We wanted to ask "What are the guiding principles we should use to vet the draft list of IS&T Core Products and Services?"
An extremely rough transcription of brainstorm follows:
- 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
Given that messy collection, we thought we wanted to fine tune this list, perhaps to complete the sentence "A Core IS&T Service Is..."
... to produce a short, crisp and well-defined list.
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.
So the goals of a core service are to 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 Responsibilities, ISTDeptDesciption3.doc.