Skip Links

Network World

  • Social Web 
  • Email 
  • Close

Campus creates a collaborative IT culture

University of Maryland, Baltimore Vice President and CIO Peter Murray discusses how he achieved that goal.
By John Cox , Network World , 01/16/2006
  • Share/Email
  • Comment
  • Print

When Peter Murray arrived as the new CIO for the University of Maryland, Baltimore four years ago, he faced a daunting set of enterprisewide IT projects that were just getting underway.

There was no formal structure for effectively organizing and deploying these projects across the UMB campus's numerous IT groups, which included a 250-person central IT organization as well as local IT units in the university's schools and departments, the highly regarded medical center and an affiliated organization of doctors.

Network World Senior Editor John Cox talked with Murray to find out how he made collaboration possible. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Why did the university need some kind of special effort for IT collaboration?

It's not that collaboration did not occur before I arrived. We just took it to another level, a more formal level.

It was recognized that the response to [enterprise IT] issues was disjointed; it was difficult to bring the key IT activities together, define them in common plans and make them work across the various campus organizations.

What's a concrete example of the problems you encountered?

One of the first questions I got when I arrived was "what e-mail system do you want to use?" And I said, "What do you mean?" There were 21 separate, disparate e-mail systems in operation at UMB. One of the first things I did was to create a task force to tie together these systems so users could have a global address list to find anyone in the system and send them an e-mail and be certain it got to that recipient.

You refined this approach in coordinating the various help desks around campus, correct?

There was no campuswide help desk. Various organizations had their own. I created the first campus help desk, hired people to staff it and found a space for them. Then we organized formal meetings of a task force composed of people from the various local help desks.

The university's School of Medicine was using help-desk software Remedy. We just added some more software licenses to that for the campuswide desk. Through Remedy, we collect data on what are the most common questions and problems and address them. For example, we knew we were getting a lot of questions about the Apple Macintosh. So we spun off a Mac users group. We realized we could use this same approach for other IT initiatives.

  • Share/Email
  • Comment
  • Print
Partner Content

NetScout is one of the world's premier providers of integrated network and application performance solutions.

www.netscout.com

Know First

Get Proactive — Move from Troubleshooting to Monitoring to Management with nGenius K2's Service Dashboard & Intelligent Early Warning Alarms

Watch the Video

Know Where

Get Rapid Performance Problem Isolation with nGenius Performance Manager and Diagnose Problems up to 70% Faster!

Learn More

Know Why

Get the Details to Validate and Solve your Toughest Performance Issues with nGenius InfiniStream and Sniffer Intelligence Modules

Read the Whitepaper

Comment
Login
Forgot your account info?
Add comment
Anonymous comments subject to approval. Register here for member benefits.
Have a NetworkWorld account? Log in here. Register now for a free account.

Videos

rssRss Feed
Get instant email notification when white papers, webcasts, executive guides are added to our library. Stay informed and up-to-date with the latest on IT Technologies with Network World's Resource Alerts.
Network World,to go. Wherever you are. Breaking news delivered to your mobile device. Select the hottest topics in networking and start receiving Network World on your mobile device today.