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'd better fine tune this list, perhaps by completing 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 the CSS Leaders Team wiki space entitled Responsibilities of Information Services and Technology Department at MIT. I don't yet know how to link to this attachment from this page, but I'm gonna learn, honest!
Humbly submitted by today's scribe...tjmcgovern...all remaining errors are mine. Whack away!