ITIL: IT Infrastructure Library

ICT Services at the University of Canberra is keen to embrace ITIL.

ITIL, the IT Infrastructure Library, was developed by the UK Office of Government Commerce and is currently gaining wide acceptance as an approach to managing IT Services. From the Official ITIL Website (http://www.ogc.gov.uk/index.asp?id=2261):

ITIL provides a cohesive set of best practice, drawn from the public and private sectors internationally. It is supported by a comprehensive qualifications scheme, accredited training organisations, and implementation and assessment tools.

Some background to the structure of ITIL practice is covered in the ITIL Structure paper.

Training: how much is enough?

Best Practice in IT Training for University technical staff.

If the University of Canberra is going to embrace ITIL, then there needs to be a commitment to supporting Best Practice in a number of areas. So what is Best Practice for training IT staff?

According to Best International, citing a Computerworld list of the Ten Best Places to Work in IT for training, the ten best places to work in IT in the US spend on average between AU$9,000 and AU$14,000 per employee per year on training, with an average number of training days per year of between 7 and 17. Since the TSU has 9 employees, this means spending between $80,000 and $126,000 each and every year on training, plus the cost of the additional staff required to cover their absences while training (about another two-thirds of a person, plus THEIR training…).

There is a case study of the University of Florida (voted number 2 in the 2004 Best Places survey) at http://www.computerworld.com/careertopics/careers/story/0,10801,93759,00.html. Average annual number of training days per IT staff member at the University of Florida is 7.

Broadcast Flag is lowered

...before it was even raised!

Last year the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) mandated the introduction of a broadcast flag in digital television broadcasts that receivers and other devices dealing with digital video signals would have to read and obey (an item on the mandate was in the Technical Services Unit Report 20 August 2004). The idea was that producers and broadcasters could limit what consumers could do with digital television broadcasts: preventing the broadcasts for example from being recorded, or made into DVDs, or broadcast around IP networks (all of which we do here in the Division of Communication and Education, under existing provisions of the Copyright Act).

Last week a US appeals court struck down the regulation, concluding that the FCC didn’t have the authority to regulate ancillary devices like recorders.

While the FCC has no jurisdiction in Australia, under the Free Trade Agreement signed between the US and Australia last year, there would have been pressure on Australian broadcasters, manufacturers and distributors to mind the flag here as was to be required in the US.

See Court Nixes ‘Broadcast Flag’.

Scholarship for Service Delivery Manager

WWDC Scholarship for Service Delivery Manager from Apple University Consortium.

The Division's Servce Delivery Manager has won a Nationally Competitive Staff Scholarship to attend Apple Computer’s World Wide Developer Conference to be held in San Francisco 6-10 June 2005. With Apple’s recent release of Tiger, Mac OS X 10.4, and QuickTime 7, his attendance at the Conference is very timely and will be of great benefit to the Division.

Microteaching

The microteaching spaces are proving problematic...

• There are some technical issues still being resolved: one particularly difficult to resolve technical issue is a hum in the sound recording systems when the rooms are used in a particular configuration: TSU staff are working with the supplier and installer to either rectify the problem or replace the errant components.
  
  
• The new installations are challenging students: as an example, in one case last week a group of students became quite insistent that their issues with using one of the rooms were dealt with summarily, and were told to contact their lecturer, or the comedu helpdesk. Subsequently a member of the TSU staff on his lunch break was contacted directly, with the insistence that help be provided to the students immediately. It turned out the students had not followed the instructions provided and the fix was quite simple: changing one setting on the camera to reflect their requirements for recording.

The microteaching spaces are a flexible design required to satisfy a number of different and varied uses: this has increased the apparent complexity of the spaces when used by inexperienced students and staff, even though the rooms are now simpler to use (for single camera recording) than they were before.

• Access is difficult: not a day goes by without students seeking access to the rooms: without swipe card access this will continue to the annoyance of staff in the surrounding offices. Also as a result of the lack of swipe card access the rooms are being left unlocked: there have been a number of security reports of the rooms being found unlocked by security on patrol overnight.

In order to get the full use from these rooms the Division will need to consider seriously dedicating staff resources to help staff and students get value out of the resources there. Either that or limit access to trained and qualified operators only.