Digital Media: The New Big Thing for IT By Jerry Waldron CIO, Salisbury University, Salisbury, Maryland

Social and cultural developments constantly shape the way information technology evolves. Researchers tell us that consumers generate hundreds of exabytes of information annually in the form of audio, video, and photos. Generation Y is one of the driving forces behind this rich media explosion: Its members are making unprecedented demands on the information infrastructures of today, and they will certainly make more demands tomorrow.

Digital media usage in a higher-ed setting provides a clue to what enterprise CIOs will face in the future. Students today are being educated in an environment in which they are accustomed to producing and using resource-taxing, rich digital media, and they will continue to generate and interact with digital media after graduation.

At Salisbury, students' adoption of everything from podcasting to YouTube has changed the way my staff supports the student body and has created new challenges to our information technology resources.

Digital media files are generally quite large. Because of their size, they can consume quite a bit of the network resources. This affects our traffic at the Internet connection point, but it also can affect the internal network. As the types of data files have grown more diverse and the use of the Internet has increased over the past few years, we have had to increase the size of our connection to the Internet. In 2000, we had two T1 lines to make the connection (3 MB total). Today, we have two OC-3 lines (310 MB), an increase of more than 10,000%. We are now redesigning our network architecture to provide as open a route to the Internet as possible, while protecting our campus databases.

In order to control media traffic on the network, we have been using a packet shaper device to limit certain types of media traffic. We can set very low limits on this type of traffic, which keeps it from overtaking the network. This has worked well, but the environment continues to change. With the advent of Web 2.0 content, we are seeing legitimate and educational uses for this type of media.

Therefore, we need to use new tools to discern which media types are desirable and which are not. We are also evaluating tools that will allow us to monitor network traffic files and determine how our network is being used at a granular level. This will enable us to provide the appropriate quality of service to key locations such as the classrooms. It will also enable us to ward off attacks and other intrusions that affect performance.

We anticipate an even faster pace of change in the near future. The university is actively promoting interdisciplinary programs and facilities that are producing unprecedented amounts of digital media. Traditional courses featured three or four hours of classroom sessions per week. Today, a significant number of course offerings—more than 500 in our most recent semester—have Web components that require students to spend two hours in the classroom and another one or two hours reviewing supplemental digital content served by the university's information infrastructure. That content ranges from audio lectures to Web presentations to interactive video.

Our classroom infrastructure has changed as a result of growing digital media usage. In 1998, Salisbury University had just four "smart" classrooms that featured Internet connectivity and computer projection systems. Our campus now has more than 120 such rooms, and these features are being built right into some of our most important new facilities' classrooms.

Outside the classroom, increasingly popular distance education requires IP-based teleconferencing. With Alcatel's help, we are exploring synchronous and asynchronous videoconferencing for lecturers who are putting presentations online.

Media produced by the creative arts disciplines have been particularly challenging for us to support. Art students are creating and applying designs that may appear on digital film, websites, DVDs, CDs, and other media. Aspiring filmmakers are writing, directing, and producing complete video productions on campus. Music students are creating and integrating compositions digitally.

In response, we're building an information infrastructure that would be as well-suited in Hollywood as it is on a university campus. By 2008, Salisbury will have a 20,000-square-foot Integrated Media Center, which will include a 3,000-squarefoot high-definition video studio, music recording studio, video and audio editing facilities, a digital integration lab, a digital photography lab, and an electronic art gallery, as well as multimedia classrooms where students will interact with digital media.

The new center will emphasize collaborative technology to allow students and faculty from diverse university programs to work together on projects involving digital media. Students from the art, music, video production, theater, dance, education, and other academic programs will apply the theory and principles of their disciplines to develop a variety of digital media products.

The challenges presented by this shift to collaborative, integrated digital media are welcome. After all, I am an educator first and a technology professional second. As digital media becomes integral to more and more academic disciplines, the skill sets gained by working with it will be of great career value to graduates in almost any field. In particular, those who pursue careers in fields such as biotech or information technology will find themselves better equipped to exploit the ever-evolving world of rich digital media.

The greater impact on the IT discipline is profound. As our future doctors, lawyers, and creative professionals get even more accustomed to the availability of these rich media resources, our staff and budgets need to be equally equipped to ensure that the IT infrastructures for tomorrow's generation are being planned for and built today.

Complicated Environments R Us By Ron Bonig CIO, The George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

I'm adaptable. I like change and challenge. But lately, I feel as if I'm traveling through hyperspace in Han Solo's Millennium Falcon.

