IT Agility: The Phenomenology of Virtualization, Consumerization, and Organizational Change

Theodore Love

Director of Technology

Phoenix Central School District

@ted_love

Ted Love - IT Agility

IT Agility: The Phenomenology of Virtualization, Consumerization, and Organizational Change


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THOUGHT EXPERIMENT• Shareholders decide that your

organization has been significantly falling behind the competition and that the entire business will have to be conducted differently in the future in order to be competitive

• The product will be created to new standards within one year

• The new evaluation system will give each employee a score out of 100 points – based 60% on a 99 criterion rubric and 40% on the measurable profitability added to the product by the employee

• The budget will be reduced, and employment cuts will be made


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How should IT respond?

• Lead?

• Follow?

• Get out of the way?

• What would you have done differently leading up to these events?


New York was awarded $700 million in funding from the Federal Education Department’s “Race to the Top” in return for:

• New statewide curriculum based on the Common Core standards

• Districts will create and administer Common Interim Assessments (CIA) for Data Driven Instruction (DDI) and teachers will measure annual Student Learning Objectives (SLO)

• New computer-based assessments from the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)

• NYSED is creating an Instructional Reporting and Improvement System (IRIS) Education Data Portal (EDP)

• Revised Annual Professional Performance Review for teachers (APPR)

• Fund school turnaround for the poorest performing schools Creative Commons Attribute: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bruceclay/

http://www.corestandards.org

http://www.parcconline.org

http://www.engageny.org

I believe that the biggest revolution of public education

since the formation of the central school district (1925)

is about to take place and that technology will play a

crucial role.


Fundamental Belief #1

I believe that IT teams can simultaneously meet and

exceed the ever increasing demands of our end-users

and do so in a way that is simpler and more efficient to

manage and maintain.


Fundamental Belief #2

Reduced IT staff

Reduced equipment and supplies budgets

Increased IT department responsibilities

Increased # of teacher and student workstations

Reduced power consumption


Phoenix Central School District 2009-present

Capital Project (09,10)

Network redesign (09)

Thin clients (09,12)

Novell -> Microsoft (09)

Remote Desktop Session Host (RDSH) (09,10)

Storage Area Network (09,11)


One Step at a Time

Application Virtualization (ongoing)

Virtual Desktops VDI (11)

Server Virtualization (09,11)

User Profile Virtualization (11)

Disaster Recovery (12)

WiFi (12)


“…we’re not VDI haters. We actually love VDI! (Seriously!) What we don’t like is when VDI gets a bad name when it fails because people try to use it for the wrong reasons.” (83)

“If you look at the commonalities of why people choose to use desktop virtualization you see that they’re not trying to replace Windows and they’re not trying to virtualize 100% of their desktops. That means the even in the companies that have chosen to implement desktop virtualization, there are still a lot of traditional, physical Windows-based desktop and laptops in their environment.” (132-133)

– Brian Madden

Centralize management of desktops

Reduce footprint by having a lightweight end device

Consolidate and share compute resources

Benefit: flexibility of user device agnosticism


Goals for Phoenix Desktop Virtualization

Desktop technicians become desktop architects

Better desktop management benefits all desktops (physical and virtual)

Percentage of logged technician time spent on troubleshooting went from 29.7% to 7.4% over five years


Effects of Desktop Virtualization


2007-2008 2008-2009 2009-2010 2010-2011 2011-20120.0

5.0

10.0

15.0

20.0

25.0

30.0

35.0

40.0

45.0

50.0

Troubleshooting

Configuring

Updating

Installing

Imaging


Why is this important?


"U.S. public schools have been largely impervious to the productivity

gains that other sectors have realized from technology, for two main

reasons. First, until recently, they hadn't widely adopted technology:

Education ranked dead last, a 2002 Commerce Department study

reported, in deployment of technology relative to number of

employees. Second, when technology was deployed, it wasn't being

used to do anything different - a problem many industries have long

since confronted and resolved.“ Harvard Business Review, March 2012


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• School of One in NYC gives each child an

individualized daily scheduled called their

"playlist“

• By October 2011 Khan Academy had 2600

videos and sees 39 million pageviews and 3.5

million unique visitors per month (http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/19/khan-academy-triples-unique-users-to-3-5-million))

• Blackboard purchased by an investor group last

July for $1.64 billion

• The Software and Information Industry

Association (SIIA) and consultant John

Richards of cs4ed consulting estimated that the

edtech software market size is at approximately

$7.5 billion (http://www.fastcoexist.com/1678918/marc-andreessen-on-the-potential-promises-of-edtech-investments)


@ASUSkySong Education Innovation Summit April 16-18, 2012


#novaedu at Microsoft – Reston, VA June 1-3, 2012


New Schools Venture Fund – Aspen Institute #nsvfsummit

June 12-13, 2012


#launchedu at Microsoft – Mountain View, CA June 12-13, 2012


https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aj0vmJwi1Vq3dE9LX1M5MnFyTXhyZXFTZDY1bDZrZ0E





Education is going to look different and be delivered differently.

Who is working with Principals and Superintendents to navigate?

To be effective at the local level will require an IT team who can operate with the agility to adapt and survive within the fast pace of rapid change

OR… be outsourced entirely

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Are you

implementing

or

innovating?Creative Commons Attribute: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kanaka/

Questions?


Thank You!

Theodore LoveDirector of TechnologyPhoenix Central School District

@ted_love
