Wellness & retention

Attracting and retaining IT staff is a considerable challenge for universities, but UniSA has found a creative solution, says Beverley Head. Skills have once again been voted the number one challenge facing IT directors in Australia’s universities. Chief information officers report that it is hard to find IT staff. Alan McMeekin, chair of the Council of Australian University Directors of IT (CAUDIT), who is also the executive director of ITS at Monash University, argues the skills challenge is particularly acute in university IT departments, but is being felt widely across the tertiary sector. “There are some really frightening figures around at the moment; 54 per cent of academics are 45 and over already and less than 33 per cent will be under 60 by 2020,” said McMeekin. IT directors searching for already scarce staff have to not only compete with one another, but with all other industries. The problem is compounded by globalisation, an increasingly mobile workforce and largely uncompetitive salaries on offer in the higher education sector. A novel approach to tackling the IT skills issue has been taken by the University of South Australia. Over the past five years, its 100-strong IT team has been the focus of a wellness program aimed at encouraging employees and recruitment prospects to view the university as an employer of choice. Paul Sherlock, director of information strategy and technical services at UniSA, detailed the program at a CAUDIT conference in early May, and found himself the subject of keen interest from universities keen to replicate the program. Both McMeekin and Nick Tate, director of information services at the University of Queensland, immediately committed to rolling out similar programs. Under the program, exercise classes are held every week with 75 of the 100 IT staff participating regularly. In addition, the IT department purchases passes to gyms and swimming pools, and staff have access to fit balls and pedometers as well as 15 minute massage sessions each fortnight. Staff are provided with fresh fruit, supplemented by fruit juices in summer and soup in winter. A colour chart describing urine colour is posted in the lavatories, encouraging people to ensure they are not dehydrated. Information is freely available detailing issues such as back care and work-life balance, and health professionals are brought in to perform blood pressure, cholesterol tests and provide free flu vaccinations. The program costs about $15,000 a year but pays for itself with a reduction in sick days. Staff feel healthier and more valued, and the department has recorded significant increases in satisfaction levels in recent employee surveys. “Staff turnover that I don’t initiate is down to 2 per cent. We are not losing good staff,” says Sherlock. There are considerable challenges for the higher education sector to be able to match salaries on offer in other industries. “But if you go to a bank and get paid three times as much they will want their pound of flesh,” he says. The program has attracted the attention of the US group Educause (CAUDIT’s US equivalent) which has drafted a case study about the program. While staffing remained the number one issue, university IT directors also noted a sharply increasing interest in green IT. While still not in the top 10 issues of importance, many universities initiated green IT initiatives. In March, Macquarie University netted 5226 kilos of e-waste. Other innovators are Monash, UWS and UNE. Separately, Griffith University announced in May that it would lead the United Nations Asia Pacific initiative to tackle e-waste. Dr Sunil Herat, the head of Griffith’s e-waste research group, will establish a regional hub of the UN’s Solving The e-waste Problem (STeP) program, which aims to raise awareness of the issue and encourage environmentally sensitive treatment of e-waste. Interactive PDFs Bringing vast reservoirs of data to life has long been a passion for Australian researchers. Molecular scientists want to create three-dimensional models of complex proteins; astrophysicists generate simulations of galaxies; materials scientists show how plastics flow in a mould – believing that seeing how something works is more compelling and easily understood than just describing how something happens. However, in the past, when it came to publishing their findings, researchers were forced to work in just two dimensions with the printed page. Two researchers at Swinburne University’s Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, however, have been developing tools that allow three-dimensional visualisations to be embedded into Adobe PDF files. While tools such as Acrobat Automation could be used to generate PDF versions of 3D models they have been challenging to use. Dr Christopher Fluke, an astronomer and senior lecturer and his co-developer Dr David Barnes used the S2Plot programming library, developed by Swinburne based on the OpenGL graphics library tools, to develop three- dimensional models. They subsequently developed a tool that converts the S2Plot models automatically to the VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language) format which can be embedded into Adobe PDFs. Fluke said the model should encourage researchers to start publishing their 3D models in PDF documents. Although developed with astronomers in mind, a team in Germany is exploring the system to publish 3D visualisations of sea snails. The tools are being made freely available to researchers – although the university would be interested in negotiating a royalty deal if corporate users were interested. “Our primary goal was to help our colleagues do better science,” Fluke said.