The challenges of IS insfrastructure

Almost 20 years ago, I spent a year as the IS manager for the strategy consulting firm I worked for. We had 4 North American offices, as well as a virtual Bay Area office. Two of our offices were on PCs, two offices ran Apples, and we had to have duplicate networks (Ether/Appletalk), duplicate printers, and so on. Just to make things interesting, we were also a Beta site for Lotus Notes, and we had to be able to connect to our European and Asian offices, which we did via dial-up modem at midnight, transferring emails in batches. Needless to say, it was a significant learning experience for someone with nor formal training in IS/IT. I'm not saying it didn't have it's moments, but on the whole, it wasn't exactly fun.

So I feel like I do have some sense of the challenges associated with small, much less large-scale IT infrastructure management. And it is not my intent to criticize the University's IT/IS staff, especially at the Business School, who have been responsive and helpful since the day I arrived. Paul, Matt, Clarke, and Martin, in particular, have handled all sorts of issues technically not covered by their day-job expectations (like the time I effectively crashed the School's network with DropBox).

But the University expects/requires me to utilize certain tools as part of my teaching process. These primarily include WebCT and Euclid. While these systems have their strengths, personally I have not found them easy to use or consistently reliable. Euclid, for example, has been down the entire weekend, which prevents me from accessing any information about student enrollment in my courses.

While WebCT has been available this weekend, I cannot run it either on my home computer (iMac) or my desktop PC at work without a consistent stream of messages from my web browser (Chrome/Firefox) explaining that components of the site are not secure, or are presenting expired signatures, and similar sorts of warnings. Given the amount of malware on the internet, it's not exactly confidence-inspiring.