TECHNOLOGY PLANNING & PRIORITIES COMMITTEE

JUNE 14, 2013

Present:  Bev Nagel, Janet Scannell, Fernan Jaramillo, Fred Rogers, Hudlin Wagner, Paul Thiboutot, Linda Thornton,    Don Hasseltine

Absent:  Laura Chihara

AGENDA:

1.         Review minutes from April 19th meeting  

2.         MISO Survey

3.         Colleague makeover status – and 2 potential go-live timeframes

4.         Checkout Center fines draft policy

5.         Demo of proposed instructor station

 Review minutes from April 19 meeting:

The minutes were approved from the April 19, 2013 meeting.

MISO survey: 

The MISO survey originated at Bryn Mawr College after they merged the library and computing services departments and wanted a baseline in order to be able to assess whether the reorganization had improved its services to the community.  Now, 10 years later, 40 different colleges have used it and more are participating each year.  The survey provides information on good national trends and comparable results that can be used by participating institutions to inform strategic decisions and ongoing service improvement.  Brad Schaffner, Library and Janet Scannell would like to do it and Janet asked the committee if they would support it.  The fee is $1,800 to run the survey and there is some amount of staff effort that’s needed put into it. Fernan commented that because of the changes in ITS over the last few years, it’s an opportune time to use the results as a benchmark and felt it’s worth the investment.  After discussion, the committee unanimously agreed that Brad and Janet should move forward with the MISO survey. 

 Colleague makeover status and 2 potential go-live timeframes:

Minutes from our April meeting mention a delay in the project timeframe from July 2013 to November 2013 or July 2014.  Since then, Janet has been working with the team to come up with some benchmarks, including a thorough evaluation of the remaining tasks, and doing monthly reviews to check on progress. Delays in the project have been attributed to issues with tools and time estimates, unrealistic assumptions about how much time staff could spend on the project, and an extended open position.

Janet, the project team, Colleague Steering Committee, and Administrative Computing Advisory Committee are advocating and recommending go-live with the migration during Thanksgiving weekend, this November then continuing to work on a list of other items to be finish by July 2014.  The committee was provided with a list of items to be worked on past the live date (many of them have workarounds).  The alternative is to address some pent up needs, update the current server and consider a 1.5-2.5 year timeframe.

We talked through some risks that were also identified and mitigation options.

·         Staffing changes: might hire consultants or shift pre-migration tasks to other resources.  One EIS staff member has a pending adoption. A newly hired member of the team is coming up to speed quickly and could help fill that gap. 

·         Performance problems –ITS will schedule Ellucian consultant and clients from other institutions to assist us with this process.  

·         Vacation/sick time – the team has considered known vacation time into the project plan.

·         Time estimates/ previously undiscovered problems:  ITS has a precise list of items that need to be addressed for the process to work and are doing monthly reviews to check on progress.

Committee members had a number of questions and concerns about the tight schedule, adequate resources, and no leeway.  With only two windows of opportunity to go-live, if the November date is unfeasible, we will hold off until 4th of July.  The reporting work is being used by departments immediately (it can run against either database); the Colleague changes could need to be reworked if there is too much time between the programming and the GoLive, e.g. with the alternate (longer) timeframe.

The plan this summer is for all Colleague users to do testing in July and August, performance testing in October with lots of users and ITS tweaking the system, then final testing and go-live in November. 

Don assured Janet that this committee supports getting ITS the resources it needs to reach the November date.  We agreed to touch base on the projected timing at the August meeting.

 Checkout Center fines draft policy and 3rd Party Software evaluation:

The discussion about the fines policy was postponed to our meeting in July.

We also agreed to revisit the question of the residential life software and Fred’s related question of the process for evaluating administrative software that needs a connection to the enterprise system.

Demo of proposed instructor station:

The amount of time it takes between classes for an instructor station to reboot is clearly a pain point for faculty, and ITS wants to improve the situation as much as possible.  Over the past few months, ITS held several open sessions with faculty to set priorities, gather input, and understand the technical issues regarding instructor stations. 

After gathering that information, Troy and Rebecca Barkmeier set up demo machines of 2 options (faster dual boot vs separate Mac/PC computers). They invited faculty to do some performance testing and the response was good for the dual boot option with faster solid state drives, bypassing the individual login and doing less checking and cleanup between users.  Troy and Rebecca gave the committee a demo of how much faster a machine reboots with this drive on both Mac and Windows and explained the user interactions.   This will benefit everything in the classroom and everyone will have an improvement in experience.  It will be a change in our strategy to manage software updates only overnight.

The cost to replace approximately 60 drives is around $450 each; however all involved feels it is a worthwhile investment.  ITS will be working this summer to upgrade all the instructor stations in classrooms.

Meeting adjourned at 4:15p.m.    

Submitted by,
Candyce Lelm