IT Town Hall 2008

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November 12, 2008

Chancellor Blumenthal
The November Town Hall opened with over 160 ITS staff members. VC Doyle welcomed staff and introduced Chancellor Blumenthal. The chancellor reviewed his six campus goals and priorities to inform and guide our collective decisions and actions as we move forward this year:

Reaffirm UCSC’s goals as distinctive public research university and to implement our comprehensive academic plan. Build upon and enhance our achievements as an outstanding undergraduate institution. Grow graduate student population and build professional schools to meet the needs of our state and country. Better reflect the diversity of California's population and cultures in our faculty and staff and students. Be a responsible neighbor to collaborate effectively with leaders in our community, local, city and county and be careful stewards to our land and the environment. UCSC campus will begin first comprehensive fundraising campaign to support university. More self reliant on raising private money for funding the campus.

The chancellor acknowledged that we are in difficult times and face challenges with mid-year cuts. Our job is to get through it. He reiterated his confidence in Mark Yudof as the new UC president. Yudof's impact is felt already, he has a great ability to deal with state funding crises at state universities and has a history of effectively advocating for public education.

He also spoke a bit about the Web Presence Program saying that it’s important that our presence shows who we are and is both useful and appealing. We as a campus have not committed ourselves adequately in the past. Our departmental web sites are too diverse. We need more uniformity of information that is provided on the web. It will do a lot for our image. The world views us through our web presence and we all need to represent the university via the web and it’s relatively inexpensive. We will have a state of the art web presence.

VC Doyle Update - Mary presented the following two awards:

08-09 Guislin Award - The Beth Guislin award is presented to an individual who successfully leads a team project that is an example of excellence in collaborative information technology projects at UC Santa Cruz. This year, the award was presented to Change Manager, Charles McIntyre and the the Change Management Team consisting of:

There are three stages to the Change Management Process within the ITS Division:

• Outage Process which requires all planned and unplanned outages to be communicated to service clients and to sc.update@ucsc.edu.
• Release Readiness means that all changes are tested, scheduled and communicate where impact and risk mitigation are paramount.
• The Complete Change Management process defines a lifecycle of a change from idea to post implementation review.

08-09 Larry Merkley Leadership Award - This award is presented to an individual who exhibited, over an extended period of time, the types of vision, leadership, accomplishments, and recognition among peers that achieve a scope that extends beyond a single ITS unit on campus. This year, the award was presented to CRM Director, Bill Hyder by Larry Merkley himself. Larry joined the ITS Town Hall to present this award and to great ITS staff.

VC Doyle ended her comments with a reminder of our priorities. The Web Presence and Services and Learning Management System projects currently have the highest priorities. Stabilization of services is another issue. We are here to serve the campus and they rely on us for their day to day work. She referred to her memo emailed to ITS about the budget, and reminded us that we need to take care of ourselves and each other, and that our health is important in these difficult budget times. Mary will continue to keep ITS updated on any information as she receives it.

Web Program Update - David Turner
Please visit the Web Program Web site. Web has been an ongoing pain point across campus.The Chancellor himself wrote the charge letter (PDF) for this program. Power Point Presentation (PDF 2.26 MB)

August 13, 2008

VC Update: Mary Doyle Suggested Divisional Goals (PDF)
The August Town Hall opened with a welcome to over 100 ITS staff members. VC Doyle started the meeting with a few summer updates. CRM Director Bill Hyder is recovering from surgery and doing well. He intends to be back to work in October. There were new staff introductions including Jim Phillips, Director of Instructional Technology Group as well as a few other introductions. Special thanks were given to the WWW Team for a successful deployment. VC Doyle also gave an update about the review of the governance structure. The Information User (IU) program resulted in governance questions. The campus will be more divisionally represented now and will have a stronger voice. Feedback and comments about Town Halls are requested. Please email them to Mark Cianca. Include what would you like to see, how often, what topics are helpful, departmental updates, etc.

Access Card Reminder: Karalee Richter
Karalee Richter gave a quick reminder to all ITS staff that, for security reasons, if you have lost your access cards, to please contact her so she can deactivate the lost card and issue you a new one.

CruzAlert Update: Marian Sherrin and Chris Gaylord CruzAlert presentation (PDF)
Marian Sherrin gave a CruzAlert update and introduced Chris Gaylord from the campus Fire Department. Staff are encouraged go online and sign up at cruzalert.ucsc.edu. The information entered will only be used for emergency/safety issues only. It will not be used for regular communication and is only accessible by a dozen people. Managers and supervisors are asked to encourage their staff to sign up. It’s voluntary but highly recommended. If you haven't seen the campus emergency web site, you are encouraged to do so. CruzAlert will be marketed to campus this fall. Information will be given out at new student orientations, faculty orientations, divisional meetings, etc. There will be weekly tabling at quarry plaza. System testing may be done as often as quarterly. Email alert@ucsc.edu with questions.

IdM Update: Eric Goodman IdM Presentation (PDF)
Past, present and future work of IdM and the impacts to campus IT service providers and individual users.

May 14, 2008

The May Town Hall opened with a welcome to over 125 ITS staff members. We had several new ITS staff announcements that followed with general updates.

