Jisc case studies wiki Case studies / Transformations Cardiff University
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Transformations Cardiff University

Project Name: ThinCardiff

Lead Institution: Cardiff University

Project Lead: Paul Rock 

 

Background

 

Aims and objectives

The aim of the project was to undertake a study of thick and thin client solutions and their features through engagement with Jisc-funded resources and projects. This would enable us to understand the most effective use cases and allow us to make more timely and effective decisions about the use of thin client technology within Cardiff University. We would also identify critical success factors for thin client deployments within a University.

 

Context

Cardiff University has some existing thin-client infrastructure in place designed as point solutions to solve specific problems and these have simply been maintained since deployment. These are a Sun global desktop Library catalogue search system using SunRay terminals and a Citrix virtual desktop environment using Wyse terminal for trainee doctors across Wales. Technology and user requirements have moved on since we installed the above systems. Engaging with the Jisc resources and projects was intended to help us improve our understanding of the environmental, financial and other benefits and implications of deploying thin client technology in a university.

 

The business case

The review we conducted as part of the project was intended to help us understand which use cases and approaches to deployment are likely to be successful and sustainable. This would help us decide whether to:

 

  • Continue with our existing strategy based mainly around thick client deployment with a few notable exceptions (e.g. Library catalogue search; Citrix NHS Wales service)
  • Expand one or both of the existing thin client systems to cater for additional use cases
  • Build new systems to cater for new and existing use cases.

 

Key drivers

 

  • User Experience
  • Environmental Efficiency
  • Financial Efficiency
  • Use of Space

 

Jisc resources/technology used

 

Jisc Programme Work

Jisc has funded a number of pieces of work which are relevant to this evaluation. The Jisc resources have helped us to undertake a comparison of thick and thin client features and, through engagement with the institutions involved, examine their use in order to understand the most effective use cases and allow us to make more timely and effective decisions about the use of thin client technology within the University.

 

Thin-Thick Client Comparison Tool (SUSTE-IT, 2008; Updated 2009). This tool has been identified by Jisc as a deployable resource for the Jisc Greening ICT programme. This was expected to show us where the best financial value and energy efficiency may be achieved. In general, we found the SUSTE-IT tool useful for assessing thin client projects, however its scope needs to be understood – completing the spreadsheet, in tandem with the accompanying user guide is absolutely recommended. As the tool was written at a particular point in time, the assumptions and default values are no longer current and need to be adjusted at the outset. In particular the default figures for thin client per number of clients were rather optimistic when compared with the real world experience of Jisc's case studies. We also found the use of negative values to show energy and financial savings a little confusing at first.

 

ThinC: Does 'thin client' mean 'energy efficiency'? (Leeds Metropolitan University, 2010). This project tried to verify or otherwise claims about the benefits of thin client infrastructure as opposed to conventional thick clients. We found this case useful because it concluded that green benefits alone are often an insufficiently strong reason for sustainable thin client deployment and that a "green" PC in thick client mode returned the lowest power use.

 

Thin-client saves energy costs: Case study in Green ICT (Queen Margaret University, 2009). We assessed the potential use of the Jisc Thin Client Movie to introduce the technology capabilities; for staff development and for other purposes. The movie clearly shows the benefits that can be reaped when a thin-client deployment takes place as part of a bigger programme of work in a new-build scenario. As QMU are a mainly humanities and arts university, the vast majority of their users do not require resource-intensive applications - at Cardiff, a significant proportion of our users require resource-intensive applications for their work.

 

Strategic Deployment of Thin Clients and Multi-user Windows NT for Campus Computing Services (Manchester University 1999) and Re-use of Legacy Computers: a comparative pilot (University of Bristol, 1999). Both Manchester University and University of Bristol funded by Jisc Technology Applications Programme (JTAP, 1996-2000) to demonstrate the application of technology. These represented a useful snapshot of a point in time in thin client technology. Owing to the age of the projects it was not appropriate to contact the project teams however we were particularly interested to discover if either institution continued with thin-client technology beyond the project funding and we looked for evidence for the continued presence of the technology in the institution. Neither project report mentions environmental factors with respect to thin client technology, all their focus was on the financial savings - this reflected a different time.

