We all want to do new cool stuff and not worry about the more boring IT stuff. I dream up at least a couple of new ideas a week that I’m convinced would be worth investing some time in but I rarely get to prove them because of the more boring IT stuff that just has to be done.
Well I actually think we need to do new cool stuff and not worry about the more boring IT stuff.
One of the principles of Scrum is that the work you do is business value driven. You do the things that have the biggest impact, the useful things, the things that people need and which give us an edge or push our service levels and capabilities out a little further. And lets face it, these are the things that only people immersed in the organisation tend to be able to do (if only they had the time to do them).
Even at UNE where we are fortunate to have a relatively recent and therefore still quite clean warehouse and BI implementation we have to do maintenance and housekeeping which simply has no direct business benefit. When you only have a team of 3 tasked with providing intelligence to the entire institution, you don’t have a lot of time for upgrades.
I’m therefore intrigued by things like Google Apps which claim (amongst other things) to help free up IT resource by handling the more mundane aspects of our lives, and note with interest the pace at which Google seems to be swallowing up the education market across the globe. Their latest website shows a map which claims Australia has between 250K and 3 million education users and over 5 million worldwide. I know that Adelaide, and Macquarie universities use Google Apps as do Waikato and Auckland in New Zealand and recently they were joined by the NSW Department of Education. Just four days ago, Dublin University rolled out email to all its students, ad-free with 7GB of storage.
Google have also just launched the Google Apps Education Community Site and the Google Apps Education Resource Center.
If you use Google Apps, what is it like? As a member of staff or a student? As an IT person? Does it help, does it make life easier and does it free up some of your time? Does it even save you money as Google claim it will?
Initially I think my view of this type of ASP model was a sceptical one, I probably thought of it as the thin end of the outsourcing wedge, or just another large corporate trying to get easy revenue from the education sector. But I think differently now, I think that anything that allows us to focus on what we need to be doing and what our institutions want us to be doing has to be good - because then we are delivering business value.
I run an IT company and we migrated to google apps about 3 years ago, we operate from 3 remote offices and it works well for us. Although we are a small company we have replaced nearly all our clients exchange servers with google apps.
We have suffered with the outages like the other google apps/gmail users however we practically eliminated email related support calls from our clients.
With regard to cost savings it has removed the need for a mail server and removed the need to for us to manage these. At the end user level it allows them to outsource their IT to our company with greatly reduces their costs.
But Google isn’t the only “cloud” option out there. Microsoft (Live@Edu), Amazon (EC2) have very credible competing offers.
You are right, where there are scarce computing resources it makes tremendous sense to offload commodity computing to a scale provider who can meet your SLAs. But it should be a thoughtful decision, not a bright shiney object reaction.