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Slipping Into High Reliability

Presenters:
        [Panel Discussion]
        Theresa Rowe, Oakland University
        Christine Haile, University at Albany
        David Todd, University of San Diego

What is happening at the grass-roots level and on the front lines of IT that could grow into the next "high reliability" expectation? How do we prepare for it? The historical pattern for IT is that technology often "sneaks and creeps" into our environment. If the technology is useful and productive, it gains a strong foothold, but often without the dedicated support resources that are needed for "high reliability." Expectations about reliability and support change over time. For example, email started off as a tool for a limited few and an occasional outage was acceptable. But email became ubiquitous and widespread over a few years. Most of us don't remember any discussion among senior management that said: "Email is an important strategy for us and we want to grow and integrate it into the culture." That only occurred AFTER we had given email access to everyone and the systems failed or struggled with the load. How many of us have had a "strategic role" discussion about instant messaging with campus leadership? Yet it is likely one of the top network traffic protocols in the university environment. In a recent CIO list discussion, several participants commented that much forethought and budget planning goes into the high-reliability and high-support expectations for enterprise systems, but planning for high-reliability and budget for communications or storage systems, or less visible systems like security and network management systems, was more difficult.

Presentation (ppt)