case study The IT team at the Centre for Engineering and
Manufacturing Excellence in London has been given the opportunity
to build a state-of-the art network from scratch.
What would you do if you had the chance to design a network and IT
infrastructure around up-to-the-minute teaching methods at a new
technology college?
The IT team at the new Centre for Engineering and Manufacturing
Excellence (Ceme), set up in East London by motor manufacturer Ford
in conjunction with local development agencies and colleges, had
just such an opportunity.
The first principles taken into account by the team were:
- The college needed to offer anywhere-access to up to 1,200
students internally and a greater number logging in from outside
the campus
- The IT strategy needed to be aligned to business needs so that
money saved could be reinvested
- The network needed to be highly secure and scalable up to
50,000 users.
The college will make heavy use of IP telephony and wireless
networks to allow access from anywhere, voice and video over the
network and hot-desking in the college. All this will run on
Microsoft infrastructure and applications on IBM hardware linked
via Cisco Avvid voice, video and data network technology supplied
by Omnetica.
IT manager Roy Sharples explained how the network was fitted to the
new teaching methods. "Students and lecturers increasingly expect
to be able to use mobile devices, such as portable computers and
Tablet PCs, wherever they are working, teaching and learning.
"Ceme is backing this requirement with wireless Lan support and
making Tablet PCs and portable computers available to students and
lecturers. This would mean that a student could sit in a lecture
taking notes on a Tablet PC, simultaneously checking background
information on the subject from the information portal."
Sharples said the provision of state-of-the-art e-learning
facilities is an important goal for Ceme, so the centre needed
networks, software and hardware that could provide facilities such
as real-time video and multimedia lectures. Ceme needs to be able
to deliver e-learning functionality in a stable, low management and
virtually transparent way.
As a training facility for future engineers, Ceme is also ensuring
it operates in an enterprise culture from the start. This is
evident in the considerations taken into account in planning the
network infrastructure. "We worked rigorously with our stakeholders
and business partners to align our IT strategy to their business
strategies and to ensure that IT is a business-driven line activity
and decisions were based on value.
"We wanted the organisation to benefit from the IT investment, and,
although we are a not for profit organisation we need to operate as
a lean and agile enterprise, generating a surplus to reinvest."
