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February 21, 2018

Committee Members Present:

Kris Benoit, Michael Callahan, Pedro Cordero, Craig Froehlich, Elisabeth Greenwood, Adnan Hameed, Bryce Jackson, Larry Jaffe, Felicia Kendall, Joel Lavoie, Becky Moulton, Tim Neubrander, Andrew O’Mara

Committee Members Absent:

Brian Graham, Fred Okumo, JP Peters

Others Present:

Joe Alcala, Yasmin Brady, Richard Caldwell, David Canova, Thomas Christensen, Robert Connors, Jim Ennis, Cisco Espaillat, Jon-Paul Estes, Adiaak Gavarrete, Joel Hartman, Tim Larson, Thierry Lechler, Todd McMahon, Bob Mello, Mike Scruggs, Bryan Sevinger, Mike Sink, Brian Strickland, Chris Tellez, Chris Vakhordjian

Minutes

Larry Jaffe called the meeting to order at 10:01am.

Larry asked everyone to review the minutes from the previous meeting.

  • Elisabeth Greenwood voted to approve the minutes, Andrew O’Mara seconded.
  • Everyone agreed on approval of the minutes without any changes.

Mike Sink gave an AVP Update.

  • The first thing I wanted to announce is on Friday, March 30th we would like to have another joint meeting with the IT Strategic Governance committee and the IT Professionals Committee. Some of the agenda items that are going to be in that meeting are related to the demand intake process. We have had conversations on changing the name of the demand intake process, since that is more of an inside out approach and we are focusing on an outside in approach.
  • In the last IT Professionals meeting, I mentioned that the decision on Cloud ERP is being revisited. There is a small group of people that got together to talk about the effort to put PeopleSoft grants in place on premises and also go through Chart of Accounts change management. The Chart of Accounts is being revamped, partly because of the grants module requiring it, but also because it gives us an opportunity to have a Chart of Accounts structure that allows for better reporting.
  • Florida Atlantic University went to Workday a couple of years ago. The project was completed in 18 months and they spent about five million dollars. Part of what drives this cost is how much change you have to go through and how many customizations you have to undo in order to get to the cloud.
  • We had a university budget committee meeting yesterday and we presented the concept for moving ERP to the Cloud, but we still do not have all of the numbers to present.
  • The servers have been installed at DataSite Orlando and we have a proof of concept.
  • David Canova has been working with SnapLogic to try and get a proof of concept.
  • The Culture Focus Group has met multiple times, and we have begun socializing questions that we want to put into a survey to send out to UCF IT. I sent the questions that the group came up with to Margie from Human Resources to get her feedback.
  • We have a UCF IT Town Hall meeting coming up on March 13 in the afternoon. That meeting will be an opportunity for me to share some of our vision for the future with UCF IT, including some organizational changes.

Chris Vakhordjian gave a CISO update.

  • We are putting security awareness training in Canvas, which will be available for everyone.
  • The Enterprise Active Directory governance policy was passed. We are going to be forming the committee within the next couple of months. We are trying to come up with representation to be on that committee.
  • We are engaging faculty to apply for two grants. One of the grants we are looking at applying for is a sandbox environment for students to learn and for us to do exercises in. The sandbox will have some incident response capabilities and hacking real production instances. The other grant we are looking to apply for is to expand SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) to provide community services to Orange County.

Joel Hartman gave a CIO Update.

  • We have identified a cohort 3 for UCF IT. Mike and I met with Bill Merck and his direct reports. At that meeting, there was a general agreement that the units within the division of Administration & Finance will participate in cohort 3. Unlike a college where we have an MOU for the college and departments, the units of Finance and Accounting are essentially independent units that operate differently from each other, so we will likely treat each unit as a separate entity.
  • Trevor Colburn Hall is coming along quickly and the new building should be ready for potential use in August.
  • Research I is essentially done. The researchers are moving in and the team is activating telephone and network ports on a continuous basis as researchers occupy the space.
  • Work on UCF Downtown is in progress and we continue to work with Valencia on integrating IT facilities, services, and support. The scope of the Downtown project continues to increase almost exponentially. We have a meeting later today with Mike Kilbride to review the budget for personnel and equipment to make sure they are on track with what we need to get the job done.
  • Many changes are occurring including the reorganization of the College of Health and Public Affairs and the College of Education and Human Performance. As of July 2, those colleges will not exist in their present form with their present names. COHPA will form new structures with about one half going to Lake Nona and the other half Downtown with some campus presence. Between now and the end of March a series of announcements will be made in terms of the exact names of the new structures and names of the individuals who will lead those structures. There is a plan to build a nursing building at Lake Nona for College of Nursing. The building is being oversized to accommodate those areas I previously mentioned who will relocate to Lake Nona for a nursing and allied health presence at Lake Nona.
  • One of the things that was on the agenda today for the University’s Finance and Facilities committee was the purchase of the L3 building in Research Park. The proposal is for the UCF Foundation to purchase the building for occupancy by the Division of Digital Learning (Center for Distributed Learning) and part of UCF Connect. This building would then become the home base for UCF’s online learning initiative.
  • The President search is in very high gear. We will be interviewing eight finalists on campus tomorrow and the day after. There is a public session scheduled for each of the finalists. The Board of Trustees search committee will then be reviewing those candidates and on March 9, the Board of Trustees will vote and select the new President.
  • The audit group has just completed a HIPAA audit, which deals with Student Health Services, the Psychology Clinic, the Communication Disorders Clinic, and UCF Health in regard to how they manage and protect Personal Health Information (PHI).

