Students First

At Utah Valley University (UVU), we continue to develop a culture where we focus our efforts on students. UVU is an integrated university and community college that educates every student for success in work and life through excellence in engaged teaching, services, and scholarship. This post addresses how a service organization like the UVU Division of Digital Transformation (Dx) can participate in engaged teaching.

Engaged Teaching

The UVU Office of Engaged Learning describes engaged teaching as the teaching, learning, and scholarship that engages faculty, students, and community in mutually beneficial and respectful collaboration. Consider the three possible pairings of students and faculty, community and faculty, and students and community.

First, students learn from faculty, but faculty, in turn, learn from students. In addition, students help faculty develop their scholarship. Second, our community advises our faculty and gives their scholarship direction. Likewise, our faculty develop scholarship that benefits our community and local economy. Finally, our community provides mentoring, internships, scholarships, and jobs for our students and graduates, and our students provide our community with knowledge, energy, and fresh perspectives.

Our On-Campus Community

Dx at UVU is like information technology organizations at other universities in that Dx provides information technology infrastructure such as networks, servers, storage, telephony, identity, cybersecurity, and more. In addition, Dx includes enterprise architecture, product portfolio management, process improvement services, classroom technology, teaching technology, mobile computing platforms, teaching studios, and more.

Dx provides these products and services through the work of full-time, part-time, and some student employees. In addition to their “day jobs,” some of these employees teach as adjunct faculty in various academic units on campus. In this role, they contribute to engaged teaching as described above.

However, a campus service organization like Dx can more fully participate in engaged teaching as members of the broader community. In other words, Dx should serve as advisors to our faculty and give their academic scholarship real-world experience, data, and direction. Likewise, Dx should benefit from the faculty scholarship that informs our work. Dx should provide mentoring, internships, scholarships, and jobs for our students and graduates. In turn, these students will provide Dx with new knowledge, energy, and fresh perspectives. This insight from students regarding the student experience with the services provided is invaluable and will no doubt improve provided services.

Moving Forward

So, what needs to be done to transform Dx? Well, there are several necessary tasks, approaches, and ideas:

  • When Dx hires new full-time employees, new employees must have the ability and desire to mentor students above and beyond the traditionally required skills.
  • When full-time positions become available, Dx must consider filling the positions with multiple student employees. While student employee turnover is rapid, requiring a tremendous amount of training, isn’t that why we’re here—to educate students who take what we teach them and become productive contributors to society?
  • Dx should provide internships to UVU students.
  • Dx should provide meaningful capstone projects to student groups that will benefit them; in turn, the campus community will benefit from project outcomes.
  • Dx must seek out faculty who teach classes and perform scholarly work that may benefit from the real-world experiences and data that Dx has. Dx must make these experiences and data readily available.
  • When Dx faces questions about technology choices, function, or performance, they should seek out the technical expertise of our faculty colleagues
  • Finally, Dx must find ways to give directly to faculty and students. Perhaps Dx can fund named scholarships for students or fund endowed chairs for faculty. Both endeavors send a clear message that Dx is aware and engaged in the mission of the university

Summary

Digital transformation is about much more than technology and its use; it’s about changing thinking, process, and culture. It is time that Dx and other campus service organizations transform to benefit our students more directly. Employees of Dx and all campus entities should become teachers, mentors, and examples to the students who come to us to learn and grow. We have an excellent opportunity to influence the world for good. Join me in this grand pursuit!

Digital Transformation Building Blocks

This post describes technology building blocks to enable digital transformation at Utah Valley University, but the principles and concepts are universal. Utah Valley University is digitally transforming. The faculty and staff are excited about the possibilities and are envisioning a better future for our students. Students should expect our transformation to yield richer experiences, enhanced learning activities, increased skill acquisition, and a less burdensome path to completion and success. Our faculty and staff should experience less administrative burden allowing them to provide exceptional care, exceptional accountability, and exceptional results to our students and one another.

To facilitate digital transformation, the Office of Information Technology (OIT) and Academic and Student Digital Services (ASDS) must also transform. They must provide reliable and easy-to-use technology solutions that faculty and staff can use to enhance their interactions with others and improve the products and services they deliver. OIT and ASDS must adapt, modernize, provide existing products and services at a reduced cost, and provide new products and services with exceptional customer service.

In general, products and services should be available via self-service, 24 by 7, and ample support to make technology consumers successful, satisfied, and even delighted. The remainder of this post describes architectures, principles, and philosophies intended to make these necessary changes and the dream described above possible.

Application Programming Interfaces

Application programming interfaces (APIs) make it easier for others to interact with applications, create and use alternative user interfaces, and use the available services for alternative and even unexpected purposes. When acquiring or developing an application, it must have an API, and preferably a RESTful one. Data, services, and processes needed to build an application are used to create an API. The resulting API is then consumed to deliver a user experience. Mashup Corporation by Andy Mulholland et al. is a short fictional read that illustrates these concepts and the enabling power of APIs.

To make them most valuable, APIs must be exposed and consumed through API management tools. APIs should be more than simple JSON-based CRUD interfaces; APIs should expose appropriate business logic so that API consumers cannot violate required business processes. Enforcing this principle allows others to build delightful user experiences without institutional concern about policy, practice, or process compliance.

Domain-Driven Design

Everyone should read at least the first two chapters of the book Implementing Domain-Driven Design by Vaughn Vernon! Here is my super-short summary of domain-driven design (DDD) and those chapters — bring domain experts and developers together to create a ubiquitous language embedded in the application code itself. In addition, define or determine bounded contexts wherein this language is valid. This exercise helps software developers genuinely understand the business processes they are being asked to automate. It also helps the business participants understand the code being written and allows them to question decisions, test assumptions, and find bugs before deployment. This collaborative group of business leaders and developers is “the team”; success or failure is in their hands.

Microservices

Microservices are an architectural style that will be used at UVU to create larger systems. Systems built using microservices are loosely coupled; I would even go as far as saying they are highly decoupled, implement a single business capability, have well-defined interfaces, and communicate using only these interfaces. The size of a microservice is governed by the associated bounded context, go, and read the DDD book! At UVU, an essential part of a microservices’ interface is its ability to raise events. Go figure out why.

