ITC Meeting

10/8/04

Present: Jan Fox, Sarah Denman, Karen McComas, Donna Spindel, Mike Dunn, Karen McComas, Mike McCarthy, Layton Cottrill, Frances Hensley, David Johnson, Arnold Miller, Monica Brooks

Review of Minutes: Approved

Jan

Fox: We do have a student who will be attending, but she could not be here today, Jennifer Gaston is the student president.

The State Information Technology Council consists of CIOs statewide. Please be aware of things happening at the state level. I represent higher education on this committee. Topics they have addressed this year include:

From a GIS mapping perspective, the various state agencies all had different standards, we adopted federal standards for the state use. This helps us with our own projects, such as mapping the campus. ·

· From an e-government perspective, the state portal is http://www.wv.gov/ where all state information is found. The State phone is book found there. I have issues with the state phone book. Historically they could not accept a file. All of our phone book information comes out of Banner. They were going to charge us every time they made a change. They will now accept our electronic document to update state phone book. As soon as they get us a file format, we can update the data for the phone book.

Based on the title of the state organization, I am proposing that we change our name from Information Technology Committee to Information Council. Voted and Approved

UPDATES:

Jan

Fox: Over the last year, Senate Bill 700 changed the way payment was made for telecommunications. We were not supposed to have a shared cost facility. There was a big grant when David Ice was the Secretary of Education, he paid for all of the lattas in the state and eliminated any shared facility costs for K-12 or higher education. These Court of Claims bills are going back and trying to tack on that shared facility cost.

These issues could impact us financially. A lot of people don’t realize that we are not supposed to pay the shared cost facility.

The Court of Claims thing is actually coming from Verizon. IS&C is trying to claim the shared costs. Layton wants to know who is interacting with Attorney General’s office. We need to have some interaction with the AGs Office ourselves. Per Jan: I spoke with Dennis Taylor who was Secretary of Education and Arts before he was the vice-chancellor. He is very aware and knows the share facilities. He knows it is being double and triple billed.

We could check with Jenada Howdishell who represents us with AG, to check our status.

We have also dealt with the State Network. June 30, 2005 our current ATM contract ends. In order to get the e-rate, the contract would have to be bid and finished by November, 2004. It has to be out and billable January 1, or we could potentially lose 9 million dollars in e-rate. A group was supposed to meet to discuss what should be in this RFP. We met once and brought in consultants from Garter who told us how to do it. The state didn’t have consultant do the work for the RFP because they didn’t have the money. On November 1 they are going to take the old contract out for bids and hopefully get it in place for a one year extension.

State network issue is a problem for us, costs could go up because if that is re-bid and costs go up, it could dramatically impact our budget. The Courts have totally gone off the ATM and on to frame relay, which will cause our costs to go up.

We are actively having discussion with Ohio’s OrNet. They have something called the Third Frontier. They have fiber running including a main connection point in Ironton and actually run to the bridge for other purposes. We are looking at some redundancy because I feel that we have a need for some system as a back up for this campus. I am seeking the support of this council so that we can continue our discussions with OrNet. I mentioned this to Dennis Taylor at the HEPC office and he told us to go forth. No opposition from council.

David

Johnson: Vista III is our course management system now. It is extremely stable compared to the old Campus Edition. We have 2500 total students in 60 fully online classes. We have 14 outstanding issues that we are dealing with WebCT on now. These are ongoing problems that we need to address. We met with WebCT and HEPC, and we have a good commitment from the Chancellor and WebCT to make this a stable product. The faculty feels that there are features that could be redesigned, and we will hopefully see the redesign in future updates.

We are currently hosting two campuses; piloting with Southern and Glenville and it is working very well. There are still issues to be resolved in terms of communication and support, but all an all it has gone smother than we anticipated.

Southern has stepped up since the beginning of fall semester. They are now starting to live up to their end of the MOU.

Fairmont is not hosting anyone yet. WVU is hosting their own campuses only at this point. We are trying to set an agreement between the three hosting institutions to make sure we are all using the same hosting standards for policies and rates.

Jan

Fox: The Chancellor wanted Banner to be hosted by different institutions, so as we hear more and more about potential mergers of institutions this becomes very critical to have a MOU in place.

We need to resolve the policy issues for hosting students taking courses but not part of Marshall core courses. It will come to a point that as people renew Grants or submit new grants they will need to address these issues in their budget.

Per Sarah: that needs to be articulated, particularly to MURC to help them build their budgets to include.

Monica

Brooks: Thanks to Donna’s FDOMMD (?) allocation and from COFA, we are purchasing Art Store and have started the process for that. It is not up yet, but we anticipate that it will be up next week. This will be an asset to digital imaging collection to 300,000 images and will gradually grow to 500,000 of which we will own. Even if we sever our relationship with Art Store, we will still own the rights to those 500,000 images.

David

Johnson: Veriage video logger software takes a piece of video, puts it into a computer, encode it digitally into Windows Media, and Veriage uses voice recognition to create a transcript of the activities that took place and break it down the video into clips for searching. You can go in and search by key words. There are issues we need to resolve in terms of copyright issues. We can’t take everything we have and run it through. We need to make sure we know the copyright issue for each piece and make sure we have permissions for each video.

Arnold

Miller: In terms of Banner over all right now, we all know about the problems we have had during the last couple start-ups. Enrollment Management has written some notes of what they would consider a reasonable contingency in the event of start up problems. The Banner Users Group met yesterday afternoon. I have not heard anything this morning.

