IT Transformation Town Hall Meeting
July 13, 2007
As several UB2020 IT Transformation projects move towards reality, the July 13, 2007 Town Hall meeting was an opportunity for three projects to present formative information critical to project initiation. First, Joe Kerr, Assistant Vice President Of Technology Services, reported on the Strategic Information Resource Initiative (SIRI): business case , project phases, and time lines. Next, Matt Stock, Manager, Enterprise Research Computing Services, depicted the vision and work flow discussions of the Shared IT Service Desk team. Finally, Charlie Moran, partner of Moran Technology Consulting and Consultant for the Student Systems Assessment project presented the IT Readiness Assessment report for the project. Inserted between the presentations, Peter Rittner, project leader of the Workstation Standardization team, updated the group on the latest details of the Dell contract for the Workstation Standardization team.
All three presentations are available for you peruse on the UB2020 IT Strategic Transformation at UB2020 IT Strategic Transformation website, including PDF's of two handouts during Matt's presentation.
Strategic Information Resource Initiative
Joe Kerr began his rapidly moving presentation by reviewing the background to illustrate why SIRI is vital. The full presentation can be viewed from the Downloads box at the top of this page. The past three years has seen rapid administrative and leadership change along with the formulation of important, yet simple, questions such as “how much funding is available?”, or “what is our class enrollment level?” SIRI's basic deliverable is an enterprise, all resources, data rich, analytic and reporting environment. Kerr offered, “This project is focused on getting a basic foundation so that we can go forward most effectively and efficiently”. In addition, SIRI will provide tools for analysis with a high degree of confidence. To illustrate this need, Joe told a story. “It took us 3 months to get confirmation from the departments on the strategic management report that we created for [the new administration] and we delivered it 5 months later.”
The long term vision is to acquire any information that we want from data sources in consistent manner, put into a data warehouse with routine tools for data analysis and reporting, and with logs of pre-calculated data derived from aggregation. The current phase of the project, which began in March 2007 with the approval of the Steering Committee, has the project team examining one vendor, Business Intelligence, as a solution, focusing primarily on financial and human resources information initially, with the intention of including procurement and personnel transactions at a later date.
Kerr fielded questions from the audience of about 100 participants from the IT and UB Business communities. When asked about availability, Kerr answered that some releases are planned for a January 2008 time frame to specific customer test groups. “The product will roll out on a phased schedule”, Kerr said.
When asked about end user training, Kerr assured the audience that whatever training is necessary to roll the product out will be offered, similar to the assistance offered for the People and Money modules of UB Business. “We'll roll out area by area”, he said.
“Will there be a help desk?”, one person asked. The project team will include a recommendation on how to support end users as part of the project plan.
Dell Contract
Peter Rittner, Assistant Dean for Educational Technology, College of Arts and Sciences, took a moment to update the audience on the status of the Dell volume purchase which is a component of the Workstation Standardization project. “We expect a shipment of machines from Dell within a week”, Peter said. The deal with Dell is expected to save UB $700,000 from just this purchase alone, with a $50,000 savings for the College of Arts and Sciences. Finally, Rittner reported the Workstations Standardization team is working on methods to automate the customization process with scripted installs.
Shared IT Service Desk
For the first time since it's inception, the Shared IT Service Desk team was able to articulate its vision and processes for how a shared desk would function, including principles, roles and responsibilities for the proposed staff involved. The full presentation can be viewed from the Downloads box at the top of this page. To begin dissecting the vision, Stock shared two important definitions, that of Customer Service Point (where direct customer support is coordinated); and, Service Provider (the behind the scenes operations organized to provide required support activities). Stock offered that most IT units do a mix of these two functions today.
A Shared IT Service Desk is seen as a collaboration between service providers and service points across campus utilizing a common set of tools with the improvement of customer support. With that vision in mind, Stock reviewed several principles developed by the project team:
- Strive to solve the problem at the FIRST contact with the customer.
- If we can make it so the customer can solve the problem him/herself, that would be ideal.
- We don't want to have the customers need to know HOW the service works (customers do not need to know how IT support is organized on campus to get their problem addressed).
- Improve communications between existing IT units/nodes regarding customer problem, impact, and status of resolution
- Provide accurate estimates of solution to manage expectations
- We want to make this as flexible for units as we can.
Stock then stepped the audience through the process flow diagrams that describe how the Shared Service Desk would work for distributed customer service points and customer interaction (consult the diagram which can be accessed from the Downloads box at the top of the page). Some of the roles in the process flow are distributed, for example Knowledge Base Management for everyone customized for particular specializations. Other roles are singular, as would be an oversight group to ensure that customer needs are met. More complicated than the process flow diagram for service points, Stock presented the internal work flow process diagram (again, consult the Downloads box).
