Who’s responsible for IT at U of T?

If you had trouble logging onto the Blackboard Portal at the beginning of the year, you aren’t alone. According to a recent estimate provided to the Resource Centre for Academic Technology, who manages Blackboard, the the system has up to 40,000 student users, all of whom were unable to access the portal during intermittent outages during September.

Over the past several weeks, the RCAT staff have worked overtime and flown in Blackboard experts from Washington to stabilize the system. Blackboard is now stable, but the cause of the glitches are still unknown, in part because new hardware was installed at the same time as the software update.

It’s a situation that Linda Murphy- Boyer, director of RCAT, isn’t entirely happy with. “We’re being very cautious how we run the system right now,” she said. For this reason, planned blackout periods have been installed between midnight and 5:00 a.m. That window of time allows analysts to look at what went wrong and update the system. Murphy-Boyer is apologetic for these blackout periods, recognizing that the hours after midnight are many students’ peak work time. RCAT is currently trying to reduce the blackout periods so that they fall later in the morning, between 3:00 and 5:00 a.m.

You’re also not alone if you hadn’t even heard of Blackboard until this year. Two years ago there were 12 to 15 course management systems operating at U of T. Until recently, the system best-known amongst Arts & Science students was CCNet. Information collected by RCAT shows that in the 2004-05 school year, 1,856 courses used CCnet, whereas only 150 courses, mostly in the Faculty of Medicine, used Blackboard.

In January 2006, U of T decided to use Blackboard as the school’s centrally-supported courseware system. A pilot phase began in September 2006, in which all former WebCT users, new faculty, and original Blackboard users were moved to the new system. During that phase, Blackboard had 600 courses and communities, and 18,000 student “seats”.

RCAT currently has only nine staff—“We could use more,” said Murphy-Boyer—and the outages may not have been caused by the software update itself. The university is currently attempting to reduce redundancy by cutting down on the number of systems being used. Whereas a June report to the provost by the administrative review committee on University ITS (ITS Review) identified 128 different e-mail systems being used across departments, administration is now pushing hard for all interactions between students and the university to be over UTORmail. But with that consolidation of IT resources comes greater dependence on centrally administered systems. The Blackboard outages in September raise the question of who is ultimately responsible for IT at U of T.

According to a June report prepared by the Office of the Provost, U of T spent approximately $68 million on Information Technology Services (ITS), including salaries, hardware, software, and services in 2005-06. Of this, about $24 million was devoted to central IT services, such as Blackboard. Yet, the report noted, these are probably conservative estimates of the amount U of T truly spends on ITS. For example, the provost’s office knows of 509 U of T staff with IT-related job titles in central and divisional departments, but it is harder to track the IT services performed by staff without these job titles.

Putting a dollar figure on central ITS is also difficult because several portfolios manage central ITS at U of T: the VP business affairs manages Administrative Management Services (AMS), while the provost is ultimately responsible for RCAT, ROSI, Central Network Services (CNS), and the Office of Space Management (OSM).

In addition, there are several noncentral IT services at the divisional or departmental level, such as UTSU’s Information and Instructional Technology Service, UTM’s Computing Services, the Engineering Computing Facility, and CHASS. An administrative review committee on University ITS, undertaken by the Office of the Vice-President and Provost in July, recommended a central group, overseen by a chief information officer, to oversee the various services and portfolios, like systems at other schools. The CIO’s tasks would include providing accountability to members of the university on ITS matters.