Fast, Flexible, Friendly: Supporting & Governing Collaborative Tools in a Web 2.0 World

1. Fast, Flexible, Friendly: Supporting & Governing Collaborative Tools in a Web 2.0 World Bill Corrigan Emerging Technology Project Manager UW Technology Tom Lewis Director, Catalyst Research & Development Learning & Scholarly Technologies

2. Past Strategic Choices Brought together separate IS, IT, telecom, infrastructure, broadcast, and service delivery entities into a coherent central organization. • Ubiquitous and stable infrastructure • Great (legacy) systems • Great (basic) tools Stuff worked!

4. Old(er) Challenges • Maintainability of tightly-couple, complex legacy systems • Lack of agility in system or processes • Shadow and duplicative systems • Tools for collaboration, research, teaching, learning not integrated or lacking • No clear governance structure or connections to end users

5. Current Strategic Choices Separate data and information management from infrastructure and tools and then leverage growing spirit of collaboration. • Taskforces, committees, SIGS, governance…oh my! • Provide broader, timely access to data and new tools • Plan to retire/refine/refresh key systems • Buy, build, use open source, outsource • Integration, Web services and ROA • Engage with users

7. Organizational / service evolution Office of Information Management UW Technology It’s the clients, stupid! Itchy Deans, PIs, faculty New Challenges Infrastructure needs • Data centers • Clouds -n- grids -n- outsourcing • e-Science • Wandering researchers Handling new technologies • Web 2.0 • Personal mobile devices • Identity management

8. The Problem • People want to use the same communication and collaboration tools for all of their activities. • They want the tools, NOW! • They want them to be easy to use. • They want to use them with people inside and outside UW.

9. The Solution • Buy, build, implement open source, and outsource. • Standards, Web services, federated identity, SSO, ROA. • User-centered processes, grassroots governance, data-driven decisions. • Collaborate or die!

11. iTunes U at UW • Grassroots Governance • SaS Experience • Findability Meta-tagging is important

13. SharePoint • Super Platform Vendor • Tightly Integrated With Office • Findability: Use Content-types and a taxonomy

14. Collaborative Tools Taskforce • Scan the environment, Discuss the goal(s); Gap Analysis • Collaboration tools should be available to everyone. • Needs across different domains are really similar.

15. Collaborative Tools Taskforce • Instructors & Learners; • Administrative Types; • Researchers; and • Professional Schools

16. Collaborative Tools Taskforce

18. Lessons Learned • Offer a combination of bought, built, open source and software-as-service technologies. • Standards-based applications, Web services, and service-oriented architecture are critical. • Innovation is fostered when collaboration tools are available to all members of the university community (and beyond) for a variety of purposes. • Governance processes should connect with end users, leverage the expertise of leading edge faculty and researchers, and ground decisions in data.

19. Questions? tomlewis@washington.edu bcorr@washington.edu