Christopher J. MackieAssociate Program OfficerThe Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

9-10 October 2007

Technology in Education Open Forum, Brisbane, Queensland

1

The views and opinions expressed in these slides and commentary are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my colleagues or The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

These materials are made available under a CreativeCommons By-NC-SA license(see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/)

9-10 October 2007

2

Currently, eResearch or “cyberinfrastructure” (CI) projects in higher education are sustained by massive infusions of government and private capital. History suggests that these contributions will eventually dry up, forcing CI projects to seek campus support for their continued operation. Unfortunately, the projects are usually poorly designed for institutional sustainability, suggesting that the costs of the transition are likely to be high for both the projects and the institutions, and that the failure rates and lost productivity may both be substantial. A better strategy would be to build CI projects from the beginning with institutional sustainability as a top priority, developing in the process an enterprise services architecture for higher education institutions that can accommodate new scholarly or scientific projects at minimal incremental cost. This presentation will discuss one strategy for accomplishing this objective, using examples drawn from software projects for the arts and humanities supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and highlighting both the opportunities and the obstacles that are being faced.  Arts and humanities CI, while distinctively challenging, offers an excellent starting point upon which to build a sustainable, CI-friendly enterprise services architecture for the entirety of higher education.

9-10 October 2007

3

Largest non-governmental, NFP funder of OSS infrastructure projects in the world, to our knowledge, through the Program in Research in Information Technology (RIT)

Applications and middleware; moving toward SOA

In the last 7 years, approximately two dozen projects: 2/3 now emerged from funding; all still self-sustaining

9-10 October 2007

4

Community design, followed by consortial build dozens-hundreds of institutions, with pro facilitation, participate in

process modeling, services decomposition, app recomposition Consortial partners produce OSS reference implementation Commercial vendors engage from the beginning, via co-

development, support, appliance, hosting, SaaS models All vendors are services-based (IBM, Sun, Oracle, Unicon, rSmart) Community owns IP via open, democratically governed Foundation,

provides incremental maintenance via ordinary budgets Major refreshes/extensions engage additional philanthropic support

Virtual development orgs (VDOs) Consortial staff are formally seconded to VDO VDO has architects, engineers, project mgr: reports to Foundation $6m-40m initial capitalization; Mellon contribs coord/generalization

Every community source project is still self-sustaining

9-10 October 2007

5

What if these eResearch/CI projects are so great that we want to keep them in operation, even after the government agencies are through funding them?

What would the challenges be?

“Don’t do anything great unless you’re prepared to survive the celebration.”

-- John Madden

9-10 October 2007

6

Internal IT capacity is declining Demand is increasing faster than budget Staff are aging; labor markets are inhospitable Software development & maintenance capacity

is vanishing; vendor dependence is increasing Enterprise software complexity is increasing

beyond institutional competence: Home-brew enterprise software is growing impossible to build or maintain

Application overburden is increasing $heer number of application$ Incompatible stack$ Adoption & integration challenge$ TEOS: Technologically Enabled Organizational

$ilo$

9-10 October 2007

7

Adoption, usage, maintenance costs must be kept to a minimum Minimize number of stacks, TEOS

CI must integrate/interoperate smoothly with existing infrastructure AuthN/AuthZ/IdM Workflow, UI, business rules, messaging Academic systems (LMS, calendaring, etc.) Admin systems (ERP, HR, student, research admin) Commercial and OSS systems

Important for CI integration today; more so post-funding

Nobody wants Sophie’s Choice

9-10 October 2007

8

Common Dimensions/Objectives Information and Communications Tech High Performance Computing Virtual Organizations Tech Xfer, Training, and Workforce Development

Useful/Important Addenda Inclusiveness/(Disciplinary/Institutional)

Diversity Agility/Global Competitiveness (Institutional) Sustainability

9-10 October 2007

9

Composability/Reuse Flexibility/Loose Coupling Scalability/Affordability Standards-based/Openness Malleability to organizational

processes: “Get the technology out of the

way”

9-10 October 2007

10

Managerial challenges Bottom-up strategy (alone) is counter-productive

SOApps reproduce your current problems at new levels of intractability: even-more-chaotic anarchies or not-so-loosely-coupled TEOS

Fragmented services and mashups work fine for personal use, long-tail monetization (Gmaps, Ypipes), but not as well for institutional efficiency, sustainability: We serve the “fat tail” of campuses first, only then the long tail

Institutional governance of SOA is a huge issue You can’t govern what you don’t understand Finger-pointing, side-effects, downstream problems, …. Scalability/load-balancing concerns Who pays, how?

