Provide staff IT services to HDR students

A sub-project of the IMR project, which comprises two inter-linked sub-projects:

• Provide staff IT services to Higher Degree by Research (HDR) students, and
• Introduce AAF[1] federated authentication technologies into Monash

1  Aims of the sub-project

To treat Higher Degree by Research (HDR) candidates as “early career academics”, i.e. as for academic and other research staff (with regard to different security, financial, supervisory or other restricted access rights, and the different IP/copyright ownership conditions applying to HDR students), and recognising that:

• ManyHDR students also have staff appointments in a range of tutoring, sessional teaching and support roles;
• The ‘life-cycle’ of many individual HDR students  is such that they progress directly to academic or other research appointments at the completion of their HDR candidacy.

Importantly, this sub-project aims to ensure that HDR students are treated by default as for staff, and to establish uniformity between faculties as to the IT services available to HDR candidates.

2  Current status of IT services for HDR students

All e-Research services and applications are available to HDR students as for staff.

In many other ways HDR students are treated fundamentally by most Monash systems as students.  A few years ago, a range of enhancements[2] was added to the HDR ‘student-like’ IT environment to be more ‘staff-like’.  These enhancements include a range of quota and account settings affecting email, shared drives, network and related ancillary services.

The Monash Directory Service (MDS) flags HDR students as a distinct cohort, this attribute being available to other applications, including the my.monash portal, to use as they see fit to differentiate mode of service provided to the HDR cohort.  Such differentiated functionality, where it exists, varies from application to application on a case-by-case basis.

Monash e-Research services, covering research data storage and data management, collaboration environments and high performance computing (HPC) services, are available to HDR students on the same basis as for staff.  Similarly, HDR students have access to Eduroam[3] wireless and network services worldwide.

3  Current limitations

Whilst ITS has introduced this range of improvements to services (as described above), unfortunately many of these are:

• Only available on request, rather than being provided uniformly and by default to all;
• Not applied uniformly by all faculties, leading to faculty-by-faculty inconsistency in the student experience;
• Cumbersome add-ons to what are underneath fundamentally still student services.

Where HDR candidates are also staff, their HDR and staff accounts, email addresses, identities and records are currently independent and disjointed.  Whilst facilities exist to link these together within various individual system contexts, e.g. in the Callista, SAP‑HR and MDS systems, these linkages may or may not be consistently applied, as this relies on manual action.

Where HDR students progress to becoming staff at the end of their candidature, there is no natural or automatic process by which their IT accounts, identity, files, data, group memberships, access rights, etc, carry forward from their student IT environment to their staff environment, because their student account terminates and a new and separate staff account is created.

Where HDR students terminate at the end of their candidacy there is no regular process for capturing, archiving, cataloguing or preserving their research data and findings for re-use by those who come after them, because their student account terminates.

5  Proposed scope

This is a relatively small project with modest objectives, and does not set out to achieve a holistic revamp of Identity Management at Monash.  That has been the subject of separate discussions over a long period and would require a much larger project activity.  This small project sets out to achieve incremental improvement, prior to any such larger-scale revamp.

In many regards this project is a pathfinder or discovery project, a major deliverable from which will identify opportunities for follow-on projects and activities to change processes, systems and services.

The scoping phase of the project will be to identify and prioritize improvements that are feasible to be effected within the resources available.  Much of the work will be behind-the-scenes changes to Callista, SAP‑HR and directory (MDS) database systems.  Specific outcomes are expected to include:

• Analyse and audit processes and systems, and identify immediate and future improvements;
• Provide a staff email account, and not a student email account[4], for all HDR students;
• Provide uniform printing service access rights for HDR students in all faculties[5];
• Investigate configuration and provisioning issues regarding shared network drives for HDR students, in particular to ensure continuity of access when HDR students become staff;
• Provide improved direct services to HDR students at international campuses;
• Cross-link[6] identity information in Callista and SAP‑HR for HDR students;
• List HDR students in the telephone[7], email and staff search directory services;
• Ensure that all HDR students continue to have access to Eduroam wireless and network services worldwide;
• Ensure that all HDR students are registered with AAF and hence have access to research applications and datasets that will be controlled by AAF federated authentication provided by Monash, Australian and international institutions;
• Introduce IMR processes to support the preservation of HDR research data and findings following the end of their candidature;
• Publicise availability of these and other services for HDR students, including as part of new HDR induction, MRGS briefings for HDR students, and covering international campuses;
• Make recommendations for subsequent projects and tasks, in particular application-specific modifications for a wide range of processes and applications which are outside the scope of this pathfinder project.

6  Project conduct

It is proposed to hire a Project Leader/Analyst to work with diverse (operational) groups within ITS, divisions and faculties to:  (a) analyse and audit;  (b) identify priorities and make recommendations;  and (c) direct the modification of a variety of existing systems, such as those listed above.

Due to the very small funding proposed for this project, only minor resourcing (<1FTE) would be available for development or data-entry (and data cleansing) activities.  It is envisaged that project outcomes would be heavily leveraged by existing operational staff in a variety of ITS and other areas, undertaking many relatively minor changes to systems and processes as identified and guided by the Project Leader/Analyst.

Similarly it is assumed that changes introduced by the project would have no significant impact on system resource requirements, hence there is no project funding allocation for hardware.

(a)  The Project Leader/Analyst will first undertake an 'as is' audit of the existing processes within the various IT systems, faculties and campuses (including overseas campuses) that facilitate the provisioning of services for HDR students.  This will include a detailed comparison of what students actually receive across those various service contexts.

(b)  The Project Leader/Analyst will then, in consultation with ITS (in particular IMS, EWS and AS), MRGS and the Research IT Projects Steering Committee, Student Services, Human Resources Systems Group, the Monash Research Committee, and other interested groups, establish a series of recommendations detailing:

• Minimum and recommended levels of service provision for HDR students, taking into account a range of factors including location specific variables;
• Administrative application system and process changes required to achieve greater accuracy and automation of the processes involved in provisioning those services;
• Priorities for implementation.

(c)  The Project Leader/Analyst will then lead the implementation of the prioritized and achievable changes by various groups inside and outside ITS as required.