Event-Driven Architecture (EDA)

Systems that poll are inefficient! Build systems that raise events so other systems don’t have to waste time and resources. You can keep asking me if you must do this, but you can be assured that when I change my mind, I’ll let you know. If you didn’t find the humor in the last sentence, then reread the links.

Application Acquisition

When we purchase applications, we should give preference and a strong preference to those running in the cloud. When we build services or applications, they should use the most abstract service offerings that make sense. In other words, we should not instantiate servers and consume storage and then build queues, notification services, etc. We should instead use services such as queues, notification systems, serverless functions, etc.

DevOps

DevOps is a culture and practice that we hope will result in rapid development, testing, and software deployment. We also hope this increases accountability by allowing those who develop an application to be responsible for running and supporting it. Nothing motivates a developer to fix a bug more than to wake them to fix it repeatedly. Teams, DDD teams, are in charge and responsible for the functionality, performance, and reliability of “their” products.

If those in the hardware world think you’re off the hook, think again. Software is eating the world. The days of interacting with network switches, routers, firewalls, servers, storage appliances, AV equipment, etc., are over. Learn to program, learn to configure hardware devices using programs, remember to use DevOps principles to configure, test, and deploy hardware platforms as rapidly as “other” developers – that’s right, you just became developers!

Where to Compute

We built data centers and populated them with servers, storage systems, and network components in the past. As CPU performance increased, computers became more able to run multiple applications, but stability due to unintentional application interaction made this approach intolerable.

We found ourselves with many underutilized servers running single applications to maintain reliability. Along came server virtualization enabling us to instantiate multiple virtual servers on each physical server. Over the past several years, the number of physical servers has diminished considerably.

Well, we’re in the middle of another paradigm shift. We are continuing our journey that will result in our compute and storage being somewhere else. Acquired applications will also run in the “cloud.” in either case, they will not be housed here.

Networks

Unlike server and storage, I believe we will have a wired and wireless network on campus for the foreseeable future. However, the way we deploy, configure, and maintain these networks will change drastically. Remember, software is eating the world, and networking is not an exception to the rule. Network components will be physically installed in some generic way and then configured remotely via software. In a DevOps fashion, when a problem occurs, you’ll figure out what went wrong in the configuration script, you’ll repair the script, you’ll test the script, and you’ll redeploy.

Final Thoughts – For Now!

We have a great team! Let’s pursue all this FUN with great enthusiasm. Let us share our best thinking with others: share code on GitHub, answer questions on StackOverflow, blog about your experiences, publish papers, present at conferences, participate in panel discussions. In short, learn, teach one another, and teach the world!

UVU’s Secret Sauce

In a recent opinion piece in the Deseret News, Samuel Benson writes that Utah Valley University (UVU) is leading higher ed’s tech revolution. He raises several key points:

  1. Many universities cut back or closed permanently during the pandemic. UVU, instead, graduated its largest class in its history — 6,410 students — last fall.
  2. Much of the credit goes to Dr. Astrid Tuminez, who now enters her third year as the university’s president. She’s the perfect person for the job — a veteran in the tech sector.
  3. Even before the pandemic disrupted in-person learning, she made sure UVU was prepared.
  4. UVU wants technology to drive and enhance every aspect of the student experience, from recruitment to graduation.
  5. The technological revolution is alive and well in the shadow of Silicon Slopes, and that will continue long after masks and social distancing are relics of the past.

In response to Mr. Benson’s article, several individuals asked the question, what is UVU actually doing that is different from other institutions? What is UVU’s secret sauce? Well, that is a question worth answering. It isn’t as much about what we are doing as who we are. The remainder of this post will address who we are, the culture of UVU, and what we’ve done and will be doing.

Higher Education

In Clayton M. Christensen’s book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, he discusses how established industries must change to stay competitive. If they are unwilling or unable to change, they are doomed to eventual failure. We’re all familiar with GAFA or Google (1998), Amazon (1994), Facebook (2004), and Apple (1976). I’m old enough to remember alternative search engines, bookstores, mySpace, and computer companies such as Digital Equipment Corp., Compaq, and IBM. While some of these still exist, they have become less prominent in the fields dominated by the big four. What happened? Innovators, who founded the big four, disrupted the existing market space, and the previous big players weren’t able to or chose not to compete. By the time they realized there was danger of losing their markets, it was far too late.

According to Britannica, the first true university in the West was founded at Bologna late in the 11th century. Interestingly, Britannica, a company older than the United States, but only 1/4 the modern university’s age, who up until 2012 sold a 32 volume encyclopedia set for $1400, had to adapt to a new market. Britannica stopped printing its collection it had printed every other year since 1768 and now offers annual online subscriptions for $70.

Like Britannica and many other companies in many industries, higher education must adapt to changing needs and demands. If higher education institutions are unwilling or unable to change, they run the risk of becoming irrelevant. Our students will demand and deserve that we offer education in a form that they can and want to consume. They will demand that their education leads to the acquisition of good-paying jobs. Employers want access to students and graduates with the hard and soft skills they need to be competitive. Finally, society demands higher education provide all of the above without sacrificing the education the students need to become productive and civil members of our world community.

History, Clayton Christensen, and GAFA teach us that if we in higher education are unable or unwilling to adapt, we will be replaced by innovators who take the initiative to deliver a more modern education. We see some of this already happening with Grow with Google, Microsoft Learn, Great Learning, HackBright Academy, DevMountain, Western Governors University Academy, BYU Pathway Worldwide, and many others. So, how do we adapt to changing needs and wants while maintaining our identity as a university? Part of the solution is taking advantage of information technology and applying it where and when it increases student success, learning, and completion rates and decreases time to completion and cost.

UVU’s Secret Sauce

While nearly every higher education institution is putting classes online, training faculty to work remotely, and strengthening IT infrastructure, UVU is truly transforming the educational landscape. This starts with the exceptional can-do culture developed over the years by our students, faculty, and staff. Our students are diverse, inclusive, and gritty, our faculty put student success above their own professional aspirations, our amazing staff proactively reach out to students to help them be successful, our administration focuses on student success, and our president, Dr. Astrid Tuminez, resonates with our students, understands what an education can do for them, and understands how and where technology can help.

Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is about transforming the way an institution does business. In our case, it is about making education better, more accessible, with fewer administrative burdens for students and faculty. Digital transformation is about using technology in the right way, in the right places, and at the right times to help students complete their educational dreams and be successful.

