?
>
>In principle, would you provide an account to someone if you were not sure
>about how it is going to be used? I have looked at the web page and
>hesitated what account number would I enter? What if I wanted/needed to
>charge different accounts based on the project? what rate is going to be
>charged? is there a cost limit? how do we confirm that a person is
>authorized (you already noted that concern)?
>
>Within the administrative space, for the queues that are be implemented is
>chargeback appropriate for any of them? It is my understanding that for
>the CAO printing needs (glmp, gltw, etc.), there will be no chargeback. Is
>this under reconsideration? For EP1 and FSS1, the hardware is provided via
>the Administrative Desktop Acquisition Fund or the Department's
>expense. FSS1 is supplying their own paper. Is EP1's volume significant
>enough to charge for?
>
>I do not expect you to take the time to write a response. Since these
>questions have been preoccupying my mind, I wished to note them and
>hopefully, we can discuss them when we meet.
>
>Thanks,
>Theresa
>
< prior posts deleted here >
