TECHNOLOGY PLANNING & PRIORITIES COMMITTEE

JUNE 28, 2017

Present:  Janet Scannell, Elise Eslinger, Bev Nagel, Fred Rogers, Paul Thiboutot

Absent:  Tommy Bonner, Carolyn Livingston

AGENDA:

1. Approve minutes​

2. Status and prioritizing needs of “Web2020” (move away from Reason)

3. Approach to reviewing our campus-wide enterprise systems portfolio next year

4. Conference & summer project debrief, time permitting

Approve Minutes:
 The minutes from the May 18th meeting were approved.  

Status & prioritizing needs of web2020:  
 Janet gave the committee an update on the Admission redesign project and future from Reason.  Mstoner has produced the first round of HTML pages and they did not do well in our testing.  The next round is due July 10th with more testing to follow, then final pages due August 2nd.  In parallel we are figuring out mapping of the Admissions pages and thinking about what the infrastructure in the future might be.  We are considering Drupal and WordPress and have learned that the tools are moving toward each other with enhancements making them more powerful.  The Web Team is reviewing features of WordPress and Drupal and creating a list of questions to survey staff and get a sense of the user experience. The committee encouraged getting a few faculty to participate.  WordPress has been used in our class environment and that would continue.  Department web site updating and development would likely be in Drupal.  Tom Brice (Web Services) will be putting together a proposal on our options including additional infrastructure layers.

In conclusion, Janet suggested two more conversations with this group.  Reviewing evaluation of the two products/proposal and then cost/timing options, both to precede a recommendation to Tuesday Group.

Approach to reviewing campus-wide enterprise systems next year:

At the May meeting, members had an initial conversation about how to engage the strategic and financial issues associated with our enterprise systems. At today’s meeting, Janet presented a handout with some graphs that showed a holistic view of our current enterprise systems and how they are interconnected, annual costs of each, along with a series of key questions to be answered as starting points for building a framework.

During discussion the following points and questions were raised:

·         The function of these systems is important – separate them by functional taxonomy.

·         What is the right set of products that gets us closest to the College’s strategic plan with the least overhead?

·         What are the costs of our current systems? What are the pain points?

·         Janet would like to have a campus wide philosophy around growth and management of these systems.

·         An understanding of the big products and what they do would be helpful to TP&PC.

In conclusion, Bev suggested it would be best to form a working group to begin sorting through these questions.  Janet agreed and will think about how to define the working group, establishing some criteria, and who should be involved.

Conference & summer project debrief:

No report.