Fall 2015 Strategic Technology Coordination Survey Results

Strategic Technology Coordination

Fall 2015 Survey Results
 

An essential part of the Emerging Solutions Strategic Technology Coordination process is regular input from clients on upcoming priorities.  Listed below are areas that warrant a deeper strategic conversation, contributed by ISC as well as other schools and centers. 
 

Collaboration Tools
Office 365 brings with it a broad suite of collaboration tools beyond just email and calendaring, many of which are similar to existing standalone solutions used on campus with varying degrees of consistency.  Discuss how and when tools such as OneDrive, Sharepoint, Skype for Business, and Yammer could be used on campus.

Next Generation Disaster Recovery
The technology landscape both at Penn and globally has evolved significantly since our existing service was designed, particularly in the areas of high availability and cloud computing.  Discuss potential needs and models for the future of disaster recovery service.

Container Technology
Containerized applications allow for more flexible and robust hosting and availability models for campus both on premises and in the cloud.  Discuss potential common use cases and best practices to allow for better campus interoperability and support.

Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services
As more applications and services offer interfaces for integration, mobile development, and third party or student add-ons, how we as a campus govern and organize those APIs becomes even more important.  Discuss governance and best practices for application APIs and the Enterprise Service Bus.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Desktop as a Service
Maintaining and securing desktop endpoints with agility, consistency, and manageable costs is becoming increasingly important.  Discuss common needs and best practices to leverage this technology on campus.

Storage as a Service
There are considerable amounts of underutilized storage on campus that could be leveraged where performance or security concerns do not mix well with more commodity could storage options.  Discuss approaches to sharing the cost and utility of local storage, and best practices or needs when standing up storage infrastructure.

Datacenter Consolidation
Cloud offerings, virtualization, shared standards, and space constraints all create opportunities for consolidating campus datacenters for cost savings and efficiency.  Discuss needs and best practices to better allow for such consolidations if the need arises.

Common Customer Relationship and Service Management
Providing students, faculty, and staff with a common experience as they get help with services that cross organizational boundaries is more of an expectation than ever.  Discuss ways to provide this quality of support through managing the services in a more distributed fashion.

 

To help prioritize upcoming initiatives, IT Roundtable and Common Solutions Group members were asked to rank these topics and provide feedback on their appropriateness to the Strategic Technology Coordination process.  The cumulative rankings from that survey are as follows, with the number of times a particular topic was given top priority in parenthesis beside it.

  1. Collaboration Tools (8)
  2. Next Generation Disaster Recovery (2)
  3. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Desktop as a Service (4)
  4. Storage as a Service (1)
  5. Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services
  6. Common Customer Relationship and Service Management (3)
  7. Container Technology (1)
  8. Datacenter Consolidation
  9. Java in the Browser - Write-in (1)
  10. Next Generation Video Storage - Write-in
  11. Streamlining Software as a Service Contracting - Write-in