ITPG Meeting Minutes March 12, 2007

Present: Jeffrey Barteet, Lubo Bojilov, David Bosso, Larry Carver, Saturnino Doctor, Doug Drury, Randall Ehrens, Kirk Grier, Aaron Martin, Elise Meyer, Bruce Miller, Alan Moses, Linda Moskovits, Andy Satomi, Glenn Schiferl, Jan Smith, Jamie Sonsini, Paul Weakliem, Jim Woods.

IT Needs

The EVC presented a list of IT Needs to the ITB. After a discussion, the resulting list of IT needs contains:

1. Identity Management
2. EISPG Recommendation
   1. Financial Information System
   2. Student Information System
   3. Alumni/Donor Financial System
3. North Hall Computer Center Renovation
4. Course Management System
5. Campus Wireless Network
6. Intrabuilding Wiring Project
7. Wide Area Networking Costs
8. Campus Security/Privacy Officer
9. CIO Office
10. Effort Reporting
11. Data Warehouse

The ITPG offered to help the ITB effort to develop the list of IT needs, and we were asked by the EVC to help in the following areas.

1. Identify missing needs that are of comparable priority to what is already on the list. As priorities are identified,
2. Provide insight into the phasing and implementation of these solutions.
3. Identify the impacts on the departments.

The ITPG went through our two lists of IT issues and discussed whether any had comparable priority to the items already on the ITB list.

The ITPG had consensus on the following: IT Service Providers need to build in an (end-user) support model as part of their service – this applies to the new services on the ITB list as well as existing services.

There was a lot of discussion about the possible support solutions that were common to all services that might become a general support item to add to the ITB list. The range of common solutions included:

• A centralized help desk.
• A centralized FAQ/Knowledgebase system that would have content provided by service providers and would be used by IT staff in support of their endusers or by endusers directly.
• The ITPG would review support models for both existing or new services.

Other issues mentioned were:

• Some services lend themselves to a more centralized support structure and others to a more localized support structure.
• The amount of support available is more important than the organizational structure of the support.
• Certain services include a demographic of unsupported users, e.g., campus-wide services such as wireless and identity, versus services such as CMS and FIS.

There was strong argument both for and against including a support item on the ITB list, and the group consensus was to not include such an item, but instead to address the support issue for each and every item on the list.

There was some discussion about identifying dependencies. It was pointed out that some items enable other items, so it might make sense to address them in terms of either layers or categories, along the lines of the following suggestion.

There was interest in dialoguing with the ITB regarding the scope and priority of each of the items.

Our proposed response to the ITB is that we can provide the dependencies, and make sure that support is adequately addressed in each item.