To do this, digital transformation efforts must be aligned with institutional goals and strategy. UVU has an exceptional strategy document entitled Vision 2030. Vision 2030 includes the UVU Mission Statement that reads, “Utah Valley University is an integrated university and community college that educates every student for success in work and life through excellence in engaged teaching, services, and scholarship.” Vision 2030 outlines three strategies:

  1. Enhance student success and accelerate completion of meaningful credentials
  2. Improve accessibility, flexibility, and affordability for all current and future UVU students
  3. Strengthen partnerships for community, workforce, and economic development

Strategy Map

To ensure our digital transformation efforts are aligned with institutional strategy, we created, with assistance from PM2 Consulting, a strategy map, which is a diagram that shows an organization’s strategy on a single page.

At the top and center of a strategy map, we place the organization’s mission or vision statement. Stacked down the map’s left side are four perspectives: customers or stakeholders, internal processes, enablers, and financial.

Within each perspective, we place a small number of strategic objectives. Arrows indicate how one or more strategic objectives help accomplish others. Our strategy map is illustrated in Figure 1. For details regarding the creation of our strategy map, see my post, Digital Transformation Strategy.

Figure 1: Strategy map for the UVU Division of Digital Transformation, including strategic objectives and associated weights.

The UVU Division of Digital Transformation pursues the institutional strategies of achieving student success, including all students, and engaging our partners. We accomplish this by delivering delightful experiences, providing transformative solutions, strengthening our partnerships, and practicing exceptional product portfolio management. These strategies are supported by a culture of being responsive, manifesting UVU values, and developing our staff.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

As much as I like our strategy, it is only as good as the associated tactics and our ability to make needed changes and progress. So what have we done? Like nearly all institutions of higher education, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we immediately bolstered our campus networks, increased cybersecurity, added classroom technology to enable multiple teaching modalities, including remote, live streaming instruction, acquired several hundred laptops for student checkout from the library, and procured a couple of hundred WiFi hotspots with unlimited data bandwidth to provide student connectivity. However, while we dealt with the immediate needs of our students and faculty, we also made changes for the post-pandemic world of higher education:

  1. We created an Academic and Student Digital Services (ASDS) organization to focus on the teaching, learning, and academic administration technologies and services that will be delightful to use and enhance our ability to achieve student success.
  2. We reorganized the existing Office of Information Technology.
  3. We combined previously distributed IT organizations.
  4. We organized a product portfolio management group to enable us to practice exceptional product portfolio management.
  5. Within these groups, we organized units to focus on:
    1. Identity and access management
    2. Communications
    3. Website, intranet, and mobile application design
    4. Business intelligence
    5. Academic systems
  6. We hired two associate vice presidents to lead our Office of Information Technology and our Academic and Student Digital Services groups.
  7. We named a Senior Director of Product and Portfolio Management and charged them to ensure our products and services are delightful and transformative.

In addition to these organizational shifts and adjustments to enhance our ability to focus and transform our work at UVU, we also initiated numerous critical projects that will enhance student success:

  1. We initiated a project to move from our traditional PBX-based phone system to Microsoft Phone System technology. This move will enable remote faculty and staff to reach out to students from anywhere in the world, using nearly any device, and appear as if they’re placing the call from their campus office. This change adds functionality, makes the experience more delightful, and saves the university money.
  2. We began a new student-centric mobile application that will enable students to accomplish many of their administrative functions on their mobile devices. They will be able to check their academic progress, set appointments and communicate with their academic advisor, add and drop classes, pay tuition and fees, and see events, classes, exams, and final exam schedules. In the future, the UVU mobile app will include voice recognition, be a digital assistant, and act as their ID card.
  3. We started a project to create a campus Intranet using MS Teams as the core component. Just today, Microsoft introduced Viva, a new product that may meet our needs. A modern intranet will provide us with the means to communicate better as a campus community.
  4. We continued creating a business intelligence system that will assist all campus areas in utilizing data and information to make informed decisions. This will help students track their progress, faculty reach more students, general communication, and facilitate the use of artificial intelligence (AI) across the institution.
  5. We began a complete rework of the UVU identity management system. This work will result in students, faculty, and staff being digital equals. While different roles and responsibilities will enable each individual to access the information pertinent to their roles, this equality will foster communication, calendaring, and virtual meetings.

These initiatives are a direct result of choosing to pursue activities that support our strategic objectives. In one way or another, they all increase the institution’s ability to help students succeed.

Summary

Utah Valley University is a special place where students, faculty, and staff understand its mission, strategies, and values. However, these are not merely the institution’s, but they’re ours, we know them, we love them, and we live them. We do all that we do to express exceptional care, exceptional accountability, and exceptional results. We are digitally transforming the university because we want our students to succeed in a digitally transforming world. So what is our secret sauce? It is a set of amazing people, driven by a common mission, directed by strategy, and guided by a set of values we’re committed to expressing in all that we do. Digital transformation at UVU is simply applying technology where, when, and how it helps people reach their full potential. We care, are accountable, and promise results!

Digital Transformation Strategy

Introduction:

A strategy should inform an institution where business process improvements will have the largest impact on realizing its mission. Both for-profit and non-profit institutions should pursue projects and initiatives that help them reach their strategic goals. A strategy should help guide what projects and initiatives are pursued.

In a for-profit institution, the main strategy is to increase profits. Projects should be pursued if they have the potential to increase revenue, decrease expense, or both. In such a setting, it is reasonably straightforward to compute a financial return on investment (ROI) for digital transformation projects and initiatives and use it to prioritize them.

In a non-profit institution of higher education, our main strategy is to help students succeed. Projects and initiatives should be pursued to help the institution reach its strategic goals. Computing a financial ROI in this setting is not straightforward and perhaps not beneficial; therefore, we need an alternative mechanism for prioritizing which projects and initiatives to pursue. The ideal metric is a measure of a project’s ability to decrease the gap between where an institution is concerning its strategic goals and where it will be after the project is complete, i.e., its strategic value. Those projects with the most potential to decrease the strategic gap have the highest strategic value and should be pursued.

