Office of the University Chancellor

These will not be formal remarks. Rather, as in past years, I will provide updates on a couple of issues, comment on the present situation with IT at IU, and speculate a little about the future. Then I will open things up to the floor for questions about anything that may concern you in general about IT at IU or anything else in the university.

Almost exactly six years ago, President Brand sent me a fax, before I had left Australia, of the press coverage of the announcement of my appointment in September of 1996. In this announcement, Brand stated he expected us to make IU the leader—in absolute terms—in the uses and application of information technology. I remember thinking, “Well, this is going to be an interesting challenge to try and pull that off.”

But nearly six years after President Brand made that bold statement, thanks to the efforts of everyone in UITS at IUB and IUPUI, and to the efforts of many other faculty, staff, and students throughout the university, I think there is now no doubt that we are, if not the absolute leader, then one of the two or three leaders in absolute terms in the uses and applications of information technology in the United States.

This then will make 2002 a very important transition year for us, since psychologically we need to transition from thinking of ourselves as IT followers, constantly catching up with others who are the leaders, to realizing that we are in fact now the leaders in numerous areas in the uses and applications of information technology nationally, and, for that matter, globally.

We are all focused on our daily toils and struggles and probably do not fully appreciate the extent of the transition to leadership that has occurred, nor what the ramifications of it are. But I suggest that you sit back and reflect on virtually any area at UITS and on the kinds of things we are doing in that area and ask yourself, “Who is doing it better anywhere in the country?”

Some examples taken from the divisions and offices of UITS will, I believe, make my point and should remove any need for debate. These examples will, I am sure, suggest many more in each case.

I will start with the Telecommunications Division, which has one of the most visible examples. Right here in the middle of the cornfields of Indiana, we have established the Global Network Operations Center (GlobalNOC), which manages a series of major international networks, the most advanced national research and education network in the country, and various other national networks and networks within the state, as well as all of IU’s internal networks. The group of network engineers, support staff, and managers in the GlobalNOC is now regarded nationally and internationally as one of the finest and most able in the country. This group is making what may be the country's most significant contribution to the nation's involvement in international research and education networks. An example is the recently announced Global Terabit Research Network, the GTRN, the idea for which originated at this university. To put that into perspective, the official inauguration of that network was held at the European Commission headquarters in Belgium a few weeks ago. A collection of people from Europe and Asia at various senior levels blessed this and said this was one of the most important developments in global networking in the higher education community.

This division is pivotal in the operation of the I-Light Fiber Network within the state. And it is also taking on a greater role in the cybersecurity of the national IT research and education infrastructure. Many of the staff associated with the Telecom Division sit on a wide variety of national committees, including EDUCAUSE, Internet2, and National Science Foundation (NSF) committees, providing their time and advice to those agencies and to colleagues across the nation. This work is very important—it is leverage, in that it also provides additional opportunities to attract faculty, students, and grant money. But at the same time, the division continues to provide comprehensive services within IU that are the best we can make them. That remains our number one priority.

The Research and Academic Computing Division is providing major national leadership in several areas. Our IBM Teraflop SP System, the most powerful high performance computer owned by any university in the United States, puts IU at the forefront of high performance computing in this country. As a result, staff working in this area are being regularly approached by the NSF and other agencies for advice in the effort to develop national strategy in high performance computing, especially in light of the recent announcement of a very large-scale system in Japan—currently the fastest computer in the world, and one that has caused a certain amount of consternation in Washington.

Also of special note in this division is the HPSS Massive Storage Infrastructure. We believe that IU now has the largest amount of online data stored under HPSS of any university in the country. In fact, IU recently exceeded Caltech in the amount of online stored data it has, which is particularly impressive given Caltech’s academic standing, especially in the sciences and engineering.

A key initiative in the University Information Systems Division is the newly developed Financial Information System (FIS). The development of the FIS has been a collaborative effort involving many offices across the university but has been led by UITS. It is now attracting considerable attention from other universities as a model for the next generation of financial information systems. UITS is taking a leadership role in a consortium of major universities in the country, including universities like the University of Michigan, that are looking to us for leadership in the development of new information systems. For example, the work the division is doing on the OneStart Portal is also attracting a lot of national attention. It is regarded as probably some of the best-thought-out work in this area.

