Information Technology Council Meeting
May 12, 2006
Present:
Review of Minutes: Approved
as amended
Jan
Fox: We
had the WVNET Policy Board Meeting yesterday. There are some real issues in the
state with the network and this has been brewing for 10 years but I think this
is the year when something happens. Because
there haven’t been real proactive moves on the state network, other people are
moving in on the network. There’s
competition between the Governor’s Office of Technology and WVNET of who will
control the network. Per Arnold: We are
now seeing the shared service costs in the range of $20,000 per month for the
actual network connection and their shared facility costs are going to be an
additional $9,000. Right now
We
have asked for the detail of that bill because we don’t know what we are paying
for. IS&C produces the bills based
on information obtained from WVNET.
Another thing that came up at the meeting is that our internet costs are
way beyond what they should be. The
contract was bid a couple years ago; they were asked to re-bid the
contract. We are seeing a fraction of
those costs with other companies.
We
have put forth an RFP for quotes from other companies.
The
whole “We are
We
have the state IT conference in August.
Matt
Christian: We
just checked enrollments this morning for all of Summer
and we have 2,663 enrollments in online courses. That is approaching the number we had for Spring a year ago. We
had 1,800 for all of last summer.
We have
been working really hard to get the Turn it In Power Link to work. We were able to get that functioning this
week and Donna and I are doing some testing in the next couple of weeks. Hopefully we can roll that out for the Fall.
We are
also looking at a Merlot power link. It
sets your settings and then pulls in the top learning objects. It’s not as cool as we would like it to be
but it opens the dialog of the concepts of learning objects and reusable
content in courses. If we could start
thinking about learning objects repositories, as we look at K-12 in the state
they are beginning to do some of the same sorts of things and this might be a
place where we can build a bridge.
We are
currently looking at a Fall promotional campaign for
online courses and we really like doing the faculty promotion, especially to recruit
new faculty to teach online. We have
come up with a promotion called MU Online Faculty of the Game, so at each of
the five home games this season, we are going to select a particular online
faculty member and we’re going to do a 20-30 second video on the big screen and
they are going to get a guest pass for them and a friend to be in the
President’s box for the game. It really
ties in academics with athletics and gives the faculty out in front of large
crowds of people.
Don
Combs: One
thing that just cleared faculty senate:
In my area we will have a new degree program called the Bachelor of
Applied Science; similar to the
Jan
Fox: We
are doing the wireless maps because the TECI project has increased the
wireless. We want the students and the
faculty to understand all of the locations.
Miller: We
are about finished with the first year’s plan for the TECI project and that
basically amounted to nearly 80 wireless access points distributed around the
campus. It has made a big dent in access
space. We hope to be able to continue
that next year. There are 5 classrooms that have been selected to get the full
TECI outfitting. Per Jan: As part of the
North Central visit, we added wireless access in the Commons as well as the
President’s Dining Hall and the Shockey room in the
Student Center.
The
campus re-wire project is pretty much coming to an end. We have almost re-wired all of the buildings;
we’ve put new fiber in the ground and that’s just about over.
Something
I’ve been remiss on following up on is the creation of SLAs where we do Service
Level Agreements when we do special work for people other than the normal
things we do on the help desk. It’s time
to have those renewed, so I’ll be working on those.
We have
SLAs with
Terri
Byrd: We
have a Banner upgrade scheduled for Memorial Day weekend.
With
regard to Luminis over the summer, we are waiting the
software to be released which should be in the next few weeks. We’re going to be upgrading the environment of
the
Miller: We
are going to rework the entire email infrastructure for everyone. Effectively since the net result of that
email either goes to Luminis for the students or into
Exchange for faculty and staff. You,
theoretically, won’t see any net result.
There some other things that will change; it will change the way we do
list serve capabilities so we are trying to work our way through that. We will get the word out to everyone as to
when that will be affected. Hopefully we
can do conversions of data and everything will work out okay.
The
LAN/WAN bid: We have gone out with an
RFP to look an entirely different network infrastructure in the wide area
network to move away from the ATM/frame relay network and actually go to metropolitan
area network, which is basically an extension of Ethernet out into the wide
area network which will gain us significant growth in bandwidth. We are attempting to get a full gig link
between here and
We have
not awarded the bid yet. Once that is
done, there will be parts that we can get into place before the semester starts
in the Fall.
Even if we don’t do that, we will still be upping the band width to the
internet. We hope to have a second ISP
before fall.
In terms
of disaster recovery, we brought the medical school component at the Joan C.
Edwards site back onto the telephone network last spring. As part of that there is a single point of
failure possibility for them in terms of their phone service which includes the
fiber run between here and Cabell. We
are in the process of purchasing the equipment that will allow them to be a
stand alone recovery mode should that fiber be cut.
We are
also in the process of putting the network up in the Biotech building this
summer.
We have
about 300 computers sitting in the basement that are scheduled to go to the
labs and various faculty desk tops to continue the replacement cycle.
Jan
Fox: The
WV Department of Education/K12 has created a very aggressive Technology Work Plan. They
have really looked at their infrastructure issues; and faculty development
issues that may financially help
Monica
Brooks: Many
of you are aware that we are recruiting for an Information Literacy
Librarian. This dovetails on the SAILS
project which we did two years running where we assessed the information
literacy skills of our incoming freshmen and we discovered that we were
actually above average but that average was failing.
