Building an IT Community

Background

The IT revolution is not confined to any single School or Faculty. Important campus-wide advances are occurring in the Arts, Sciences, Social Sciences, Humanities, and Professional Schools. These programs are supported by significant campus-wide investments in computing and communications faculty and facilities. Students with a combination of IT and disciplinary skills are highly sought after in the new Information Age.

UAlbany has a number of existing interdisciplinary and discipline-based IT research programs with strong national reputations, including the Center for Technology in Government and the Institute for Informatics, Logics, and Security Studies. The University has hosted for more than ten years an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Information Science involving faculty from across the campus.

In response to the increased importance of the field, many additional research and academic opportunities are currently emerging. These have many commonalities, including courses and other resources that could be shared. The Provost's Advisory Committee on Information Science and Policy proposed a bold new direction forward. The IT Commons begins to implement some of the key recommendations of that report.

To capitalize on our strengths and achieve national prominence in information-related studies, the University is engaging in a broad-based campus initiative to expand its educational and research programs in information technology. Through the development of discipline-based IT-related concentrations that rely on an "IT Commons" - a shared set of faculty, courses, research activities, and other resources - students will be prepared for the information-centric society of the future. The IT Commons has the following attributes:

• The IT Commons is designed to support programs across the entire University, in arts, sciences, social sciences, humanities, and professional schools.

• The IT Commons supports both interdisciplinary and discipline-based IT-related concentrations located across the campus. The IT Commons shares resources with these concentrations, and will grow and prosper as they do.

• Courses in the IT Commons are available to all students. They are offered by the units that participate in the Commons. These courses include a variety of topics in information literacy, core technologies, and fundamental information issues (e.g. information policy, information management, and information security).

• Depending on the needs of the participating units, multiple Commons curricula and courses may be developed to meet the needs of different students.

• Funds for hiring faculty and developing shared facilities for the IT Commons will come from a variety of sources, including the Schools and Colleges, University budgets including Academic Affairs and Research, and external funds. University resources for the IT Commons are allocated to interdisciplinary IT activities, but assigned to participating units under MOU's between the units and Academic Affairs.

• Participation in the IT Commons is voluntary, but formalized. Participating units make resources (including faculty lines, graduate assistants, laboratories, classrooms, and other physical space) available to the IT Commons, and open core IT and interdisciplinary courses to students in the other participating units. In return, they develop both the shared and discipline-based curriculum and are the recipients of new resources made available through the IT Commons initiative. Voluntary participation in the IT Commons allows campus investments to be leveraged with resources contributed from existing units.

• The existing Ph.D. program in Information Science - - faculty, courses, and curricula -- is expanding to meet this new mission. Investments are targeting existing areas of UAlbany strength, as well as promising opportunities that leverage campus capabilities.

• The Associate Provost for Informatics is working with the Provost to coordinate hiring, resource development, and curriculum development campus-wide, and with the Deans Council and the participating units to develop the IT Commons. Faculty committees are working on developing guidelines for the coming year. For more information, please see the RFP and the pre-proposal form for the 2004-2005 academic year.

The University at Albany, like most universities, is developing its administrative capacity for building shared resource centers of excellence. Building the IT Commons requires the creation of shared resource models and mechanisms that are durable but provide for flexible growth. A system of joint appointments and shared courses and curriculum carefully described in durable MOUs between Deans will need to be refined over time. These mechanisms must work within the existing realities of resource allocation methodologies and incentive-based budgeting. We need to develop "rules of the road" that are clear and predictable, recognize resource constraints across campus, reward synergy that comes from working together, and are durable.

Creating such a system of shared development will require the focused work of all. The joint hiring in AY 2004 provides a concrete laboratory for working out all of these arrangements. A new cohort of IT-excellent faculty is now scattered broadly across the campus. These faculty will be joined by shared resource mechanisms, such as the IT Commons Course Catalog, that craft an IT Commons that will benefit us all.