ITSC Strategy 25 September 2005 4/4
IEEE IT (Information Technology) Strategy Concepts
ITSC.109: Approved by ITSC, Oct. 1, 2005
This document is developed and maintained by the ITSC (Information Technology Strategy Committee) of the IEEE Board of Directors.
The following strategy concepts are critical to IT efforts along the direction elaborated by the IEEE IT (Information Technology) Strategic Direction document.
A. Anticipate and align with IEEE Priorities
Information Technologies (IT), especially the Web, are the driving mechanism for developing and delivering information, products, and services to the technical and professional communities served by IEEE. As a result, the IEEE’s IT Strategy and investments must support the overall strategy of the IEEE. At times, opportunities will surface in the consideration of IT strategies that will warrant changes in these strategies, requiring coordination with the affected boards.
B. Leverage IEEE’s Resources Effectively
Development of products and services emerge from the innovative nature of IEEE’s OUs at many levels. The IT Strategy is based on an understanding that it is essential to leverage innovation among the IEEE OUs by encouraging and empowering it. At the same time, it is recognized that to maximize IEEE’s impact in the market it must effectively leverage its IT resources. The strategy encourages the development of tactics that achieve a balance between these two goals. The following components of this strategy guide this effort.
· Encourage Innovation in Products and Services: Key innovations and response to emerging opportunities will occur at all levels in the organization. The ‘customer base’ for various IEEE products and services is not homogenous, and these different segments may require substantially different services at any one time. In some cases key innovation will be emerging outside of IEEE. Responding rapidly to these opportunities will require both the OU’s and the central IT group to experiment with new and innovative technologies. Provisions should be made for “laboratory environments” to foster creativity that are distinct and separate from the Production environments that are by their nature more secure and regulated. Innovation may require going outside of current tools and standard systems.
· Coordinate IT Resources: An internal dialog must be maintained between the OU’s and IEEE’s central IT groups so that all are aware of each others’ capabilities and project directions. When new projects that serve as the leading edge in various areas are identified, these groups can agree on which unit is best equipped to take the lead. Then, as these leading edge projects progress, the entire group can hear the lessons learned from these. Ideally, the successes fostered by the OU’s can be integrated into the mainstream as parallel requirements emerge.; indeed when other OU’s have similar needs, they can make an informed decision on how to use the experience gained by early adopters.
· Leverage IEEE’s Capabilities First: As OU’s and IEEE are developing new projects they should first leverage IEEE’s capabilities by either a) using shared services where they exist and are appropriate; or b) when appropriate investing their money within IEEE to acquire new tools or build new capabilities that could ultimately benefit the entire organization rather than funding outside vendors. There will be situations where centralizing a specific service is essential to IEEE core competencies, and other times when common guidelines/standards and integration mechanisms will be sufficient to meet the business objectives.
· Maximize Return of Products in Production: The IT Strategy recognizes there is a difference between developmental projects functioning on a small scale, and projects that become mainstream production systems operating on a large scale. Once innovations are introduced into the market and are considered “in production” it may be appropriate to maximize their effectiveness in terms of cost-effective, reliable, scalable, and maintainable operations, while retaining ongoing innovation and volunteer initiative. Affected stakeholders need to be involved in determining when overlapping operations may be appropriate.
C Embrace the emerging heterogeneous diversity of sources
Interlinking of IEEE and non-IEEE environments will be essential to the future of professional collaboration.
· Integration: IEEE central IT efforts should seek to provide for integration (not necessarily consolidation) of diverse services, along with guidelines, tools and support that will facilitate the formulation of a coherent environment spanning diverse internally and externally created and maintained systems.
· Coherence: IEEE system users should have a coherent experience as they move across different types of products and services, different formats of information, or move between product configurations. Of special importance in this increasingly hyper-linked world is ensuring a coherent experience for users as they jump from non-IEEE domains into IEEE space and visa-versa.
· Confidence: As IEEE members and other customers come to rely on IT for the delivery of their IEEE experience we need to ensure that they have confidence in the consistent availability of services.
· Service: Service level agreements should be developed as a mechanism to assure that OU’s providing services and those receiving them (internal or external) have a clear understanding of the capabilities, limitations and costs of such arrangements.
D Right Information to the Right Person at the Right Time
· Facilitate Finding Information: Coherent methods to assist users in finding relevant content from IEEE and related sources should be provided. To accomplish this will require a search function spanning all OU sources – papers, conferences, standards committees etc. – as well as metadata policies, etc. Institute wide and beyond search services are the current key to this objective. For IEEE sites to become authoritative sources of information for relevant professionals we need a search capability that will allow interested individuals to locate relevant papers, publications, technical committees, conferences, standards committees and so forth.