The
committee is moving really fast. We have
a hopeful candidate coming in on June 5.
She will give a presentation and we will ask her to touch on the
information literacy competencies.
We
also lost Cora Teel who decided to retire, effective May 16. We have gotten approval to replace her. She may come back on a part time basis to
help ease the new person in since she has possession of the
That
position will probably not require a Masters in Library Science but will be a
preferred qualification.
We have
4 major library systems coming up in June.
CELL PHONE PLAN
Herb
Karlet: These
are changes being made to the existing Cell phone policy. When we originally created this policy, we
concentrated heavily on the stipend, but forgot about the purchase of the cell
phone. It wasn’t really spelled out in
the policy. Accounting has been getting
Pcard statements where people have been using their Pcard to purchase cell
phone. They were then getting rebates on
the cell phones and then asking accounting what to do with the rebates. It was the intention never to have bought the
cell phone with university money. The
purpose of this alternative plan was to totally be a personal purchase and a
personal bill and then the user gets a stipend for the business portion of the
personal bill. We got together and
Miller: It
still may be feasible for the institution to help subsidize the cost of some of
the more advanced devices in some areas, but under no circumstances would state
money be used to do that. Funding from
alternative sources, if available, would be used. Under all circumstances, that would have to
be approved by the Vice President.
The
first thing we want to look at is the authorization form itself. It now has a new section in the middle for
cellular telephone purchase. Everything
else is the same. If you are requesting
assistance on the cellular phone purchase you have a choice to ask for a base
cell phone, a Windows mobile spark phone; a Windows mobile PDA or a PCMCIA card
if you are going to use it in a computer.
Base is
a regular run of the mill cell phone.
According to the policy, you are expected to get that much. What we are talking about here are advanced
devices that have a higher probability of containing sensitive information that
we want to reserve the right to specify what the capability, security issues
related to those, password protection, central ability to wipe out if lost or
compromised. Those come in two types, a
smart phone or a higher level such as a Blackberry. The third level is for a card to put in a
notebook that lets you get data across the cell telephone network. That also has to be approved for stipend.
In
here, everything has remained the same until you get to something in red text. Basically, this was to help someone walk
through the process step by step.
Everything is the same until you get to the section on cell phone
purchase.
1.
It is assumed that
employee is responsible for the purchase of the base cellular phone equipment
2.
Under no circumstances
should state funds or University purchasing card be used for purchase of cell
phone equipment used under stipend plan
3.
Vice presidential
approval is required for the purchase of cellular phone equipment under this
plan from non-state allocated funds.
On the
second page of the Cell policy in the middle section 2.2:
Voted
and Approved
We
will wait for this discussion until
We
will have newsletter out for orientation that deals with all kinds of technical
issues. I will try to approve that
newsletter through this group first for feedback. It will have a whole issue on illegal
downloads as a part of that.
Privacy and Security Issues:
Terri
Byrd: What
I have put together for you really encapsulates the issues that we are
discussing in the Banner Oversight Committee (BOC) meetings as well as the
Security Sub-committee of the BOC. We
are talking about talking about security and the procedures and practices we
have in place with regard to data security and individual permissions to
data. This handout goes beyond that to
the overall encompassing issue of privacy itself.
I’m not
going to spend my time talking about privacy statements and lack thereof. What I want to talk today about is the
security piece of the whole privacy initiative.
Where we
feel that we are doing a good job is actually disseminating the permissions to
the data to begin with so when people come in and the get accounts and
permissions to data we are doing really good job of verifying their need to
know and following proper procedures.
One of the areas where we feel the need to improve upon is what happens
when employees exit or when they move from department to department. We have things in place for when people exit,
but we have some deficiencies there with regard to timing of their exit and
when we are notified of that exit. We
need to be able to detect movement from department to department to adjudicate
changes in permissions to the information.
The administrative procedure recommendations are going to be coming to
you for review soon.
Our
other areas of concern are our decentralization of the data that is not
controlled in our central environment.
We have so many tools now that make it easy for end users to retrieve,
store and use the data to make their business decisions which is what we should
be encouraging people to do. We have been
sitting up the technology to do that. We
have been educating these people on what their responsibilities are with regard
to that as well as doing any kind of auditing of where these repositories of
information are located, whether they are on departmental servers; personal
laptops; or personal devices such as a PDA.
We have a very good piece in our information security policy about the
responsibilities of data owners, but what we feel we to be doing better is
actually taking that to every employee and making sure they see it and
understand it and understand what their options are with regard to the actual security of that
data.
The
overall governance of that is also an issue; who is the watchdog looking at
this?
We
really feel that there should be some training going on to truly educate all of
us on what’s going on out there.
This
summer we will be testing within Banner pictures of the students for class
lists. We probably need some type of
information for faculty to make sure they understand what they can and can not
do with those pictures.
We do
not need to have meetings over the summer.
We will begin the next year with security and privacy as a major topic area. I will also accept any agenda items from
members.
Demonstration
of Breeze Product
David Johnson
Jan
Fox: The
state of
We
are going to try to introduce a new technology, hopefully at every meeting to
give you some idea of things coming up.
Do
we want to meetings over the summer? It
is agreed that we will have meetings on a per need basis over the summer
months. If you see things that we may
need to deal with before the Fall semester, please let
me know.
Adjourned