Ravi's blog

I have been at Pace for just a tad over 5 months. With new leadership comes changes and many Pace faculty and staff have told me that they can visibly see changes for the better. I am thankful for the way many of the ITS staff members have adjusted to the changes, without whose commitment and hard work, changes would not come! All of this is great. However, the faculty and staff also remind me of things that can get better and should get better. And they are right and the more we listen and respond, the more successful we will be!

BTW, I want to let everyone know that we are Information Technology Services (ITS) here on! There will be an official communication that will go out announcing this.

Also, I keep referring to faculty and staff and not students. I need to find a way to directly talk with students and understand how we can offer better services to them. To facilitate this, we have announced the following:

It really was not a big secret after all! Apple’s announcement about iPad yesterday was discussed to death in the twitterland as well as in the blogosphere prior to its arrival. The only things that were speculated were the pricing, the name and the various offering. Apple manages the marketing so well that they did it again with the Master Tech Showman – Steve Jobs!

Let me say that at the first look, it is as impressive as all Apple products. Now the big question is what impact is this going to have in Higher Education. I have my own opinion on this subject, but there is a really nice article in the Chronicle on this subject that I encourage you to read. There is also a general review in NY Times that you should read.

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I forgot to talk about a few more things while talking about project management so here they are.

Intra-Organizational Communication

An organization like ours is relative large and dispersed and I have been surprised by the lack of coordination and communication. When we talk about the flattening of the globe as a result of communication revolution, one would think that this applies to relatively smaller organization like ours. Unfortunately this is not the case. I have been amazed by the lack of coordination and collaboration, which actually results in significant cost to the institution as a whole. One reason is the lack of common language to describe a particular activity as well as too much specificity to a project.

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First off, Project Management is a mature science and there are well proven methodologies, when followed (and followable), can result in excellent dividends. However, in certain circumstances, because of the complexity of the environment, and the culture of the place, it is impractical to follow these methodologies exactly. This almost always results in frustration. The point of this post is definitely NOT to discourage the use of Project Management (PM) techniques, rather, offer some practical suggestions to help manage the projects and frankly, our professional life in academia. Obviously, I am going to use IT related examples in the following paragraphs. And I am not saying anything that you already don’t know, of course. This is what I have been practicing and collectively, they do make a difference. The natural first step is for you to believe that some of these can make a difference and adapt them!

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Happy New Year to you all! At a meeting yesterday someone asked “when do we stop saying Happy New Year?” Great question and I don’t know the answer. As you can see, I have been lazy about writing and I have a ton of stuff to talk about. Hopefully I can get the time to do it.

I, like many of you, thoroughly enjoy the holiday break – hanging out with family, parties with family, friends and colleagues, all great stuff. For the past few years, we have also traveled to Florida during this time where our children and I played a lot of Golf, even on Christmas day! This year, because our younger one had applied early to some colleges and we were not sure of the outcome and the follow up, we did not plan any trips. It was a huge relief for all of us that he is got into one of the top 10 Universities in the country. So, the holiday break was very relaxing.

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As you all know, the buzzword in campus computing for the past couple of years has been “Virtualization“. Of course, like everything else, there are many implementations of this – server virtualization, storage virtualization, database virtualization, network virtualization and desktop virtualization to name a few. When I talk about desktop virtualization, which the most relevant to the end users, the easiest explanation that I have been able to offer is how computing used to be in the mainframe world. Thus, the Deja Vu. Of course, it goes without saying that I can’t use this indiscriminately on all end users because some of you are not old enough to know what this means!

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I am sure many of you agree that we all do this routinely whether we are looking to purchase hardware or designing software! It is like insurance in the case of hardware – redundancies, over-planning capacity etc. and in case of software, we anticipate the expectations of wide variety of users and over-design. In our personal lives, we do this (I am not sure about you, but I do!) when we buy groceries or food (especially anticipating the appetite of the teenagers) or when you go to the local orchard to pick fruits where a sudden urge to be healthy makes you over-pick those berries. Reality always works itself in finally!

I think it is a great idea to think and talk about overengineering so that we get everything on the table, but we need to be realistic – return on investment eventually should help us decide where we go with it. The reality is, whether it is hardware or software, whether you over-engineer or not, you will never cover everything and you will never satisfy everyone!

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We are engaged in many new projects, but I want to talk about a few here to illustrate the variety of ways we are beginning to engage in supporting the Pace Community. Before I begin, I am sure that many of you are following the discussions around how Microsoft and Google are going at each other as well as some of the worst restrictive practices that Apple seems to follow in managing the iPhone Applications. Microsoft is apparently paying Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation money to prevent Google from indexing stories in his vast empire of publication as a way to direct those interested in such stories to go to Microsoft’s bing. And, of course, Google is expected to release Chrome OS during the second half of 2010 as a direct competition to Microsoft Windows. The difference is that Chrome will be free! Apple has very strict policies about letting the application and their upgrades get on their App Store, which many feel is so restrictive that many are predicting that developers will migrate to Android phones. So, it appears that while Microsoft and Apple are practicing a more controlled system to ensure that they make money, Google is taking a completely different approach of offering the core services free and relying on people clicking on the ads and search results as a way to monetize. This is a very interesting battle to watch from outside, but has real implications for us…

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I vividly remember my very first Thanksgiving. It was in the year 1978, the year that I arrived in this country. I had no clue what it was for, except, we all were invited to celebrate it in our thesis mentor Prof. David Beveridge’s house in Westport. Most of the grad students and postdocs from the Beveridge lab went for the occasion in a car. Everyone in the car was from India for two reasons – one is that we had no other place to go to celebrate and secondly, majority of Prof Beveridge group was from India! The drive was pretty impressive for me given that I landed in NY City and lived in Queens and the open surroundings reminded me of my undergraduate days that I spent in a small village in South India. Though I was a vegetarian, the Beveridge family had enough for me others to eat and enjoy the evening. I was thankful on that day to have had the chance to come to this great country and to be part of Beveridge research group. And today I am still thankful for that great start which has led me to have the best possible professional life that I could have ever imagined.

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ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning and is intended to manage all information and administrative/business aspects of a company or institution. Many higher education institutions began purchasing and implementing them in the mid to late ’90s. The most prevalent ones in the Higher Ed market are Jenzabar,DataTel, PeopleSoft and Banner. Prior to that every institution had their own “systems” to handle most of the administrative aspects in a mainframe or mini computer like environment and these were deemed unsupportable in the long run by modern computing standards. They were either written in languages that were dying or written specifically to run on hardware that were no longer being manufactured. Looking at opportunities in the Higher Ed market place, the abovementioned companies, some of whom had prior experiences in the Higher Ed market, began developing ERP systems. What follows are my personal observations about the ERP systems, which I feel should be called the Expensive Resource Planning systems. I will use the car as a close analogy to the ERP system.

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