We have gone out on the used equipment market to find pieces of systems to move to a new platform. This will put us in a position for disaster recovery. We made a commitment to switch to a new platform in the Spring or Summer. The interim platform will give us about a 3x expansion over what we have now. That should give us some relief for Banner issues. We would like to have it in place before pre-registration but will definitely have up by regular registration. We can’t run in parallel, because we are reusing some of the current equipment.

The Associate Deans are working with us to review any old processes. We are trying to look at processes to update them for streamlining.

The building rewiring project is about 25% complete at this point. This project was predicated on bond money. We have started the project, but have not received the money. We need help from Sarah to find out how to get the funds. We have a request in to Herb to get the allocated funds into our budgets. Sarah will present the request to Herb next week. We need permission to go into deficit on our accounts to finish the project.

The move to Exchange 2003 has caused some problems; but the features are so much better.

We are in the process of trying to finish up various SLAs to groups around campus.

RISK AND BUSINESS IMPACT ANALYSIS AND BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLAN

Arnold

Miller: Risk and Business Impact Analysis – We are trying to look at the various risks lurking out there and how we will deal with it. We are asking “can we prevent the problem or lower the risk”. If not, how do we recover?

This draft was a student project that provides a good starting point. It needs work before we can declare it what we want to do. There is a list of recommendations that need a financial ramification attached. We need a feel for what we should be protecting and then prioritizing what needs to be brought back up in what order.

The Impact Analysis leads into the Business Continuity Plan. We need to establish a contingency organization for the University. This is obviously in the developmental stage. Portions were drafted using the MIT public plan. This plan sets the stage in the event of: (1). IT failure or (2). Plans in the event of a complete loss of a building.

I have set up a contingency structure consisting of an executive group that makes decisions and a working groups that carries out the work.

In this document I have set up the ITC group as the executive group in contingency scenario. We can reassign this group if necessary.

The working group really consists of people we need to get things done; someone from Security, Communications, Telecom, IT, Insurance, Plant Operations, Finance, HR, etc. Reporting to them are some university wide support teams that go in and assess damage, search and salvage.

A Transportation Team is needed to get people to and from established back up sites or command centers. A Public Information Center and Notification Group would be established as well as an Audit Risk and Insurance Group to set up quick procedures on how we deal with purchases, claims, and watching over finances to get things running again.

This plan sets out 3 stages of a disaster:

1. Emergency declared;

2. Move operations to a back up facility if needed and get critical systems on line;

3. Recovery mode if back up mode takes longer than anticipated. Establish temporary facilities until real facilities are re-built.

We need to determine if the institution is comfortable with the contingency structure contained here. We need to determine the people that need to be in the established positions.

There is discussion regarding the benefits of a hot back up site vs. a cold back up site. A hot site is site where we have computers up and ready to go at all times at an established location. A cold site is simply a room with power, available for use. We would buy equipment ASAP and bring the site up in recovery mode.

Jan

Fox: There is an issue with the state in that they received 6 million dollars from Homeland Security for a warm site for the entire state at the IS&C building. As more Homeland Security dollars become available we want to have plan in place to seek those dollars.

Arnold

Miller: I would like this group to look over these documents. This is an umbrella plan. There are actually a bunch of teams called FARM teams. These FARM teams need to write their own plans on how they would recover from their perspective. I have tried to put a basic skeleton together, but there is still a huge amount of work remaining.

This is a major commitment on the University’s part to make this an encompassing plan.

Every year the Auditor keeps stretching its reach for what we cover.

At this point we have kept this internal to ourselves within IT. In theory the plan should cover So Charleston too. MUGC is our back up location, but it is not up to our needs at this point. I am committed to writing the FARM team plan for IT recovery.

Per Layton: We have a disaster response plan for the institution that was prepared prior to 9/11. We need to look at it again to make sure it complies with what the Auditor wants.

The Plan does not have to be complicated; just on paper.

POLICY 13 AMENDMENT:

Donna

Spindel: Last page, tuition and fees should be fixed. Needs to indicate “and fees”

Sarah

Denman: page 3 – question: do we insure that no faculty member makes a requirement for software that cannot be accessed in public labs or library. Can students see course requirements prior to registering for that course?

Per David: there is a feature after the next hot fix where certain pages, including the syllabus would be available before registration.

A problem exists where Mini-tab is being used in some classes on campus, but students can’t use it on public machines. Faculty members choose textbooks, textbook determines software used. There needs to be a place in this policy requiring faculty to meet requirements of the campus agreement. Faculty needs to meet requirements before the course is allowed to be put up on schedule as an e-course.

The Policy needs to state that faculty has the burden to make sure the software is on image and available for license to the University.

Donna

Spindel: Page 11, courses undergo review every two years. Right now we are doing a voluntary review of courses. Sarah wants something in there that indicates that review can occur sooner if there are requests by the Office of Academic Affairs or Information Technology.

Jan

Fox: Many courses are requiring e-pacs for an e-course. There is no clear statement that textbooks and materials are expenses in addition to the cost of the course. We also need to require syllabi to be posted.

The email account for all student communication must be the official MU account for help desk online service.

Computer software requirements on page 2 need to say requirements as specified by MUOnline.

Jan

Fox: There is also an evaluation issue. I need something stronger to make sure the evaluations are done. Students are not doing evaluations. Faculty must ask students to fill out evaluations.

Amendement voted and approved

RESEARCH COMPUTING CONFERENCE:

Jan

Fox: This is still in draft. Please review and give us input.

Adjourned