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ITS Organizational Structure

IT Leadership Team

The IT Leadership Team (ITLT) is led by Vice Chancellor of Information Technology (VCIT) Aisha Jackson. This team is responsible for the effective delivery of IT services that align with and advance UCSC's priorities. This team collaborates across the campus with leaders, vice chancellors, deans, faculty, staff, students, and other key campus stakeholders to leverage technology in ways that support the goals of teaching and learning, research and discovery, and outreach. ITLT team members / org chart

Responsibilities

  • Articulate a vision for the future of IT.
  • Develop and execute strategies that advance that vision, align with institutional priorities, and make the best use of institutional resources.
  • Foster a challenging, fulfilling, and enjoyable work environment that cultivates staff engagement, strengthens inclusion, and empowers individual and collective success.
  • Ensure IT is operationally excellent and strategically relevant.

ITS Teams

We consist of five overarching teams that proudly serve the entire UCSC community – students, faculty, researchers, staff, alumni, and beyond. Here’s a bit more information about each area and links to the organization charts.

Experience Strategy & Design (EXP)

The Experience Strategy & Design unit is led by Associate Vice Chancellor, Phyllis Treige, and consists of 9 staff members. Their goal is to help make the most of UCSC experiences by seeking out feedback and listening. They strive to make user experiences visible and are prepared to take informed action. EXP org chart

What, how, and why

  • What they do - they create, improve, and sustain effective and delightful experiences.
  • How they do it - they use design to understand and take informed action on users’ needs and achieve organizational objectives.
  • Why they do it - to ensure that everyone can make the most of their unique UCSC experience.

Areas of focus

  • Communications & Engagement: This area is the hub of communications and employee engagement in ITS. They support external and internal communications, ITS marketing, branding, content strategy and web, and the overall end-to-end employee experience.
  • User Experience: This area focuses on the overall user experience including strategy, research, and service design. They lead user journey mapping and service blueprinting, in partnership with ITS colleagues, for seeking and using ITS services.
  • Digital Accessibility & Equity: This area supports a comprehensive digital accessibility and equity program for UCSC. They create digital accessibility and equity principles, standards, and processes that can scale to support the division and campus.
  • Web Improvement Program: This area leads a program that drives and sustains improvements to the UCSC’s web ecosystem including design, content strategy, service, and community engagement.

Information Security (InfoSec)

The Information Security unit is led by Associate Vice Chancellor, Brian Hall, and consists of 17 staff members. Their goal is to protect the UCSC’s information assets and be at the forefront of developments in security standards and threats facing higher education. They create cybersecurity awareness and educate the campus community on best practices. InfoSec org chart

What, how, and why

  • What they do - they identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover.
  • How they do it - they build and implement security systems and educate the campus
  • Why they do it - to ensure that safeguards are in place to protect critical campus infrastructure and information assets.

Areas of focus

  • Identity & Access Management: This group creates frameworks of business processes, policies and technologies that facilitate the management of electronic or digital identities.
  • Incident Response & Detection Analyst: This group responds to security incidents and recommends action as needed. They perform tasks including monitoring, research, classification and analysis of security events.
  • Security Engineering: This group builds campus security systems. They implement and monitor security controls to protect UCSC’s data from cyber attacks, loss, or unauthorized access.
  • Cybersecurity: This group manages the campus identity and access management system, performs regular audits and works across campus to ensure security practices are compliant, deploys endpoint detection and prevention tools to thwart malicious hacks, and educates UCSC on cybersecurity awareness.
  • Physical Security Management: This group, in collaboration with the campus police department, provides technology services and support to help protect UCSC against serious threats of harm and loss.

Resources Planning & Management (RPM)

The Resources Planning & Management team is led by Associate Vice Chancellor, Laura Persson. The unit consists of 11 staff members. Their goal is to manage & support business operations, planning and strategy, focusing on the delivery of high level budget, finance, space, human resource management and assessment services to optimize resources and maximize ITS's value to the UC Santa Cruz community. RPM org chart

What, how, and why

  • What they do - they serve as the business hub, providing a range of internal organizational services.
  • How they do it - they provide critical policy and process guidance, forecast and monitor data, review metrics to develop frameworks that demonstrate value of ITS products and services.
  • Why they do it - to optimize resources and provide data informed decisions in support of divisional and campus goals.

