April 18, 2023 1

Contents

1. IT strategic task group charter and goals

2. Cal Poly IT services and organization, ITS

3. IT Trends, Campus Needs, Institutional Challenges

4. ITS goals

5. Types of Recommendations

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Charter: Working Group on Information Technology . Information Technology (IT) plays a central role in supporting the academic, research, and administrative functions of the university. The Working Group on Information Technology should consider the current state of IT capabilities and make recommendations for changes that will enhance existing strengths or add new strengths. Areas for consideration include course transformation, IT organization, dashboard indicators for effective decision making, instructional materials, and IT support for programs in the arts, music, and game design. The results of the Working Group’s deliberations should be a few concrete recommendations that are practical and consistent with the current organization, resources, objectives, policies, and practices of IT at Cal Poly.

. ON April 29, 2008… plan for a 10 minute presentation with 10 minutes of discussion.

. It is important that the Working Group conduct its deliberations in light of cross-cutting issues important to our university. They are diversity, sustainability, interdisciplinary collaboration, faculty workload, student success/retention/graduation, quality of life, and community citizenship.

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Plan for IT task group

. Goal: Develop 3-5 concrete recommendations that are achievable

✦ Pre-reading to set context for discussion

✦ Meet week of March 10 to discuss context, goals, and determine high priority areas of interest. Form working groups to examine possible initiatives and determine feasibility. Contact “model” universities for ideas, etc.

✦ Meet early in April to determine recommendations

✦ Review feasibility

✦ Report to Academic Senate

. This leaves time for extra meeting if the group would like to work as a whole or would like additional background

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Recommended Background Information

. Horizon Report

. Access to Excellence Report

. CSU Coded Memo on Facilitating Graduation

. Academic Analytics

. Executive Summary of ECAR study on Students and IT

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IT organization: Centralized Decentralized Governance

. Blend of Centralized/Decentralized management and implementation

. Governance Structure✦ Policy and Planning Group – VP level

✦ Student, Faculty, Staff, Information Security advisory groups

✦ Yearly requirements gathering

. Central IT✦ 120 staff, $12M budget, 200+ servers

✦ telecomm, network, servers, enterprise, communications, and collaborative software, service desk, workstation refresh

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Centralized Campus Services. Administrative:

✦ Student, HR, Finance – system-wide ERP (Oracle/PeopleSoft) with local modifications

✦ Data Warehouse, Identity Management, Reporting✦ Web content management (Planned)

. Communications and Collaboration:✦ Email and Calendar (Oracle Collaboration Suite)✦ Workflow (Pilot)✦ Document Sharing, Wiki (Pilot)✦ Academic:

– Learning management systems (BlackBoard – Digital Commons (Pilot - bepress)– ePortfolio – Grid Computing (Pilot)

. Other: Service Desk, Workstations, LAN, scheduling, asset management, site license software, Smartrooms and Media services

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Centralized services

Network (wired and wireless), Remote Access,

Computation and Storage Systems, Security, Telephones

Data WarehouseDirectory

ServicesPortal Services

Communication

Services

Administrative

Services

Collaboration

Services

Policy: Acceptable Use, Security, ADA compliance, IT Business Continuity,

…

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Decentralized

✦ Special purpose labs: circuits, graphics, controls, computer science, etc.

✦ LAN and workstations for colleges and some administrative units

✦ Special purpose administrative systems

– Imaging

– Facilities management

. Issues: Training, Inconsistent UI for students faculty, Security and Policy compliance, Potential cost savings, Governance

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IT Governance

University oversight and consultation✦ Executive Staff

✦ IRMPPC

✦ IACC, AACC, SC3

. Internal✦ Three Directors with operational responsibility

✦ Office of CIO: Policy, Security, Portfolio Management, Finance

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Strengths

✦ Infrastructure, Open, moving toward SOA – more flexible, easily managed environment

✦ Credibility to influence CSU. We are perceived to be the technology leaders and are well ahead of other CSU campuses in identity management, data warehousing, policy development and management, virtualization

✦ Key technical skills, although thin, in security, identity management, virtualization, data warehousing

✦ Vision – have a broad understanding and commitment to deploying middleware and developing policies that support a more modern infrastructure that makes providing services easier

✦ Policy has been developed and supported by the campus that provides for a secure and robust network infrastructure

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Weaknesses

✦ Lack of campus strategic direction for IT. Strategy and goals are largely technology driven not by organizational needs.

✦ Managing Human Resources: Need to grow management talent and deal more directly with unsatisfactory performance

✦ Perceived lack of IT responsiveness to campus needs leads to lack of trust. We have made progress in relationship building but have too few resources to really be responsive to campus needs.

✦ Tend to focus too much on long term, sustainable infrastructure and capability building prevents implementing good enough solutions

✦ Not invented here syndrome. We do not learn much from other university IT.

✦ Lack of organizational cohesiveness: Four different locations

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Issues and Gaps

. Gaps: plans but lack the human and technical resources✦ Security –Two additional security technical staff

✦ Business Continuity – More space and dollars

. Issues✦ Managing CSU Initiatives: Prioritize our responses to these initiatives

appropriately

✦ Communication with campus. Develop a more effective model of communicating with the campus. Especially for strategic issues.