Project next steps, from Stock's presentation:
- Start an RFP process for a common ticketing system
- Invite vendors to present to campus on their products
- Narrow down to a small number of vendors, and invite them to campus to present their solutions (incident/ticketing) to all of us
- Adjust/tune the SITSD vision based on feedback
- Begin to look at Service Provider to Service Provider communications
Student Systems Assessment results of IT Readiness Assessment
Charlie Moran, Partner of Moran Technology Associates and Consultant to the SSA project, introduced himself by saying , “We've been hired to help UB select a new student system. We've done an IT Readiness Assessment to see where we're ready and where we need to make improvements. In the meantime, there won't be any improvements made to existing systems.” He proceeded to update the audience on the key issues of the IT Readiness Assessment for the SSA project, focusing on the outcomes. He complimented the presentations of the previous teams in that UB is on the next curve “understanding the correct questions to address to move forward. Other campuses are experiencing the same issues, but don't know what to ask.”
The presentation slides offer a great deal of detail. In brief, the presentation outlines:
- the details of the focus and the approach of the assessment which is not intended to be a comprehensive cross-university or CIT IT assessment
- Who exactly are the participating stakeholders
- High-level assessment themes and most re-occurring and pressing concerns:
- resources (people),
- understanding the full catalog of IT projects,
- improvement of cross-CIT communications,
- an imperative for project management skill development,
- the need for a CIT Change Management/Control Board,
- and, similar to SITSD vision, clearly designed customer service/end-user support
Readers are encourage to review the presentation content.
Q and A
Similar to other Town Hall meetings, the audience was given the opportunity to ask questions of the presenters.
Q for Charlie Moran: “Did you look at raw number of people and skill sets, when we compared ourselves last year we found we were half staffed. Did you do that? Every school I go to, there is more work to do than you can do. “
Moran: We didn't do the full-blown assessment this time.
Q for Matt Stock: “On the first diagram, the focus of my question is for a node to select the initial contact point. I've been here for 28 years, I often simply don't know where to go. For example, Engineering handles my email but doesn't support Mulberry, CIT supports Mulberry but doesn't support my email. Other things, even if I ask, I can't get an answer. [CIT] Help desk apparently can't answer Blackboard questions! it doesn't have [faculty] access. And we will run into more of this as we add new systems.”
Stock: Yes. This is a problem. That's why it's a balance. This will require the “CIT Help Desk” to know so much more of how to proceed with a customer problem.
Q for Matt Stock: “Is there any mechanism, to get help right away? Some faculty don't want to be talked through things. And how will this knowledge database work in terms of showing stats to everyone on the number of calls? “
Stock: There's been lots of discussions, and where we've landed is that issues are not owned by CIT. I want to know the history when I'm helping a faculty that got help elsewhere. By default, we want the ticket history open. There are situations where there is private data being discussed, we want to have that ability to need things to stay private. But that's not the norm. We are recommending the ability to control who sees what statistics, but ultimately what people see and have access to is not an IT problem, but a policy decision. We can't make a case for adding resources if we can't use the data. We would like to recommend that there is a way in the system to flag those issues that need to be escalated to policy people.
Q for Charlie Moran: “Explain this 4-hour server downtime comment.”
Moran: There was such a push from end users for 24x7 access, they have a 4 hour window each month to take the system down to do the non-emergency service, but you have emergency conditionals put in the SLA.
Q for Charlie Moran: “I'm interested in your experience with other campuses, do they have people dedicated to project management?”
Moran: Everyone has the problem, but some don't know they have it. They don't realize the amount of operations hours that are needed by people that also are dedicated to projects. A lot of times we accept projects, without knowing if we can do it or not. You need to have data to make these evaluations, and ultimately solve the problem.
Q for Matt Stock: “Is the vision a replacement system? OSS is looking at a similar thing.”
Stock: It will be THE ticketing solution for the entire campus. We will have to look at the services (like phone support) and see how everything fits in.
Q for Matt Stock: “Some units use their ticketing systems for other issues. Do you envision this system to have extensions so people don't have to recreate?”
Stock: We're not at that level of discussion yet.
Nancy Smyth, Dean of Social Work and SSID team leader: We're trying to buy a tool to solve a problem that we haven't process-mapped out yet. We've spent many months talking out these kinds of issues, but the truth is, while some areas have very clearly defined services, most units don't function that way. We need some framework from a tool, and let's take one by one the folks that want to use the system. The environment is too complex to do that in advance we found out, while transformation is going on.
Q for Peter Rittner: “About workstation purchases , Is it for only department orders, not for personal purchases? “
Rittner: No, personal purchases are available. UBMicro website has the 3 platforms that we are getting for the university, and the pricing is fabulous. It's available right now.
Q for Rittner: “Why did the price go from $859 to $880 [on the UBMicro website]?”
Rittner: The short answer is the result of a bump we had with Dell and their relationship with the State. We continue to benefit on the huge discounts we're getting, vs. the difference of $21. We're estimating $2.6 million savings a year.
Q for Matt Stock: “You would like to solve the problem at the initial contact. A lot of calls come in on the phone. We might spend 23 mins. on an initial phone call, but solve the problem. How does that go into the system? “
Stock: There should be a threshold defined so we can make decisions on what should be entered and what should not.