Case scenario - The University of Uriarra

The University of Uriarra (UU) is a small to medium sized regional university in Australia, with a professional emphasis on its courses. There is no direct connection between the fictional UU and any other Australian university. Any similarities are purely coincidental. Where there are gaps in this case study description, you should make appropriate assumptions and include these in your answers. The University has a student population of around 15,000 which translates into the equivalent of 10,000 full time students, about 75% of which are undergraduates, 20% in course-work graduate programs, and 5% are higher degree research students. The UU employs around 400 academic staff to deliver its teaching programs and further its research efforts, and around 500 professional and administrative staff. The UU has an annual budget of $250m for recurrent expenditure. UU has 5 faculties where the academic work of teaching and research is located. These receive most of the revenue budget, but then contribute 55% of this back to the central administrative areas to cover the costs of providing these services. Around 90% of faculty and administrative unit budgets is spent on staffing related costs. The UU has 15 academic departments and various research centres within the five faculties. One of the faculties provides courses in IT, Information Systems, Engineering, and Mathematics, and hence makes significant use of the UU IT facilities for these courses and associated research efforts. Naturally, most other faculties and departments also make some use of IT facilities in their courses. All parts of the UU make extensive use of desktop computing facilities for office, email and other applications and are connected to the UU network backbone. The UU also has two administrative divisions (which also have significant demands on UU IT services) - the Corporate Services Division (CSD) and the Information Division (ID). The CSD has functions and units which support the whole of UU: Finance/Accounts; Purchasing/Stores; Personnel/Payroll; Residences; Student Administration; Research Administration; Student Support Services; Planning and Statistics; International Office; Marketing; and Academic Services Office. The ID on the other hand includes the following sections/units: The UU Library; IT Management; Audio-Visual Services; Mail Room, Records Management and Registry; and Switchboard. The head of ID is designated as the University Librarian. ID receives approximately $30m for its annual budget and it is estimated that around $20m of the $30m budget is spent on the below listed IT services. Within the ID, the

IT Management section includes: IT Systems Development (for corporate systems such as accounting, personnel, library, student records etc) Business analysis and ICT planning Technical Services/Infrastructure Support (network services, database administration, corporate web servers and external gateways) Information security Central Computer Centre (provides common access PC laboratories) IT User Support (staff and students) - including the provision of a service desk with associated IT service management (ITSM) functions and IT Training.

The key corporate systems (applications portfolio) supported by ID include: Finance (accounting/purchasing) system HR (personnel/payroll) system Student records (STRec) system Learning management system Library systems Timetabling system UU website (including staff and student portals) Parking system Data warehouse/business intelligence. Most major systems are externally sourced - either purchased software that is internally managed or provided on a SaaS basis. Many of the smaller applications have been developed inhouse. Governance Structures UU is governed by the UU Council (equivalent to a board of directors) which is chaired by the Chancellor. The Council is made up of external appointments, but also includes the VC, an elected staff member, and a student representative. The UU has a Vice-Chancellor (VC) (who is equivalent to a CEO) and a Deputy Vice-Chancellor (DVC). Bothe the VC and DVD are responsible for the day-to-day running of the UU. The UU also has an Executive Committee which is made up of the VC and DVC, the five deans, the two heads of the administrative divisions (CSD and ID), and the chair of academic board. UU also has an Academic Board which is responsible for setting policy and reviewing performance on academic matters. There is also an IT Steering Committee that facilitates various IT governance matters. This committee is chaired by the DVC and includes the head of IT Management, and representatives from each of the faculties and administrative divisions. IT Management Department There is a centralised approach to the management of IT in UU, with the Information Division (ID) looking after a range of services such as the network backbone, corporate systems, IT support services for the faculties and admin divisions, and teaching laboratories. The IT academic department has 2 labs with 50 PCs dedicated to its own students, with one IT staff member providing specialist support. This staff member also supports specialist IT research laboratories. UU previously had a distributed IT support organisation, where there were 6 separate IT support division within UU, with the ID looking after the executive, the two administrative divisions, the network backbone, central teaching laboratories and corporate information systems; and the five faculties having their own IT support organisations looking after their local needs. This distributed IT support model reflects the overall UU culture, where the faculties had a significant amount of local autonomy and used their own faculty budgets to provide any desktop-based IT facilities to their staff. However, about 8 years ago, and as part of a major administrative restructure, UU centralised all of these IT support structures into the Information Division (ID), and only the IT faculty was left with its own local IT support staff.

The central IT Management department (within ID) has not defined the services provided to end users (Faculties and business units at UU) and has little in the way of financial systems that can record or charge these user areas for any services provided. There are also no formal service level agreements (SLAs) between the IT Management department (within ID) and any of the user areas, although the nature of the support provided is usually well understood and some informal SLAs exist for few services but not for everything. Over the past year, UU has been going through a process simplification and improvement exercise which has led to a major proposal being put to the UU Council about outsourcing some functions and services. These functions have included IT support and systems administration; payroll; and accounts payable. UU Council recently approved this proposal in principle, subject to successful contract negotiations and final sign off by Council. Expressions of interest (EoI) will be called and discussions with potential outsourcing contractors will now proceed, with implementation expected within the year. Of the 80 IT related staff in the Information Division (ID), it is expected that about 40 of these will be replaced in this outsourcing arrangement and ID will be left with 40 staff to cover areas such as business analysis, system development, planning and supervision of the outsourcing arrangement. IS Planning The current IT situation at UU has come about more through responding to needs as they arise using ad hoc planning and implementation, rather than through strategic planning efforts. Around 10 years ago, the UU put in place their first IT Strategic Plan (ITSP) with the assistance of an IT committee made up of end user representatives from faculties and business units. Their inexperience at strategic planning meant that this effort suffered from a number of problems, but at least provided a start to IT planning for UU. The ITSP failed to adequately address many of key issues associated with the centrally provided services and seemed focus on giving ID control over IT services provided by other parts of UU. As a consequence, this ITSP was generally not supported by end user groups - mainly the faculties - but the centralisation was still implemented. About 5 years ago, UU issued a revised (second) ITSP, again through an IT committee made up of end user representatives, this time with more senior user representatives than the earlier effort. This ITSP was a significant improvement on the first one and created much less conflict within UU but still suffered from minimal executive management involvement and no connection with the UU Council. This plan facilitated a gradual implementation of an ITIL based approach to service management.

Question

It used to be common in larger organisations with good sized IT department to have 'systems development' and 'systems administration' activities separated. This separation is currently evident at UU, where business analysis, ICT planning and IT systems development are separated from the remaining functions in the IT department dealing with systems administration and IT service management. This separation means that staff doing these functions work in different parts of the IT department and report to different IT managers. Some recent literature suggests that it may be better to restructure IT departments so that the division/separation is NOT between systems development and systems administration activities, BUT rather, between IT activities supporting business as usual (BAU) and IT activities supporting 'new' IT initiatives.

1. Describe the rationale used in older style IS/IT departments to support the traditional separation of functions between 'systems development' and 'systems administration'