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Welcome to another update of Information Please. I've got a couple of things to tell you about
to kick off the new term. You should be seeing this (issue), I think, in September.
One of them is a budget update. As you know, we had a 10.1% cut to the Office of Information
Technology. The directors, with all of their staff, worked really hard to do to their best
to impact people as little as they could. We're working through those final things with
HR, so about the time that this comes out, the effects - we minimized them as best we
could - will be communicated, and we'll be able to move on and start doing all of the
things that we've got planned for this year.
(Here are) a couple of the more exciting and good things that we're doing. Many of you
have heard, especially if you're in OIT, about the new project management tool that we're
using. It's called "Daptiv." The goal is to try and take all of the many projects and
all of the instances that we have and merge them together so we can do project management
and time management in a comprehensive fashion so we see how we're doing things. It’ll
help us do things like working across the units and cover things that when we've got
a project going on that depends on another unit, they know what's expected, when their
time frames are, how to get it done, (and) how much time we've allocated for it. We'll
just be able to manage the whole process better. So, it will be great. We’ll be able to do
time estimates and roll projects up to see how we're allocating our time in order to
help keep OIT - in these lean times - working well, helping the campus and doing what we're
supposed to do to provide good service to the university.
The other thing that is going on that many of you have heard about is our PeopleSoft
upgrade. I mention that because we're starting into the phase where things will start rolling
out. In October, we're going to be rolling out a Portal upgrade. The Portal upgrade gives
us the new tools that we’ll use in order to do the development of the other pieces.
We're also making the change and switching to Shibboleth as the identity management piece
within the new portal. And then after that in four- or five-month increments, we'll be
rolling out in March a new Finance System and then back again in fall of 2012, we'll
be rolling out HR and the new student versions. There will be a lot of new functionality and
new capabilities. What that means is that everyone is going to be working really hard
to try and get those things out. The upgrades will improve our disaster recovery capability
and our organizational resilience.
There are a lot of really good things working. Everybody's working really hard in OIT and
I appreciate it. The campus is integrating well and the new governance model, hopefully,
should be rolling out this fall also. There are a lot of good things happening and I look
forward to continuing the great progress we've been making. Thanks!