· Consistent identification of users: Consistent authentication should be provided for all levels of systems. This authentication service must provide for member and non-member support since corporate customers, and many of our conference attendees, standards working group members, etc are not members. These users must be able to manipulate their on-line records consistent with established privacy guidelines. Users should be able to identify all services for which they are registered and add/delete these.
· Personalized Services: To a greater degree than ever before IEEE’s Products and Services will recognize users as individuals in order to provide personalized services such as filing cabinets, stored searches, subscription identifiers, etc.
· Support IEEE’s essential role as a community of professionals:
Robust, individualized communications services between users. These must be trivial for members to initiate, and open beyond our membership. These must allow opt-in/opt-out for individuals as well as integrate into search services (to locate relevant ‘groups’) and the authentication environment above. Today we can envision this as “email reflector” services, or “communities”, but this will be a core of self-organizing activities in the future and will be tied to many services we cannot currently envision.
E Web Based Environment Evolution
· Design For Ease Of Access to Information: For the foreseeable future, the ‘web’ will be the target for user interfaces.
o This requires attention to the diversity of client environments (wireless, slow speed, browsers, platforms, etc.)
o IEEE Systems should incorporate appropriate human factors planning and testing. These include ease-of-use , accessibility for persons with disabilities as well as access for persons with diverse linguistic capabilities
o To ensure ease of use IT designs will emphasize things such as designing pages so that they load fast, reducing the number of clicks necessary to get to the desired information, organizing a site to facilitate quick navigation, facilitating the loading and display of documents as soon as they are ready
· Web Site Engineering: Application of IEEE Std. 2001-2002 (web site engineering) is recommended.
· Adopting beneficial web standards:
o Web services can allow IEEE OU’s to provide ‘central’ services that can be used by other OU’s where needed. Authentication is one example (IEEE membership confirmation at conferences, etc.). This may also be the appropriate future for some of our SAMIEEE type capabilities.
o Make it easy to implement and maintain the IT services through use of techniques such as table-driven database design, standardized page templates for web pages, XML tools such as cascading style sheets, use of DOI for page calls and linking and deliver applications as web-based services instead of client based software.
F. Prepare for the Future:
As the largest organization serving the technology community (publications and conferences in particular) it is incumbent on IEEE to employ IT tools that are competitive in today's market, meet changes to policy (security for example) and provide for future improvements. IEEE should be monitoring the leading edge for relevant services, at least with respect to publicly available services and policy (universities, startups and open-source communities are likely to run ahead in innovation and will be a good source of insight on emerging capabilities.) There are situations where IEEE might wish to be on the “bleeding edge”, become an early adopter, or wait for the main stream. Internal investment might be carried out thorough an OU champion, or via IEEE’s IT organization on new technologies. IT staff should develop and maintain an operational level of expertise through training programs in more than one operating environment (Windows, Linux, Unix) and the "open source" community, so decisions for selection and implementation of systems can be made based on an informed analysis of the long term cost/benefits rather than past staff expertise.
G. Apply Good IT Project Management Principles(New Projects)
IEEE IT projects must be initiated after determination of the appropriate level of needs assessment, systems analysis and software engineering direction. IEEE products and services (both current and future) need to ensure high availability and robust reliability of products in production. To ensure the on time completion of projects for product in production and a highly reliable operations, concentrate on tools that reflect the current state-of-the-art but have demonstrated stable operation and vendor support. IEEE must adopt standards and tools, available to the diverse authoring communities of IEEE that minimize the time and effort to incorporate the content into applicable IEEE environments.]
H. Develop a collaborative working environment for communities of stakeholders
IEEE must develop a robust, collaborative community tool suite and collaborative community strategy. With its deployment, the way IEEE does business will change dramatically. Business processes will become more efficient, users will be able to communicate and collaborate much more easily and seamlessly across the enterprise, and members will see greater value for their membership through significantly increased networking opportunities. IEEE will be able to make better use of its increasingly virtual workforce as well as its virtual volunteer force.
Note: This development will utilize a test bed philosophy since many capabilities are emerging. Scaling the results to all of IEEE is a distinct possibility / goal.
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Document history
This document was split from IEEE IT Strategy Direction Document, 23 September 2005
Approved by ITSC by letter ballot, Oct. 1, 2005 (submitted to Board of Directors for their information at Nov. 2005 Board meeting)