This post will describe the creation of the strategy map for the UVU Division of Digital Transformation. I’ll also describe three ontologies we’ve created:

  • An impact ontology that illustrates the impact divisional business processes should have on our strategic objectives.
  • A performance ontology that describes the impact our business processes are currently having on our strategic objectives.
  • A project ontology that illustrates each project’s strategic value or its ability to close strategic gaps.

The impact and performance ontologies are used to determine the strategic gap between possible impact and current performance. The project ontology determines which projects have high strategic value in closing the identified strategic gaps. Finally, a list of projects and initiatives, prioritized using their strategic value, is presented.

Utah Valley University

In early 2019, Utah Valley University (UVU) organized a Digital Transformation Task Force, which issued its final report in April 2019. In their report, the task force defined digital transformation like this:

“Digital transformation is the process of applying technology to fundamentally change how organizations operate and provide value to those served. Digital transformation requires an integrated enterprise approach to workflow, process, data management, technology, and culture.”

The use of digital technology and an accompanying change in culture will allow the university to reduce complexity, function efficiently, and provide delightful products, processes, and services to our students, faculty, and staff. While digital transformation strategies and tactics must be aligned with the institutional mission and strategic initiatives, they must also be easily understood and implemented by those participating in the transformation of digital technology, culture, and institutional practice.

Institutional Mission and Strategy

Digital transformation efforts must be aligned with institutional goals and strategy. UVU has an exceptional strategy document entitled Vision 2030. Vision 2030 includes the UVU Mission Statement that reads, “Utah Valley University is an integrated university and community college that educates every student for success in work and life through excellence in engaged teaching, services, and scholarship.” Vision 2030 outlines three strategies, with accompanying priority initiatives, employed to accomplish its mission:

  1. Enhance student success and accelerate completion of meaningful credentials
    • Implement the UVU Completion Plan 2.0 (2019-2023)
    • Assess and remove barriers at every stage of the student life cycle
    • Support completion through comprehensively designed curriculum and services
    • Enhance educational quality through the recruitment and retention of excellent and engaging faculty and staff
  2. Improve accessibility, flexibility, and affordability for all current and future UVU students
    • Build out a coordinated multi-campus plan
    • Expand flexible educational and online offerings
    • Strengthen outreach to and support for underrepresented students
    • Maintain commitment to affordability and accessibility
  3. Strengthen partnerships for community, workforce, and economic development
    • Create seamless processes and practices for student transition from K-12 to UVU
    • Improve industry partnerships to meet workforce and community needs
    • Strengthen engaged learning and community engagement opportunities for students, faculty, and staff

Strategy Map

A strategy map is a diagram that shows an organization’s strategy on a single page. A strategy map has three significant uses:

  1. It helps every employee understand their organization’s overall strategy and where they fit in.
  2. It helps keep everyone literally on the same page.
  3. It helps employees see how their work helps the institution meet its strategic objectives.

At the top and center of a strategy map, we place the organization’s mission or vision statement. Stacked down the map’s left side are four perspectives: financial, customers or stakeholders, internal processes, and enablers. A for-profit enterprise would typically place the perspectives from top to bottom in the order previously described. In a non-profit organization like UVU, we place the financial perspective at the bottom. Making money is not our aim, but financial objectives support everything else we do.

Within each perspective, we place a small number of strategic objectives. Arrows indicate how one or more strategic objectives help accomplish others. Finally, we add a weight to each strategic objective indicating the amount of effort and resource we want to commit to them currently. While most aspects of the strategy map remain as is for a considerable length of time, the weights assigned to each objective should be regularly reviewed and potentially adjusted to meet changing needs.

We created a strategy map for Digital Transformation at UVU with Brett Knowles and others at Hirebook. Brett and his colleagues patiently helped us craft our strategy, asked probing questions that refined our language, and acquainted us with powerful ontologies and techniques to connect our project work with our strategic objectives.

Figure 1: Strategy map for the UVU Division of Digital Transformation, including strategic objectives and associated weights.

At the top and center of the strategy map, illustrated in Figure 1, is an abbreviated form of the UVU Mission Statement. You can see the four perspectives down the figure’s left side: stakeholders, internal processes, enablers, and financial. We’ve added brief definitions of each perspective to help us remember who or what is included in each. Within each perspective, we have added strategic objectives.

Within the financial perspective, we have a single strategic objective, Plan, Budget, and Assess, which represents the UVU planning and budgeting process known as PBA. We used a shared governance approach, with much discussion and compromise, to determine the weight associated with each strategic objective. In this case, we determined that we’ll spend 10% of our effort and resources on this objective. This strategic objective supports all other objectives in the strategy map. Arrows have been omitted for clarity.

The enablers perspective contains three strategic objectives: Be Responsive, Invest in Staff Development, and Manifest UVU Values. Accomplishing these strategic objectives is essential to enable the organization to accomplish the strategic objectives above them. We must invest in staff development to ensure they continue to be productive professionals who can deliver high-quality results. The staff must also be responsive, i.e., react quickly and positively to institutional concerns and needs. Finally, they must manifest UVU values of exceptional care, exceptional accountability, and exceptional results. This perspective will receive 35% of our effort and resources.

The perspective dealing with internal processes contains four strategic objectives: Practice Exceptional Product Portfolio Management, Provide Transformative Solutions, Strengthen Our Partnerships, and Deliver Delightful Experiences. Our division doesn’t currently have a strong practice in product portfolio management. We must develop this process to enable the delivery of the other three strategic objectives in this perspective. A strong product portfolio management process will strengthen our relationships with internal partners and enable our organization to provide transformative solutions. Together these three strategic objectives will enable our division to deliver delightful experiences to our stakeholders. This perspective will currently receive 50% of our attention and resources.

The stakeholders perspective includes three strategic objectives: Achieve Student Success, Include All Learners, and Engage Our Partners. While we organize our division, strengthen our internal processes, and develop our staff, we will only expend 5% of our effort and resources on these strategic objectives. However, these objectives are shared by all divisions at UVU. We expect that pursuing the strategic objectives in the internal processes and enablers perspectives will increase other divisions’ ability to focus on these important strategic objectives.

