My wife and I are here in India after some 4 years and the changes here are significant.

The digital revolution here is frankly mind boggling. The acceleration in it between the last time we visited and now is so visible and amazing.

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As I have mentioned in my previous posts, the explosion in technology around us and the desire on the part of our own community members to adopt several of them is real. We, in Library and Technology Services (LTS), have an obligation to manage this process in a way that the College’s technology portfolio is manageable and sustainable. LTS, a merged Library and IT organization, is a small one and we cannot be good at supporting too many technologies at a level of depth that is necessary. For example, information security is of paramount importance and the responsibility for data grows exponentially as one adds more and more systems and services to support and we just don’t have the personnel to support them.

Our recent strategy has been focused more on a handful of principles – low code systems, minimize customizations, highly secure systems, security education of the community, satisfy the needs of the community as much as possible with existing systems and contain the portfolio sprawl. We need to constantly remind ourselves that we are here to support the academic mission of the College primarily and need to optimize our resources accordingly. One of the major steps we have taken towards these goals is to adopt systems that require less programming and change responsibilities of the programmers to make them be  business analysts. This has dramatically changed how we support administrative offices.

This change was rooted in the parallel to academic computing support. There are generally no programmers in the group. But they have subject matter experts who work with the faculty and students to adopt technology appropriately for teaching, learning and research. This is exactly what we have done on the administrative side by the move away from programmers to business analysts.

We also have been successful in consolidating services to some of our existing systems. I would like to share a major step in this direction that is taking place as we speak.

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Just like that, two major projects that we knew were “in the works” became a reality in the last few months and we have actively begun working on them. One is a renovation of Clapp Library, our main library, and the second is also sort of a “renovation”, but of a different kind – Website redo.

Clapp Library is part of the deferred maintenance initiative at the College and it will receive a much needed redo of its internals – HVAC systems, Plumbing and Roof to name a few. The great advantage is that the building will meet the standards that the College has recently committed to, including the use of infrastructure that supports our environmental sustainability initiatives. In addition, the air circulation and temperature in the building will be far superior to what they are now.

Our current website was redesigned 10 years ago and my colleagues from LTS and I were involved with Public Affairs very closely to implement it. That is a very long time in the web world! So, it is time to redesign the website. It is another non trivial and complex project!

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After a three year hiatus, Workday Rising, the annual conference of Workday, happened in person from September 11th-15th in Orlando. Still following some of the COVID related protections, the total number of in person attendees were limited to just 8,000 though the total attendees including remote participation was more like 19,000. I was very happy to hear repeated statement that for the first time, the highest number of in person attendance is from Higher Ed! Way to go!

On Monday, prior to the real conference started, there were two pre-conferences related to Higher Ed. One focused primarily on Workday Student and the other on all products. I was fortunate to share our story with the audience in both of these, which I believe was well received. One was the advising system that we put in place last Fall using Workday Extend, which has grown from where we began. The second was how we have expanded the use of Workday recruitment to include student and faculty recruitment.

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I have carefully avoided all travel since the COVID crisis began, for a variety of reasons. For one, most conferences were held virtually. Secondly I was not comfortable traveling in a closed space like an airplane, wearing masks for hours with no guarantee that this by itself protected me enough.

When the call for proposals came in for Workday DevCon 2022, I could not resist the temptation to submit a proposal on the Advising application I had developed using Workday Extend, which has served us really well. To be honest, I was not aware that if accepted, I needed to present the talk in person. Even after I knew this, I somehow thought I could convince the organizers to make an exception. None of this worked out… (more…)

I was fortunate to be invited to be in a panel titled “Evolution of the CIO: IT leadership for the smart, sustainable campus” along with Klara Jelinkova from Harvard and Lev Gonick from Arizona State University. Unfortunately Lev could not join us, so it was just Klara and me. It was moderated by Sara Custer.

I want to share some of the things we discussed and possibly things I really wanted to say but may not have. Bottom line, whether it is Harvard or Wellesley, there is so much similarity in terms of what the CIOs have to manage. However, the scale and some of the details are distinctly different.

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****WARNING – This is much longer than my usual posts. But I promise you that it is very informational ***

I can’t believe that we have been using Workday Student for the past three years. I thought this is a good time to reflect on how far we have come. Why now? Because we have recently rolled out some exciting functions in Workday Student that took a lot of effort on the part of the Registrar’s office and LTS. And we are happy to see that it has been received well by our students and faculty. 

I often get asked the question “I keep hearing that Workday Student doesn’t have all the functionalities of a Student Information System, how are you all doing”. My answer is “We have matriculated three classes, we have graduated two classes, our students have registered successfully at least 14 times, we have been producing transcripts for the past two years from Workday, students have been viewing their financial statements and students or parents have been paying the bills, we use it for functions we never had before, such as waitlisting, prerequisite checking etc. so it is working just fine for us. By the way, which SIS provides you EVERYTHING you want anyways?”

