Our enterprise IT governance currently consists of 4 “planning” groups and a high-level IT Board.  The planning groups are:

• Enterprise Information Systems Planning Group
• Academic Technologies Planning Group
• Research Infrastructure Planning Group
• Information Technologies Planning Group

The first three of these groups are oriented around functions (Administrative, Academic, and Research), and the fourth is oriented around the technical infrastructure and support aspects of our plans.  The Research Infrastructure group was recently formalized; the others have been involved in planning for years.

The high-level IT Board is composed of the Executive Vice Chancellor, all of the Vice Chancellors, the University Librarian, the Assistant Chancellor for Budget & Planning, a representative dean, representatives from each of the planning groups, and the Associate Vice Chancellor for IT / CIO. 

In our recent work to develop a strategic plan for enterprise IT, we found ourselves with a rich collection of excellent plans prepared over the past several years by the planning groups, and a general consensus on the list of major projects that need to be accomplished.  (See the attached list.)  These plans have been advanced for approval of the IT Board, but they have all stopped at the same point:  funding.  Since the list of projects probably represents over $50 million in development costs over perhaps 5 years, the funding gap is enormous. 

A strategic plan needs to take availability of funds and sequencing of projects into account, so development of a strategic plan has been placed on hold for now while we explore funding for strategic enterprise projects. 

Studies are under way to identify current funding and expenses for IT across campus.  Furthermore, the IT Board has begun IT funding discussions with a sense that this impasse must be resolved.  There has been some recent progress in principle toward using research indirect cost recovery to pay for the development of a research co-location facility on campus. 

One funding direction we have been pursuing is to partner with the students to approve a “lock in fee” for IT services that students want.  A committee studied this issue last year, examining student IT fees across the country.  Based on the work of that committee, students seemed to be willing to pay for increased wireless access, up-to-date computer labs, and improved web access to instructional material.  We proposed a fee this fall, and we are now collecting petitions to put the fee on the ballot this spring. 

The other funding issue we are pursuing is to revise the way we pay for the network.  The idea is to rationalize the model to achieve a “fair share” of cost recovery that removes incentives for people or departments to do things to save money that don’t save the university money.  We are looking at the experience of UCSD in particular, and use of the “communication worker” metric.  We are preparing to hire outside consultants to help us put alternative models together.  This type of rationalization is largely a reallocation of funds, not an increase.  There could be some increase from inclusion of research projects, but we have to be careful whether that cost is already supposed to be included in the indirect return.  

Our identity management project continues slowly with Sun engineering on site to implement large portions of the JES server structure. The largest component of the effort is conversion to a formal provisioning engine - Sun Identity Manager. We are converting all our external, custom coded feeder systems into Identity Manager connectors.

Following a positive feasibility study done by rSmart consultants, we have been working on a detailed project plan and cost estimates to replace our vintage 1990 General Ledger with Kuali.  We expect this plan to be presented to our Enterprise Information Systems Planning Group and subsequently to the IT Board over the next month.

The Enterprise Information Systems Planning Group has prepared a document describing the need for a new student information system (admissions, financial aid, records, etc.)  There is a sense of urgency as people are retiring who are conversant with the ADABAS/ Natural platform that underlies our home-built system, and the projected cost of just doing nothing is nearly as large as the cost of a new system.   Work is beginning to analyze the alternatives including commercial products, Kuali Student, and rewriting our own. 

Our “pilot” project offering both Sakai and Moodle course management services has been struggling with too much success and too little capacity to expand.  We intend to select only one platform as a primary CMS this summer.  At the moment, the Academic IT Planning Group has not determined how the selection will be made…

Arlene Allen has been pulling together plans to remodel our campus computer room into a facility that can serve as a co-location site for research computing.  The plans are coming together and will be presented to the IT Board at an upcoming meeting.  As mentioned above, there has been some recent progress in principle toward financing the project using research indirect cost return. 

Our network staff is working with the College of Engineering to develop a design for guest access to campus wireless.  The idea is to allow the colleges to take responsibility for identifying their guests in an otherwise central authorization system.  We expect to have a prototype ready by June. 

Another challenge for the network group has been the University’s recent acquisition of a set of buildings that made up the 33 acre Devereux School for developmentally disabled young people.  This parcel is in what we call the West Campus where there is no fiber or network infrastructure.  It is just another one of those “opportunities” for creative network engineering.

Finally, we note with mixed emotions that John Haskins, our CENIC technical guru for many years, is taking a new position as Manager of the UC Santa Cruz Network Operations Center.  We wish him well, and we are glad he is still in the UC system.