Impact Ontology

An impact ontology describes the impact that business processes ideally have on strategic objectives. The UVU Division of Digital Transformation has nine major business processes:

  1. Financial
  2. Product Portfolio Management
  3. Operations
  4. Service Management
  5. Human Resources
  6. Research and Development
  7. Data Delivery
  8. Risk and Security Management
  9. Digital Transformation Strategic Planning

Note that these nine business processes are not necessarily organizational units.

Figure 2: Impact ontology for the UVU Division of Digital Transformation, including major business processes, strategic objectives, and indicators of the potential impact business processes ideally have on associated strategic objectives.

The impact ontology illustrated in Figure 2 shows the impact that business objectives have on achieving strategic objectives. Our nine business processes are included across the top. The strategic objectives and associated weights from the strategy map are included down the figure’s left side. We have a value from zero to five at the intersection of each business process and strategic objective. Like the strategic objective weights, these values were obtained through a shared governance exercise and much discussion. Zeros indicate that the associated business objective has no impact on reaching the associated strategic objective. In contrast, fives indicate that the associated business process strongly influences reaching the associated strategic objective. The grey levels are added to aid in identifying impactful business processes. For the UVU Division of Digital Transformation, the Operations business process impacts our strategic objective of Delivering Delightful Experiences but does not impact our objective of Invest in Staff Development.

We can glean other interesting information from an impact ontology. For example, intersections containing fours or fives identify business processes that greatly impact the associated strategic objectives. We should monitor these processes using key performance indicators (KPIs) and improve them. Additionally, a business process owner can use the column associated with their business process to determine where to deploy their best people and the most resource for the greatest impact. Finally, looking across a row tells us which business processes should be represented in activities intended to enhance the institution’s ability to achieve the associated strategic objective.

Performance Ontology

The performance ontology illustrated in Figure 3 shows a relationship between business processes and strategic objectives.

Figure 3: Performance ontology for the UVU Division of Digital Transformation, including major business processes, strategic objectives, impact measures, and indicators of how the current performance of business processes are impacting associated strategic objectives.

In this case, the relationship we’re mapping is how well our organization performs each business process to pursue associated strategic objectives. Like the previously discussed impact ontology, the performance ontology includes our nine business processes across the top. The strategic objectives and associated weights are included down the figure’s left side. For convenience, we have included the impact ontology values from Figure 2. We have added a score from one to five, indicating how our organization performs each business process to pursue associated strategic objectives. These scores were obtained through self-evaluation and much discussion. In the future, these scores should be obtained through the measurement and evaluation of key performance indicators (KPIs). The color-coding indicates the magnitude of the strategic gap. The strategic gap is calculated by taking the difference between the impact a business process should have on a strategic objective and the actual performance we’re achieving and then multiplying by the strategic objective’s weight.

The color-coding of the performance ontology directs attention to important areas where there is a strategic gap. For example, the Data Delivery business process and Deliver Delightful Experiences strategic objective. In this case, the difference between the potential impact of the business process, determined to be a four, and our current performance, determined to be a two, multiplied by a strategic objective weighting of 17 creates a significant strategic gap of 34, is color-coded red, and demands our attention. The Operations business process has a potential impact of four on Manifest UVU Values while our performance receives a value of two. The impact and performance values are identical to those of the previous example. Still, a lower strategic objective weighting of 7 results in a strategic gap of 14, is color-coded yellow, and deserves less attention. Similarly, the Data Delivery business process’s desired impact on Achieve Student Success is a four while our performance yields a two. A strategic gap exists, but because the importance of that strategic objective is low, the strategic gap of 4 doesn’t warrant our attention and is color-coded green.

Strategic Gap

As previously described, the difference between impact and performance, weighted by the importance of a strategic objective, results in a strategic gap measure.

Figure 4: Strategic Objective Gap graph where the total bar height indicates the desired level of impact, the blue bars represent the current performance level, and the yellow bars the magnitude of the existing strategic gap.

The yellow portion of each bar illustrated in Figure 4 represents the total strategic gap for the associated strategic objective. The yellow portion’s height is the difference between the desired impact, total bar height, and our current performance, height of the blue portion. In the figure, the strategic objectives are ordered from greatest to the least strategic gap. The largest strategic gap in Figure 4 is for the Deliver Delightful Experiences strategic objective.

Each bar’s height is the total impact we desire to exert on each of the strategic objectives. This is computed for each strategic objective by multiplying the strategic objective’s weight and the sum of the business process impacts for the given strategic objective. This result is multiplied by five to enhance visualization.

The blue portion of each bar represents our current performance towards each of the strategic objectives. This is computed for each strategic objective by multiplying the strategic objective’s weight and the sum of the business process performance values for the given strategic objective. This result is also multiplied by five to enhance visualization.

Project Ontology

The previous section illustrated a process for determining which strategic objectives have significant strategic gaps and need attention. We want to pursue the projects and initiatives with the highest strategic value or the greatest promise of decreasing strategic gaps. Figure 5 shows the project ontology, where we can discover which projects have that promise.

Figure 5: Project ontology showing the impact various projects have on closing the strategic gap for each strategic objective, their strategic value.

The project ontology includes the strategic objectives on the figure’s left side and across the top a list of potential projects and their costs. The costs are in $100,000 increments and include cash and the value of required labor.

The values within the ontology range from zero (blank) to five, where zero indicates the associated project has no ability to close the strategic gap of the associated strategic objective. These projects have no strategic value concerning the associated strategic objective. Five indicates that the associated project has high strategic value and will significantly decrease the strategic gap of the associated strategic objective. For example, a project to create a mobile application will result in a product that significantly closes the gap for several strategic objectives, including Achieve Student Success, Include All Learners, Deliver Delightful Experiences, Provide Transformative Solutions, Strengthen Our Partnerships, Be Responsive, and Manifest UVU Values. This project has a high strategic value.

Figure 6: Strategic Objective Gap Closing graph illustrates the ability of a suite of proposed projects in closing the strategic gap for various strategic objectives.

In Figure 6, the yellow bars represent the strategic gap for each strategic objective, as described in the previous section. The red dots indicate the sum of the projects’ strategic values that impact the associated strategic objective. The successful completion of the proposed projects, which have significant strategic value, would nearly eliminate the strategic gap associated with several objectives: Deliver Delightful Experiences, Be Responsive, Strengthen Our Partnerships, Achieve Student Success, Include All Learners, and Engage Our Partners. In contrast, the other strategic objectives receive insufficient project work of sufficient strategic value to eliminate their strategic gaps.

