Technology Planning & Priorities Committee

April 4, 2014

Present:  Janet Scannell, Fernan Jaramillo, Bev Nagel, Linda Thornton, Joe Hargis, Paul Thiboutot, Tommy Bonner,

 Steve Spehn

Absent:  Fred Rogers, Hudlin Wagner, Laura Chihara

AGENDA:

1.       Review minutes from February 20th meeting.

2.       ITS strategic planning – update and discussion.

Review minutes from February 20th meeting.

There were no changes or corrections made to the February 20, 2014 meeting minutes.

Janet informed the committee about two failures that took place in the past 24 hours with e-mail (process was stuck) and the evening before registration the Colleague export file in Moodle was incomplete.  We reran the processes and things came up fine.  ITS is looking into the cause of these two failures. This raises the question of when and how we communicate these kinds of outages.  These two outages were brief enough, with only a few calls to the Helpdesk, and were fixed in a relative short time.  

We are due for a Zimbra upgrade and figuring out the best time to move to the next version – likely this summer.   

ITS strategic planning – update and discussion:

We reviewed and discussed Janet’s strategic planning document titled The Road to a 3-year Technology Strategic Plan: A review of Technology needs and strategic priorities.    This document is the culmination of her first 12 months as CTO and will act as a roadmap to guide ITS efforts moving forward.  The document included:

1.      Executive summary

2.      Remarks on current state of ITS

3.      Statement of ITS mission

4.      A summary of key forces for change

5.      Six strategic themes and potential initiatives

6.      Next steps.

Bev asked “what would be most helpful to Janet in light of the visiting committee”?   There are so many ways to approach strategic planning.  By bringing in the visiting committee Janet hopes they will bring the appropriate level of importance to the process, bring their own perspective, and guide us in priority setting/raising the right issues.

Comments brought forth during our discussion included:

·        Financial efficiency – Bev brought up software purchases and statistical software as an example.   We have too many of them.  How do we decide what core things are fully supported and what are partially or self-supported.   New choices – we could do better at deciding when to sunset things and determining when to move to something new (either custom built or 3rd party).

·        Telecommunications is not represented in this document.  St. Olaf Telephone Company is in transition right now, but we are expecting an announcement to be made soon.

·        MISO survey results – students were the least satisfied with performance and availability of wireless on campus, the Hub, and Moodle.

·        How we set priorities, communicate them, and make decisions are areas Janet will be focusing on with the Academic Technology Advisory, Administrative Computing Advisory, and Future Learning & Technology Groups.  Joe noted that from his own experience if you have alternatives for people then it’s a little easier to deal with them.  As communication and transparency improves you gain more support from the institution.

·        Reflecting on the academic parts of this document, the question was asked how far we should go before the new Director of Academic Technology is in place.  Janet views the current planning work as preparing the way for the new Director.   The plan leaves most aspects on the academic side as ‘exploratory’ at this time.

·        Ellucian has a very promising replacement for the Hub, but only some of the modules are ready (and we will have to pay extra for it). 

·        1st year initiatives – launch project management, create security councils and work with St. Olaf on cybersecurity, campaign things (there’s a placeholder for ITS participation). 

Janet will be sharing this document more broadly and meeting next week with the Forum Group, CSA, and a Faculty breakout session.  It was suggested this would be a good topic for The Occasional Meeting too.

 We are expecting a report from a 3-member visiting committee to help guide our strategic planning after their visit on April 14-15th.  Then we will need to determine a process for prioritizing our wide range of projects and initiatives, including resources allocation and monitoring.

 

Meeting adjourned at 3:05p.m.

Submitted by;

Candyce Lelm