The list of IT advances over the last decade reads like a "good news/bad news" joke: Centrally managed, mainframe-based CICS green screens have mostly gone the way of the dinosaurs, but no one hacked green screens. When control was centralized, people using customizable workstations weren't calling help desks complaining they couldn't see the sign-on screen (after they'd zoomed the screen's resolution past any reasonable bounds).

Beyond the glass house changes, we're also dealing with wireless computing, with handheld devices for functions that once required hard connections, and with other "innovations du jour."

Consider e-mail. Two years ago, George Washington University students couldn't walk past a kiosk without checking their accounts. Now e-mail is passé, replaced by IM, text messaging, Facebook, and blogging for peer-to-peer, minute-by-minute communicating. When something new and cool appears, students have it in hand before our IT staff even knows it exists. And universities can't ban devices. We can only list them as "non-supported."

The environments we manage these days are letting us serve users in ways that once were impossible. However, the many new IT products and utilities necessary for providing this expanded service have created an extremely complicated environment for us to manage.

At GW, we run the SunGard Banner Higher Education ERP suite and Oracle Financials ERP. We are also deploying the EMC Documentum® suite enterprise-wide. Merely scheduling upgrades and testing is complicated, given our university's business cycles for recruitment, admissions, financial aid, registration, housing, etc., and our fiscal-year operations for federal reporting and so on. Our latest analysis revealed the ideal upgrade window is the fifth Thursday in March of leap years.

That's for the systems that users see. Databases, servers, operating systems, utility systems, the SAN, and backup software have their own refresh cycles. GW maintains test and development environments for every production server and application; it manages dual, mutually supporting data centers. Still, finding the least onerous time to implement a component is difficult.

Also, even as IT is supposed to be moving to service-oriented architectures, end-users' workloads for understanding new software functions and our testing and configuration of those functions requires more commitment from everyone. (I'm still waiting for the first department head to beg me to stop making his/her life easier.) Some IT industry leaders, however, are developing plug-and-play components to help us make infrastructure changes on the fly, without requiring risky, unsustainable levels of end-user involvement.

To implement ERP-caliber releases and upgrades, we developed (and are refining) a process that stresses collaborative testing between users and IT staff.

Our IT team spends the first third of a project analyzing the release's content and earmarking critical changes and enhancements. They prepare for comprehensive testing in myriad ways, including arranging for servers and databases, testing desktop clients, analyzing security, and preparing core scripts for end-user testing. Every hour spent preparing pays off in more comprehensive analysis and less impact on campus operations.

Next, the IT staff trains "power users" from critical offices on the new features and teaches them to lead end-user training. The power users apply IT's test scripts, their knowledge of their operations, and their understanding of the previous version of the software to analyze and confirm the accuracy of the "new and improved" functionality.

We log every anomaly. Some are real problems; some are misunderstandings; some are artifacts of test scripts. Generally, anomalies stem from reports that refer to changed database elements, unfamiliar screen interfaces or navigation steps, or edits that are catching previously accepted things. Our programmers work with the ERP vendor to investigate all issues. They are typically fixed quickly and sent back to users for confirmation.

In the final stage, chief user representatives sign off on the upgrade, and a C-level executive committee confirms the "go" decision. We wrap up any final technical items and migrate the software to production. The cutover plan is begun (it's extremely detailed, often by sub-hour increments), and the system goes live at a specific date and time.

Such a process is necessary due to GW's thousands of users, the limited windows for making large system changes, and the huge investment of time and energy required to implement them. For less-intensive database upgrades or security patches, we use a scaled-down version of the process to confirm that the system is operating as it had previously, albeit more efficiently or safely.

Attention to detail has allowed us to upgrade several large ERP-class systems without ever having to roll back to a previous version due to unanticipated issues. Each upgrade plan, however, does include a contingency date in case of last-minute surprises. Establishing this date (usually falling no more than two weeks later) reduces the psychological pressure to "just do it" regardless of risk. And it gives decision makers a logical, practical alternative. Taking the pressure off leads to a more reasoned risk analysis.

Bill Gates reportedly said, "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 mpg." But if the auto industry released changes as the IT industry does, we'd have our vehicles in the shop in January for new tires, in February for new airbags, and in March for newly developed ceramic brakes.

As an industry, our IT environments will never grow less complicated. But as we make changes, we can lessen the end-user impact. All of us want to serve our end users more efficiently and effectively. We need to concentrate on reducing the unintended adverse impacts of generally positive changes.