These pages are intended to be less formal than the content on the UCS website but should certainly illustrate my views as the director of the UCS.
Mission
The mission of the UCS is first-and-foremost to maximise the productivity of teaching and research at the University of Cambridge.
In practical terms this will mean the provision of services to staff involved in teaching and research pretty much regardless of their immediate institution affiliation. This is important at the University of Cambridge so that we provide effective support to the very broad range of contributors in the Cambridge 'ecosystem' ranging from post-doc researchers to tenured professors, college staff and the huge number of visitors. Also, the UCS provides IT services to students (undergraduate and postgraduate) with the particular goal of optimising their absorption of the great Cambridge tuition.
Alignment to departmental and college objectives
Cambridge can be viewed as approximately 200 institutions operating with quite a high degree of autonomy, each pursuing excellence in their respective area of endeavour. These institutions include the 31 colleges, perhaps 120 departments with well understood academic roles across the arts and sciences, and the remainder being institutions that might exist for a special purpose such as a joint venture with another university or have a less direct relationship with the University. The simple guiding ethos for the UCS is that a head of an institution will typically be better placed to judge what is good for their mission than a less-well-informed edict from the UCS, but the UCS is responsible for ensuring its services are wholly fit-for-purpose for this federated organisation and that the institutions are well informed to be able to take advantage of them. On a practical basis, services where it is self-evident there is great value in widespread adoption, such as the Cambridge-wide Lapwing wireless network, will require and have a programme of university-wide promotion to maximise the installation.
So we significantly depend upon intelligent decision-making within the departments and colleges of the university but that is something Cambridge is good at.
Collaboration at the university
A world-class university such as Cambridge has an exceptional need for the academics to be able to collaborate effectively with colleagues both within Cambridge but particularly elsewhere.
The corporate solutions in this space are exclusively based on collaboration within the enterprise, assuming the tight control of the tools used and ownership of all the infrastructure end-to-end in the collaboration. This model is unworkable in academia, and even within Cambridge it would be rare that all the contributors to a research effort are on the University payroll. Consequently the tools made available have to provide great flexibility of access, and the understanding of this need pervades the University Computing Service.
This affects the priority applied to the delivery of services that impact upon collaboration, and our use of metrics to measure our success. In particular, unique users per week is a powerful metric used to assess the value and ease of access to these services which are effectively 'optional-to-use'. For example, the chart on the right shows the count of unique users each week for the Lapwing wireless network with colour-codes for type of authentication (i.e. web vs. eduroam, visitors vs. university members). Note that institutions in the collegiate university opt-in to this service, and pay for the privilege of having the network installed in their buildings, so the relationship is fundamentally transparent and healthy but we have to ensure local decisions (e.g. not installing this network) don't act to the detriment of the enterprise as a whole. Carefully tracking usage is one mechanism by which we ensure we're on the right track.
Most importantly, these services have to be designed well to give the institutions what they need, which typically includes effective local management of how the service is adopted in their institution, sometimes with the connection of unique local services, and transparency of costing so our central element of service provision receives the appropriate degree of scrutiny by the institution receiving the service.
A variety of the services provided by the UCS facilitate effective peer collaboration amongst academics, but would be unusual in the commercial world. The Cambridge University Data Network provides academic departments the ability to easily connect equipment and servers via public internet addresses so they can be directly accessed by their colleagues elsewhere. Our development of a Shibboleth authentication service so our members can both authenticate their own resources and access resources around the globe using their existing Cambridge credentials was given priority because of its value in inter-enterprise collaboration. This was an example of a service where the UCS were aware of the potential and implemented the service ahead of awareness within the departments, but the usage of the service has organically grown to thousands of users taking advantage of the capability each month.
The scale of the services
It needs to be understood that in the provision of IT services across the collegiate university, the UCS affects the daily lives of about 40,000 people. In addition approximately 10,000 visitors each year take advantage of our services while they are here, e.g. with temporary access to the Lapwing wireless network. Our data network connects about 130,000 devices with need for high-speed and robust communication within Cambridge and globally. The 'workstation' service deployed to PC's across Cambridge supports about 20,000 users accessing those PC's daily. The VoIP telephony service, with 16,000 users connected to a single common core, was the largest of its kind in the HE sector globally. Any system at Cambridge has the potential to become significant on a global scale, whether it is our publicly-accessible persistent digital archive DSpace at Cambridge, or our Streaming Media Service.
So the DNA of the University Computing Service necessarily includes the ability to design and implement services that scale to support the likely demands of a world-class university.