Moving targets

Amongst other things my team issues SSL certificates to the University. Whilst much of the process is automated, there is a call and response routine we need to follow with our certificate provider that has to be dealt with by hand. Earlier this year the Heartbleed vulnerability caused us to work like demons to replace all impacted SSL certificates. At the time we were grateful that only some of the certificates we had issued were impacted.

Back in September my colleague Jon, who masterminds the technical side of this service, told us that SHA-1 certificates were to be deprecated on a rather aggressive time scale by Chrome with other browser producers falling in line with them in due course. So we sat down and worked out how we were going to handle this for the ~300 certificates we had issued that were impacted. our cert issuing authority was helpful, and after a few conversations they agreed to issue free of charge replacement SHA-2 certificates.

Strategy

Much of August has been spent away. The last two weeks have been "re-entry". Catching up, looking for balls that may have been dropped and tidying up loose ends before term starts. Officially term begins on 1st October. However, the University has started emerging from its summer slumber this week, and the operational side of things is starting to feel busy.

Over June and July I'd been involved in 'Workstrands' at the office. These are working groups drawn from volunteers across our newly formed IT organisation and other parts of the University. Their purpose is to help design the broad shape of the new organisation following a thematic approach - Architecture, Service Delivery, Information Security, etc. Each Workstrand is an overarching theme, containing multiple threads. I have been leading three of these threads split across two Workstrands covering aspects of information security and user administration - things that I led in the old UCS. It has been interesting work, although an ambitious set of deadlines co-inciding with the most hectic part of the User Admin cycle made it relatively challenging to find sufficient time to invest in these areas and do a reasonable job.

Making power while the sun shines

It's no secret that I'm keen on self generated energy, energy prices that only go one way and my environmental footprint are things that concern me. However, environmental measures need to make financial sense as well as being something that can be painlessly incorporated into my lifestyle for them to be worthwhile. This puts me between the two camps of the "green" (some of whom are fond of telling me that I should adopt green technologies on ethical grounds without considering any ROI), and the "capitalists" who are only interested in the bottom line. I suspect that most people would be willing to consider greener technologies if my two criteria are met, without the lectures on ethics.

Managing complexity

The University has grown organically since its foundation in 1209. Organisationaly it consists of a complex federated set of entities. We use shorthand terms such as "big U" and "little U" to differentiate when we are talking about 'the University' as a central organisation with centralised administration, departments and libraries, from the broader University which includes the Colleges (31 legally separate entities) and many research institutes than have an orthogonal (and often very longstanding) relationship with some parts of "small U" which may or may not have some formal footing.

Building Consensus

This year I have been chair of a major University committee, the Board of Scrutiny. All members are drawn from the University's governing body, the Regent House, and elected in a ballot of all Regents (a constituency of about 4,000 academic and academic related staff). The Board acts as the University's internal watchdog body. It has wide ranging powers and generally meets in camera with senior figures such as the Vice-Chancellor and the Registrary to question them on a variety of subjects. Operationally is very much like a Parliamentary select committee.

ITIL Foundation Course

It was back to school this week as I spent three days following the ITIL Foundation Course. My Department is evaluating whether ITIL is the right approach for our newly merged IT organisation, so I and 13 other middle managers had the opportunity to dip our toes into the world of ITIL.

My primary motivation for doing the course was to gain a better understanding of the language of ITIL. Increasingly this is being used at work, and it has become clear that the semantics are highly specialised. Indeed at the start of the course we were implored to "forget the meaning of terms you think you know". At the end of 3 days I feel I have a better understanding of what our slowly increasing band of ITIL-speakers are saying, some idea of how to talk the same language and an inkling of how this might improve the day to day running of our organisation.
So what was the course like?