Preface

The Indiana University Information Technology (IT) Strategic Plan was formally approved by President Myles Brand and the Trustees in December 1998, and the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology (OVPIT) and CIO was given responsibility for its implementation. Thus, 2000 was the second full calendar year, and FY 00/01 the second full financial year, of the implementation of the Plan.

This document is a summary for this period principally of University Information Technology Services (UITS) accomplishments, but also of those of other parts of the University, in implementing the Plan and activities related to it. Though this document is, strictly speaking, prepared for FY 00/01 as part of the University's annual budgetary process, realistically it reports accomplishments mainly for the calendar year 2000, given that it is prepared in early 2001. The Plan is a five-year plan and will guide IU's activities and initiatives in IT until the end of 2003. Hence, OVPIT will produce a document similar to this on an annual basis for the life of the Plan.

The Plan consists of 10 major Recommendations and 68 Actions. The accomplishments for 2000 are described under these.

Introduction

The year 2000 was the second full year of the implementation of IU's Information Technology Strategic Plan. As it nears its halfway point, many of the major actions have either been successfully implemented or progress in their implementation is well underway.

Consequently, it seems appropriate that a mid-course assessment of the Plan should be carried out. To that end, I have renewed the information technology committees that were so instrumental in the development of the Plan and charged them with providing me with such an assessment. These committees consist of faculty, staff, and students. This assessment should indicate whether the original priorities of the Plan need adjustment or whether there are any new issues that have emerge since the Plan was completed in 1998. I expect to receive this assessment before the end of the Spring 2001 semester.

Information technology is essential to the whole IU community in all its diversity, with all its wide-ranging priorities and on all campuses. IU's wide-ranging efforts in information technology are fundamental to teaching, learning, research, outreach, and lifelong learning, which in turn are doing so much to help build the information economy in Indiana.

The year 2000 saw major accomplishments in two "bread and butter" areas that affect nearly every single member of the University:

• The completion of life-cycle replacement funding was announced in October for all 15,000 desktop computers in all schools and across all campuses of Indiana University. From now on, no desktop computer at IU should be more than three years old, and all will be replaced on a continuous three-year life-cycle. All desktop computers run the most recent versions of Microsoft or other popular software and are connected to the Internet by a minimum of a switched 10Mbps Ethernet connection. This successful initiative has been widely praised, and IU may well be the first university of its size to have put in place an institution-wide, life-cycle replacement program for all desktop technology.

• A program was commenced under the Plan to install or upgrade the information technology environment in all 600 general-inventory classrooms on all campuses of IU. When complete, all classrooms will have IT environments of one of four types, ranging from a basic level of IT to a very sophisticated level to support the most advanced multimedia instruction.

Some other major accomplishments in 2000 included:

• NETg has been successfully deployed as IU's central, computer-aided instruction environment. Under IU's agreement with NETg, 600 course titles are available to the whole IU community on CD. These course titles range from elementary courses in the use of word processing software to advanced Microsoft certification training for IT staff. The NETg courses provide anyplace, anytime training for the whole IU community.

• The remarkable success of IU's Microsoft Enterprise License Agreement (MSELA) has continued. Nearly 250,000 copies of Microsoft software have now been distributed under this four-year, $6M agreement for a retail value of nearly $45 million, yielding total value to the University approaching $40 million. Similar savings are starting to be seen with some of IU's other software agreements. For example, more than 3,500 copies of SPSS have been distributed to faculty, staff, and students through an Enterprise Licensing Agreement. Overall, site licenses save the University well in excess of $100,000 annually, as well as make possible a level of software utilization that would otherwise be impossible.

• In supercomputing, IU was successful in obtaining another $1 million Shared University Research Grant from IBM that has enabled the upgrading of the University's SP distributed memory supercomputer to around a 300 gigaflop system. IU was also named as one of only a handful of Sun Microsystems Centers of Excellence and, as part of this, acquired a Sun ES10000 shared memory supercomputer.

• IU's massive data storage infrastructure has been expanded with the establishment of a new IBM storage facility at IUPUI, which will be integrated with the massive data store at IUB through the Optical Fiber Infrastructure.

• This year saw the deployment of the first modules of the new Student Information System (SIS) and the new Library catalog system. The SIS admissions module was successfully deployed in the Fall and implementation of other SIS modules is on schedule. An interim Web-based registration system will be deployed in the Spring of 2001, foreshadowing the deployment of the main SIS registration module at a later stage. A new Web-based Library catalog system was also successfully deployed in January 2001, allowing users to navigate among the online catalog, Web resources, Windows applications, library resources on all IU campuses, and e-journals and indexes.

• In December 2000, IU and Purdue signed an agreement with Verizon to install multiple strands of fiber between IUB, IUPUI, and Purdue, as well as fiber to connect IUPUI to a carrier hotel in Indianapolis. This fiber will provide almost infinite bandwidth between these three major research campuses and will herald a new era of network-based collaboration between the campuses.

• IU is now responsible for the Network Operations Centers (NOCs) not only for the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded TransPAC connection to the Asia Pacific, but also for the NSF-funded connections to Europe (Euro-Link) and Russia (MIRnet), the AMPATH connection to Latin America, and the facility in Chicago where many of these connections peer ­ the Science, Technology and Research Transit Access Point in Chicago (STAR TAP, also funded by the NSF). In late 2000, these individual NOCs were consolidated into a Global NOC, co-located at IUPUI with the Internet2 Abilene NOC. IU also participated in the successful review by the NSF of the program that funds the TransPAC, Euro-Link, and MIRnet connections that led to the continuation of funding for this program.

• IU launched the Digital Music Library project to support research and education in the field of music. The project will develop a system containing music in a variety of formats, and will involve research in music instruction, usability, and intellectual property rights. Participants in the project are from the Schools of Music, Law, and Library and Information Science, the University Libraries, and UITS. This project is supported by a $3-million grant from the NSF and the National Endowment for the Humanities, through the Digital Libraries Initiative, Phase 2.

Though strictly speaking not part of the implementation of the Plan, UITS formulated the IT portions of the successful Indiana Genomic Initiative, which received $105 million in funding from the Lilly Endowment, the largest single grant that IU has ever received and one of the largest ever awarded to a university anywhere. OVPIT continues to establish the Indiana Pervasive Computing Research Initiative, which was funded by a $30-million grant from the Endowment in 1999.

A fundamental factor in the success of Indiana University's IT Strategic Plan has been the funding for IT that the State Legislature has provided in the last two bienniums. That IU has emerged as one of the country's leading universities in the uses and application of information technology is due in very significant part to the carefully planned and focussed use of these funds. This funding is essential to maintaining this lead. Indiana University is most grateful to the Legislature for this essential support in the past and looks forward to its continuance.

Michael A. McRobbie
Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer
January 2001