If resources are fully allocated, the results illustrated in this figure may be used to adjust what projects and initiatives are pursued to distribute the strategic value more uniformly. Alternatively, if more resources are available to pursue additional projects, the graph indicates where strategic value is needed, which may be used to select appropriate projects.

Project Priority and Value

As shown in the previous section, a suite of projects may significantly decrease strategic gaps. However, the ability to close a strategic gap may also be attributed to individual projects. We should pursue projects and initiatives that have significant strategic value, i.e., significantly decrease strategic gaps.

Figure 7: Initiative Impact illustrates the strategic gap closing value of each of the proposed projects and initiatives. The dark blue bars illustrate project value in terms of strategic value per dollar spent.

Figure 7 illustrates the strategic value or gap-closing ability of each project and initiative. The initiative with the highest strategic value is creating a business intelligence unit and associated governance and processes. Projects to create a new web site, intranet portal, and mobile application are also strategically valuable.

The dark blue bars in Figure 7 indicate the impact value of each project. This is simply a project’s strategic value divided by the project’s cost. The MS Telephony project may not be strategically impactful, but it saves the institution money and has nearly zero cost.

As a division, we will seek approval and funding to pursue the strategically most impactful projects, those with high value, and those that save the institution money that may be applied to other high impact projects.

Summary

As pointed out earlier, a strategy should inform where improvements in business processes should be made and what projects and initiatives should be pursued. In this post, I described a process to determine the gap between an organization’s desired performance level and its current performance concerning strategic objectives. Also, a method to determine the strategic value of projects and initiatives was described. Combining these two activities enables us to evaluate proposed projects and initiatives in terms of which will best help us meet our strategic objectives. In environments where ROI is difficult to determine, this is a powerful tool to help us realize our mission.

My Career Change

Monday, March 16, 2020, I ended a 31-year career at Brigham Young University (BYU) and started in a new role at Utah Valley University (UVU). I accepted the newly created position of Vice President of Digital Transformation and CIO. I was hopeful that I could stay above the tactical problems associated with IT systems and focus on the institution’s digital transformation. While that was a worthy goal, COVID-19 put a damper on most strategic thinking and a significant focus on getting 4,000 courses online and ensuring that the Office of IT-supported that effort.

While the initial intent was to get to know my new team, help them understand my expectations and plans, and hire an admin and an associate vice president, COVID-19 put an end to all of that. My initial introduction to the team was a virtual team meeting, and our message was to stay safe, stay alive, and work from home if you can.

This week wasn’t the perfect traditional first week, but it was ideal for me to join the team at UVU. I think I have already contributed, and I hope to contribute much more as we move forward. I am encouraged by how quickly the cabinet, led by President Astrid S. Tuminez, adapts to new challenges and moves to new communication mechanisms and processes. She’s a great leader, and her team is anxious to serve UVU students. We hope the students are safe and ready to learn remotely.

myCoreDump

Introduction

I hope you enjoy this core dump! The thoughts are so interrelated and connected it is difficult to optimize the presentation so you may need to apply your own defragmentation to get it. In addition, the order is not intended to indicate priority, it is all freaking important!

University API (UAPI)

When acquiring or developing an application it must have an API, and preferably a RESTful one. If the function of the application is core to university business then it should be exposed through the UAPI. If it is not a core function of most, if not all, educational institutions, we should expose the API through our API management tools, but it shouldn’t be part of the UAPI.

Personal API (PAPI)

When we build a system that will store personal / individual information we should consider how we might leave the information in the hands or possession of the individual and access it for our use through their personal API. Since no one yet has a personal API, for the time being we must provide that as well. This will require you to stretch your imagination and creativity, but that’s good for you.

Domain-Driven Design

Everyone should read at least the first two chapters of the book Implementing Domain-Driven Design by Vaughn Vernon! The super short summary – bring domain experts and developers together to create a ubiquitous language that is embedded in the code itself. In addition, define or determine bounded contexts wherein this language is valid. Without this you won’t understand how we’re going to build solutions and you won’t have a clue what is in and what is not in a microservice. Read it!

Microservices

Microservices are an architectural style that will be used at BYU to create larger systems. Systems built using microservices are loosely coupled, I would even go as far as saying they are highly decoupled, they implement a single business capability, they have well defined interfaces, and communicate using only these interfaces. The size of a microservice is governed by the size of the associated bounded context, go and read the DDD book! At BYU an important part of a microservices’ interface is its ability to raise events. Go figure out why.

Event-Driven Architecture (EDA)

Systems that poll are inefficient! Build systems that raise events so other systems don’t have to waste time and resources. You can keep asking me if you have to do this, but you can be assured that when I change my mind I’ll let you know. If you didn’t find the humor in the last sentence then go read the links again.

Application Acquisition

When we purchase applications we should give preference, strong preference, to those that run in the cloud. In fact, before we choose an application that is not available as a service choose someone in your group you don’t love and care about to come get my approval.

When we build services or applications they will run at Amazon and use the most abstract service offerings that make sense. In other words, we should not instantiate EC2 servers and S3 storage and then build queues, notification services, etc., but instead should use services such as SQS, SNS, Lambda Functions, etc.

DevOps

DevOps is a culture and practice that we hope will result in the rapid development, testing, and deployment of software. We are measuring the number of deployments / week, failures / week, and time to recovery. We are promoting small changes, thorough automated testing, and deployment to production often. Your team (the DDD team) is in charge and responsible for the functionality, performance, and reliability of “your” product. 

If those in the hardware world think you’re off the hook, think again. Software is eating the world, software is eating your world. The days of interacting with network switches, routers, firewalls, etc. are over. Learn to program, learn to configure hardware devices using programs, learn to use DevOps to configure, test, and deploy hardware platforms as rapidly as “other” developers – that’s right, you just became developers!

Where to Compute

In the past we built data centers and populated them with servers, storage systems, and network components. As CPU performance increased computers became more able to run multiple applications, but stability due to unintentional application interaction made this approach intolerable.

We found ourselves with many underutilized servers running single applications to maintain reliability. Along came server virtualization enabling us to instantiate multiple virtual servers on each physical server. Over the past several years the number of physical servers has diminished considerably.

