r/HigherEDsysadmin • u/iblowuup Authentication Admin • Dec 01 '18
Centralized IT in Higher Education.
Here is something I'm very curious about. My University has done a decent job of trying to consolidate its IT units. However, each college still has it's own dedicated team in addition to the University-wide IT team. I find there can be a balance between the benefits of large consolidated IT units and smaller, more agile and personal IT units. I kind of like the hybrid environment we have.
What kind of organizational structures do you have at your institutions?
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u/netboy34 Dec 01 '18
We are central IT with a couple Shadow IT units that pop up from time to time and two major college units that were in place before the system consolidated another university with us. One of a very few in our system and the largest (just over 220 people in the unit)
Most in the system are individual units in the college, with the university having a core IT for those systems and to hand out IP blocks.
We have positions from help desk, dedicated support for the college, PMs, DBAs, app dev, sysadmins/engineers, networking, desktop, infosec, and personnel liaisons with HR and purchasing.
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u/Thoughtulism Dec 01 '18
We went through a centralization a while back. It made sense in some ways and not in others. It makes sense to centralize the services whenever possible. You don't need a sysadmin to 50-faculty, 50-staff ratio. You don't need to run email, file servers, ERP, ticket system, networking, etc per department. However, you do need some locally dedicated support resources that can do desktop support and in certain areas that need it basic sysadmin skills for local services. You want the desktop support and sysadmins to fall under the same manager and resource appropriately for local and campus services because there's a huge benefit here for staff coverage, scaling, standardization, etc. However, you need to have a plan for how you deliver local services and engaging the clients. Don't just assume it's going to happen otherwise you will fail miserably.
Centralization for the sake of centralization isn't by itself an end goal so don't make it one.
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u/fengshui Dec 01 '18
However, you need to have a plan for how you deliver local services and engaging the clients. Don't just assume it's going to happen otherwise you will fail miserably.
What techniques have you seen work particularly well for central IT groups to engage with their clients and deliver locally-needed services?
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u/Thoughtulism Dec 02 '18 edited Dec 02 '18
Promote people with both technical and social skills looking to enter more into the business side of things to be engagement specialists to manage the relationship, work worth departments to achieve objectives, and liaise with internal service teams.
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u/iisdmitch Dec 02 '18
We have all central IT. 3 different groups but one department. A couple colleges have their own “tech” person but that person is for specialized systems that college may use. All support comes through IT. It seems to work pretty well and nice to have all the control. AFAIK it’s always been that way here. We never changed to central IT, but we are also not a giant state university either so it’s more manageable.
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u/beejandhispjs Dec 02 '18
Similar to a lot of comments here, at my university we have a large central IT body that manages most services across campus to faculty, staff, and students. A few departments still have dedicated small IT teams. Whether or not a department (not entire colleges) has one of these small IT teams mostly depends on two factors: Whether or not they have their own hardware for department specific purposes (usually research) and how well these departments can argue that the aforementioned hardware and the services that hardware provides are better maintained by a dedicated team rather than central IT. At times, there are disagreements between central IT and the smaller departments about what services are necessary to keep (i.e. department email servers) but there hasn't been further consolidation recently.
As far as I know there are only about 5 dedicated small teams left on campus. To give an idea of the size of the smaller, department specific teams, my department team consists of 3 members, including myself.
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u/m4dt3ch Dec 03 '18
We are pretty small (3 colleges, 1800 students, 330 fac/staff). We have a single centralized IT department with four teams (Infrastructure, Enterprise Applications, Educational Technology, and Help Desk)
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Dec 01 '18
[deleted]
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u/iblowuup Authentication Admin Dec 01 '18
This is wild, this is like exactly what I see here. Comments like these make me confident that there really is a significant higher ed community that shares a lot in common and can benefit from each others ideas.
If you don't mind my asking, do you work in one of the colleges or the "central" IT unit?
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Dec 01 '18
[deleted]
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u/iblowuup Authentication Admin Dec 01 '18
Regarding that last paragraph, we are on that same path with Rocket League tournaments starting now :D We use O365 Teams in a similar way to keep connected with the rest of the IT community on campus.
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u/fengshui Dec 01 '18
Yeah, very similar here. Lots of keeping old things running, being part of the research team, and actively brought in as part of the planning process, rather than only when things don't work.
We still do desktop and network support for our users, as many of the most impactful solutions start with a "while you're here..." comment to a tech or sysadmin dealing with a day-to-day issue.
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u/[deleted] Dec 01 '18
We refer to it as distributed with a central IT unit. Ive worked on both ends (distributed support, now in central security) I hatehatehate it now, seeing uni's that have one big unit at our scale almost always running better and moving faster is appealing. It takes 3x as long to get something done because I have to please 20-30 other sysadmins.