The committee conducting Michele Norin's Five-Year Review invites you (members of UITS and the Office of the CIO) to join your colleagues for an open forum on Wednesday, November 28th from 9:00-10:00 AM (Tubac Room, SUMC) or Thursday, November 29th from 1:30-2:30 PM (Sabino Room) in the Student Union. We have 40 seats available for each session. Registration is not required, so please join us if you can. You will have an opportunity to provide anonymous written feedback at the end of the session. 

I am pleased to announce that after much campus and constituency consultation Christian (Chris) Schreiber has been selected to be the University Information Security Officer (ISO) effective December 3, 2012.

With its ability to analyze trillions of numbers and repeatedly perform massive calculations, the Research Data Center facilitates cutting edge exploration in many disciplines at UA.

In our last issue of UITS News (March 23, 2012), we reported on events celebrating the Grand Opening of the new Research Computing Data Center. A video compilation of the grand opening events is now available on the new Research Computing website,

From Laurel Wadlund:

From Melanie Cooley:

From Dragana Vasic:

From Nikolas Hodge:

Please join me in welcoming Neil Durkes (pronounced Durkis) as the newest member of the Student Administration team. Neil has joined The University of Arizona team as a Business Analyst Senior representing Student Financials.

From Chris McCotter:

Please help me welcome our newest Telecommunications Services Representative, Nancy Roberts.

From Lori Shinn:

UANews has coverage of recent technology updates—thanks to all your hard work!

Campus 2.0: Technology Updates at the UA

From Dragana Vasic:

From Sharon Bushart:

From Kim Mayfield:

From Kathleen Bowles, on the Computer Center first floor construction:

Construction on the data center will begin on Tuesday and may be fairly noisy but the contractor will try to limit the disruption as much as possible.

Please join me in congratulating Chris Mathias on her promotion to Assistant Director of Support Services at UITS. In this position, she oversees the 24/7 IT Support Center and the Campus Switchboard. Chris has been overseeing technical support with a customer service focus since the days of the OSCR Help Desk, and we are fortunate to have her knowledge, experience, and attention on the first line of contact most campus users have with UITS.

Congratulations Chris!

I would like to welcome Josue Andres Irigoyen-Au to the 24/7 IT Support Center! Andres started with the our group yesterday in the role of the Floor Manager for 24/7’s walk in support area. His primary responsibilities will be to run the daily operations of this high traffic area as well as supervise, train and lead our student technical consultants.

The Arizona Technology Council has named the recipient for its Education Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the Year award to be given out at the end of this month. The University of Arizona’s CIO, Michele Norin, has been selected to receive the honor.

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/go-daddy-brain-state-technologies-university-arizona-executives-win-arizona-technology-1513232.htm

UAccess Student  is now implemented and in a sustaining mode. We are currently working with the academic functional areas on post implementation tasks and system enhancements. To support these efforts we have recruited four new business analysts to join the Student Administration team of the Enterprise Application Business Analysis and Project Management Services Unit. Please help us welcome them to UITS. 

Brad Hensley

I would like to welcome Graham Newsham to the SA Tech Team! Graham started with us on Monday, April 4 and can be found in the center cubicle area in 337.

The monthly Mosaic Project Status Report and Mosaic Newsletter are now available online at http://www.mosaic.arizona.edu/project_documents.

As a brief summary of Mosaic Project Updates…

Please welcome Annie Pearson to our organization; she has joined the Enterprise Applications Security Team as a Sr. Business Analyst. 

Annie has enjoyed her first few days of Tucson’s sunny skies and warm temperatures.  She joins us from the University of Minnesota, where she partnered with business experts across the university to document requirements, create process flows, and identify solutions. 

Please join me in welcoming Richard Holland to the Communications/Marketing department, Office of the CIO. He is joining us as the Communications/Marketing Manager and will be working in room 337.

Richard brings a wealth of experience from a variety of communications and marketing positions in the marketing, healthcare and television industries. We are thrilled to have him as a member of our team and look forward to working with all of you!

As Student Administration and Human Resources systems replacement projects move into sustaining mode, we have new staff joining UITS:

Putting in a large enterprise system is like building a new home—the maintenance and enhancement work continues after “moving in,” or in this case, “going live.” As soon as you go live with any of these large enterprise systems, the main implementation project is done but a whole suite of follow-on projects begins, in part, because until the complete system is in, it is difficult to intimately know the software or really understand all the nuances of all the business processes.

