Extremely rough transcription of brainstorm
Q: What are the guiding principles we should use to vet the draft list of IS&T Core Products and Services?
- Is maintained
- Promotes collaboration across MIT
- Critical to MIT mission
- Enhances workspace -- helps people study, teach, admin. and collaborable
- All other things equal, should serve the many, not just a few
- We help people use the service
- Responds to community need
- It should also be needs-driven
- "Most" DLCS don't want to do it OR were told they can't do it
- IS&T is not the sole provider of central IT services
- Is IS&T at least a "good" provider of the service?
- Sustainable
- Reduces "cost" in total across MIT -- might be financial cost, or could be other qualitiative factors
- Guides prioritization, for example, research computing inside IS&T vs. NOT inside IS&T vs. SOMEWHAT inside IS&T
- Should not be stated in terms of "product" name
- Easy to explain and easy to use
- Practical (this needs defintion)
- Has explicit policy, governance and a roadmap
- Predictable and consistent -- no surprises!
- Reliable
- Measurable
- Keeps "current" with technology trends
- Represents "best practices" in some sense
- Is legal
Distilling the brainstorm
We then decided to try and fine tune this list into a short, crisp and well-defined list. We want to complete the sentence "A Core IS&T Service Is..."
We produced this list:
- critical to MIT's mission
- sustainable and scalable
- practical
- maintainable, supportable, reliable and predictable
- cost-effective
- governed, roadmapped, resourced, etc.
Underlined words were open to interpretation, and we flagged them for further semantic analysis.
And then found ourselves in a cul-de-sac, at which point we decided that what we were really listing were the delivery goals for Core Services (see below) should be.
...
Goals for Core Services
A core service is ...
| Wiki Markup |
|---|
how we fulfill our charter \[see elsewhere\]. |
A core service should be...
cost effective
easy to use
effectively managed
explainable
justifiable
measurable
practical
reliable
scalable
secure
supportable
visible
Finally, we reached the land of Guiding Principles ...
... by returning to the document attached to this wiki space entitled IS&T ResponsibilitiesThat is, in effect, every core service should be delivered with the above GOALS in mind.
...