The Infrastructure Phase (1997 – 2000)
The Infrastructure Phase is the important phase that maps the direction and process of maturing of IT usage in IIUM. Uniquely in ITD is the existence of technical post of engineers (J). IIUM is the earliest university to offer Computer Engineering Program under Kuliyyah of Engineering, with the first batch to graduate in 1998. Later, recognized by Board of Engineers Malaysia as Electronics Engineer with specialization in Computer.
Thus, it is suitable for ITD to have an engineering posts, because of the syllabus on Computer Engineer is a symbiosis between electronics and computer, thus it is appropriate and logical, communication technology (telephone) and network (computer) technology is being handle under one central unit. This is a wise and futuristic decision made by IIUM and supposed to be followed by other government institution, as a result of this the laying of cabling infrastructure for telecommunication and network is made easy and redundancy can be avoided and cost saved. Also in term of human resource, the skills of an engineer can be improved by swapping their task and multi tasking between telecommunication and network.
By normal practice at other places, network is being handle normally by an IT graduate (F scale), and by choosing an IT graduate, they are minimizing the scope of jobs because most IT graduates are not practice to handle hardware scope such as circuits and cabling, which requires certain basic electronics knowledge, and this hinder them from overseeing cabling infrastructure or to be involved in the earliest stage, when designing, and civil, mechanical and electrical implementations with Public Works Department.
With the existence of engineers in ITD, they can be consulted whenever the initial plan of building reach the stage of cabling infrastructure implementations.
All these will not materialized without the ideas and intellectual endeavors of Prof.Dr. Imtiaz Syarie the first Dean of Engineering, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Sufyan al-Irhayim first Head of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Adznan Jantan the first formal Director of Information Technology Division, Dr.Ir Wajdi al-Khateeb lecturer and mentor to most of the Engineers, Br. Nasruddin Abu Sari mentor to the Engineers and Br.Hamka, Head of Engineering ITD.
To enable 100% percent operation from core backbone, a mesh nodes topology was deployed linking to four ATM backbones. ATM was at the time the in trend technology and IIUM was the pioneer in deploying it.
ITD also took the initiative to deploy PABX and maintain MDF and SDF on their own without the assistance from others. Thus in all ITD is actively collaborating with Public Works Department as their consultant in network and telecommunication, designing, choosing the best topology, finding the best solution to fit IIUM needs as an ISP on its own.
Also staying true to sunnah of the Prophet s.a.w, by naming good names to object surrounding and used by him, as a means of du’a for the things to bring manfa’ah or benefits to the user. IIUM Network was aptly named IIUM High Speed Advanced Networks or IHSAN, Ihsan or good deeds, may the network brings muhsin or goodness, benefits and good tidings to the users. ITD has been actively minimizing outsource and dependency to others, most of the tasks were able to be completed without heavy reliance on outsiders.
As such in term of network, ITD has managed and successfully maintained and configured all network devices up to border router and firewall and maintain IIUM sovereignty in cyber space. During that time, in other organizations, its very rare to see the institutions on its own manage to configured, operated and maintained on its own their network devices, most depended heavily on their vendors and some outsourced their network to others, because they lack the ability to control the network.
Assoc.Prof.Dr Adznan Jantan as the first Director, also put an equal emphasize on the spiritual development of the staffs. Through usrah, halaqah and Islamic study circle organized once in a week, staffs gets a chance to engage in a live discussion of Islamic teachings, ways and methods to implement the teachings in daily life, even certain disputes between staffs are settled through this discussions. Assoc. Prof. Dr. Adznan with his straight remarks and strong comments, still maintain his fatherly figure over the staffs, his concern towards the staffs not only covers their professional works but also their personal life, marriage, Islamic education, and so on.
This was assisted further by the Assistant Director then, Sis. Hasleena with her sisterly touch, in dealing and engaging in administration matters, her door is always open for discussion even sometimes when touching on personal matters, because in Islam there is no real separation between personal life and working life, all are in reality inter-related. The problem in real life in reality does affect the working life and this is what many administrators failed to look and always chooses to ignore.
It is up to like Sis Hasleena to provide her attentive ears and providing proper guidelines as in according to Islam, because the objective of any organizations not only education organization but any organization that profess Islam as their way of life, is to produce at the end a good Muslim, and not merely obsessed with any short term or medium term quantifiable objectives. It is not wrong to have objectives, it actually helps the organization’s in term of activity and operations, but producing a good Muslim must be at all time the true holistic objective of any divisions.
The Structuring of Management of IT in IIUM (2000 – 2002)
When the foundation was laid, the physical structure was laid and stable, then the next logical phase was strengthening the IT management.
Previously, each divisions have own IT unit, to care and maintain the specialized needs of the particular divisions. However on long term duration, these IT units have their own limitations and inter-dependencies. Thus one proposed solution is to have all these IT staffs under one division for better management and cooperation.
Under Assoc. Dr. Adam Suhaimi as the Director of ITD, ITD has manage to gather significant number of IT staffs scattered between different divisions, agencies and departments under ITD, and this expansion created few new departments under ITD namely Software Development Department, Computer System Engineering (Cose), Computer Network Engineering (Cane) and Telecommunication.