The migration of campus faculty and staff email accounts to UAConnect—Microsoft's BPOS system—has been put on hold while the UAConnect Project Team and Microsoft technicians onsite work through issues to determine the source of some unexpected behaviors.

More on the hold is available here.

The most current news on UAConnect can always be found at the project website's News and Updates.

All-Employee Security Awareness: Over 10,259!

Since June 20, 2010, over 10,200 employees have completed the mandatory all-employee awareness training, either by attending a “live” session or completing the process online. You can complete the training online by going to http://security.arizona.edu/infosecessentials#electronic. While we are not scheduling any more general sessions at this time, we are still holding departmental sessions for groups of 25 or more.

Please welcome our newest addition to the Network Operations team, Robert Hunter.

Robert started earlier this month and will be helping us with programming and software development, so that some of those tools that have needed some fixing and patching for some time can finally be polished into good shape. He's already familiar with the University in general, having just come over from across the street at AHSC.

I would like for you all to join me in welcoming Cheri Darling to the UITS/Mosaic family. Cheri is joining the Student Administration technical team as a senior analyst/developer. Cheri is beginning her track today on SA by familiarizing herself with the business processes involved in supporting a student system while learning the world of PeopleSoft. We are excited to have her on our team and look forward to her many contributions!

Please help me welcome our newest Telecommunications Services Representative, Scott Neighbor. Scott joined us for his first day of service today, December 13, and can be found in the Telecommunications Services cubical area located in the northeast corner of 337 in Bldg 73, (CCIT). Scott comes to us after his tenure at Qwest where he worked several positions that involved design and planning of IT & carrier services.

Major milestone: All UITS and Mosaic departments have officially migrated to UAConnect! Thank you all for your support, your patience, and your willingness to provide the feedback that will ultimately translate to a successful rollout to the rest of campus.

Here are a few helpful things to know as you begin using these new tools:

*Sec-U-R-IT-y Tip*

As we make substantial progress toward the development of a sustaining model for the Mosaic Project deliverables, we have been looking for an opportunity to extend our excellent communications talent and practices to all areas under auspice of the CIO (Information Security Office, UITS and Mosaic). With 2 major portions of Mosaic in production, the time has come where we can realistically achieve that vision.

The UAConnect Project Team is migrating the email of departments and teams within UITS to the new Microsoft BPOS system, in order to make sure all the technical issues and documentation corrections are addressed before migrating the other campus clients.

Individuals in UITS will be notified the day before their migration begins. They will be instructed to come back to this post to get the latest instructions on migration.

The Enterprise Instructional Support (EIS) Team in UITS Enterprise Applications is a critical area of IT service as the University of Arizona works to improve student learning through technology initiatives, as defined in our strategic plan.

Welcome to UITS!

• Mitch Lewis, Multi-Media Instructional Support Technician, officially began with UITS on Monday August 16, 2010. He is the newest addition to the Classroom Technology Services team. Mitch brings many years of customer service and tech related experience. His energy and expertise could not have come at a better time! Mitch can be reached at mllewis@email.arizona.edu.

• Troy Miller rejoins UITS.

Welcome aboard!

• Todd Craig Todd joined UITS on June, 28th. He comes to us from UA Student Affairs from the College of Engineering with 14+ years of experience. Todd will work within the WNC and OSCR teams. Thanks for joining us Todd!

• Jayaram Timsina Laurel Wadlund wrote:

On July 22nd, 64 members of the UAConnect Project Team and UITS staff began testing the email and calendaring components of the new system using a test environment. On a daily basis, the participants are given a set of tasks to accomplish that are focused around different features (e.g., email folders, calendar features, etc.).

The start of a new school year is an exciting, fresh time for all students, especially those just beginning their college career. Be a part of their welcome!

Wildcat Welcome is looking for volunteers for any shifts you can take August 18-29, for tasks ranging from helping students move into residence halls to staffing the barbecue or ice cream social. Please fill out a volunteer form by August 6.

More in Lo Que Pasa.

Please pause for 5 seconds while you are reading this, put your hand behind your neck and pat yourself on the back for a job well done this fiscal year – we have truly done some amazing things and it’s time to recognize that!

I hope you will block your calendar and plan to join the CIO Team so that we may appreciate all of your hard work in person! Michele, Derek, Hank, Cathy and I would like to invite all UITS, Mosaic, ISO staff and consultants to an afternoon of fun and appreciation for all the hard work you do!

