Future tech: Less is becoming more
BY JUDY LIN
UCLA Today
They make it look easy, but the staff who manage information technology for your department have a daunting task: Keep computers running; e-mail flowing; calendars scheduling; research, education and business systems humming; and a whole lot more. Multiply this by 100 units campuswide, and one gets a sense of the vast resources entailed in keeping the campus IT-enabled.
Enter “repositioning,” a campus initiative that endeavors to better position UCLA to be more competitive with interdisciplinary pursuits, improve security and align IT resources for high-value, “front-line” research and educational activities.
The initiative was conceived two years ago by Associate Vice Chancellor and Chief Information Officer Jim Davis to help prepare UCLA for the next generation of IT services. By consolidating such common functions such as email, calendaring, networks and data centers, the initiative creates a shared infrastructure that can more effectively meet UCLA’s primary objectives.
Endorsed by the Information Technology Planning Board, repositioning has become one of the leadership’s strategic initiatives. So far, more than two dozen major campus units - from Business and Administrative Services to the UCLA Library - have discovered that by handing off some of their IT duties, resources can be refocused on other educational, research- or business-related IT projects.
In Campus Human Resources, for example, Information Services Director Mitch Ogi said he and his team “have been able to shift from providing operations support to being more of a strategic partner, supplying solutions for HR-specific func-tions.” They’ve turned their focus to developing Web content as well as new software to track applicants, among other projects.
Repositioning IT is a team effort that involves staff from across the Office of Information Technology (OIT), Communications Technology Services (CTS), Administrative Information Systems (AIS) and other units. Marsha Smith, director of the Office of Information Technology, is directing the initiative with leadership support from Michael Schilling of CTS and Don Worth of AIS. Cross-organizational teams in networking, e-mail, data centers and security are working together and collaborating with campus IT professionals to affect this long-term change.
“There are currently on the order of 50 distinct IT support centers on campus, many with their own separate systems for networks, e-mail and calendaring, data management, security and other applications,” Schilling said. “One of our goals within Business and Administrative Services, one of the largest business units, is to reduce hardware, applications, support requirements, costs and maintenance in nine areas.”
So far, some 5,000 e-mail boxes have been put into an integrated campus e-mail and calendaring system. This includes all units within Business and Administrative Services, the Library, OIT, Summer Sessions and the School of Nursing.
And many are reaping the bene-fits. Campus Housing Services, for example, was able to redeploy its IT resources to create an online Q&A that has cut by more than half the customer phone calls to that office. And Campus Business and Financial Services redirected its resources to improve overall productivity with such services as automated payments for parking permit and student fees.
“Consolidation,” Ogi said, “has also enabled IT professionals within the business community to share in the same knowledge base. Everyone’s crossing their t’s and dotting their i’s the same way.”
Throughout the process, participants maintain a voice in the new system and its shared manage-ment, Smith said. “Our main questions are, ‘How can we help?, and ‘How can we work together?’ Key to this process is providing options for those who want to shift their focus away from common IT service support to more specialized IT projects.”
The Library, for example, was reaching the stage “where we needed to either upgrade our current system or replace it,” noted Terry Ryan, the library’s chief information officer. “This did seem like an opportunity to us. We have great ambitions in terms of managing and delivering digital content and Web-enabled services that are based on what the library uniquely does. Now we can keep resources attuned to that instead of having to cope with ‘The spam filter went down’ or ‘Someone has lost a file.’ ”
Ryan lauded the repositioning team for “looking to craft a service that was flexible - they were very open to thinking about how to make this work for us.”
Flexibility in meeting diverse campus needs is essential, said Smith, who has created task forces involving repositioning participants in the planning process. For example, to address e-mail security, the initiative recently brought together IT security officers from all parts of campus to form the Applied Security Task Force.
“They are out there every day, fighting the attempted security breaches in their local units,” Smith said. Their task: to craft an integrated approach to protect all users from spam, viruses and hackers while recognizing the needs of individual users, like the Library. While an e-mail with “Viagra” in the subject line may look suspicious to the average e-mail recipient, it could be a legitimate research inquiry to someone in the biomedical library.
“We learn something new from every client,” said Schilling. Said Smith: “Every solution we provide for one group also helps meet the needs of a broader group, which brings us to an even higher level of service.”
Davis said that while reposi-tioning has had some early positive impacts, it is definitely a long-term effort that will take sustained leadership and commitment.
“This is a change in the way we think about running IT, evolving from many independent IT units to a federated system where local-unit excellence is preserved and UCLA as one institution is positioned for the future,” he said.
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