 

We looked at two projects funded by the Jisc Institutional Innovation Programme which were not focused on thin clients but made use of them as part of their solution:

 

i-Borrow (Canterbury Christ Church University, 2010). Laptop borrowing scheme using thin-client to provide access to a range of software and learning resources. The use of devices and space is tracked in order to understand how the learning space is used and plan for the future. A very comprehensive report is available from their web site. We visited this project and were impressed with the way the University has embedded this system into an improved student experience and use of space in their learning spaces.

 

ITS 4 SEA: Integrating Thin client Systems for Secure E-Assessment (University of Bradford, 2009). The focus of the project was improving their eAssessment capabilities. This included the use of thin-client devices to deliver a consistent examination experience to their students. It appears to have been well-received by their students and staff. This has helped us to understand some of the ways thin client technology can be used to deliver examinations more quickly with fewer infrastructure requirements. Such a system could also be extended to other use cases such as enrolment.

 

Regional Support Centre Case Studies

We also looked at the recent (2010) Jisc RSC Green ICT Thin client case studies hosted by the Excellence Gateway. These demonstrated good breadth of solutions and have the advantages that, being short and practical, they are easy to engage with. One of the studies was very local to us but we were unable to visit because a key contributor was no longer available.

 

  • King George V College: We have the power - Meeting demands for IT in non-IT classrooms; increasing laptop capability using long-life batteries and thin client technology. Laptops with thin client rolled out in teaching areas to provide access to applications, but with the introduction of (heavy) extra-long-life external batteries to prolong the use between charging.
  • Preston College: Virtually on your desktop - Piloting virtual desktop in a HE library; extending lifetime of desktop devices.  Successful pilot although they note that the virtual desktop developments won’t automatically be rolled out across the College unless the analysis it is conducting with finance provides a business case which shows that the current development is too effective not to go ahead on a larger scale.
  • Hereford Sixth Form College: Space-saving technology for effective learning spaces - A space-saving alternative to desktop using Jack PCs – Power Over Ethernet (POE) ‘thin clients’ computers embedded inside a network port. 

  • Bromley Adult Education College: Desktop virtualisation - a smarter, greener solution for classroom IT - Reduced environmental impact by deploying NComputing boxes enabling multiple users to share the processing power of a single computer. They used the SusteIT ICT Footprinting Tool to calculate the comparative energy use of conventional PCs with the NComputing system that replaced them, and published their findings.

 

Jisc infoKits

We were asked by Jisc to review the following infokits as part of this case study.

 

 

Our review concluded that this Infokit provides good background material and a good summary of Change Management concepts, which would be useful to people encountering the concept of Business Change as a discipline for the first time. Whilst most Business Change Managers would already be familiar with much of this information, the Infokit could still be a useful resource to guide others actively involved in, or affected by, change projects. The ‘Resistance to change’ and ‘Reviving a stalled change effort’ sections of the Infokit were found to be particularly useful, as they set out a clear approach that may be applicable to use in varying situations. The ‘What needs to change?’ and ‘Change audit’ sections also provide links to informative and relevant Jisc material, even though the information sits outside the actual Change Management Infokit.

 

It was felt that those people with questions or seeking immediate practical help might find the Infokit difficult to navigate, particularly when reading from start to finish, as it commences with summaries of theoretical models. The Infokit may therefore benefit from the addition of some quick links to content, such as the Transition Management section at the beginning of the document.

 

The addition of more practical information would also be useful. For example, whilst the Change Roles section introduces the  idea of identifying and managing stakeholders, more guidance around communications plans and stakeholder analysis would be beneficial – perhaps with the inclusion of some real world examples. Also, an illustration of a Business Change Lifecycle would allow the reader to identity when concepts are most applicable. Finally, a selection of case studies that identify factors in successful and unsuccessful change projects would be a welcome addition.

