djds@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (DARYL JOHN D'SOUZA) (03/21/91)
I hope this is the appropriate news group for what I am about to say. If not, please advise, and I will re-post. I am currently involved in a debate about who should be the provider of computing facilities at an academic institution. Most academic institutions (in Australia at least) are organised into Faculties which, in turn comprise of several departments. There are also special Divisions and Centres which fulfill other requirements of the Institute. One such Centre is often called the Computer Centre which, traditionally at least, provides for the bulk computing needs of the Institute's activities. Such activities usually fall into one or more of the folowing domains: teaching, administration, research or consulting. With the special needs of various domains and the varying scales of computer power (supercomputers, parallel machines, general mainframes, minis, superminis, personal computers, etc...) available, the debate about Centralisation vs. Decentralisation becomes a major issue. Centre managers usually like to insist that the computer centre should be the sole provider of all computing needs, whilst many others would tend to disagree. I'm sure there are groups out there who have produced proposals (or even definite plans) as a result of such discussions. I am interested to hear from them and indeed have access to publicly available descriptions of such "IT Strategy" plans. I am not interested in vision/mission statements nor the broad goals and objectives of such a strategies, but rather in a description of what is seen as a satisfactory implementation of one of these strategies. The infrastructure details of facilities management (what the facilities are and who controls it) of the various (functional) domains, is what I am after. Mail direct to me, please. Daryl D'Souza ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dept of Computer Science Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology 124 La Trobe St Melbourne, Victoria 3000 AUSTRALIA PHONE: +61 3 660 2348 ARPA: djds%goanna.oz@seismo.css.gov BITNET: djds%goanna.oz@CSNET-RELAY CSNET: djds@goanna.cs.rmit.OZ.AU JANET: goanna.oz!djds@ukc UUCP: {enea,hplabs,mcvax,prlb2,seismo,ubc-vision,ukc}!munnari!goanna.oz!djds