Crew is currently chair of the Google Workspace track of Google’s Higher Education Customer Advisory Board, and he was a speaker for the 2023 Internet2 NET+ Google Workspace for Education webinar series. A longtime volunteer with the higher ed cloud community, Crew also served on the now-defunct NET+ Box Service Advisory Board from 2013-2020.
The collective bargaining power of institutions facilitated through the Internet2 NET+ program have continued to benefit Crew in his current role: “NET+ brings vendors to the table to have real discussions about how to make their service offerings more useful to the higher education community.”
Like many of his colleagues in the cloud community, Crew is focused on how best to leverage cloud services to meet the needs of his colleagues at UC Berkeley and beyond. He shared his insights on the challenges and opportunities ahead for research and education when implementing cloud services.
Fun Facts About Ian
- What He Likes Most About His Job:
I love the process of solving problems and doing service design. Even though I’m primarily focused on SaaS offerings these days, this draws on my user experience design background and focuses on things like how we make choices about how a specific service is set up and integrated with other services before it’s released to our campus; or how we redesign a service while it’s still in active use to make it simpler, more reliable, or easier to support.
- Best Advice About the Cloud He Ever Received:
It’s hard for me to point to a single piece of advice, or a single person, but one of the groups of people that I’ve learned the most from over the years are the amazing folks that I served on the now-defunct Internet2/Net+ Box Higher Education Advisory Board with in 2013-2020. These are people including Bob Flynn and Sean O’Brien; Chuck Boeheim (recently retired from Cornell); John Kelly (Notre Dame); Shlomo Ballas (CMU); Brian Cors (UMich) and MaryBeth Stunkel (UMich, retired); Jill Romboy (BYU); and Nick Young (UNC Greensboro). Nick wrote up a lot of the collected wisdom of that group in the “Dear Vendor” series on his blog. Most of the folks listed above contributed to those articles, and that advice is so consistently useful to me.
Operating with a Different Mindset
For almost eight years, Crew has been the architect on the team at UC Berkeley that runs Google, Zoom, Box, Adobe Creative Cloud, and a few other similar solutions. One of the biggest challenges he consistently faces is that his work requires a very different mindset than what one might think of as “traditional IT services.”
“Managing SaaS solutions is much more about influence and relationships and talking to people than the traditional IT ‘take a problem and write some code to fix it that runs on a VM up in the data center’ approach,” Crew explained.
“Those relationships and influence run both directions: in terms of helping faculty, staff, and student understand that they can’t just have a custom built solution for whatever idiosyncratic or legacy business practice they’ve developed;” he continued, “and also with the vendors of the SaaS services to help them build service offerings that really work for our community and at our scale.”
Managing and Redefining Goals
While Crew emphasized the importance of vendors building service offerings tailored to higher ed, he also sees opportunities from standardizing services.
“Idiosyncratic business processes often aren’t the actual goal. They’re really a legacy of built up decisions over the years,” Crew observed. “More standardized service offerings often force us to rethink what the actual goals are, and that often results in processes that are simpler, easier, and more maintainable.”
“By doing that, we might be able to save money, sure,” he continued, “but we can also free up time and resources to focus on far more interesting projects, both for us as IT staff but even more importantly for our students, faculty, and staff.”
Motivating Factors
Crew’s concern for not only UC Berkeley students, faculty, and staff but the larger research and education community motivated him to volunteer.
“Volunteering has allowed me to help not just the people at UC Berkeley to have services that are better suited to their needs (so that they can carry out Berkeley’s teaching, research, and public service mission) but also to band together with my fellow volunteers to help make things better for all of higher education,” he said. “That’s pretty cool, and pretty unique to higher ed.”
“I often use the example of Coke and Pepsi,” he continued. “If you work for Coke and I work for Pepsi, and you say ‘hey, how’d you do that?’ I’m unlikely to respond well. But in higher ed, I get to say ‘here’s the source code—how else can I help?’”
The prime benefit he gets from volunteering? From Crew’s vantage point, the relationships he’s built are everything: “I’ve got colleagues (and in many cases now friends) all over the world thanks to the volunteer efforts I’ve made in the higher education community.”
You can be a superhero too!
Check out current opportunities to participate in NET+ working groups, service evaluations, and service advisory boards.
ICYMI