 

 

Our review concluded that this Infokit was a comprehensive resource that would be very useful for people starting out in project management for the first time, or for institutions that do not have their own project management framework in place.

 

The Infokit is well written and easily readable, and is therefore something that the novice project manager can utilise quickly. The structure of the Infokit seems well thought out and easy to navigate, from planning, costing and starting a project, through to managing, controlling and disseminating project outcomes. It was particularly useful to see a summary of some of the reasons why projects fail at the beginning of the Infokit, as this provides an opportunity to reflect on some of the potential pitfalls up front.

 

Perhaps the most useful aspect of the Infokit is the variety of templates provided that would allow institutions to easily adapt and re-use. The Project Initiation Document, Gantt chart example, and status/highlight reports all provide a good starting point that could be tailored to meet individual institutions’ requirements. However, as with the Change Management Infokit, perhaps the addition of some real world examples would enrich the Infokit – particularly in the ‘Methods of communication’ area.

 

Outcomes

 

Achievements

This project has helped us to learn how to make more effective use of existing Jisc resources in the future. We hope its outputs will encourage more engagement with existing and new Jisc funded resources across Wales and the UK.

The project team prepared an Internal report for Cardiff University management and colleagues based around an overview of the Jisc resources; their benefits; how they have been applied elsewhere and their implications for Cardiff University with recommendations for next steps, further work and identifying "low hanging fruit".

Such a report would have been much more difficult and time-consuming to prepare without the Jisc resources which gave us practical examples of highly successful and less successful projects. The Jisc "demonstrator" and "case study" projects helped us to understand the types of use case, projects, solutions and approaches that were successful elsewhere and therefore have a good chance of succeeding at Cardiff.

 

Being able to talk to and visit institutions who have participated in these projects has been invaluable for us in deepening our expertise and understanding of both the technical solutions available and their use as well as the environments, approaches and business cases that tend to be successful. This will help us to make achievable and realistic recommendations for future projects and to find proven, low-risk, high value pathways to using this kind of technology for the benefit of the University.

 

The Jisc "Thin-Thick Client Comparison Tool" was useful in allowing us to verify the results we were already seeing with our existing thin client systems and will be of considerable use to gauge the environmental and financial implications of the future work we have recommended and the implications of specific choices of technology. In the absence of vendor-independent tools like those Jisc has provided, institutions may have little choice but to rely on material and tools prepared by vendors and industry analysts - whose independence is not always clear.

 

We were asked by Jisc to review the Project Management and Change Management Infokits as part of this project. Doing so has helped to raise awareness of these valuable resources within the relevant communities of practice within Cardiff University.

 

To aid dissemination and engagement with the community, we have produced a podcast highlighting the main findings of the project. This is available as a resource for the academic community and wider public sector in Wales and beyond.

 

This work is also intended to help Jisc identify the kinds of project it has funded in the past which we have found most useful and the ways in which the project outputs may be usefully applied within institutions.

We were able to survey our information services management both before and after they engaged with our internal review. This allowed us to judge the impact of the project's outputs. We found that they had become more aware of current thin-client technology and of a number of successful use-cases. We also found that they were more aware of factors such as licensing and financial and environmental impact and the ways they can affect thin-client deployment projects. They were also more able to identify success criteria. Senior programme managers and change managers were able to review the Jisc Infokits and recommend their use to their respective communities of practice. Technical staff were able to engage with the non-technical aims and objectives of projects which may include thin-client technology and use the Jisc Thin-Thick client comparison tool to evaluate the financial and environmental impact of existing systems with a view to using it to evaluate potential new deployments.

