Several IT jobs remain vacant amid problems

By Jack Gillum and Allison Sundaram

As e-mail and Internet access have been sporadically disrupted over the past academic year, Information Technology has been unable to fill a handful of vital positions to support technology on campus, The Santa Clara has found.

Those low staffing levels come as the university is becoming more dependent on complex technology -- anything from Internet access and e-mail to essential university software applications.

While IT maintains that Santa Clara's network services are reliable for a university network, interviews suggest that staffing levels to support that technology are at a bare minimum, with six vacant technical positions and two vacant administrative positions -- some of which have been open for several months.

Top technology administrators, including Chief Information Officer Ronald L. Danielson and IT Director Carl Fussell, say filling those vacant positions are important.

"Is (low staffing) a problem?" Fussell said in an interview last quarter. "Absolutely."

The problem, administrators say, comes from both a lack of adequate funding for new positions, as well as not being able to offer adequate compensation for new employees compared to Silicon Valley firms.

Currently, IT employs a technical staff of 46 with an operating budget of about $10 million. Additionally, numerous academic departments employ their own technical support staff that operate independently of IT, according to Danielson.

Fussell said in an interview last quarter that workers who chose to come to Santa Clara from other firms in Silicon Valley face a 10- to 15-percent pay cut from what they would have received had they stayed at their current job, which could account for why three of those positions have been vacant for months.

Fussell, citing personnel issues, would not divulge salary scales.

Salaries aside, Fussell seemed frustrated with a lack of experienced candidates who apply. In fact, out of 10 resumes that came in for one vacant systems engineer position, none were "as senior" as department administrators had hoped for.

IT administrators acknowledge that staffing is not a silver bullet to prevent technology problems, nor can they say that having fewer-than-average staffers directly resulted in technology problems this past academic year.

But even if IT had a full staff of employees under the current budget, Danielson said, the department would be still operating with staffing levels that are lower than industry standards. For example, Danielson said that Santa Clara has one technician who oversees about 200 servers. (The industry standard is one per 30 machines.)

"We could use additional staff," he said.

Danielson said that while IT is able to respond to trouble, they cannot actively avoid problems. This is especially true, Fussell said, as the complexity of information systems "is going up by orders of magnitude."

Danielson said that not having enough staff, for example, has kept IT from fully examining logs and monitoring system performance. These measures ordinarily would help the department identify "trouble spots" before they become serious enough to cause failures or security breaches from viruses or hackers.

In several failures, which date back to June 2005, students, staff and faculty had to face hours -- if not days -- of partial or full outages to their GroupWise accounts, Web services or Internet access, according to online announcements. In several cases examined by The Santa Clara, initial estimates on resolution or the extent of damage were later proven to underestimate the amount of time it would take for the problem to be fixed.

Such cases of failures, which were posted on IT's Web site during the failure or recorded by the newspaper, include:

* During fall quarter, the university's Internet connection slowed because of a failing piece of network hardware, which had become infected with viruses. Access had completely improved after a few days.

* During early December 2005, incoming mail could not be delivered to GroupWise e-mail accounts for several days.

* In June 2005, a "catastrophic error" made in updating GroupWise caused the erasure of all student and faculty mailboxes and calendars. In that case, Danielson made a rare admonition of such failures and vowed that Information Services -- the university branch that oversees IT, Orradre Library and Media Services -- would do better to avoid such errors in the future.

In addition to this list, there were several instances of short-term outages or problems, all listed in IT's Web site at the time of the problem.

Several IT technicians, when called for comment about failures this year, declined to comment for this article.

IT has reorganized several times to increase the number of networking and systems administration staff, Daneilson said. IT is also attempting to cross-train employees to provide assistance for other new technologies.

Plans for the new "Library for the 21st Century" do not include increased funding for technical support staff to support the new library technology.

Contact Jack Gillum at jgillum@scu.edu, or Allison Sundaram at asundaram@scu.edu.