Week 2 Discussion Comments

You made some very good points this week. I also appreciate the examples you included from work environments. My comments on each discussion follow.

W2D1 Does IT Matter article

Google and Dominican are different: I believe that there is a distinction between IT companies and other companies. In IT companies, there is the "normal IT" (back office systems, accounting systems, internal e-mail etc.). The same rules that apply to "normal" companies apply to these systems. IT companies also produce systems for direct delivery to customers such as the Apple iOS operating system in the iPhone, Google apps and Google search for direct use by customers, and Microsoft Azure (Cloud services). Most of these are or were strategic investments in new product development and not just "IT Investments".

 

Training for new systems: Some postings talked about IT investments being wasted. Employees must be trained in new systems in order for the investment in the system to be most effective. I agree. When you are in a management role, you will need to deal with the trade-off of temporarily reducing capacity and output in your department in order to provide your team with training. When faced with this trade-off, you can remember this Discussion.

Is the IT Build out finished? I think we are just at the beginning of "The Internet of Things" where snow plows, refrigerators, and cars will be loaded with digital technology and communicating with the Internet. This will give rise to significant new applications for businesses.

Is the IT Build out finished? The build out of data centers at non-tech companies may have peaked. For example, Dominican is running Canvas on servers in Utah instead of at Dominican. Student e-mail is no longer handled on servers at Dominican. Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, HP and others are building huge data centers which, in my opinion, will take over work currently done at individual companies. As an analogy, individual companies used to generate their own electricity before this work was taken over by electric utilities. Think of the big cloud companies like Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and HP as the new information technology utilities. Note: There are always changes in the on-site / off-site balance. Some people are now installing solar panels so not all electicity generation is being done centrally.

Cost of technology It is now possible to start a business without making a major up-front technology investment (data center, servers, software licenses). A startup can get as much infrastructure as is required by making pay-as-you go arrangements with an information technology utility (cloud provider).

The only way to support Carr's claim that IT management is boring is if you only consider the routine management of technology infrastructure such as the PCs in Dominican's classrooms and the routine operation of Dominican's administrative systems (registration, grading,...). Deciding where to apply technology next and how to change business practices because of the availability of new technology is far from boring.

Specific example 1: In one of the groups, there was an example of saving IT costs by replacing the Adobe PDF reader with a reader called Nitro. Employees have found the transition difficult. It might be worth the hassle if the company saved a huge amount of money. However, the savings have to be very big in order to justify all the lost time that has occurred. Too often the savings occurs in one budge (IT wins) and the costs pop up somewhere else (users lose time). One of your jobs as a manager will be to setup systems that do not encourage undesired results when people strive to meet the measurements.

Specific Example 2: "My brother-in-law used to work for Schwans. In his time there, he found a way to incrementally improve the gas mileage of the delivery trucks, which led to millions of dollars of savings for the company. Individuals in IT management have an opportunity to make a big impact and positively influence the bottom line of an organization." My comment: Very small process changes or systems changes can have a significant impact when applied to many transactions. For example, area codes in big cities have small numbers in order to save clicks and maintenance costs on old mechanical phone switching equipment. (Chicago = 312, New Mexico = 505)

 

W2D2 - Netflix and iTunes

 

Not everything is about IT: In one group, you pointed out that content was more important the IT streaming capabilities. Both Netflix and iTunes license content from others and the licensors can impose restrictions as to what countries and what devices are covered by the license. An interesting question that I think will be answered in the next five years is "Who has the power -- the content provider or the content distributor?" One of the major reasons for iTunes' initial success was the license agreement(s) that Apple negotiated with the content providers. This was at least as important as the technology infrastructure underlying iTunes. In fact, Netflix does not have that much infrastructure. Netflix runs on Amazon Web Services -- just like Canvas does. See http://www.networkworld.com/article/3037428/cloud-computing/netflix-is-not-really-all-in-on-amazon-s-cloud.html (2016). Although, Netflix is now running some processes on Google. See https://www.geekwire.com/2018/longtime-amazon-web-services-customer-netflix-said-cozying-google/

Monthly subscriptions: A number of businesses get revenue through a subscription model. Cable Companies, Internet Service Providers, Netflix, and some web sites charge monthly fees. Controlling monthly subscription costs can be important to your financial health over the long term.

 

W2D3 - Dominican and IT.

Trade offs: Many of you recognized that setting a level of investment in IT involves trade offs and limits. Over investment in storage, bandwidth, and computer hardware will cause tuition to rise and make Dominican less competitive. Under investment can also make Dominican less competitive.

W2D3 Dominican IT

Dominican has a Strategic IT Plan. You can find a copy here.

This five-year plan was done about five years ago and work is underway to produce a new plan.

This (July 2018) is the first term that difficulty in connecting to wireless in classrooms has been raised in this Discussion and I will summarize this and communicate it to Jill Albin-Hill, Dominican's CIO.

In my experience, Dominican does not upgrade machines too rapidly. I have received two computer upgrades in 12 years and none of these machines were technologically advanced or overpowered. In fact, I have purchased my own external hard drive to get the disk capacity I want locally in my office.

There was a comment about making some databases available for download. Some datbases have licensing restrictions that only allow their use on the Dominican Network. Eliminating that restricution in the license could be very expensive.

There were several comments that other schools "give" students a laptop when they first enroll. An advantage of this approach is that IT can have a policy that only those laptops are supported and that students could not connect other devices to the network. Example: If PCs were issued, no MACS would be supported. This can greatly reduce support costs and staffing.