Brocbhre - University of Tasmania

Innovating to stand the test of time

Champions of change

The University of Tasmania is one of Australia’s oldest universities, but its Chief Information Officer Jeff Murray explains how it’s a stalwart for the digital age WRITTEN BY

NIKI WA LDEGR AVE

PRODUCED BY

GLEN WHITE

U N I V E R S I T Y O F TA S M A N I A

J

eff Murray, Chief Information Officer (CIO) at the University of

fantastic their contribution has been

Tasmania (UTAS), remembers

recognised in this way,” he says. “At

reading Martha Heller’s book, The CIO

any one time we’re working on up to

Paradox: Battling the Contradictions of IT

40 capital-funded projects. The

Leadership, a few years ago, in which she

current team is 109-strong and

says the CIO’s role is to create a team of

we’re a third more productive than

many CIOs.

ever before, producing a greater

It’s something that’s stuck with Murray, who has built – and continues to build – a

number of outputs per person.

“We’ve refined our people,

solid, award-winning IT team at the

becoming more efficient and we’ve

university, which is ranked in the top 10

done that through programme

Australian research universities and the

delivery and better governance.”

top 2% of universities globally.

11

“The team are outstanding and it’s

In the last year alone, the team has won

UTAS is one of Australia’s most geographically-splayed universi-

numerous national and state awards,

ties, with courses across 65

including:

locations and four main campuses at Sydney, Burnie, Launceston and Hobart. It’s home to more than 50

• AIIA iAward Winners Tasmania (2017)

world-class research centres and

- Winners of Government and Public

institutes across science, engineer-

Sector for the eResearch Ecosystem

ing and technology, health and

- Merit Infrastructure and Platform

medicine, marine Antarctic and

Innovation of the year

maritime, business, arts, law and

• Australian Institute of Project

education, and together they

Management (AIPM) Project Management

generate a rich and diverse

Achievement Awards (2017)

research culture, underpinned by

- Winners of Tasmanian Project of the Year

vibrant multi-disciplinary collabora-

for Skype for Business project

tions, world-class facilities and a

- Winners of Small Project of the Year for

global reputation for research

Skype for Business project

excellence.

• 11th ranking in the CIO Australia Top 50

TECHNOLOGY

“OUR PROGRAMME OF SYSTEMS ENHANCEMENT HAS DELIVERED $10MN IN ANNUAL COST SAVINGS.” — Jeff Murray, Chief Information Officer

BIO

Jeff Murray, Chief Information Officer (CIO), as head of the Information Technology Services (ITS) section, is responsible for ensuring the alignment of ICT strategy and services to the business goals of the organisation. This encompasses the strategic development, agile delivery and support of a broad range of Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) based services for the University campuses in Tasmania, interstate and internationally. The role is a key executive leadership position within the Division of the Chief Operating Officer, reporting to the Chief Operating Officer.

Murray leads the executive management team of ITS and provide high level expert advice to the Chief Operating Officer. He is responsible for strategic management and direction of IT projects/programmes, services and policies at the institutional level and will be expected to work collaboratively with other heads of administrative section to deliver seamless services and support arrangements across the institution.

12

The University of Tasmania partnered with Huawei on the provision of eResearch infrastructure in the area of high performance compute (HPC) infrastructure. The University’s portfolio additionally offers cloud-compute and research data storage to the Tasmania research community and their collaborators.

HPC Solution • 256 CH121 v3 blade nodes (more than 7,000 Central Processing Unit (CPU) cores) • 100Gbps EDR non-blocking infinity band network • Implemented a now Open Source HPC cluster software

The HPC cluster provided a massive increase in capability and performance which was quickly adopted by the research community. Our mission is to deliver the best possible solution to enable researchers to solve the big problems of not just today, but tomorrow.

Jeff Murry, Chief Information Officer

Huawei worked well with myself and the eResearch Infrastructure team to have the HPC ordered, delivered, racked and ready for acceptance within a matter of three weeks.

There are few other organisations that could have achieved this as effectively.

