Comments on the "IT@UT Coopertive Study" sent to Faculty
Sewnate President David Patterson on 12/11/07


David,
     This is to provide some quick feedback on the IT Review
report by Studman and Kemper. I find this to be remarkable in
a number of ways:

1. It was dated August and yet it has taken til December to be 
released and acted upon in any way (if you call requesting a 
committee to search for a System CIO to be acting).

2. It makes no attempt whatsoever to evaluate UT IT in light
of best practice at peer institutions. As best I can tell this 
is a view of a University System as a business operation only,
yet the peers to which we wish to be compared are not managed like
businesses but rather account for the diverse needs of a 
system with decentralized knowledge of needs that is 
outrageously difficult to achieve in the hierarchical structure
of a typical business organization. There is a complete 
disjunct between this report and the earlier one that was done
by peer institution IT leaders. They do not at all critique
the conclusions in this earlier report, though it was 
available to them. How then can they assert that their 
conclusions are appropriate when they make no attempt to 
refute the conclusions of the report from IT personnel
much more familiar with typical university needs?

3. It is totally unrealistic in both practice and theory. Expecting 
EVERYONE doing IT at UT to be part of some humongous System-wide
enterprise would require enormous reorganizations throughout 
essentially every unit at UTK (and likely in many units at
other campuses). What they call "rogue IT" has arisen and 
makes sense here because the older, centralized IT functions 
we had in the mainframe years simply are ineffective and 
not responsive to the varying needs across highly different 
units. They give absolutely no reasoning at all as to why
having IT staff managing systems at department-level (I
am thinking here of the systems managed within EECS, Math, 
Chemistry, Physics, SWORPS, Bio) is not appropriate and 
why it is more costly than having all these systems managed
centrally. It certainly could not possibly be as responsive 
to local unit needs to do away with IT staff reporting to Heads.
    Regarding funding, they are perfectly correct that the 
salaries for IT staff here are far below those at ORNL. What
they don't assert is that salaries at essentially every level 
at every position are lower at UT than at ORNL. Why should
IT be the only area in which salaries must be raised? Why
is IT more important than the hosts of other functions that 
staff at UT carry out? It is also horribly inappropriate 
to imply that our current IT staff are not doing their jobs 
adequately because their salaries are so low - my experience 
is that in the main the OIT staff are very effective under 
very constrained circumstances. 

4. Given the complete inability of the current System-level 
administration to act in a consensus-building manner on
any issue at all, the implication that they can hire a white-
horse person who will suddenly change the entire temperament 
of the System-level administration is simply ludicrous. 

5. The authors of this report were completely aware of
the President's prior public email announcement regarding 
the structure of IT (the Feb 28 memo to all faculty and Staff 
on Organizational Structure) since I gave them a copy and 
discussed it with them. They ignore this completely though 
it was a publicly stated policy of the System, and they give 
no indication as to why the plan outlined in this memo from 
the President is not appropriate.

In sum, I strongly urge the Senate Executive Committee to
request that the President repudiate the plans outlined 
in this report and instead carry out his previously stated 
intentions in his Feb 28 memo to all faculty and staff.

I am copying this response to the Chancellor and Provost, and
will be happy to post it along with the two reports on my
web-site if you think it would be helpful to the Faculty Senate.

Cheers,
     Lou
12/11/07