University of Maryland

The Right Tools for Research

By Barbara Gibson

“We support the tools that will further the success of research here,” says Mike Landavere, IT director in the fast-growing College of Life Sciences at the University of Maryland.

“If a particular tool is critical to the success of a research group, we need to support it,” he says. “That’s why we have just about everything — Macs, Windows and Linux.

“More and more, though, we’re seeing the Mac platform fits the needs of many of our research groups. Our Mac population is growing.”

“When you find the right tool for the right job, the support effort is easier. It’s smoother. It’s more seamless.”

Confronting a Fragmented Compute Environment

Landavere joined the College of Life Sciences in 1998 to coordinate the technology among the college’s four departments and the university’s central IT department. He works directly with the departments of Biology, Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics, Chemistry and Biochemistry and Entomology.

When Landavere arrived at the college, however, he walked into a troubling scenario: more than 1,000 Mac, PC and UNIX computers with no centralized management at the college level.

Landavere explains: “Each department was trying to run its IT infrastructure solutions without sufficient support or coordination. It was a disaster.”

Professors Hampered by IT Woes

“Professors were on their own,” Landavere recalls. “Those who used Macs didn’t need as much support as those on other platforms, but they still had to work with unstable IT solutions.

“Everyone was spending far too much time away from their research and teaching because they were trying to provide their own technical support. They’d try to research solutions, test, troubleshoot, buy, install — everything.”

As academic technology coordinator, Landavere had planned to push the technology envelope. “But every time I wanted to show an instructor a new tool or invite someone to a sequence analysis package demo, I’d hear ‘Mike, if I could just print today, that would be great,’” he says.

“They just wanted what they already had to work.”

Launching a Strategic Plan

Immediately, Landavere transferred email, calendar, file and print solutions to the central IT group on campus, which operates enterprise-wide solutions for the university.

Next, he launched a strategic and technical plan that would provide researchers throughout the college with the tools and the technical support they needed.

The college hired four full-time computer managers to form a technical support staff for the open-platform environment.

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