9-10 October 2007

11

ESA: The holistic practice of SOA in a software ecosystem that encompasses the enterprise

Addresses security, other institutional concerns Emphasizes process modeling, proper

relationships among design, implementation, tech management, and governance

Balance top-down and bottom-up sustainably What is the enterprise? Campus? System? HE?

9-10 October 2007

12

It's no big secret that Web services introduce the potential for enterprise-centric interoperability. But to realize their reuse potential requires that broad support for … [ESA infrastructure] … already be in place. The broader the support, the greater the opportunity for repeated reuse. Without this level of support, services can only be accessed by consumer programs within "pocket domains" and can therefore not even get close to realizing meaningful ROI.

-- SOAMag.com, Issue XI, 2007/10 Will enterprises resolve their current architectural challenges, allowing

SOA to become the predominant approach to Enterprise Architecture worldwide? Or will it succumb to the pressures of confusion, misdirection, and ignorance that assail it, and become a tired label that signifies little more than a set of product features? We've seen this sad conclusion before with Enterprise Application Integration -- once a promising architectural approach, now a euphemism for expensive, inflexible integration middleware. Will SOA suffer the same fate?

–ZapThink.com, 2007/10/01

9-10 October 2007

13

Provide agile, commercial quality FOSS alternatives to monolithic, locked-in commercial SOA stacks, but… Play very nicely with all vendors who support OSS

models Emphasize transformational aspects of SOA, but…

Provide incremental paths for institutions not there yet

Focus relentlessly on institutional sustainability, but…. Design for all of higher education, worldwide

Build institutional and global infrastructure, but… Emphasize user-level functionality

Accommodate every ESA use-case, but… Design and develop in the arts and humanities

9-10 October 2007

14

A&H are a large intellectual domain with fuzzy boundaries (e.g., philosophers of science)

Text? Music? Video? What’s more cutting-edge? A&H researchers exist in almost every institution UX issues dominate: “if I can use it here, I can

use it anywhere” Money is tight: “if I can afford it here, .…” Besides, it’s my job….

9-10 October 2007

15

Four-layer stack ESB: Enterprise Services Bus Rules Engine Workflow (end-to-end: admin, scientific, and scholarly) UI (www.fluidproject.org)

All agile, all interconnected using Open Standards Interfaces

“Meta-ESA”: each one an instance of the global, virtual ESA Seamless collaboration, maximal amortization worldwide

Pure FOSS reference implementation, but… Open, standards-based interfaces allow easily mixed

OSS/commercial (or all-commercial!) installations Goal is to maximize institutional autonomy, choice, not

force-feed an OSS philosophy

9-10 October 2007

16

FEDORA repository system (www.fedora.info) SEASR rich-media analytics (www.seasr.org) Kuali Financials/ERP/Research Admin/Student

(www.kuali.org)

Sakai? (www.sakaiproject.org, … and Moodle?) Bedework? (RPI: www.bedework.org) Evergreen? (GPLS: www.open-ils.org) OpenCollection? (MMI: www.opencollection.org) Tessitura? (Ticketing:

www.tessiturasoftware.com) Bamboo? (acad/collab WS: Chicago/Berkeley)

9-10 October 2007

17

Robust products, not proofs-of-concept Healthy vendor ecosystem to provide services: big

& small vendors, worldwide Easy integration with MESA-using institutions Meta-inter-disciplinarity (helps CI projects

collaborate) Efficiency (cuts redundancy & maintenance costs) Focus (on the academic mission) Sustainability

MESA sustains itself via its own FOSS communities (you can and should contribute)

You only need to sustain the truly unique aspects of your CI

9-10 October 2007

18

Q. Will you fund Australian institutions as part of Australian (or international) projects?A. Sure, if they meet our criteria and priorities

Q. I’ve got an idea but I don’t know how to work it into a project you can support: can you help?A. Yes, within reason and if you have institutional backing; in fact, we prefer consultative proposal development. Send me a 1-2 page description of what you want to do, why it’s important, and what it will cost.

Q. Will you fund my project?A. We fund consortially governed open-source software projects with community design processes, institutional co-contribution, effective adoption and sustainability plans, and potential global impact, which also have direct, targeted benefits for the arts and humanities in higher education, research libraries, museums, or performing arts—is that you?

Q. Yes, that’s me: how do I contact you?A. ….

9-10 October 2007

19

Christopher J. Mackie (Chris)Associate Program Officer,

Program in Research in Information TechnologyThe Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

282 Alexander St. 140 E. 62nd St.

Princeton, NJ 08540 New York, NY 10065

cjm | at | mellon | dot | orgcjmackie06 | on| AIM+1 | 609 | 924 | 9424http://rit.mellon.org

9-10 October 2007

20