From: "James O'Donnell"
Message-Id: <199605311721.NAA15607@ccat.sas.upenn.edu>
Subject: restructuring ISC 
To: IT Steering; Comp-Restruct; Super-Users Group
Date: Fri, 31 May 1996 13:21:56 -0400 (EDT)


With apologies to those colleagues outside ISC whose overlap on some of 
our lists may get you more than one copy:  this is an announcement that 
went to all ISC staff yesterday afternoon.  Comments and questions 
welcome:  send to me directly.

Jim O'Donnell

James O'Donnell wrote:
From: "James O'Donnell"
Subject: restructuring ISC
To: ISC Staff
Date: Thu, 30 May 1996 14:38:41 -0400 (EDT)

Restructuring ISC

With this announcement, plans for phase one of internal restructuring of
ISC are complete; some of what is announced below takes effect 
immediately, the rest as soon as paperwork can be completed (by 1 July 
on all points).  I apologize for the delay and the concomitant
anxiety that many have felt and can only say that this has come
about because it has been more important to me to do the right
things and do them in the right way than to meet a self-imposed
deadline or even to calm nerves that deserve to be calmed.

By "phase one" I mean the part that falls immediately to me on
coming in the door, the review of the overall structure and the
makeup of the senior management team.  Restructuring ISC is far
from over, but it is now *our* job.  I expect to work with senior
staff and directors over the next six months to a year to do a
thorough review of our practices and structures to bring them
into line with the model for restructuring computing across Penn
that came out of the task force work last fall.  I have two
*very* strong personal commitments in all this, which those of
you who work with me will tire of hearing -- but I am quite
serious about them:

     1.  Customer satisfaction is our principal metric of
     success.  We cannot always satisfy them and they are not
     even always right -- but their errors are no excuse for
     failures on our part to work harder to make partnerships
     that work.  We are charged by the University with creating a
     "culture of measurement" to give objective evidence of our
     success as well -- I will place the highest priority on
     responsible measurement of the effectiveness of our services
     and our customer satisfactions.  (One point of customer
     satisfaction, of course, is cost-effectiveness.  We will
     continue to review everything we do to keep costs as low as
     possible.)

     2.  Internal cooperation among ISC staff across the entire
     organization is a necessity and a given; we are members of
     one organization and no single part fails without reflection
     on the entire organization.  

For some of you the most dramatic development is in bureaucratic
terms the simplest.  The separate organizational identities for
DCCS and UMIS will be abolished.  There are arguments to be made
in favor of keeping those fences around those particular parts of
ISC, but it is my strong belief, reinforced by detailed
discussion with some of our most important clients, that the
overall negative effect of keeping pieces of ISC separate from
each other far outweighs the benefit of cohesiveness and identity
that the names impart.  I'll say again, ISC is one organization. 
When you doubt this, think of Ben Franklin and what he said to
John Hancock on 4 July 1776:  we shall all hang together, or we
shall all hang separately.  

One of the particular implications of that increasing connectivity will 
be active review of the relations between operational units across ISC 
and, I expect, their increasing consolidation over the months to come, 
where that consolidation gives increased quality of service.  The 
disappearance of the DCCS and UMIS names for groups of units will take 
place over a similar time frame as we review the day-to-day 
administrative implications and take appropriate steps; but it would be 
good practice to begin *thinking* in terms of ISC as a single 
organization immediately.

It is to achieve these goals that I am announcing the following
senior staff assignments.  These will be my direct reports, the
team with which I will work most closely.  

Two members of senior staff will have primary responsibility for
managing our relations with our clients on campus.  There will be
some places where the line between their responsibilities will
not be crystal clear, but they will work together to keep
responsibilities clear and assure customers of seamless contact
with ISC:

     Robin Beck will serve with the title of Associate Vice
     President and be responsible for relations with clients
     dealing with administrative services.  She will continue to
     take direct report from Applications Development, but she
     will also sit as my designee at John Fry's Senior Management
     Team and deal directly with the Vice Presidents who meet
     there; she will also deal with the schools on issues that
     pertain to administration rather than to research and
     instruction.  She will also continue to be our team leader
     for Project Cornerstone.

     Mike Eleey will continue as Associate Vice Provost and be
     responsible for client relations dealing with matters
     involving research and instruction.  He will continue to
     take direct report from CRC, First Call, and TLS, with a
     mandate to work with those units to transition ISC out of
     the business of "primary support for free" over the next
     year or so.  He will also oversee "distributed staff" for
     virtually all customers who make such arrangements with us
     (including administrative units).  The Communications Group
     will continue to report to him, and will be increasingly
     involved in the ISC WWW site and in the Penn Web site
     production as well.  Donna Milici will continue to report to
     Mike and will be consolidating ACS with new functions of
     responsibility for site licenses of all kinds across ISC and
     for continuing the benchmarking support which was such a
     signal success of the task force work last fall.

     Carl Abramson will serve as interim Executive Director of Operations 
     for ISC with Tech Resources, Operations, Diaster Recovery, and
     Facilities Management reporting to him. 

     Mike Palladino will serve as Director, Network Planning and
     Operations.  He will continue to be responsible for forward
     planning and design of network facilities, especially
     coordination with telecom and HUP, but also for managing the
     operational business of the network.  Mark Wehrle and his
     shop will report to Mike, as well as network operations
     staff and the Penn video network.

     Noam Arzt will serve as Director, Information Technology
     Architecture and Network Services.  He will be responsible
     for linkage between network staff and the to-be-built
     network "public utilities commission" and will supervise the
     setting and enforcement of network policy and rates;
     continuing as Director, Information Technology Architecture,
     with renewed mandate to be our scout at the bleeding edge, and
     thus he will coordinate ISC forward technology planning in cooperation
     with other University centers.  He will now take direct
     report from network engineering.

(Both of Mike and Noam's network assignments should be viewed as interim
while we review the need for additional staff in the wake of George
McKenna's reassignment.  I will be working closely with Mike and Noam, as
well as with Deke and Mark, to define those needs and meet them at an
early date.)

     Jeanne Curtis will continue as Data Administrator with
     burgeoning responsibility for the Data Warehouse as it
     becomes more central to the management of the University's
     information assets, with and after the roll-out of FinMIS.

     Bonnie Gibson will continue as Director of Finance and 
     Administration, responsible for ISC financial affairs and 
     relations with Human Resources.  She will be tasked over the 
     coming year to transform ISC business affairs in line with 
     the restructuring possible from FinMIS and to expand the 
     model of the ISC-wide virtual business office in a way that 
     does justice to our business needs, and supports our identity 
     as a single organization.  ISC financial staff currently reporting 
     on a unit basis will report centrally to Bonnie, and will work 
     with her to serve all of our financial and administrative needs. 

     Linda May will continue as Director of Planning and take on
     new responsibliity for coordinating with what I am calling
     "external non-client relations" -- nurturing ISC's diplomatic 
     relations with the President's, Provost's, and EVP's centers and with
     the schools, as well as coordinating our community relations
     involvements.  Her skill in areas of organization and
     management will be called on repeatedly as we work through
     the restructuring issues that remain before us. As announced
     previously, Cathy DiBonaventura will be reporting to Linda, 
     with an enlarged role specially directed towards community
     outreach.

There will be an all-staff ISC meeting the second week of June at
which there will be ample discussion of these changes (and non-
changes) and their implications for the future.  I encourage each
of you to take that opportunity to speak up and take a
part in shaping the future of the organization.  The success of
the one organization that is ISC depends on the commitment of all
hands.  I'm impressed with what we have.

jo'd