*Sec-U-R-IT-y Tip*

Home PC Maintenance for Windows Operating Systems


Performing maintenance on your home computer will help it to run faster, use
resources more efficiently, and could save you from headaches caused by
system failures and degradation. Most importantly, proper PC maintenance is
crucial in order to protect your machine from security threats such as
worms, viruses and other malicious activity. For helpful tips in maintaining

After months of planning, the Remedy upgrade to the new and improved 7.5 version is underway! The project is called UAssist and is taking a more global approach than the standard systems upgrade. The goal is to eventually offer Remedy to other departments around campus, though the focus right now is to get the software up and running for central IT in support of UA’s enterprise applications.

Welcome back to the DCIO News portion of our new Intranet Site! 

With most of the students gone, it is quiet around campus and parking is a breeze, but as you know that’s not an indicator of work.   I always smile when friends and family ask me what I am doing with my summer off – they have no idea that  we are all working hard preparing for Opening of School (August 23) and  doing big projects that we can’t always do when the students are here!

While we are busy, I sincerely hope that everyone is still taking an opportunity to spend some vacation time with the special people (and animals) in your life. I know July will be a big month for vacations, so enjoy yourself and give yourself a big congratulations on a good school year where we did lots of good things for faculty and staff and moved forward in lots of ways toward being the IT Partner of Choice!

You have been seeing regular updates for the organization, personnel, space and projects - I hope they have been helpful and informative.   There is no new information around budget, and of course we have lots of big projects going on with their own websites where you can find information – with the largest impact projects being:

·         Mosaic – the University of Arizona Enterprise Replacement Project

http://mosaic.arizona.edu

·         UAConnect  - the Faculty Staff email, calendaring and communications replacement project

http://uits.arizona.edu/uaconnect

Regarding UAConnect – I hope you will heed Derek’s request in his 3D email:

Mark Your Calendar and Attend the UAConnect Guidance Committee

What: UAConnect Guidance Committee Meeting

When: June 15 from 2pm-4pm

Where: Ventana Room at SUMC

The project team will host a series of open UAConnect Guidance Committee meetings on a bi-weekly basis throughout the summer. The Guidance Committee meetings are intended to be a forum for campus and the project team to exchange ideas and promote open dialogue about the project. These meetings will provide updates on the project's progress, as well as inform you of project decisions and issues the team may be experiencing.

Your involvement can have a tremendous impact on the success of this project, so we encourage you and members of your department to attend.

Strategic Plans and Annual Reports

Well not only is summer the time when we land big projects, it is also the time of year when we start pulling information for our UITS and CIO annual reports and updates to strategic plans.   Meetings have been held over the past few weeks to get organized and set deadlines for reports so that we can submit our final reports to ABOR and the Provost in September.   The Assistant Directors are the primary conduits for gathering data about accomplishments and plans.    I am sure they will be working with their teams to gather the data and roll it up to the Senior Leadership.   I have posted a document flow that we are using to show how the data will flow into the strategic plans and annual reports.   You can see it on our intranet site under documents and presentations.   Note:  The dates are targets only, and actual due dates are set division by division.

Here’s some other information that I thought you might find interesting, or one or more of you asked me to share:

Domestic  Partner Benefits – Great News!

You may have missed the Lo Que Pasa article about the University of Arizona being the only state University to provide insurance coverage for domestic partners.  You can read more about the plan, the University’s efforts to provide the coverage and the next steps in the June 2, 2010 Lo Que Pasa –

 http://lqp.arizona.edu/node/2704

At this writing I don’t see any updates to the HR site regarding this issue, but we will try to find out when we can expect to see that information.

Digital Signage Moving Along

As I told you in my last update, we are working on being a pilot for the Digital Signage project as well as making our main entrance more attractive to visitors.   If you have been in the east entrance lately you will see progress with the installation of equipment through the wall.    This equipment will display UITS metrics and marketing graphics, and a Computer Center welcome message with some way-finding.

We are hoping to have everything in place and functioning before school starts in August.

Improving Our Physical Working Environment As We Can – Paint on the 2^nd Floor

As often happens at the end of a fiscal year, we are able to nail down how much temporary funding  we have that we can  use for one-time items such as painting or other improvements to our workspace and environment.   Throughout the year we tend to hold on to temporary funds in case of emergency or temporary budget cuts.  This year is no different.  But now that we are close to the end of the year we can relax a little around these funds that really can’t be used for permanent commitments such as hiring people or giving raises.

So, Gabriel Lopez and the Space Team will be organizing some painting to make our 2^nd floor area more consistent, modern and aesthetically pleasing.   I hope that these small physical improvements make you a little prouder to bring guest to the building, and brighten your day just a little.  I sure am ready to get rid of our 1980’s pink paint!

