What does your organisation do?

UWS is a large, predominantly undergraduate university with 38,000 students and some 3000 staff. Its teaching and research activities are carried out at six campuses dotted across Sydney’s west and it is one of the largest employers in the region. It doesn’t have a “head office” as such — although the vice chancellor, the chief executive, is based at Penrith.

Who do you report to, and who reports to you?

I report to the deputy vice chancellor (academic and services) — Professor Rob Coombes. I have four direct reports who have line responsibility for the infrastructure, business information systems, client services and administration portfolios. There are about 120 staff in central IT overall.

What is your IT budget?

About $20 million which covers all of the central IT services including our network, data centres, applications and database support, computer laboratories for teaching use and end-user support. Probably as much again is spent in the various academic parts of the university in specific teaching and research programs.

What are your key applications?

Key systems supporting teaching activities include a central e-learning system (WebCT) and our library catalogues and loans system (Voyager). Our main administrative systems are student administration (Callista), Oracle Financials and Human Resources/Payroll. The Web is a major plank in our systems delivery strategies with substantial back-end systems providing identity management, document management, staff and student portals and sundry other systems.

What is your key infrastructure?

A private network built on microwave links between campuses which connect all sites to central data centres (being upgraded to fibre this year and next). Sun and HP/Compaq hardware supporting key applications areas running under Solaris and Windows 2000. Oracle as the major production DBMS with Microsoft technologies (Exchange, AD, SMS) being rolled out to support collaboration and document management needs.

Given an unrestricted budget, what IT technology or service would you buy for your company?

There’s no individual technology that springs to mind (although we are always looking at new products and services). What I would like to do is substantially increase the reliability, availability and ease-of-use of the services we offer now. Much of this unrestricted spend would go into people — allowing us to develop better end-user documentation for the systems we support through more extensive research and development, reducing the applications development and implementation backlog, having more hands-on assistance for end users at the campus level and extending our support windows into the 24x7 realm.

How long have you worked in IT?

Too long:-) Started out as a COBOL programmer in the NSW Department of Education in 1973 trying to squeeze the most out of Honeywell H800 systems which seem incredibly primitive by today’s standards.

What IT technology do you lust after?

Ubiquitous wireless!

Which IT technology do you think is overhyped right now?

Wireless — I think it’s got a way to go yet (see previous question re lust).

What area of IT would you like to understand better?

Storage management and related technologies. This is becoming a bigger and bigger headache for us each year as the requirements for storage grow against a backdrop of demands for 24x7 availability, reduced windows of opportunity to carry out essential backups and maintenance, better recovery times, remote access to large data stores.

What are your greatest IT challenges?

Responding quickly to the systems and support needs for what is a very diverse user base.

What is the most difficult IT decision you have had to make?

Nothing stands out — there have been plenty of challenges but that has been half the fun! Maybe I’ve had a charmed life so far (fingers crossed).

What areas of IT do you specialise in?

Probably management more than anything else as I have been the head of IT services in the organisations I’ve worked in since 1985. Before that I spent most of my time in application software development and support.

What is the most exciting IT project or implementation you have been involved in?

UWS undertook a major restructure three years ago which effectively merged three separate organisations into one. The job I was appointed to (my current job) had responsibility for bringing three separate IT organisations together (people, servers, networks, support systems) and leading the implementation of new applications to meet the business needs of the new UWS. It’s been a very demanding three years, but looking back now, I’m quite proud of the progress we’ve made and the way things are working. I think that IT services at UWS are arguably amongst the best in the university sector in Australia.

What are the most pressing issues IT managers face?

Responding to competing business needs without compromising security and ease-of-use.

What is the most embarrassing thing that has happened to you at work?

Probably missing an early morning flight to carry out an important systems review in the country after a late night Christmas party — I slept in!

Where do you see your career heading and how do you plan to get there?

The next step (if any) will probably take me right out of IT — as I think my current job role is the one I always aspired to when joining the industry many years ago.

What potential IT disaster keeps you awake?

A major systems failure during peak processing periods and discovering backups have not been working for some weeks (and nobody told me).

What’s been the biggest lifesaver of a purchase or procedure?

Our decision to spend quite a few million dollars on large database servers two years ago — we didn’t realise what growth in demand we would experience in the period since and we would have been in big trouble had we not established this capacity.