✦ IT lacks the resources and skills to support the campus in developing strategic IT based solutions to their business problems. We recognize the importance of business analysis as do many of the functional units but the expertise and resources are lacking.

✦ Enterprise management applications HR, Finance, and Student needs to transition to maintenance and support infrastructure.

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Opportunities

✦ Reduce duplication across campus.

– Web content management

– LAN and workstation support

✦ Anytime, anywhere access.

– Wireless

– Mobile clients

✦ IT Support for Academic Transformation

✦ Leverage Open Source Collaboration.

– Collaboration applications.

✦ Administrative transformation.

– Dependent on business process improvement

✦ Outsourcing application hosting has the potential to save money, staff, security and planning difficulties

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Threats

✦ Reduced funding. The current state budget situation is a typical of the cyclic budget cuts that prevent the University, in particular IT, from being able to plan and implement new technology effectively

✦ Inability to attract talent in certain areas e.g. data warehouse, security. (Money and location are issues)

✦ Unable to adapt quickly to rapid technological change and expectations can lead to our clients implementing point solutions that create inefficiencies and future difficulties. (Staff stretched too thin)

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Draft Five Year Goals

✦ Clear Campus needs– Provide the campus with anytime, anywhere access (Portal, Federated ID

management, Mobile Client support, …)

– Learning spaces (projection, class capture, bandwidth, power)

– Data Warehouse, Analytics (Simple data access, analysis tools)

– Collaboration Tools (Document sharing, etc. – see collaboration strategy table)

– Support Services (Media distribution, Service Desk)

– Reduce infrastructure and support costs – Virtualization, Open Source, etc)

✦ Build internal capabilities:– Better HR process and outcomes. Plan for staff maturity to meet future goals

– Internal vision of how to provide services- Technical architecture and internal plan

– Better project and portfolio management

✦ Campus relationships and governance– Campus IT plan core to university mission. Shared decision making and goal

setting

– Develop more predictable, sustainable funding

– Develop campus understanding that IT is intrinsic to business process, delivery and support of learning, and advising

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Important Trends

✦ Software Tools on the Internet – availability anytime, anywhere, most any mobile device

✦ Virtualization

✦ Web 2.0

– Social Networking

– Blogs, Wikis, etc.

✦ Mobile and network centric replacing PC centric

✦ Assessment

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ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and IT 2007: Methodology

✦ Quantitative survey of over 27,000 students:

– 49% Doctoral institutions

– 38% Master’s institutions

– 5.5% Bachelor’s

✦ A few focus groups

✦ Analysis of open ended comments

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ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and IT 2007: Use of Technology

✦ 98% have computers, 76% laptops from 52% on 2005

✦ 86% have cell phones, 12% Smartphones

✦ 92% have high speed internet access

✦ Report spending 18 hours (Engineering students 22 hours) a week on-line

✦ 80% use social networking such as Facebook or MySpace

✦ 83% use course management system

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ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and IT 2007: Perceptions

✦ 61% agree or strongly agree that IT in courses improves learning. 56% believe that convenience is the primary benefit

– 59% provides greater control

– 59% helps me to better communicate and collaborate

– 73% facilitates prompts feedback from instructors

✦ 59% prefer moderate; 20% prefer extensive

✦ Instructor skill in the use of IT greatly impacts the students perception of the value of IT in their courses

✦ Depending on major students report more skill with certain types of applications

✦ Expect IT to be available and responsive

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Collaboration Tools for Education

✦ **Asynchronous messaging: Email, calendar --- Oracle

✦ Real-time messaging

✦ **Learning management system - Blackboard

✦ ePortfolio

✦ **Digital Commons – repository for scholarly activities

✦ Workspaces – Document collaboration

✦ Workflow – pilot - electronic routing for approvals etc.

✦ Task Management – pilot – managing projects and issues

✦ Unified messaging – integrate email and phone services

✦ BLOGs – Web 2.0 tool for communication

✦ Podcasting – pilot

. ** means Cal Poly officially supports tool

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Institutional Challenges Create IT Challenges

✦ Improved learning in Learn by Doing context

✦ Teacher Scholar Model

✦ Accountability for outcomes

✦ Cross disciplinary studies and projects

✦ Technology support at a Polytechnic

✦ Fiscal constraints

✦ Student expectations for technology usage and support

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Campus Needs ??

✦ Assessment support: ePortfolio, Document management

✦ Academic Technology

– Smartrooms, Course Capture, Podcasting, Instructional Designers, Faculty exemplars, LMS support for additional tools; Next Generation LMS

✦ Decision Support: Data Warehouse, End User Tools

✦ Security

✦ Accessibility

✦ Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery

✦ E-Discovery (Electronically Stored Information)

✦ Sustainability initiatives: Server Virtualization, Desktop videoconferencing to cut down on travel, etc.

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Types of recommendations

✦ Add new service

✦ Discontinue an existing service

✦ Redirect resources to better serve university

✦ Change timing of current planned projects

✦ Change support practices

✦ Reorganize IT governance either specific to ITS or more globally for the campus

. What would happen if we do not provide some service?

. What IT services are reshaping higher education?✦ Teaching and Learning

✦ Administration