Areas of focus

  • Budget & Finance, Strategy: This area focuses on budget development and financial management through fund accounting, services costing, cash flow analysis, cost model development and funding strategies. They are the liaison to the campus budget office.
  • Strategy & Portfolio Management: This area oversees our programs and resource investments to meet long-term strategic objectives for ITS in support of campus goals. This area leads and facilitates the strategic planning and goal-setting process for the ITS Division.
  • Human Resources: This area consists of IT compensation, recruitments, analysis, staffing data, diversity, equity and inclusion reporting. They manage UC Learning Center compliance, reporting and audit. They are also the IT liaison to campus Staff Human Resources.
  • Business Operations: This area manages the ITS Network & Telecommunications recharge billing, provides policy interpretation and guidance to ensure compliance, develops and implements ITS business processes, manages campus software licensing program and all ITS space/facilities resources. Is the liaison to campus procurement, accounting, and business managers groups.
  • Business Analytics: This area provides valuable benchmarking and supports ITS leadership and managers in making data-driven decisions and achieving strategic business outcomes through analytics, data analysis, and continuous improvement.

Technology Architecture & Standards (TAS)

The Technology Architecture & Standards (formerly known as Technology Engineering) team is led by Interim Associate Vice Chancellor, Brian Hall. The unit consists of 5 staff members. Their goal is to effectively achieve current and future objectives by analyzing, planning, designing and implementing analysis on enterprise systems in addition to managing IT changes. TAS org chart

Area of focus

  • Enterprise Architecture: This group determines how our division can effectively achieve current and future objectives by analyzing, planning, designing and implementing analysis on enterprise systems.
  • Change Management: This group manages all aspects of IT changes. They prioritize change requests, assess their impact, and accept or reject changes.
  • Information Assurance: This group focuses on risk management and comes up with guidelines for keeping information secure, whether on physical (hard drives, PCs, laptops and tablets) or digital (cloud) systems.

Technology & Services (T&S)

The Technology & Services team is led by Associate Vice Chancellor, Melanie Douglas. The unit consists of 180+ staff members. Their goal is to collaborate with campus stakeholders and partners to support and deliver technology services and solutions to meet the needs of teaching and learning, research, students, faculty, and staff. T&S org chart

What, how, and why

  • What they do - they are highly trained professionals delivering services built on industry best practices to the campus community.
  • How they do it - they use Service Management (ITIL), Agile, Lean Thinking, Project & Program Management methodologies and continuous improvement to produce top quality results.
  • Why they do it - to ensure that the campus can trust us to deliver the best service experience and end user results.

Areas of focus

  • Academic Services: This group supports Research IT Engagement and Support, Divisional Services for the Arts, BSOE, Humanities, Library, PBSci, and SocSci, and Learning and Instructional tools.
  • Business Enterprise Systems: This group supports the campus Enterprise Business Administrative Systems and Enterprise Productivity and Collaboration tools. The team partners with campus customers to build, deploy and provide technical and operational support for critical enterprise systems.
  • Client Solutions & Support: This group provides services that enable members of the campus community to do their work. Services include the Support Center, Standard Desktop Support, Zoom, Resnet, Web Content Management, development and maintenance of Web Applications that facilitate campus processes, and Specialized Support for UCSC’s administrative divisions.
  • Instructional Spaces & Media Technology: This group is responsible for daily operations of 89 registrar scheduled classrooms, 12 computer labs and campus library computer commons areas along with audio visual support for campus special events. They are our rapid response team for outages and disruptions in our classrooms when they occur, offering just-in-time support to faculty.
  • Network Infrastructure: This group supports the entire campus network infrastructure specializing in Engineering and Construction Management, Network Telecom, Telecommunications, and Network / Data Center Operations.
  • Process Champion: This group helps our division optimize processes to deliver cost effective services that meet or exceed customer expectations, and promotes and enables continuous improvement.
  • Systems Engineering: This group manages and supports campus data center services, enterprise class applications, central file services, integrations, database management, Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosting support and virtual infrastructure services supporting both academic and administrative needs.