To: All Faculty <everybody@illinois.edu> 
    From: "CITES and the Office of the CIO" <cites-execdir@uiuc.edu>
Reply-To: cites-execdir@uiuc.edu

 Subject: MASSMAIL - Dramatic Communications Technology Changes to Come

TO: Illinois Faculty

FROM: Sally Jackson, Chief Information Officer and Associate Provost, and
Panit Lisy, Executive Director, CITES

RE: Dramatic Communications Technology Changes to Come

Dear Colleagues:

Communication technology has changed dramatically over the past
quarter-century, and especially over the past few years. Campus now has an
opportunity to rethink how we deliver common IT services related to human
communication, including email, calendaring, telephone service, voice mail,
conferencing, and instant messaging. Currently, we have multiple email and
calendaring platforms hosted by central IT departments and by colleges and
business units. Each form of communication has different technical
underpinnings, and for any one form there may be multiple providers of the
service. We can do much better than this, leveraging our world-class data
network and exciting new advances in communication and collaboration tools.

Many universities have already migrated from old-fashioned telephony to
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), using special telephone switches and
phone sets on the data network infrastructure. CITES did an extensive study
of VoIP technologies before concluding last year that the high cost for
this incremental advancement was not justifiable. Technology has continued
to advance, however, and the current trend is not merely to run voice
service over data infrastructure, but to actually converge many different
communication tools as part of a common system. Strongly motivated by the
pressure of the current financial crisis, campus IT professionals have
discovered a path toward massively improved communication support that is
not only affordable, but actually saves money as compared with what we
spend now. Among the ways of moving forward toward a state-of-the-art
?unified communications? environment, one stands out for its cost
advantages to campus: using Microsoft software tools available under a
Campus Agreement to all faculty, staff, and graduate/professional students.

The purpose of this memo is to inform the campus that CITES is moving
forward with implementation of a Microsoft-based solution to unified
communications, acting on a consensus among campus IT leaders and in
accordance with recommendations of the Stewarding Excellence project team
assigned to review IT@Illinois initiatives. This one new service will
replace many existing services, integrating phone, voice mail, email,
calendaring, instant messaging, and conferencing. The resulting flexibility
makes it possible for people to choose how they want to receive
communications (e.g., voice mail messages can be accessed through email),
and to specify how available they want to be to incoming communications
(e.g., during a meeting they might want to receive no messages or only
certain types of messages, or while traveling they might have calls to
their office phone routed to their mobile phone). 

Dramatic hard-dollar cost savings result from this move, through reduction
and gradual elimination of our legacy voice system. By 2013, we expect to
reduce the real cost of human communication services to the campus by
$3,000,000 yearly?while leaping forward to a much richer communication and
collaboration environment. 

This is a game-changer for voice service, but there are some downsides to
go along with the considerable upsides.  The most important downside is
that in unifying all of these services, we become slightly more vulnerable
to interruptions of all services at once. Traditional voice service
operates at a standard of reliability known in the industry as ?five
nines?: This means that 99.999% of the time, when you pick up the phone you
get a dial tone. By supporting all communication services on a common
infrastructure and common software application, we risk losing voice
service whenever we experience a network outage?still very uncommon, but
not yet a five-nines technology. We will also experience transitional costs
as people get used to the new capabilities of unified communications and
adapt to new devices. Our technical staff and other colleagues are already
thinking about how to minimize the risks and the transitional costs. We
will stop pressing forward if at any point we see that the downsides are
unmanageable. 

Because of the size of savings we expect to receive from this and the
exigency of our financial situation, we are moving forward with less
deliberation than a change of this magnitude would normally warrant. What
we can tell you is that this has been thoroughly studied by a small but
diverse number of colleagues, including IT leaders from all major academic
units, technical experts in CITES and other units, and faculty members
charged with reviewing unified communications as a cost reduction strategy
under Stewarding Excellence. Nearly all who have actually studied this
opportunity, including many who started as skeptics, have come to the
conclusion that the benefits are worth the modest trade-offs. We assume
that most others will ultimately come to the same conclusion, so we are
moving forward, but paying close attention to any new issues that arise.

Demos of the UC system will be available to campus starting next month, in
which the new capabilities that we can expect will be shown. Please mark
your calendar for August 10.  You will receive more details about the demos
soon. (If you are unable to make the August 10 sessions, other demos will
be scheduled for this fall.)

For further information about why this decision was made, please visit the
Stewarding Excellence website and choose IT@Illinois. For more information
about the technology or the project, please contact Panit Lisy,
plisy@illinois.edu, or Charley Kline, kline@illinois.edu. A Unified
Communications project website also will be available soon.
This mailing approved by:
The Office of the Chancellor

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