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• The Program's objective is to enhance the knowledge and skills of health care professionals to meet the public health preparedness and emergency response demands resulting from acts of bioterrorism and other incidents.

Infrastructure

Underlying infrastructure

Our overriding strategy to implement the technical aspects of this program is to utilize industry-proven services rather than developing our own. This strategy is practical from a number of considerations.

• It is more likely that the infrastructure for this project will be robust and maintained regularly. All of our service and software providers are firmly established in their own niche markets. Based on our past experiences, such an approach minimizes cost in the long run without sacrificing quality and sustainability.
• This approach allows project personnel to focus on pedagogical aspects of the curriculum, its delivery and evaluation, thereby providing better opportunities for enhancing course quality.
• In our experience outsourcing services to industry specialists also reduces stress on academic staff during service downtimes partly because the service specialists are typically in a better position than academics to troubleshoot and bring their systems back up again at short notice.
• In many cases, outsourcing IT infrastructural services also comes with the benefit of having access to the latest versions of the services without having to invest in expensive upgrade processes.
• Most outsourced IT infrastructures have a well established multi-level support and user training system that cannot be replicated in-house without significant additional investments in personnel and equipment. On the flip side, the selection of service providers is not an easy process and needs to be lead by experienced in-house staff who are able to see through industry marketing strategies, are in synch with existing and emerging technologies, and have the skill to do hands on evaluations of the services that will be outsourced. A few of the important selection parameters that need not be missed are for example, the frequency of downtimes of the services, the infrastructure in place to deal with data security and privacy, and data back up guarantees. The bottom line is that we are currently in the midst of an evolution to what has been dubbed Web 2.0. And while there is a general tendency to outsource increasingly complex applications, it is important to do so only after completing an extensive evaluation.