Now with expansion, certain regulations and practices are needed. It became a tradition, staff’s meeting was held monthly, for the Director to gain access, to communicate with the staffs, all subjects and formal announcements were made during the meeting, because of the expansion there is a need for formal regulations and ITD internal policies to be discussed and agreed, ITD Management Meeting was agreed to be regulated and held monthly, usually the policies and procedures agreed during ITD Management Meeting are briefed and discussed with the staffs during ITD Staff’s meeting.
In early 2000, IT was blooming and all organizations are already recognizing the importance of IT, thus in 2000 IIUM recognized the need for top senior officer in IIUM to be in charge of IT, regarding the policies, implementations and the need for IT to be enforced with authority, the creation of Chief Information Officer (CIO) is to realized that vision. The first CIO was Prof. Dr. Ismawi Mohd.Zen who assume the role and sees the need for a more collaborative and expansion of IT usage towards the IIUM community.
Quoted from Prof.Dr.Ismawi Mohd.Zen “IT is the blood for the university, without the blood the body dies”, such was the importance of IT towards an intellectual community.
With the existence of CIO, signals the commitment from the top officials regarding the importance of IT, and with that the creation of a formal council, to oversees overall IT administration for the betterment of the university, so the creation of IIUM IT Council, comprises of high ranking officers of the University to chart and dictate IT course and objectives.
IIUM IT Council, receives it advise from the technical council i,e, IIUM IT Technical Council. Technical Council was formed as a committee to deliberate on IT technical issues, it comprises of technical experts from the university both from academic and working field. With the establishment of proper channel for deliberation of IT policies, strategies etc, and the user awareness for IT as a tool for their daily jobs increased, users are more aware and jobs now are more dependent on IT IT in IIUM is already entering the next phase of taking care customers needs and want.
The IT Customer Relations Management Phase (2002-2004)
The expansion of Information Technology and the rapid increase of IT applications making users whether they like it or not dependent on IT as a tool to expedite tasks and improve efficiency. In an academic world, Internet has brought many research data to be shared, knowledge promulgated, and information is at the tip of fingertip literally. Thus customers relied heavily on IT availability.
Thus the era of Customer Relation Management. For ITD, the customers mainly are the academics world, the lecturers, the researchers and the students. Services offered are Human Resource and Administration systems, Student's systems (curriculum and co-curriculum), portal for students and staffs, electronic documents and much more. Those concepts are known as e-university.
Further, with the expertise from the sifu, Abe Azhar Mahmood, Information system Officer, ITD in IIUM was selected as Oracle Reference point. Which in itself was a major recognition from Oracle, Database largest software developer. In ITD, all the development, integration and application was done in house.
Under the Directorship of Dr. Fauzan Noordin, ITD has started to embark and adopting a new pro-active response, and anticipating users requirements and needs, instead of the old cliché of fire-fighting, which most of IT staffs are preoccupied, trapped in the cycle of solving users problem one after the other. ITD has taken a necessary step in order to stabilized it's resources and minimized its users action and entertain problem time.
Thus most of the time can be reallocated for planning, analyzing the data and maintenance, thus by this the degrees of uptime can be significantly enhance.
The Expansion and Strategic Planning Phase (2004 - 2007)
After the relationship with customer has been taken care of, comes the next questions, the client wanted to know the quality of service, how much data will he received? At what speed? And at what bandwidth cost?
ITD under the guidance of Dr. Basri is embarking on a value added services, of providing users quality of services, providing not only services but managed services and guaranteed services. ITD has come out with the ICT Strategic Planning 2007-2011. ITD plays a crucial role in ensuring that the University maintains its character as a premier University which harnesses ICT in every aspect of its activities.
The ICT Strategic Plan works as a supplement to the IIUM Strategic Plan. This report provides clear statement of all the coherent points of the ICT Strategic Plan. It is the University’s thrust for self-development. The plan only covers issues related to the overall development of ICT, sets direction for applications/services and provides recommendations for technical and infrastructure development. It includes the issues concerning teaching, learning, and research directions in ICT. This strategic planning is aligning with the government direction in order to ensure the government agencies like IPTAs can play an important role in implementing the broad principles. ICT will aid the institutions of higher learning to play a more comprehensive role in achieving these broad goals
ITD start focusing on strengthening the network security by facilitating the usage of digital signature to ensured security, privacy and authentication for transactions. Parallel to that direction, ITD has deployed a few appliances that purposely monitor the security issues such as Intrusion Prevention System, Packet Shaper and Advance Firewall.
The previous backbone of IHSAN has been upgraded to gigabit Ethernet and the inclusion of layer seven monitoring for bandwidth. The email system has been added with special filtering to negate spamming and unsolicited emails.
ITD has been working towards enhancing the services, not only providing the services 24 hours 7 days a week, but also securing and maintaining the integrity of the data. To accommodate the increasing population of students and lecturers, the leased lines have been upgraded to 34Mbps for Gombak and 4 Mbps for Indera Mahkota, 2 Mbps for Teruntum and PJ.
Another added value services is provide a holistic idea to materialize an e-university with a campus wide wireless services which offering a mobile education culture to the IIUM community. It is an essential mobile mechanism for IIUM community to get connected and communicate to the internet in order to perform their researches, interact and changing information with their colleague form other universities and to advertise IIUM to the whole world. Hopefully, the mobile environment will uphold the good name and prestige of IIUM in the eyes of international level.
