Tag: organization

Higher Ed Cloud Forum: Beyond the Architecture — Rethinking Responsibilities

Glenn Blackler (UC Santa Cruz)

Cloud-First! Now What…?

Santa Cruz’s approach – hw infrastructure was going to turn into a pumpkin in sprint 2018. “Screw it – we’re all in, let’s jump.”

What’s our approach? How can existing teams support this change? Program work vs. migration specific work. Our focus – enterprise applications.

Defining the program: Plan for a quick win (build confidence, get familiar, identify training needs). Go big – went from a small PHP app to identity management infrastructure. All in! — moved Peoplesoft and Banner. Run concurrent migrations.

But really. … why? Need to continually talk to customers about why they’re doing it. Benefits of cloud migration aren’t apparent – have to sell it. The pitch: elasticity, DR/BR, Accommodation (additional test environments); modernized tools and team structures; sustainability.

Teams – Separation of duties – now have separation between sysadmins and app admins and developers. Always been a handoff, ticket driven organization. Don’t know what org looks like in new world – took really smart people and threw them in a room and told them to figure it out. Core team includes App and Sys admins, plus less frequent contributions from security, DBA, networking, devs.

Looking at Cloud Engineering Team that incorporates OS Setup/Config/App Config/Maintenance. DBA team still a bit separate. Security contributing across the board, but not necessarily hands on all the time. Teams are learning new things about each other that they didn’t know in the ticket-driven world.

Future – shared responsibilities mean fewer handoffs; engineers with wider breadth of skills; improved cross-team collaboration through shared code base; continuous improvement through evolving technical design and available services; adjusted job titles and responsibilities; ITS reorganization; budget impact, review of recharge model.

New ways of collaborating: Sys and App admins using a single git repository for code. Shared tools/technologies, password management; cross-functional tier 1 support;

Lessons learned – don’t lock decisions down too early, use governance to end debates, identify project goals that foster exploration (within timeline), use consultants carefully. Traditional PM will not work, push boundaries of what is possible, required vs. ideal – compromise is important; don’t compare with mature on-premise architecture; be prepared for rumors;

Not everyone is on the bus – what about those who don’t want to get on?

Advertisement

A sad day at UW Tech

Today was the hardest day I’ve had in the fourteen years I’ve worked at the University of Washington. Today I dismantled the Emerging Technology organization that I spent the last two years building, and laid off five of the nine eTech staff. As many people already know, UW Technology is dealing with serious budget problems … Continue reading “A sad day at UW Tech”

Today was the hardest day I’ve had in the fourteen years I’ve worked at the University of Washington. Today I dismantled the Emerging Technology organization that I spent the last two years building, and laid off five of the nine eTech staff.

As many people already know, UW Technology is dealing with serious budget problems (here’s a Seattle Times story on it). I don’t claim to understand all of the factors that led to this crisis, but I do know that as a result we are forced to drastically cut our spending. Ron Johnson, our VP, has had to make difficult decisions about priorities – I don’t pretend to know whether I would make all of the same priority decisions, but I do know that I don’t envy him that task. I can understand that in a time of budgetary troubles these difficult decisions have to be made.

I don’t have to pretend to be happy about the result.

I am extremely proud of the eTech staff, the work we accomplished over the last eighteen months, and the relationships we built with a wide set of colleagues and partners across the institution. As a team we forged a unique and special working style, and I will miss it. The eTech staff are a supremely talented and knowledgeable group, and our organization will be the poorer without them.

To my laid off friends and colleagues – I’m sorry it’s come to this. It hurts. I wish you all success and better times ahead.

To the rest of the University and our partners and friends – I’m sorry we won’t have all the anticipated opportunities for forging new work together. We’ll see what capacity remains and where the priorities for our work lie as we regroup and try to move forward.