Adrian Dillon, Deputy Chief Information Officer

About Huawei Enterprise With continuous technologic innovation, Huawei is committed to fully leveraging the power of cloud computing. Software-Defined Networking (SDN), Big Data, and the Internet of Things (IoT) to build an open, flexible, resilient, and secure platform. Huawei Enterprise is committed to carrying out joint innovations with customers and partners, and helping customers across industries, including government and public sectors, financial services, energy, transportation, and manufacturing to achieve the goal of digital upgrade with “agility and intelligence” at the core.

Currently, a total of 197 of Fortune Global 500, including 45 of the top 100, have chosen Huawei as their partner in digital transformation.

Follow us on

Website – e.huawei.com/au Email – Mitar Marescuk (mitar.marescuk@huawei.com)

TECHNOLOGY

MSP external, coutesy of John Gollings 14 Murray is responsible for ensuring the

“We know that our programme of

alignment of ICT-based strategy and services,

systems enhancement has

encompassing strategic development, agile

delivered $10M in annual cost

delivery and support for the campuses in

savings, and in that time the

Tasmania, interstate and internationally.

university’s revenue increased

Tech transformation is crucial to the future of

$160M a year, which was a 40%

the UTAS business strategy, and Murray has

gain in annual revenue. So we know

heavily invested in IT, spending $120M on

the university is vastly more

systems and technology since he started in 2013.

productive as a result of this.

“The importance is to position us for that new

UTAS runs more sites than any

digital era,” he says. “But the flavour we want to

other university in Australia and

bring to the new digital era is that it’s human-rich.

uses technology to help deploy a

People still like to see a person and a face and

richer choice, making it accessible

know there’s a name associated with the service

and connected to its students,

provision.

academic staff and researchers. w w w. b u s i n e s s c h i e f. c o m

U N I V E R S I T Y O F TA S M A N I A

Murray says its aim is to drive the island economy and economic development through a much more integrated, industry-connected, student-connected education system.

“We are definitely working to deliver that education across the whole state of Tasmania, not just in the capital cities,” he says. “Tasmania is the least urbanised state in Australia, so technology helps us do that.”

UTAS is the second university in 15

the country to introduce augmented reality into its teaching – its architecture students can now

“OUR ERESEARCH ECOSYSTEM (EREC) CAN STORE DATA OF ANY SCALE, WITH 7,100 PROCESSORS SERVING 3.7 PETABYTES OF STORAGE – AND CAPACITY CAN BE INCREASED AT ANY TIME TO MEET NEEDS.” — Jeff Murray, Chief Information Officer

learn 3D spatial principals and design using AR – and it produces the most online content in the country from its lecture systems, producing thousands of hours of video per term and delivering live teaching across the four main sites.

With big data, Murray’s team delivered not just the supercomputer but also the software that won the AIIA iAward for the eResearch Ecosystem (eREc), which enables automation and collaboration of the researchers’ data archiving process.

AUGUST 2018

TECHNOLOGY

“eREc can store data of any scale, with 7,100 processors serving 3.7 petabytes of storage – and capacity can be increased at any time to meet needs,” he says. “We called it ‘Facebook for Researchers’ as we can automatically enable where researchers share their open data, and then gain more collaborative viewpoints and analytical viewpoints on it.

“The university’s researchers can move 30GB of data overnight from the International Marine Observatory System (IMOS) between the campus and the mainland. They transport the fifth highest volume of Australian cloud super computations.”

Murray, who is also the chair of the Advisory Committee for Australia’s Academic and Research Network (AARNet), reveals eREc’s biggest users come from the main Australian states, explaining: “Our system in an automated way interprets the metadata, the tags on that data, just like your tag on Twitter, and shares it – so when people are looking for datasets in the marine observatory system, those tags queue their search in and bring them right down to the right place in our information set.

“We’ve seamlessly provided huge datasets to the world in a collaborative way that enable our researchers to pick rich partnerships with other researchers working in that space. Then they can move towards solving vexing global problems together.” w w w. b u s i n e s s c h i e f. c o m

16

U N I V E R S I T Y O F TA S M A N I A

Of course, when it comes to such infrastructure, understanding IT vendor management strategies is key, and UTAS has climacteric partnerships with the likes of Huawei, Dell EMC, HPE, Aruba, Microsoft, VMware, Technology One, ServiceNOW, Presence of IT, Echo360, D2L, InSync, Panasonic, Data#3, Parallo and Park Lane IT. “Huawei gave us that opportunity to build the second biggest supercomputer in the sector,” Murray explains. “They have provided us with best in class technology.