The Teaching and Learning Information Technologies Division has been responsible for the development of the Oncourse system as a stable production system. It has taken a heroic effort over the last three years to take Oncourse from a laboratory prototype to an operational system. Those of you who have worked on this difficult project are all to be greatly commended. In the course management systems marketplace, it is clear the vendors are floundering. Consequently, there is more and more interest in some kind of open-source course management system, and Oncourse has attracted considerable interest in this regard. I have just returned from a two-day meeting of the CIC-CIOs (Committee on Institutional Cooperation Chief Information Officers), where the whole issue of open-source course management systems was discussed, and great interest shown in Oncourse. I was asked to brief them about it at their next meeting (which happens to be here at IU).

Moving on to cybersecurity, many of you are aware of the enormous contributions that members of the IT Security/Policy Office are making to various national projects in this area through committees and advice, as well as the vital and central role they play in the cybersecurity of the IU information technology environment. Richard Clark, the special advisor on cybersecurity to President Bush, visited recently, and we briefed him on all we are doing within IU and nationally in cybersecurity. He commented that he thought IU has the best information technology security organization of any university in the country, which was gratifying to hear from someone in his position.

The Finance Office has been responsible for one of the most consequential changes in how IU’s massive IT environment and infrastructure are financed in a sustainably managed, continuous way. This involved the establishment of life-cycle funding for all of IU’s IT infrastructure so that the funds will always be available in the future to ensure the timely replacement and upgrade of all the components of this infrastructure. This initiative has attracted very substantial national and international attention as the definitive model for how universities can implement life-cycle funding for their information technology infrastructure.

The work of the Communications and Planning Office to keep IU and the broader higher education community informed about the enormous number of new initiatives and developments in IT at IU has been outstanding. At the meeting of the CIC-CIOs from which I have just returned that I mentioned earlier, IU was commended for having one of the best IT communications strategies of any university in the country. This is wonderful testimony to the great work that this division does.

This is just a brief sketch of some of the initiatives where we lead the country and areas of IT in which we are looked to nationally for leadership. They are initiatives that the rest of the country and the world are noticing. They are noticing what we are doing, they are seeking to emulate us, and they are even involving us in the planning for the future directions of information technology at their own universities. I could go on and describe even more examples of where we lead the country in IT, but I think I have made my point.

Having established, I think irrefutably, how we have now achieved a position of national leadership in IT, let me now make some comments about the obligations and responsibilities of leadership. Some of you know that one of my recreations is history. I have a deep love of history, political history in particular. I commend the reading of history to anyone who aspires to leadership or management positions in any organization since, to paraphrase Churchill, the further you look back, the further you can look forward. In fact, with apologies to my colleagues in IU’s excellent Kelley School of Business, I always advocate reading history over reading books on management. Mind you, I said the same thing while speaking at the Kelley School the other night and expected to be struck by lightning. The historical point that I wish to make here is this: national leadership for many countries has led to those countries taking on considerable and unexpected responsibilities outside their national domains that have been of much broader benefit than to just their country. Think of Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries; and think, of course, of this great country in the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st.

This is a rather grandiose parallel, but it is a parallel that is in many ways true for us. Right across the board, we are now providing national leadership in information technology. And one of results of this is that more and more of you are likely finding that colleagues at other universities within the state, regionally, nationally, and globally, are now requesting increasing amounts of your time and help. More of your time is going into contributing to all sorts of projects and initiatives outside of IU. I want to stress, quite emphatically, that this external engagement is a good thing! It is one of the responsibilities of leadership that I tried to use my historical parallel to illuminate. I want to make it quite clear that I fully support and encourage all of you to become engaged in such initiatives and projects, as long as it is not detrimental to the fundamental mission of UITS, which is to provide excellent services to the customers, staff, students, and faculty of this university. Of course, you will have to judge what makes sense and what does not; sometimes you will be asked to participate in projects or initiatives that simply are not worth doing, and you should of course decline.

Let me close then by elaborating just a little on what I meant when I said earlier in these remarks, how this will be an important transition year for us psychologically, as we need to transition from thinking of ourselves as IT followers to seeing ourselves as IT leaders.

On the first day of my first visit to the United States in 1985, I visited MIT, an institution I had greatly admired from afar for many years. In the couple of days I spent there visiting many people in AI and computer science, I was struck with what I can only describe as a kind of “swagger” of all the faculty, staff, and students I met there. It was not an arrogant, boastful swagger—at least not in most cases—but rather a serene self-confidence born of being good enough to be at an institution, arguably the best of its kind in the world, and the fact that this would be almost universally recognized by anyone they met.

Today, members of UITS should think of themselves in the same way. The reputation of IU in information technology as an innovator and trusted collaborator now speaks for itself, and the fact that you are in UITS means that people know that the work you do must be of the highest quality, and that it is work that is respected and admired throughout higher education.