ITPG Meeting Minutes November 17, 2003

Present: Mark Aldenderfer, Arlene Allen, Art Battson, Eric Brody, Ken Dean, Bill Doering, Doug Drury, Matthew Dunham, George Gregg, Rick Johnson, Bill Koseluk, Elise Meyer, George Michaels, Bruce Miller, Alan Moses, Linda Moskovits, Larry Murdock, Joan Murdoch, Stan Nicholson, Kevin Schmidt, Glenn Schiferl, Deborah Scott, Jan Smith, Chris Sneathen, Bob Sugar, Paul Valenzuela, Craig Welsh

ITPG Co-Chairship

Historically, the chairship of the ITPG has been shared between Glenn Davis and Elise Meyer. With the retirement of Glenn Davis, Arlene Allen has agreed to accept the position of Co-Chair for the ITPG.

AuthDir Software

Scott has completed training, which was a prerequisite to the Oblix support contract. The Oblix documentation has been buried in the DirectoryProject.isc.ucsb.edu website, and is only accessible to members of Authdir via the Oblix software. The server is now running off the live directory. Arlene is still looking for early adopters for this new technology.

SB1386

In a continuation of last meeting's discussion, Doug distributed a revised draft of the campus SB1386 Guidelines, and subsequently received a draft document from the Office of the President which encourages the use of best technical judgment. UCOP reviewed our revised draft and found no issues with it, and he would like confirmation that it is ready to present to the ITB. Based on the new guidelines, he will be dropping the current incident. We should however, come up with a set of "best practices." In discussion, a major operational problem seems to exist in the issuance of checks to temporary lecturers by the Accounting Office. They require names and social security numbers for checks, but refuse to be the repository for this information, resulting in departments' maintaining databases of confidential information. Doug has discussed this with Donna Carpenter, and will bring it up at the next ITB meeting.

Network Citizenship

Only two comments were submitted and both were incorporated into the document. There was a little confusion regarding the network administrator. The designated network administrator is still the single individual responsible for network activity, whether or not they perform hands-on network administration. There is now the option of including a secondary contact point, but the designated network administrator cannot delegate responsibility to anyone else. The section regarding the Electronics Communication Policy has new URLs to make the knowledge more accessible. The main concern is to make sure the system administrators know what is going on in their net, including computer moves, etc. Also, NAT may pose a problem on some networks: if the NAT device is unable to map traffic, a separate logging system will need to be inserted on the network. A copy of the latest version will be emailed to ITPG. Next step: present to ITB on December 4 and begin to pursue implementation January 1, 2004.

IT Leadership Council

1. UC is pursuing a Microsoft settlement. Currently, Select and Open are the only programs open to claims.
2. JOG is being replaced by the ITLC. CPG is not going away, and will work with the ITLC.
3. The New Business Architecture (NBA) is not completely dead. There will be a retreat this month to consider whether any projects (up to 4 or 5) should become priorities. There is a lot of encouragement but very little funding.
4. The Digital California Project could be eliminated, which would have deep fiscal implications for CalREN2 and ONI maintenance.

IT Budget Subcommittee

This subcommittee is developing a framework of principles that will be used when looking at the tough issues of how IT is delivered on campus. ITPG input is very important to make sure that these principles are correct. The draft principles are:

1. Coordinated Strategic Planning: How is IT aligned with institutional goals and priorities, and what are they? The subcommittee agrees with the goal that UCSB wants to be a 1st class research university and thus IT must enable excellence in teaching, research and service.
2. Organization: There are both pros and cons to our current decentralized approach. One major problem is that there may be no one responsible for a particular service, so either nothing is done, or it is done inefficiently. The group will adopt the approach of looking first at services and then at who is responsible.
3. Provision of resources and services: Opportunistic funding of IT does not produce a consistent baseline of IT services. Identify common campus-wide services and determine the best mechanism for achieving appropriate baseline services. Look at a 4-year replacement cycle for desktop computers.
4. Financing/Investment: IT investments should be made if they provide improvements in productivity and effectiveness, and/or reduce cost. The subcommittee discussed whether it should be "and" or "or." Life cycle replacement funding should be built into the IT planning and budgeting processes. Institutionalizing IT funding is a key goal. Change is painful, but look for long-term payoff.
5. Security: Security must be considered in all areas of IT.
6. Performance and Culture: There are issues relating to "haves and have nots." Examples of uneven funding across campus can be seen in equipment replacement inequities, "tribal knowledge" as departments become financially isolated and develop individual responses to challenges.

Common threads: We do not have the necessary leadership, baseline standards, investment, accountability, strategic processes, and funding. This has led to lack of integration, inconsistencies, poor performance, and a lack of responsibility, which is exacerbated by a shortfall in funding. Ultimately it all comes down to leadership. There was a request for the subcommittee to distribute some document to the ITPG for further thought. (NB: the full draft of the principles will be distributed prior to the December ITPG meeting.) The IT Budget Subcommittee will make their recommendation, including any funding models, to the Budget Coordinating Committee in Spring 2004. The general approach addresses current needs and funding issues, current status and problems, confirmation that we are looking at the proper issues, and then input on the course to follow.

ITPG Proposal Process

It has been two years since the last ITPG Proposal Process, so it is time to do it again. The 2001 proposal list and ITB rankings were distributed. The context for this proposal process is the severe budget situation the campus is facing. We should focus on synergies with existing infrastructure or between projects. Perhaps we might compromise by endorsing an initiative that represents the greatest potential of capturing new enthusiasm for IT support of the UCSB mission, i.e., forward thinking, and then also endorse proposal(s) for synergistic leverage of existing structures so as to consolidate and maximize our present investments. A discussion ensued about the process for this cycle and issues that need to be addressed. We need to identify what is required or the problems encountered to attain excellence in teaching, research, and service. We should identify gaps in service with a better definition of the problem. Analysis of comparable universities could be helpful. It was questioned whether our efforts should result in defined projects or areas of strategic gap. It was also questioned whether we should recommend just a few projects, or present the full spectrum of gaps. Proposals also need to engage the stakeholders. The proposals should be campus-wide in focus, but their basic infrastructure should be capable of supporting local projects. They should also be useful for all things that follow. It was also discussed that items that are a cost of doing business, e.g., WAN costs, should not be included in this process.

Ideas of clear IT principles to utilize in framing proposals should be brought for discussion at the next meeting. Be prepared to list services that are campus wide infrastructure components and discuss where we are doing well and where there are gaps.

Email Addresses for Alumni

The EVC is asking if email addresses for alumni would be useful and if there was any interest in systematic pursuit. It would not be a problem technologically, but the existence of its being a real need was in question.