Back to the drawing board

We were convinced that we had done everything possible to educate and win over upper management and the campus constituency. We had prepared PowerPoint presentations to explain our technical and business cases. We had discussed NGMAN with a number of campus committees. We had talked one-on-one with administrative decision makers. We even hired consultants in early 2005 to assist us in the NGMAN vendor-selection process. We had covered all our bases -- or so we thought.

The consultants traveled around campus interviewing key researchers and faculty about NGMAN. You can imagine our shock when they reported they had heard three key questions repeatedly during their interviews: What exactly was NGMAN? Why did the university need a new network? Wasn't there a better use for the money?

Clearly, whatever venues we had used, whatever discussions we had held and however we attempted to sell the NGMAN project, we had missed the target.

We realized we had to start the process all over again. We had to go back and meet with the key researchers, staff and faculty. We needed to explain why the current campus network needed to be replaced, describe the original design assumptions that had created NGMAN and justify why this project was an appropriate use of campus resources.

This had to be done at the same time as we continued to move the NGMAN procurement process along -- except now we faced new uncertainties. We didn't know how much of NGMAN would be built, how much funding we could count on or how much campus support we could build for the project.

Finally, after much discussion, and more than a little gray hair on the design team's part, the university approved building the core of the network in June 2006. The funding commitment for the core was now certain.

However, the secondary sites were open to discussion -- and there was considerable dialogue as to which secondary sites would be connected directly to NGMAN. For example, it was decided for cost reasons not to link the Mount Zion and VA Medical Center sites.

Law & order: UCSF

There was one final twist. In October 2006, a federal grand jury in San Francisco indicted a former contract employee in the procurement office of UCSF on public-corruption charges.

Steven Donnelly was charged with selling confidential information about AT&T's bid to a Verizon employee in exchange for a BMW automobile. Donnelly later met with the employee and agreed to provide the employee with a thumb drive containing the confidential material for US$5,000 rather than the BMW. Verizon fully cooperated in this investigation, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Of course, this set the process back again, because UCSF officials had to decide how to proceed. Finally, UCSF awarded the bid May to AT&T's Healthcare Markets Group. In the end, we decided to go with the integrated, turnkey option. AT&T is expected to take six months to construct the network and one month to test it. UCSF then will have an additional month for our own acceptance testing.

NGMAN will go live in early 2008. Afterward, there will be a nine- to 12-month migration period when we will move users from the ATM-SONET network to NGMAN. After that, the ATM-SONET network will be sunset.

It has been painful to run a first-rate medical institution on a 1990s network, but UCSF has managed to work around the current network's limitations by accepting network capabilities that are significantly less than state of the art.

This has not been a problem for users who mainly do e-mail and database lookups. It has been more problematic for users who wish to do video distribution, high-bandwidth medical imaging, and enhanced-performance and security-based applications.

While the delays have been frustrating, NGMAN will be here shortly to remove many of these network-related limitations and let the university move into 21st-century network technologies.