Work Tales II

University of Nevada, 2003

After we got through the initial virus outbreak on campus and had the campus running again, it was time to begin a multi-faceted approach to get things under control.

One thing that those of you in the private sector will have difficulty understanding is the sense of ownership of the computers in the academic arena. There is a large sense of entitlement in the equipment in academia and allowing the central IT group manage core services centrally is Orwellian in many people's minds. Of course, in the private sector and even at community colleges centrally administered computers are the norm. In order to successfully implement at the university, my group and I met with academic departments individually for several months explaining how they would still be able to use the software they wanted to use and that all we were trying to do was provide a reliable and consistent platform that we could readily support. In most areas this went well, although the math department was pretty adamant about IT supporting 8 year old SGI desktops so pitching a supported platform was kind of tricky.

On the systems side, I made a case for what seemed to be a pretty easy argument for centralized anti-virus, desktop management software, and update servers. For the anti-virus I worked with the state higher education organization and we leveraged excellent pricing on anti-virus for not only the university-owned machines but also faculty/staff home computers and student computers. Within a year of implementing the anti-virus and central update servers we never again saw a campus-wide outbreak of any viruses. Whenever a machine became infected it was almost exclusively because it was not one of the supported machines and was in a department that opted out of the supported platform. While we would try to help out when possible, there was an element of poetic justice and typically it wasn't long after a couple of department-level issues that they would have a renewed interest in the supported platform.

While it was messy dealing with the outbreaks when they happened early on, we used it to wage an argument for the new equipment and a more reasonable approach to service the university's technology needs. After a couple of years we had the managed to reduce the amount of labor spent to fix problems and shifted energy to providing more and better services.