Talking technology

This season of dangerous, inclement weather hitting our nation has lit a fire in the academic community with regard to disaster planning. The question of what should universities be doing to prepare for potential loss of services such as information technology-e-mail, phone, websites-is leading to questions about how to keep faculty, staff and students informed when services are lost.

Despite all our best intentions, hardware running our various technology systems does sometimes break down unexpectedly, whether caused by Mother Nature or not. Prior to recent natural disasters, Duke's Office of Information Technology had been in discussions with various University and Health System personnel to find out how best to communicate service outages to our constituents.

The Chronicle actually focused on this issue in the Oct. 5 editorial, "Better communication about computers needed." This editorial has raised an important need for a common approach to notifying the community of system outages and failures, regardless of which organizational unit operates the system.

It may surprise some in the Duke community to know that Duke has a complicated and highly decentralized computing environment and that OIT does not run all the University computing systems. As Duke's vice president of information technology, I have direct responsibility for all of the OIT systems; as Duke University's chief information officer I have general responsibility for coordinating IT efforts across the many decentralized units at Duke but no direct authority for operating those systems.

Keeping these separate technology units coordinated requires working closely with Duke Health Technology Solutions-the central technology provider for the Health System-and with the many individual departments, schools and administrative units at the University that have their own information technology groups. This coordination across Duke's complicated computing environment occurs through a variety of face-to-face meetings, councils and committees. These meetings foster a positive level of coordination that connects the highly decentralized computing personnel at Duke; that said, we would never want to depend solely on these formal meeting structures to communicate about service outages and other time-sensitive occurrences. That type of communication needs to happen through whatever means necessary, formal or ad hoc, to keep the Duke community informed and updated.

An organization like OIT is best positioned to act as a centralized information resource for the Duke community. This is especially the case for students, since we provide the majority of the technology services they use. As The Chronicle editorial noted, OIT provides timely information on outages of its own systems. However, we do not currently include outage notification of non-OIT systems such as those cited in the editorial.

That said, OIT has recently been addressing the way we communicate technology problems to the community. We've added a "Service Disruptions" link to the OIT home page (www.oit.duke.edu) directing readers to our Service Updates page with information on all known planned and unplanned outages on OIT systems. We have also begun to pursue methods for extending the OIT Service Updates page to other Duke units so that service interruptions within departments (outside of OIT) can be included. Although achieving this will require a commitment to even more timely communication between departments and OIT, we hope that the broader reporting of these incidents can provide a single location where the Duke community can learn of outages across the various campus IT systems.

Many individuals throughout OIT and in other campus departments are working hard every day to keep hundreds of technology systems up and running. We are always open to hearing ideas for improving the technology services at Duke and invite students to communicate those through the Duke Student Government or Graduate and Professional Student Council representatives on the Information Technology Advisory Council, or by contacting the OIT Help Desk via email at help@oit.duke.edu.