 

Benefits

We see the key benefits of this project to be:

 

  • Applying learning from Jisc "case study" and "demonstrator" projects to our own environment.
  • The ability to talk directly to key members of Jisc projects about the projects and how the environments have developed since the project took place. This is highly valuable  - particularly in helping us to judge the business drivers and project approaches that are likely to be most useful and successful for us.
  • Being able to engage with Jisc's tools - in particular the "Thin-Thick Client Comparison Tool" and the Change Management and Project Management "Infokits".
  • Jisc appointed a "Critical Friend" for clusters of projects within the Jisc Transformations Programme to provide informal support and objective advice to project teams. The cluster of projects around our Critical Friend was useful because it allowed us to interact with other Jisc Transformation Programme projects - mostly via on-line conferencing. Our Critical Friend provided good advice throughout the project and visited us a couple of times. On one occasion he was able to arrange a member from another project to visit at the same time which we found both encouraging and useful.
  • This project has clearly shown us the kind of Jisc resources which are beneficial to the type of work we are engaged in as engineers working at a University. In particular the most useful are Case Studies, Demonstrators and Tools and we would like to see these developed in the future and the kind of use we have made of them promoted within the community.

 

Drawbacks

The biggest drawback of this project arose from the lack of a face-to-face Jisc Transformations Programme meeting early on. In fact the only face to face programme meetings came right at the end of the project. An early face-to-face meeting for the programme would have provided an opportunity for a workshop for each strand and another for each cluster. This was a missed opportunity for the programme and its outputs would have been more coherent and useful to Jisc and the community if that had happened.

 

Whilst the on-line cluster meetings were productive, we believe they would have been more so if the cluster members had met beforehand to gain a greater understanding of each other's projects and a closer community would have been formed between the people involved.

 

Clarity about the precise nature and meaning of the project's deliverables to Jisc came later for us than in previous Jisc projects. We think this may be because the programme had a very different approach to others we have been involved in. We understand members of other projects felt the same way and we think that this could have been picked up and and misunderstandings dealt with at an early programme meeting.

 

Being able to interact with Jisc case studies was critical to our project. In a few cases the people who had done the key work had left the institution where a project took place. Under these circumstances engagement was limited to reading the reports or talking to staff who were less closely involved. This was clearly less valuable that being able to talk directly to the people involved. The resources lose their value if the people who produced them are no longer employed at the institution.

 

Care should be taken when using tools because default values will become out of date as time passes and technology and other factors change. These tools may require review and updating to take account of this. In the case of the SUSTE-IT Tool, the tool needs to be modified to take account of newer green features of thick clients and other factors. Alternatively, users should make adjustments accordingly.

 

Key lessons

The most successful projects we looked at were those with a business case that focussed on delivering direct improvements to the student experience.

 

Projects that helped spaces to be used more effectively were also highly successful. A number of Jisc projects allowed learning spaces to be used in a very much more flexible manner than they would have been had a thin client solution not been implemented.

 

Some really successful projects combined both of the above:

 

  • Some projects (iBorrow, QMU, IT4SEA) were part of a new build which additionally gave them the opportunity to take a holistic approach to energy use within the whole project and to more easily measure the energy used.
  • Where institutions were able to invest in thin client infrastructure for a well-scoped project (e.g. iBorrow, IT4SEA, QMU, Preston College) they were later able to extend these services to other use cases, e.g. off-campus users, for very little additional financial outlay or effort

 

Looking ahead

Of the technologies we were made aware of during this work we consider those offered by Dell, Microsoft, Citrix, VMware and Verde to have the most potential to the University. Consideration should also be given to application virtualisation and configuration management.

 

Some work has been done over the course of this project to increase awareness of the two Jisc Infokits (Project Management and Change Management) amongst the relevant professionals at the university. A similar exercise for the other Jisc Infokits may be useful.

 

A recent enhancement to the library catalogue search has enabled it to be used to provide wider access to electronic resources to walk-in users. Consideration should be given to further additional uses for this system.

Our current All Wales Citrix service was built to be a lifeline for study and communication for students in remote locations around Wales. Eduroam is starting to become available in Welsh NHS sites and this may affect the service we provide to students on placement. For instance, the All Wales Citrix service could be made available on Eduroam to allow student access from their own devices. For the foreseeable future we will still need to cater for those students working in locations without adequate Eduroam or mobile internet coverage.