The IT Professionals Subcommittee gave a presentation on Committee Strategies with Bryce Jackson leading the discussion. The PowerPoint slideshow is at the end of the minutes.

  • Larry Jaffe stated the Committee Strategies subcommittee consists of Kris Benoit, Tim Neubrander, Joel Lavoie, Tim Larson, Bryce Jackson, Larry Jaffe, and JP Peters.
  • Larry mentioned that the Committee Strategies subcommittee was given the charge to try and understand the committees that exist that relate to UCF IT, and help figure out ways to bring together the committee information in a more effective and efficient manner.
  • Bryce Jackson stated that the group is here to talk about the next steps for the Committee Strategies subcommittee on the work that we have done so far. Last time we talked about the structure of the organization and some of the leveling that we were trying to decide.
  • The group has begun to organize the different groups and committees based off of the list that Larry has been working on, however we need help identifying all of the committees because there may be some not on our list. The onboarding process is to determine what other groups are out there and get as much information as possible.
  • Larry Jaffe mentioned that in the fall of 2016 he tried to identify all of the committees that existed that related to IT across campus. We came up with at least 27 committees between then and now. We are trying to make sure we know what types of committees exist and figure out the best structure to bring this information together.
  • Joel Hartman mentioned that some groups are likely to be long term ongoing discussions about managing infrastructure, which will give these groups a relatively long lifetime. Affinity groups on the other hand may be shorter term. Joel suggested affinity group establish a target sunset date and then reaffirm the need to continue it with another sunset date so they do not become permanent.
  • Larry stated that the group talked about a one-year renewal process in some fashion for the affinity groups to try to determine whether they are still meeting and active.
  • The level 3 governance groups considered needed at this time might be IT business processes, architecture, academic technology, research technology, and applications. The actual level 3 governance groups still needs to be decided.
  • The idea would be that anyone in the level four group would have sponsorship from a committee or group in level three. We are looking at how that communication and those connections for sponsorship would look logistically.
  • Decisions can be made anywhere from level three or above. They do not always have to be made at level one.
  • The onboarding process consists of four steps. The first step is evangelize, which really means to educate and communicate. We are thinking of ways of doing this such as having a webinar or website with this material on it so we can help share and communicate this information. The second step is to do a discovery exercise and send out surveys asking questions, which help us identify what type of group you are and where you may fit into governance. The third step is to take the information and organize it, and identify the types of people that would need to be in these governance groups. The last step would be to gather the information and present it back to you all in terms of the governance framework.
  • Tim Neubrander stated that to be recognized, some of the things that you have to do are establish official communication channels, be sponsored, and have a renewal process. The first seed of governance comes with a set of responsibilities, which I think is one of the things that will separate formal recognition of a group from a few people getting coffee. I think the responsibilities will give the people that really want to make a change a clear first step.
  • Kris Benoit mentioned that some of the thought process with this is to make it reasonably easy for other affinity groups out there to be able to plug in to the formalized process and to make it easy for groups to self-identify that there is a need. It is key to understand the differences in what each group can do and what they are required to do.
  • Tim Neubrander mentioned that affinity groups often do meet for a real reason, but the challenge we have found is a lot of times they get together to do things but they do not end up taking the next step towards actual governance.
  • Kris Benoit noted that we may not want to have our governance match up on a one-to-one type of basis with our org chart. The purpose of governance is to be able to allow for cross flow. Governance needs to be able to have perspective from infrastructure, application, etc., and have representation from different areas but not necessarily map directly to your org chart. Otherwise, you end up getting a lot of silo decisions.
  • Larry stated that there is not a 100% consensus on the process as we discussed today. Larry indicated at this point that we may want to move forward on just communicating that governance is coming and discovering more information related to the committees that currently exist. Larry indicated the IT Professionals Subcommittee would meet before the March 14th meeting and come back with suggestions based on the feedback from this meeting.

MOTION: Larry Jaffe made a motion to begin evangelizing that there will be a governance process of organizing committees in a better structure and the IT Professionals Committee will start the discovery process of committees. Andrew O’Mara seconded the motion. Everyone present in the IT Professionals Committee agreed with the motion with a vote of 13-0.

Meeting Adjourned at 11:47 am.