I am at Indiana University today and tomorrow with the CSG, a group of 27 Research1 university CIOs.

Today we worked on prospective shared service offerings. This is very relevant to what we are trying to do on our Madison campus.  In each case we have at least one institution willing to offer a service and multiple institutions considering outsourcing that same service.

The goal in each working group was to roll up our sleeves and determine whether there is a candidate shared service offering and on what terms, i.e., basic service definition/SLA, candidate provider(s) and subscriber(s), and assessment of readiness to contract for services within 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, etc.

The services we worked on include:

i. Microsoft Exchange environment (Dennis Cromwell, Indiana)

ii. Mobile App (Ann Duin, Minnesota)

iii. Calendar and/or Event Calendar (Chuck Powell, Yale)

iv. Shared data center/hosting/storage (Ron Kraemer, Wisconsin)

v. Emergency/Continuity services -- emergency website, DNS services, email backup (Shel Waggener, Berkeley)

Suffice it to say that this was an interesting day.