Lab Project Update: Heather Mietz Egli  
Instructional Computing is in partner with the McHenry Library in constructing a new computer lab. It’s a pilot project located at the Cowell Room at the Science Library from spring through fall including the summer. There are 48 machines that are accessed by not only the UCSC community, but the public as well. Evaluation criteria are being created to be able to measure how successful this project is. This is a perfect example of how we can integrate instructional technology services around campus. It’s an example of how the ITS consolidation is working around campus and can be used as a model for other areas where technology is needed.

Software Release Update: John Lallemand Software Release Presentation ** Software Release Web site
John announced the new Software Release web pages and presented to staff how software release includes planning and testing for standard end-user applications. This includes identifying and tracking new software versions and updates and coordinating the completion of support plans. The software release web page will show the status of software testing including what's been done, what's being tested currently and what's planned for the future.

Outage Process Update: Charles McIntyre Outage Process(PDF) ** Outage Process Presentation(PDF)
It has almost been a year since the ITS Outage Process was introduced to ITS staff. Charles presented the highlights of the Outage Process version 2 and reiterated how important and necessary it is for staff to use the Outage Process for all planned and unplanned outages. The main goal of process is to be more efficient in our response to our clients. All outages and service changes are added to the ITS maintenance calendar.

IU Funding Model: Magge McCue IU Funding Model Presentation (PDF)
The IU model is a headcount based metric to allocate cost of shared and broadly used IT services to campus units. It moves us away from port and line-based count. It is necessary because of changing technologies. The IU funding model will not bring in new money to ITS this year. The criteria for services to be considered for the IU charge was discussed and decisions were made on what to include now and what will be included at later iterations.

Staff Evaluations Update: Cecile Morris and Bill Parro Performance Appraisal Information
Signed staff evaluations due to Staff HR by August 15. A couple of new things added this year to the forms for managers and supervisors. The new items included health and safety issues and there are more guidelines describing the process. Departmental discussions are encouraged to set expectations and definitions of “satisfactory”, “more than satisfactory” and “outstanding” ratings to ensure fairness and equitable use. More information will be communicated to staff within the next month. Bill, Maureen and Cecile are our resources for ITS with any questions or issues. An online performance management tutorial will be posted soon.

VC Update: Mary Doyle 
Chancellor Blumenthal has accepted an invitation to our Town Hall on November 12. Mary has been busy working on strategic planning for our division. She is having a ½ day workshop with the senior managers to collect feedback and perspective for planning and setting external and internal focused direction, goals and objectives. There is no real update on the budget. It’s not known what impact the budget will have at this time. There is a possible 1.1% budget reduction for ITS but nothing is final. Once there is more budget information, Mary will communicate to ITS staff.

February 28 , 2008

The February Town Hall began with a welcome and brief news updates by Mark Cianca. We had several new ITS staff announcements that followed with general updates.

• The new Instructional Technology Group Director selection is still in process. More updates to follow.
• The ITS web site has a new home page and a new Service Catalog. http://its.ucsc.edu/service_catalog/index.php
• There are four ITS staff members participating in the Chancellor sponsored UCSC Leadership Academy for 2008 - Magge McCue, Greg Gaither, Dave Klein and David Turner. Congratulations on this achievement.
• Bruce Horn from Media Services supplied the group with a quick update about UCCSC at UC Santa Barbara being held July 20-22. The call for presentation proposals are due Friday February 29. For more information:  http://uccsc.ucsb.edu/
• Susan Willats, campus ADA Compliance Officer, talked about the UC Electronic Accessibility Policy. http://www.ucop.edu/irc/itaccessibility/resources/
  A vast percentage of UCSC’s web sites are not accessible to people using adaptive technology.
  
  • What is being proposed, policy-wise:
    - Adopting Section 508 guidelines for web content only
    - Each campus would have a “champion” and a committee
    - Timelines for milestones
    New Senior VP for Compliance and Audit is Sheryl Vacca
    Moving forward:
    - CIOs will be discussing this at ITLC meetings, with the goal to formally appoint a working group they can charge with specific assignments, e.g.:
                   - Maintaining and improving our web site
                   - Developing an RFP for accessibility tools
    - CIOs are exploring possibilities of pooling funds, and/or applying for some of the new general liability pool funding.
    - Everyone (ITLC, EAPRG, initial group involved) will continue to try and raise awareness.
    
    The California Web Accessibility Conference was attended by two ITS staff members who acquired a wealth of information. In the near future, they may put together a workshop for the ITS staff to share what was learned.

Our new Vice Chancellor, Mary Doyle, shared her vision and what she has observed the short four weeks she has been at UCSC. Mary talked briefly about her background and overall IT experience. She has a solid set of values - and is looking forward to meeting all ITS staff and learning more about the Who We Are Guiding Principles.

Mary spoke about the important of team work and fostering a team environment. She is a listener and and will understand and assimilate information before taking action. She will continue aligning ITS with the Chancellor's vision to be a nationally recognized research institution. Mary believes that a work environment should be fun; something from which to get satisfaction and enjoyment while being productive. Her door is always open.