Information Technology Strategic Oversight Committee (ITSOC)

Minutes

January 16, 2015 10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. SSB324

Attending: James Lyall, Eriks Humeyumptewa, Rick Beck, Lee Taylor, Michael Erskine, Kevin Taylor, John Wiltsie, Sheila Rucki, Patsy Hernandez,Jeff Helton, Chad Mortensen, Lindsay Packer, Janos Fustos, Chelsey Baker-Hauck, Morgan Swaney, George Middlemist, Steven DeVisser, Mark Potter

Absent: Mike Hart

Approval of Minutes from September 19th, 2014 ITSOC Meeting

  1. Jeff moved to approve the minutes. Janos seconded and they were unanimously approved

Announcement/Updates (5 min)

  1. Rick Beck is retiring after 25 years at MSU Denver. There is a reception for him on January 27th from 2 – 4 p.m. in Admin, 4th Floor. He is coming back to work part-time. Kevin Taylor brings a lot of experience and expertise and will be moving into Rick’s role.
  2. Michael Erskine is the new Director of the ETC.
  3. Diane Watkins is our new Communications Coordinator in ITS, where we have a need to coordinate and improve our documentation and communication.
  4. Office 365 Migration is complete. We would like to thank Mike Hart and all of the folks that worked on that. Everything happened very quickly; in 8 months from start to finish. The domain migration project had to be completed first. There has been tremendous effort in ITS over the past 6 – 8 months. Office 365 is more than email. Students, faculty and staff have licensing to install Office 365 on their personal devices.
  5. As we move forward with SCCM in the labs, it will help us keep labs updated and now Office is available for personal devices to ensure consistency.
  6. Quicklaunch SSO/ConnectU site changes. We will have a soft launch in the next few weeks. This will make things simpler. Once we have a link to the site, we will get out to all of you to look at.
  7. Other as appropriate. Jeff started a project to createa medical records system for students. Mike and his team made it happen. The system was fully installed yesterday. Client configuration is next. We are one of the only schools that have our own medical records laboratories. We are going to have a joint program between Health Professions and CIS. Jeff thanks Mike and ITS for their great work on this project.

Items for Discussion and Recommendation (75 min)

  1. Modifying the IT Governance Structure to include representation from the School of Education.
  2. We have a faculty representative from each of our colleges and should add representation to each of the oversight committees from the School of Education, now that it has been created.
  3. We will also add the new Director of the Center for Faculty Development, and a representative from the Faculty Senate Instructional Resources Committee to the Academic Technology Subcommittee.
  4. Steve made the motion to adopt and Lindsay seconded it. The motion was approved unanimously.
  5. ITS 2015/2016 Budget/Project Requests – review and discussion (45 min)
  6. This is not our entire budget. These are incremental requests either in base or one-time funds. It is also not a comprehensive list of all of the projects we are working on. As examples, EllucianRecruiter is going live soon, apparently the first of February. DegreeWorksis ongoing.Neither is included as a request for that here.
  7. We want to share this, as it effectively becomes some of our most significant initiatives over the next 12 – 18 months. We are recommending some significant reallocations and suggestions.
  8. Our licensing costs are mandatory and are about $1.2m/year aggregate costs. There’s an average 4% cost increase each year.
  9. The AHEC phone system is going to require about $1m. All three institutions have met with AHEC regarding the phones. UCD has already decided to transition to VOIP and not use the AHEC phone system. This was taken to the CFOs. Our new building provides a good opportunity for MSU Denver to go to a new VOIP system. This is a multi-year project. UCD is finding faculty, in particular, are saying theydon’t want a phone in their office. We are looking at using a hosted VOIP service. We now have a redundant connection on campus. The network has to be on power back-up. There was no pattern when they allocated phone numbers, which creates a more difficult transition.
  10. Within 6 months there will no longer be timesheets because of changes being implemented from The Assembly for Process Transformation.
  11. Security Audits and Risk Assessments are continued requests.
  12. Account provisioning and de-provisioning. We currently have a manual system. When a person changes positions and needs a new set of access, we have no way of knowing that. We need to implement something to accommodate an institution of this size and complexity. This is a businessneed issue and will fundamentally reduce the risk to the institution.
  13. Integration of University Data and Systems. We are trying to address this over the long term. We need to collect information while the student is here or when a student registers. It is more about the idea that as we improve our account provisioning and de-provisioning, there is an opportunity to align other systems.
  14. Integration of LyrisList is tied to Banner. When the Luminis product breaks, it looks like services are not available on campus. We will not be dependent on Luminis once Quicklaunch is available. We will be able to terminate Luminissupport which will reduce costs about $70,000. We will take some of that savings to integrate Lyris with Banner. The more we know about an individual, the more granular we can be with our communications. The two ways we used Luminis was as the gateway into Banner self-service and for targeted announcement. Lyris has a robust list of functionalities. Some lists are automatically populated daily and some lists are customized. By terminating the license with Luminis, we are reallocating resources so we can join Internet2, which gives us more aggressive pricing and allows us to get access to a higher tier of functionality from Blackboard, including analytics. There is better information for people in retention and graduation. We would have access to Blackboard’s support services, including 24-7 Help Desk services. We want to leverage so we can have support after hours without additional costs.
  15. Virtualization has been a challenge with vendors. We need the ability to offer software to the desktop but managed on a server. We had extensive conversations with VMWare, but they changed the cost and we are now looking at other solutions.
  16. ASA technology-related initiative is a flexible amount of money. Historically Deans have sent a list of requests to us and this money is to address their needs. We are looking at computer labs how are theyutilized.
  17. Remodeling. We would like to have this meeting in the Admin Bldg. but we don’t have a room large enough. The Help Desk has been remodeled.
  18. Consulting needs. We still rely on them for major upgrades. Rely on expertise for particular modules and projects.
  19. Network Equipment Replacement. We are trying to suggest that we need an annual basis to keep this equipment in a refresh cycle.
  20. Classroom/Learning Space Maintenance. We need $75k to provide maintenance to existing classrooms. AHEC has moved a large number of classrooms under our control. There are 179 classrooms, most of them are 15 years old. The average classroom costs $20k/each to upgrade. We have $400k there as we are behind with upgrades. Mark asked about the Media Center. George said that we have put a lot of pressure on AHEC to look at their processes, so if they can’t cut costs, they can reallocate. The more they make the less we have to give them. Bookstore revenues have dropped $5m.
  21. What about training? It has never been budgeted for. We are not great instructors. How do we facilitate training that is more effective? Ellucian has a training option that we can purchase on a per user basis and offer training for all the Ellucian modules we have. We are investigating this option. Lyris has online training modules that are fairly intuitive.
  22. The hope is that Recruiter will be completely live early February. We have a 35 person license for people in the admissions office.
  23. Should we change priorities or are there things missing?
  24. Mark asked why we are not going to ask for additional positions. We are not until we are fully staffed. We are always considering whether we should reallocate some of the vacancies.
  25. How can we leverage the tools of SharePoint?
  26. We are trying to come up with a service catalogue that will help with this conversation. We want to know what is it someone is trying to do or trying to get access to.