Quick notes on ITC meeting: minutes will be posted at a later date.
More information can be found at http://itc.wisc.edu/index.asp Read more…
During the meeting, we covered a few big projects:
First off, The new Course Guide
Have you used the Course Guide?
I think a good way of describing the Course Guide (or what it aims to be) is that it will be the go to place for information about classes. Timetable information, class web page link, textbook info, syllabus, etc for the entire campus. Individual departments have this kind of a thing, but the Course Guide can be powerful if it has information on classes across campus.
You can find the project group’s page at http://registrar.wisc.edu/course_guide_project_information_fs.htm
You can also find the Course Guide in your My UW page, look for the Course Guide tab.
The update the committee received was about how they’re trying to get information from all of the different areas around campus. We discussed the best ways to gather that kind of information, for example, many of the departments have a similar database of classes and the tech staff may be able to easily sync into it. For the departments that don’t have that kind of a support staff, the instructor would have to update the information manually. This brought up the inconvenience of updating course info in so many different places and the burden it places on instructors. It seems clear to me that the Course Guide could be really useful to students, but only if it has information on all departments otherwise the department class listing is always going to be better.
Feel free to comment with questions.
Human Resources System
HRS is a broad system that encompasses payroll, benefits, and a few other things concerning employment. The new system is going to act as an automated HR office. Implementation is going to be in Mid April or May, and sometime shortly after staff will stop using Kronos to report hours. They are putting a lot of effort into this and I think it’s paying off.
If you would like more detailed information you can check out the project group’s website at http://hrs.uwsa.edu on any computer. There is another more detailed website, but it doesn’t seem to have the open access that the presentation said it would. I will ask about that website and give an update when I can.
Research Computing
This was an interesting update on the state of the Social Science Computing Cooperative. The SSCC is a group funded by member groups which provides access to powerful clusters of computers with lots of different statistical software. They’re funding model is basically voluntary with emphasis on percentage of usage by member departments. Individual users from other departments can purchase an account for about $250 a year. The individual account is said to be worth it only if you need access to lots of computing power or multiple software packages.
The update explained:
They are definitely a service oriented organization, seeking to satisfy users needs. Not all departments need this kind of a service, which makes their funding model possibly better than the centralized DoIT model or the individual department model.
They have been running into issues lately with vendors switching licensing models from per concurrent user to per user. This has a very big effect on software used a very small percent of time by a large number of users (think educational, only in classroom). The problem is that the software switching to this model is non-academic software like Microsoft virtual terminal server licenses, which provide access to all of the academic software without needing a physical lab machine. The conversation turned to how the UW system or DoIT can help alleviate the licensing concerns that build up over the entire campus. It’s not clear how things can be best helped, but there is a group started by the ITC a few years ago to helping groups purchase licenses together to gain bulk prices.
Strategic Plan
The campus IT strategic plan is being presented around campus. The plan is at the point where priorities are being finalized and movement is ready to be made. Feel free to check out the plan at http://www.cio.wisc.edu/plan/. The points in the plan range everywhere from easy to difficult and heavy impact to light. The thing the CIO is emphasizing how impact if we do not focus on the points in the plan. Unfortunately I don’t have exact notes on the different major points because they are still in draft, but I can point out things like a centralized authentication/authorization system and support for research computing.
To give a little background on those two points: Authentication is the process of establishing a user’s identity while authorization is the process of determining the access that user should have to campus resources. Departments have been in favor of establishing their own systems rather than relying on DoIT provided resources for varying reasons. The goal is to provide a service that all UW-Madison departments and services will trust and use. Research Computing is a much broader subject, but includes establishing campus services that support research such as off-site backup and virtualized computing.
Other Stuff
Any input on how the student center is working for enrolment?
Please leave comments or questions below. If you wish them to remain private, e-mail me at erezny at wisc.edu
The first meeting of the Information Technology Committee for the 2010-11 academic year kicked off on Friday, October 22nd 2010. The following is a brief summary of the minutes of the meeting:
a) New member introductions
b) Rapid fire discussions to classify the various charters (of the “The UW-Madison Information Technology (IT) Strategic Plan“) based on their ease of implementation and impact
c) A discussion on new email/calendaring system for the university.
d) Personal Publishing Project report
e) Announcements by members representing various groups
Prof. Forest, the chair of the committee, welcomed the members of the committee to the meeting and asked the new members who were present to introduce themselves. Then Joanne Berg, the Interim CIO and Vice Provost for Information Technology, took over the baton and started off with the first important aspect of the agenda: to get input from all the members of the committee regard to the ease of implementation and the impact levels of the various charters in the IT-Strategic Plan. The IT-Strategic Plan, in the words of it’s website is described as “a shared campus vision for achieving and sustaining excellence in IT service for higher education”. Further, “Although this is an IT Strategic Plan, its focus is not on technology, but rather on how technology can support our campus mission”. There are 37 charters classified under various themes such as “Support teaching and learning”, “Support Wisconsin Idea”, “Prepare students”, “Connect People and Research Resources” etc-.
The CIO asked the members present in the meeting to divide themselves into 9 different groups and classify the various charters. My group comprised of 7 members including Richard Kunert (NAG), and Mike Pflieger (Academic staff, Memorial Library). As I was the only voting member in the group, I was given the power for the final vote for classification of the charters. In other words, I was supposed to lead my group. It was intimidating and a challenging experience. I was happy I could manage it well given that it was my first meeting.
After an hour of rapid discussions and after the various groups gave their opinions on the various charters, Joanne concluded the discussion activity and said that she would average the opinions of the various groups and take the averaged results as inputs to future decisions related to the IT-plan. Then annual report (for 2009/2010) and the October 2010 meeting minutes were approved.
Then up, Brian Rust, Communications director, Office of the Chief Information Officer, Division of Information Technology (DoIT) gave a presentation on the New Email/Calendaring System Update. The project to implement a new email/calendaring system (the current system is classified as “End-of-life” as Oracle has ended its support for the service as of August 2010) for the university is at the stage of taking input from the various stakeholders of the Campus community. Here is a survey being taken as part of the input process.
Next up, Kathy Konicek, Campus eLearning Roadmap Group (CeLRG) Chair, gave a brief overview of the proposed Personal Publishing Project. CeLRG is the lead group for IT Strategic Plan Initiative 13b – “Offer and provide support for an identified suite of instructional technologies for all faculty and instructors”. As part of the job as a lead group for the initiative, it recommended that “a Personal publishing be added to the campus portfolio of instructional technology, and has assigned a cross-campus hot-team to make a recommendation for a personal publishing technology”. Timmo Dugdale, (DoIT Academic Technology), Chair of Personal Publishing Hot Team, then gave an overview of the project. The complete project report is available here.
The meeting ended with announcements by members representing various groups – Comets (Mike Pitterle), CTIG (Rob Kohlhepp), MTAG (Steve Hahn), Moodle Council (Eric Alborn) and NAG (Richard Kunert) .
-Sharad Punuganti