Well, it is time for another paradigm shift. We are now embarking on a journey that will result in our compute and storage being somewhere else. We will take advantage of Amazon to deliver what our applications and services need to run. Acquired applications will also run in the “cloud”. in either case they will not be housed here. Resources used previously to purchase servers and storage, and maintain them will be redirected to this new endeavor.

Networks

Unlike server and storage, I believe we will have a wired and wireless network on campus for the foreseeable future. However, the way we deploy, configure and maintain these networks will change drastically. Remember, software is eating the world and networking is not an exception to the rule. Network components will be physically installed in some generic way and then configured remotely via software.

In a DevOps fashion, when a problem occurs you figure out what went wrong in the configuration script, you repair the script, you test the script, and you redeploy. Remember, we’ll be watching how often you deploy, how many failures occur, and how long it takes to recover.

The days of hugging these devices are over. If you want one to hug, you can have one of the old ones and keep it in your office – disconnected from the network of course.

Domain of Ones Own (DoOO)

As we embark on this new path it is a great time for you to consider contributing to the content of the Internet. Let your light so shine by getting a domain of your own and sharing your goodness and skills with others. get one at domains.byu.edu. Here you can blog your greatest thoughts, post content that you syndicate to Facebook, Twitter or other services. Go learn, learning is fun!

We are offering this service to all students because we believe they should understand more about how the Internet works. We believe they have much to offer the world and they need to know they can share it with little help from service providers. What they build is transportable to other hosting services and is theirs! In the future a DoOO will enable an individual to have a portfolio and expose this and much more through their personal API (PAPI).

Final Thoughts – For Now!

We have a great team! Let’s pursue all of this FUN with the greatest enthusiasm and Heaven will shine down on us. Let us share our best thinking with others: share code on github, answer questions on stackoverflow, blog about your experiences, publish papers, present at conferences, participate on panels. In short, learn, teach one another, and teach the world!

myDoorbell: A Learning Adventure

Introduction

After being a university chief information officer (CIO) for more than a decade, I decided to refresh my technical skills acquired through formal education and practice as an electrical engineer. I learn best by doing, so I picked a project I was interested in pursuing with the end goal being the learning, and not the finished product. I intend to share several posts that I hope illustrate the things learned and hope they are of value to the reader.

My Project

I have interest in the Internet of Things (IoT) movement and wanted to make strides towards making this practical, simple, and secure. I believe connected devices should be simple and consume little power. This likely requires devices that wake periodically, connect to some sort of network, and then go back to a low power state. After some experimentation it was clear, at the time, that WiFi was a real power hog and wasn’t a likely candidate. However, this realization led me to believe that another router, hub, or coordinator device would be necessary. I recall the effort required to convince homeowners to acquire WiFi routers and looked for an approach that would make this palatable.

I decided the answer was to create a product that homeowners would want to purchase because it excited them, and by the way it contained a network router / coordinator. Once acquired on its own merits, the product would facilitate the inexpensive and simple acquisition of other devices that connect to it. Products worth considering would be interesting to households and would connect to household power:

  • Lamps
  • Televisions or other audio / video (AV) equipment
  • Thermostats
  • Doorbells

Lamps seem simple and boring. However, after implementing my first choice, I know I should have chosen a lamp because it would have been boring, simple, and done! I decided embedding anything in televisions or other AV equipment would require skills and resources I didn’t have. Nest took the thermostat direction and while I disagree on the approach of putting so much technology in a tightly coupled system, I didn’t want everyone to judge my work against a commercially available product. I chose to implement a doorbell because they are ubiquitous, simple and meet my requirements:

  • They are in nearly every U.S. household.
  • Power is available where the indoor ringer is found.
  • They do one thing and no one cares if they do anything else.
  • They are in a good physical location for a network router.
  • They are out of the way, aren’t moved, never unplugged, or inadvertently reconfigured.

I chose to create a doorbell that would function as a replacement doorbell, would act as an IoT network router, and connect this network to the Internet by also connecting to an existing WiFi network. A quick trip to Home Depot revealed that an inexpensive doorbell cost about $13. Even with no experience in product development, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to build a doorbell that also acted as an IoT to WiFi gateway for $13. To be compelling enough to get households to acquire my doorbell it would have to be feature rich:

  • This doorbell would play ringtones uploaded by the user to celebrate seasons, holidays, birthdays, etc.
  • Each time someone rings this doorbell the time and date should be logged.
  • The owner can configure the bell to text them when someone rings.
  • The bell should be easily configured not to make noise when babies are sleeping, pets shouldn’t be disturbed, or the owner just doesn’t want to know you’re there.
  • When the bell is rung it should be configurable to access other Web resources such as APIs, webhooks, etc.
  • The system should be controlled and configured using a mobile app.
  • The doorbell must be a simple replacement of the original doorbell ringer.

While these features increase the likelihood of making it compelling enough to overcome the necessary price point, it certainly eliminates any chance of it being simple.

Summary

In this post I declared my intent to refresh my technical skills through the development of an IoT product, an amazing doorbell, myDoorbell. In the next few posts I will describe how a typical doorbell works, illustrate the general system layout for this new doorbell, describe how to create it so it fits into existing doorbell systems, and discuss many details of the techniques and technologies that make this possible. It will be a fun journey with many twists and turns, but that’s how learning happens!

Domains, Personal APIs, and Portfolios

Introduction

In addition to the traditional educational experience students at Brigham Young University receive, we want them to acquire skills, techniques, and tools that facilitate their current and future learning. We believe students should learn how to control and own their digital identity, content, and personal data. With this goal in mind we have initiated a pilot program using a concept known as Domain of Ones Own. We hope to accomplish several goals using this concept and associated training:

  1. Teach students, faculty, and staff why they should care about owning, controlling, and appropriately sharing their online identity, the content that defines them, and their personal information.
  2. Help individuals understand how to choose a domain name that accurately and professionally represents them to others.
  3. Encourage members of our community to not simply consume, but contribute to the body of knowledge through the use of blogs and social media.
  4. Support individuals in publishing a Personal API (i.e. api.example.com) that allows the owner to authorize others to interact with their personal information and revoke access privileges as desired.
  5. Support students and faculty in creating a portfolio (i.e. api.example.com/portfolio) as part of their Personal API that is owned and maintained by the individual owner, and yet enables the owner to authorize others to consume, contribute to, and evaluate their collection.

