The University of Western Sydney (UWS) has about 110 staff in its IT department, responsible for areas such as managing the university's data and telephone networks, and managing its central database and application servers. The department, whose staff report to Houlahan, also provide technical support for applications, and also look after support for end users.
Houlahan became director of IT at the University of Western Sydney about two years ago, when the university began the task of pulling together the IT systems at its six campus' in Sydney's West.
According to Houlahan, it began by working out a common infrastructure for the university's administrative system, including HR, student management and finance.
He said a lot of planning work has gone into figuring out how to amalgamate IT at the university. -We're still doing a lot of work at the campus LAN level, because there were very different ways of doing things in past, such as document management, e-mail systems, even people directories," Houlahan said.
He said it was also currently working on designing common enterprise architecture, specifying how it's going to integrate various systems. -One of key drivers is good integration between the systems," Houlahan said.
The university has microwave networks which carry its voice and data traffic between all its campuses. Although Houlahan believes these are doing the job fairly well at the moment he's looking forward to the fibre connections the university will be able to install between its campusesâ€"a result of federal funding through various capital development grants which is scheduled to come on stream in 2004.
One of the other challenges Houlahan's team faces is the itinerant nature of students, who won't necessarily only go to one of the university's campuses. This means it has to provide ways for them to access common services, regardless of what campus they're at.
Because of this Houlahan is keeping a close eye on wireless developments. -Wireless is a big area of interest to improve access to information resources," he said. He cites greater flexibility as one of the benefits, removing the scenario that a student can only gain access to lecture information if they're in a particular class on a certain day.
Houlahan envisages a world where students can gain access to information they need, for example through a PDA or mobile phone, as they wander around the campus.
But this also creates the issue of 24x7 availability, which Houlahan said means it needs to have really good fail-safe backup redundancy, which led to the university installing diesel generators. He said it also gets quite a few lightning strikes, so had to put in as much power protection as possible.
