Managing support services in a rapidly decentralizing computing environment

During the past five years, computing at the University of Washington has undergone radical changes, rapidly moving from a highly centralized, distributed computing model to a dispersed, networked model. As part of this transition, the decision was made to build up UNIX as a major operating system for academic and research computing. These changes have strained the computing support services on campus. The author summarizes how the University as a whole and University Computing services in particular have attempted to better support this new, decentralized environment. He focuses on management steps taken to deal with the rapid rate of change. In many cases, these management steps have consisted of changes in the processes by which information is collected and distributed within the University community