 

Requirements for libraries are evolving rapidly and the flexibility of learning spaces has become vital because it future proofs the spaces and reduces the need for new buildings and major refurbishments – costly activities with a high environmental impact. At Cardiff University we have included large areas of traditional open access workstations within these areas for nearly 20 years. The success of environments such as the iBorrow system at Canterbury Christ Church University – which involved a reduced number of traditional open access workstations complimented by a higher number of portable thin client laptop devices – make a compelling case for the use of thin client technology in these areas to improve the flexibility of learning spaces and we strongly recommend that this is considered for any new library builds. It may be beneficial to pilot this in an existing area as a proof of concept.

 

The same infrastructure could be used to provide restricted workstations for activities such as enrolment and examinations as was done at Bradford University.

 

Thin client technology is often cited as a solution for staff working from home or remote locations. A number of the most successful Jisc projects added this kind of service later on as an additional benefit. It may be that this would also be beneficial at Cardiff - although a service we ran to provide this kind of access was withdrawn owing to a lack of use. Trends in client device types and the new VPN service are likely to have an effect on these requirements.

In the longer term, it may be cost-effective to provide thin client workstations for some groups of staff users. This is particularly attractive for the University’s administrative staff because all of their IT costs are currently met by IT Services and many of them use a limited number of applications. We recommend identifying a discrete group of administrative staff who use a limited set of applications to pilot this with.

 

Sustainability

We intend to use the review created as part of this project to generate a set of use cases that would be good candidates to benefit from thin client technology within the University. This will then be turned into a roadmap for deployment. The projects we looked at demonstrated the importance of building systems that integrate well, scale well, do not go out-of-date and have a sustainable environmental and financial impact and it is these factors that will be paramount in our forthcoming work.

 

Appendix A

Results from the Jisc Thin Thick Client comparison tool for existing Cardiff University systems.

 

Library Catalogue Kiosks

In 1999 Cardiff University implemented a web-based library catalogue search interface which replaced the previous “green-screen” interface. It was decided to re-use diskless desktop PCs as thin clients to provide a dedicated web browser kiosk-style interface to the library search facility for casual users. This was very successful and served as a stepping stone to the current system. This system had a number of drawbacks owing to the age and prior use of the computers: a maintenance overhead; significant footprint on desks; and large energy consumption. The current system was installed in 2009 using Sun Ray thin client terminals and Sun’s global desktop management environment which effectively dealt with the above drawbacks.

 

Both of these systems provided services from open-source back-end servers, which have kept licencing costs to a minimum.

 

The current system has recently been modified to provide access to electronic journals for the general public to meet Cardiff University’s mission.

 

All-Wales Citrix service

All Cardiff University healthcare students spend part of their time studying and working in dispersed NHS locations across Wales. This system was implemented in 2002 to allow them to access University systems and other services available on the internet as though they were on campus, regardless of location in Wales, without comprising the NHS’s security. Prior to this system there was no access from these remote locations. The system consists of a Citrix and Windows back-end with a combination of Wyse terminals and soft thin clients where appropriate.

 

Appendix B

Results of internal survey

We surveyed senior staff before and after engaging them. The raw results are shown below. For all questions, "Strongly disagree" has a score of 0 and "Strongly agree" has a score of 3. The questions were phrased to provide a balance between high and low scores. 

 

Question Average Score Before Average Score After
We have a low level of understanding of current thin client technology. 1.43 1
We understand which business areas could derive most benefit from thin client technology. 1.71 1.33
Our current systems may not meet users' needs as well as they should. 1.86 2.33
Our thin client systems are outdated and we haven't yet decided how to move them forwards. 2.86 2.33
We do not have many clearly understood use-cases for thin client technology. 1.29 1.67
There are clear environmental benefits of thin client technology. 1.71 2
There are clear financial benefits of thin client technology. 1.57 0.33
There are clear areas where thin client technology can improve the user experience. 2.14 2.67
Software licensing is generally straightforward for thin client solutions. 1.5 0.33
Software licensing is often a major cost factor in thin client solutions. 1.17 2.67