“Parallo helped us in our virtual infrastructure area and Park Lane IT has allowed us to automate our database infrastructure. The software we put in place through Oracle and the technical support service we get from Park Lane IT has helped us to position that data layer in a more automated fashion so that it’s more agile and responsive to the business.”

17

Dell is also critical to the education centre, providing all Windows based desktop and laptop infrastructure and enterprise service and integrating its catalogue Amazon-style into all UTAS’ procurement. It is also a platinum sponsor of UTAS’ key innovation event, UHack.

Aruba has partnered to improve the wi-fi, which Murray jokes “has come from woeful to no one talking about it anymore, which means it’s excellent.”

Data#3 is also on-board and has enabled UTAS to provide

AUGUST 2018

TECHNOLOGY

18

FACT

MURRAY IS RESPONSIBLE FOR: • 109 employees • $35m annual budget.

• $110m systems investment • $10m annualised benefits returned from this investment

w w w. b u s i n e s s c h i e f. c o m

U N I V E R S I T Y O F TA S M A N I A

catalogue-style purchasing of Apple computers across the organisation, meaning people get that diversity of choice between a Windows machine or an Apple device.

UTAS has embraced the Microsoft cloud provision as a very rapid adopter and has Office365 across the entire organisation for students and staff.

“Cloud in the future is going to be a balanced platform of systems that are seamlessly operating the 19

internet,” he adds. “We’ve got a much richer collaborative environment around Microsoft Tools and where it’s improving our internal communications.

“Only our supercomputer is on campus and I predict that’s short-lived. We’re constantly

Apply now to study at the University of Tasmania

reviewing whether we can run that

“OUR ERESEARCH ECOSYSTEM (EREC) CAN STORE DATA OF ANY SCALE, WITH 7,100 PROCESSORS SERVING 3.7 PETABYTES OF STORAGE – AND CAPACITY CAN BE INCREASED AT ANY TIME TO MEET NEEDS.” — Jeff Murray, Chief Information Officer AUGUST 2018

TECHNOLOGY

Uhack 2018 20 in the cloud. Cloud removes the old steps

eventually be replaced by that one

and jumps that might happen in scaling big

computer that can do everything, but

computing and makes it a lot more of a

Murray says that’s not the desired

smooth and fluid uplift in performance and

outcome, insisting artificial intelligence will

uplift in responsiveness.

be specific automations to the menial

“It gives us balanced high-performance big data seamless to the user.”

UTAS now has a dashboard of every single process and every single request –

tasks, enabling humans to get on with the richer, more interesting, more intellectually stimulating roles.

“We know that human empathy is

not just for IT – but a service delivery

extremely difficult to program into a

across all of the university processes,

computer – and anyway, will humans ever

which is bringing everything into one

trust a computer if it is expressing

space, in preparation for that automated,

empathy?” He questions. “I expect not.

robotic, artificially intelligent digital era that it’s moving into.

People perceive that their job will

“Will people enjoy a flawless ballet performance by a robot? I suspect not either. So we see that artificial intelligence w w w. b u s i n e s s c h i e f. c o m

U N I V E R S I T Y O F TA S M A N I A

is not the panacea that’s going to take over everything while we sit on the couch. We see AI as an opportunity to enrich services and roles and jobs, taking away the menial, making us more productive and making our roles more enjoyable.”

Of course, with such huge changes across the systems, Murray says the change management is the most critical part of any project, and ensures every project has its own change manager.

“Change has become the one 21

constant, and we have critical stakeholders across the organisation who know their local services and local teams, and make sure we don’t overburden them too much,” he says.

“They’re called the Champions of Change and become strong advocates and stalwarts for this new future that this digital era is bringing, and my best achievement is that the team is recognised as a very strong, responsive and agile team.

“I’m 100% sure that I’ve created a team of many CIOs that are connected to the university’s vision and direction.”

AUGUST 2018

TECHNOLOGY

Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research Prof Brigid Heywood, Signing New Surface Hub

22

w w w. b u s i n e s s c h i e f. c o m

University of Tasmania Private Bag 69 Sandy Bay, Tasmania 7001 T 03 6324 3999 utas.edu.au