Domain of Ones Own

Many members of our community share their pictures, memories, thoughts, insights, and writings on social media sites that are controlled by others. The privacy policies of these sites change over time, access privileges may change, copyright ownership is a concern, and the look and feel desired by the content owner may change without their knowledge, input, or control. Contributors have no control over the amount or type of advertising placed around or even over their content. In many cases they may not be able to easily move their content to other providers, remove content they no longer wish to share, or even pass ownership onto others as desired. We want members of the BYU community to understand that there is a better way.

Consequently, we have chosen to use and teach a concept known as Domain of Ones Own. We first herd about Domain of Ones Own from Jim Groom when he was at the University of Mary Washington. After a visit we were hooked on the idea of freeing our community and using the tool to rethink content ownership, Personal APIs, portfolios, and Learning Management Systems.

Our implementation of a Domain of Ones Own consists of a simple hosted server configured using cPanel and pointed to by the end-user’s chosen domain. We are using the service and tools provided by Reclaim Hosting who provides the tools, hosting, and the process for acquiring domains. With the default, initial configuration domain owners have a blog driven by the Known blogging tool. While this is a great introduction that allows domain owners to contribute immediately, the system is open and can grow as the domain owner’s sophistication increases. The system allows users to set up subdomains, email servers, database servers, and install and run many LAMP stack based applications. The tools and services have been chosen carefully to allow users to move their domain and associated content to other providers easily. Tools were chosen to be immediately useful, provide future flexibility, and help users learn introductory system administration skills that are critical to understanding the world they are in and will inherit.

Domains

We believe every individual should own and control their domain. Choosing an appropriate domain is important. In many cases the domain will be used in a professional capacity for years, perhaps for life. We are creating instructional material, including short video segments, which will give advice on how to choose well. We intend to create these materials in a way that minimizes branding and IP protection so others can easily use them for similar purposes at their institutions.

Personal API and Portfolios

Imagine a world where other sites on the web don’t hold your personal data, but instead request access to the data they need through your Personal API. Perhaps you grant them access to only the portions they actually need and restrict them from others. They use the resources they’ve been authorized to access, perform the business functions you desire, return results, and their access is revoked.

For example, imagine you work for weLovePrivacy.com and it’s payday. The payroll system springs to life and determines how much you should be paid this month. However, it needs to know how much should be withheld for taxes, how much pretax contributions to make, where these should be made, where you want your money deposited, etc. In a traditional system all of this information is centrally held. This centrally held information compels the institution to create systems to enable you to manipulate it, and makes the company liable for any loss of this data. On the other hand, you are depending on the institution safeguarding your personal information and not using it for nefarious purposes, a dangerous assumption.

However, there is a better way. Imagine the payroll system interacts with your Personal API to obtain your social security number, the number of exemptions you are declaring, the name of your 401k vendor, 401k account number, your checking account provider and account number, etc. The institutional system does the computation and disbursements, and your Personal API revokes access to these resources until the next time they are needed. While the institution could store the collected information it may not be in their best interest to do so and could even be released to them with the understanding it is to be used for the sole purpose disclosed to the user.

While it may be a while before ERP administrators are comfortable getting employee data from their personal API, there are plenty of other scenarios where a personal API is useful. Portfolios is an example of such a scenario. An instructor at an institution requests authorization to place assignments into your Personal Portfolio, their request is granted, and the assignments are deposited. You perform learning activities that generate solutions to the assignment, and deposit these in your portfolio. You have authorized the instructor to see them and place their critiques back into your portfolio. Since this is your portfolio it moves with you from one part of your life to another, from one institution to another, etc. It is yours to use and share as you choose.

Summary

It is time for learners to take control of their content, artifacts of education, and personal information. Our desire and intent is to teach these principles to our community and give them the necessary tools. We hope to do so in a way that others can easily use and benefit from.

Freedom via Abstraction

At Brigham Young University (BYU) we have been developing a University API to expose the functionality of a reasonably generic educational institution, while consuming a very specific set of underlying technologies. Our generic institution has instructors, students, courses, classes, and locations. These resources and available HTTP methods are being combined to expose acceptable business processes such as registration, adding and dropping classes, etc. We will continue to add resources and appropriate business processes as necessary to meet our institutional needs.

Our intent is to develop future applications by consuming the University API and will encourage others to do the same. We will no longer consume the user interfaces or APIs of underlying systems. This layer of abstraction will enable us to replace the underlying technologies with new technologies that provide similar functionality. Regardless of the tools or technologies used, those consuming the University API will be unaware of the underlying change. This will give the IT organization the freedom to make changes to reduce cost, modularize monolithic applications, move to microservices, etc. without impacting application developers or end users. This will bring them freedom via abstraction.

I’m writing about this today because in my mind this is an important general architectural pattern that should be followed more often. David Wheeler­­­, a British computer scientist, is credited with saying, “All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection, except of course for the problem of too many indirections.” While most often quoted by programmers in discussions about pointers and similar constructs, I think abstraction layers, like the one discussed above, are perfect examples of additional layers of indirection that help us solve problems.

While APIs make this work easier, the approach is more generally applicable. For example, imagine you have an ERP system that is aging and the thought of living through another ERP transition scares you to death, or at least adds one more reason to consider early retirement. Imagine you add a user interface layer between the existing ERP and its users. This could require consuming an API provided by the ERP vendor, wouldn’t that be awesome, or screen scraping or via other less exciting means. When this is complete the new ERP system can be installed and connected to the user interface developed above. The two systems can be brought to a consistent state and the connected user interface can be used to keep them that way. Transaction responses can be compared until you’re confident in the new system. At this point the old ERP system can be retired. You have transitioned to a new ERP system and the users are unaware, that’s success!

There are two main points I think are worth noting. First, an additional layer of abstraction can free an IT organization to make changes without impacting end-users. Second, end-users shouldn’t use the provided user interfaces of institutionally important applications, but rather be provided with screens and applications we develop on top of APIs we control. Installation of a new application is not complete until an API we control is designed and used to create an abstracted user interface that exposes the desired functionality. When applications are installed using this model, they are more easily replaced. Freedom via abstraction!

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