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Yesterday I was two miles away from home on a local road in Connecticut and I had a  bad flat tire because I ran into a curb while driving at 45 mph. I will spare you other details. Unfortunately this is a road with no shoulder so I had parked it as close to the curb as possible. Still, the car was occupyting a significant portion of the lane, causing inconvenience to drivers on both sides. I was on the phone immediately to call AAA and this is about my experience through the process. (more…)

It will soon be 2 years since the covid crisis struck the United States causing all of our lives to be turned upside down. Higher ed institutions faced disruptions that we never imagined would happen during our lifetimes. Despite the severity of the crisis and the disruption it caused, thanks to wide availability of the internet and the advances in technology we did fairly well. However it’s fair to say that we all have lost 2 years of our life to the crisis because we simply could not live our lives the way that we were used to. This is why when we began the planning for last fall there was a sense of excitement that we may be inching towards a different world and more normalcy. That all turned south again because of a second wave and then the Omicron variant causing havoc. And here we are, a semester later, the crisis seems to continue though there are signs of it subsiding and we will never know what’s in the future.

As the Wellesley operations team was discussing the plans for spring semester in early January, it became increasingly clear that when the students returned to campus in mid-January the Omicron effect was not going to be under control. At the same time the administration was reluctant to move to a remote learning environment unless it is absolutely necessary. After a lot of deliberations, the decision was made that we will be remote just for the first week of spring semester. The rationale for this was that the greatest risk we faced was related to the students traveling from elsewhere and coming to the campus. By asking the students to come as planned and ensuring they all got two negative tests before they are released from in room restrictions, the community could feel safe. And the way to accomplish this was to make the first week remote.

This made us scramble to make some adjustments to the network…. And this is what resulted in an issue that we wish didn’t happen!

When everyone was home and doing remote learning, it did not tax the on-campus network at all because all the Zoom traffic was going from home networks directly to Zoom and vice versa. However when we have all students on campus, our networks should be able to handle literally thousands of simultaneous Zoom traffic during class meeting time. Though when the crisis hit us in March 2020, we doubled our internet connectivity to 4 Gb, it was not used that much, even after all the students returned back to campus. Though we had 4 Gb of internet bandwidth, we noticed that our firewall did not have the capacity to handle that level of traffic.

Though we had ordered and received a higher capacity firewall, other priority projects and the fact the current firewall was handling all of our traffic made us wait a bit to install it. These installations are time consuming and finding a stretch of time to take the network down for a significant amount of time is extremely hard. When we were fully remote for 3 days after Thanksgiving, we saw that the firewall was getting heavily taxed and we said, we need to do something as soon as feasible. Unfortunately, the only window of time we had was mid January.

When we heard of the final decision to have one week of remote classes, we scrambled quickly to identify a time to install the new firewall. Despite having an expert consultant and Cisco (our network vendor) to support our excellent network team, it took us three attempts, (yes, three!) to install it successfully. When this was completed, it was the Friday before the start of classes.

We monitored the network over the weekend, when the use was heavy because most students had arrived by that time. We felt good about how the network behaved.

Monday, when the classes began, everything held up and we were happy. However, around 9:30 we started hearing about problems. We quickly brought in the consultant and Cisco. The firewall seemed to be working fine from the standard metrics point of view. Our network engineer found out that the issue was that the firewall was running out of resources for Network Address Translation (NAT).

NAT in simple terms is used to map addresses in a local network to one or more outgoing IP addresses. This happens in all of our home networks where we all get 10.x IP addresses that the internet router translates and presents to the outside world its own IP number as the one generating the traffic. In order for this to work, the device doing the translation needs to keep track of this map (like, which internal computer sent me a packet) so that when it receives a response, it can reverse map and send it to the right computer.

We had recently converted the College network to 10.x address space and when the students came back, they all received the new IP number. Since everything worked fine during the weekend, we did not anticipate this to be an issue. But a few more faculty and staff on campus tipped the scale and the firewall’s ability to map was getting taxed.

Our network engineers had a quick solution to this by adding more outgoing addresses to map to. But this did not work. This was frustrating. Despite involving the consultant and Cisco support, we could not figure out why this was not working. We quickly made a decision to change IP address space for all of the residence halls around 2 PM and by 3 PM the network was back.

We escalated the issue further up in Cisco and a smart engineer found an issue with the configuration on the firewall the next morning. If only we had the fortune to have him 20 hours earlier! With the exception of the Monday issue, the network has held up well.

Still, we wish that we didn’t have that outage on Monday. Heroic efforts by LTS networking staff and several others should be commended. We communicated often with the community and got the network up as soon as we could. We learned a few lessons in the process.

Despite the temptation to assume that it is the changing of internal IP numbers to 10.x space is the cause of the problem, I want to assure that it was not the issue. It was a configuration issue in the firewall that should have handled the NAT that caused the problem and as I mentioned, even Cisco was unable to solve that until several hours later!

Now, looking forward to continuing the stable network so we can divert our attention to other projects to benefit the community!