Weekly Webinar Series from Gartner – June 2010

• Becca Richards is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric and the Teaching of English who'll be working on her dissertation this summer while helping us out with some technical writing tasks. She's an amazingly talented go-getter who'll be working on UITS News and PR pieces, our annual Strategic Plans, and the BPOS communication plan.
• Eurice Gomez (you can call him Odie) is a second-year Visual Communications major. He'll be learning the ropes from our current graphic designer, Natasha Kolosowski, and then assuming our team's design responsibilities when Natasha moves to San Francisco later this summer.
• Kathleen Cochran is taking online classes this summer to finish up her English degree at NAU. She'll be helping us with UITS News, intranet management, and general office duties.

The BPOS project is going full force with a large project team that includes representatives from the UITS divisions and NetManagers. Here's the latest news from the past week:

Farewell!

·         Scott Martin, Systems Administrator, Senior, with the Mosaic Project, will be leaving us on Friday, May 28^th.    Please join me in wishing Scott the very best and thanking him for his service to the University.

Congratulations!

·         Tommy Chang applied for and has been selected for the Environment Management Specialist in the Mosaic Environment Management Team.  Congratulations Tommy!   Tommy started with UITS in July of 2008.  Prior to joining UITS he worked for the University of Oklahoma Health Science Center working on their PeopleSoft Oracle databases.  His passion is working with Oracle technology.  A move to the Environment Team is very much in step with where he wants to go in his career.   His efforts in support of Pinnacle and AccPac will be missed, but he won’t be far away if those teams need his expertise.  Please know that we are actively planning to fill the gap created on those teams.

·         Cathy Bates will be assuming the role of Information Security Officer for the University of Arizona immediately.  Congratulations Cathy!   Cathy has deep information security experience and has a great passion for this work.  We wish Cathy the very best in her new role reporting to Michele Norin, CIO.

The following is the presentation for UITS describing Incident Command best practices during IT-related events.

• UITS Incident Command Process Presentation (pdf of Powerpoint, 3.7 MB, April 2010)

The long-anticipated Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) Project (formerly known as the Faculty/Staff email and calendaring replacement) is officially underway! Although final negotiations with Microsoft continue and ATOC (Arizona Technology Oversight Committee) approval is not expected until tomorrow afternoon, a large interdepartmental team lead by Julie Suess (Project Manager) and Derek Masseth (Project Director) kicked off the project last Tuesday.

• Michael Resnick, Systems Administrator,Principal within the Windows Systems group in Infrastructure Services (Infrastructure Development), who joined us on April 5th
• Charles Steinke, Information Technology Support Center Specialist at the 24/7 Center in Frontline Services Support Services, whose first day was March 8th.

• Amanda (Mandi) Soulliard was promoted to Systems Administrator, Senior within the Windows Systems group in Infrastructure Services (Infrastructure Development) on March 8th. Good job, Mandi!

• Best wishes for future success to Sylvia Johnson, UA Security Information Officer, whose last day was March 8th.
• Jill Rodgers, Buyer for UITS, whose last day was April 2nd will be sorely missed as she sails off to new endeavors.  Thank you Jill!

Acknowledgements go to  Narendra Phadke, Wayne Parker and Jim Redasky for the good work they have performed on the Security team.  They have helped establish the basis for user access for UAccess Employee and participated in the provisioning for the UAccess Student and UAccess Analytics rollouts.  These individuals have been put in lay-off status as we reorganize our Enterprise Applications Security Team under Laurel Wadlund.


 

SA Stabilization Incident Command: Congratulations to the amazing team of UITS and Mosaic staff led by Brian Luceri who worked late nights and weekends to get the Student Administration, Human Resources, and Business Intelligence environments humming along in time for class enrollment and payroll. By all accounts, registration was a quick and painless process for UA students. Good work!

Good Morning,

In a full staff meeting early last fall, we began talking about a need for the transformation of UITS—even with the budget cuts we knew were coming. You will recall that the vision (which remains the same) was clear:  Become the IT Partner of Choice for the University of Arizona by 2012. This vision included a focus on specific strategic priorities and aligning adequate resources around core services to build a foundation for excellence in both existing and new services.

Good afternoon:

Last month, the Provost extended until December 11 our deadline for submitting a budget reflecting a 7% or approximately $838,000 cut. Since that time, the Senior Leadership team has drafted and revised several iterations of the budget, always mindful of our mission, now and in the future, and the resources needed to fulfill that mission.