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January 17, 2018

Committee Members Present:

Kris Benoit, Michael Callahan, Craig Froehlich, Brian Graham, Elisabeth Greenwood, Adnan Hameed, Bryce Jackson, Larry Jaffe, Felicia Kendall, Joel Lavoie, Becky Moulton Tim Neubrander, Fred Okumo, JP Peters

Committee Members Absent:

Pedro Cordero, Andrew O’Mara

Others Present:

Joe Alcala, Richard Caldwell, David Canova, Marc Cassidy, Karen Cobbs, Thomas Christensen, Robert Connors, Jim Ennis, Jon-Paul Estes, Adiaak Gavarrete, Adam Glover, Joel Hartman, Lisa Isham, Brad Jones, Tim Larson, Ruben Lopez, Todd McMahon, Joanna Rodgers, Mike Scruggs, Mike Sink, Fabiana Staton, Aaron Streimish, 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.

  • Adnan Hameed voted to approve the minutes, Jim Ennis seconded.
  • Everyone agreed on approval of the minutes without any changes.

Mike Sink gave an AVP Update.

  • We have UCF Foundation’s CRM application up and running in Azure. That project is going very well and they now want to move their financials application, Blackbaud, into Azure as well.
  • This year we are evaluating the two likely options for moving ERP into the cloud. The two likely options are Oracle Cloud or Workday.
  • The Culture Focus group has a series of questions that they want to release in a survey. We will be finalizing the survey in the near future and sending it out soon.
  • We would like to move forward with SnapLogic as our integration platform approach.

Chris Vakhordjian gave a CISO update.

  • We continue to work on expanding multifactor authentication for employees and increasing awareness about how to protect personal information.
  • Last year was the year of SIEM and this year we want to continue the momentum with that. Phase one of the project is complete and now we are going to mature our SIEM environment.
  • We are looking into introducing the SIEM solution to our classroom curriculum. The idea is to have students be involved with the technology and have first-hand experience. This is specifically applicable to the forensics program.
  • Security awareness is going to be big in 2018. This involves an online security awareness course and putting a policy in place to make that mandatory at some point.
  • We are going to make the sponsored account process electronic at some point in the next few months.

Karen Cobbs gave a presentation on the IT&R Business Center.

  • We added our HR actions form, procurement request form, and our travel request form in ServiceNow.
  • We are assisting HR in the compensation and classification project. By the summer, we should have a report from Sibson. This project will allow us to create a deeper branch of classifications and expand the organization.
  • Performance evaluations will be due on February 15th. Mike Sink will be sending out communications around how you should be looking at evaluations this year.
  • We are working on piloting a succession-planning program. The directors are looking at how we can fill key positions when employees leave.

JP Peters gave a presentation on behalf of the Committee Strategies subcommittee. His presentation is at the end of the minutes.

  • The information is a draft framework that we are looking to get approval from the IT Professionals Committee so we can continue moving forward in our charge of improving how committees are organized and how information and decisions flow.
  • If we are going to establish IT governance at the university, we need to make sure we provide terminology standards.
  • Governance groups are the overarching groups that are already established. Standards and policy groups filter through governance groups. The difference between a standards and policy group and an affinity group, is that standards and policy groups can make decisions. Affinity groups can make recommendations up through governance but not make decisions.
  • It is very important to differentiate strategic governance and all of the other governance that happens on campus.
  • We started creating a list of responsibilities and capabilities for groups to follow in order to be a part of governance. We also came up with the idea of sponsorship. The idea is if you are an affinity group, a standards and policy group will sponsor you.
  • Affinity groups are required to have a charter, attain a sponsor, define a communication channel, designate a point of contact, and make sure they are on the official list of committees.
  • Standards and policy groups have the same requirements as affinity groups plus additional requirements. Standards and policy groups also need to maintain a list of membership, publish meeting minutes, publish a meeting schedule, publish an agenda, communicate all decisions in real-time, and periodically report key decisions and other happenings to governance.
  • Governance groups have the same requirements as standards and policy groups, but must post key deliverables publicly.

MOTION: Larry Jaffe made a motion to approve this basic framework so the subcommittee can continue to develop the committee structure in the UCF IT governance model. Mike Callahan seconded the motion to approve. Everyone present in the IT Professionals Committee agreed with the motion.

Joel Hartman gave a CIO update.

  • What we are doing through governance is enabling various constituencies within the university including you and others that are not in this room to have some influence and control over the direction that IT takes at UCF moving forward. In order for things to happen, including the strategic plan, the university must have an agile, robust, high capacity, responsive IT organization or it cannot succeed. The university’s success and future is directly tied to your success and future.
  • For 20 or more years, I have gone around every year and spoken to every dean, director, and vice president for quality assurance meetings. I call them quality assurance meetings because the agenda is, how are we doing in serving your faculty and staff? In the first few years, I found that there was a gap between their expectations and what IT was delivering. We spent the next few years listening, finetuning, and addressing. As the years went by the list of complaints got shorter and shorter until they disappeared. This year I am spending the meetings, particularly with those involved in cohorts 1 and 2, asking how UCF IT is going from their perspective, and I am getting feedback that in general they are satisfied. Faculty and staff members have not noticed a change, which is a positive response seeing as we have made so many big changes and nobody has noticed a negative change in service. What I am hoping for next year is positive outcomes.
  • My call to action this year for UCF IT is that governance matters. Governance matters because it opens a channel of communication between those who serve and those who are being served, to make sure that you are all in common agreement. I am going to ask to have our effort to establish effective governance within the colleges and divisions redoubled.
  • In February, a group of about 12 of us including Provost Whittaker is taking a trip to Microsoft for a day and a half of briefings. The first day is going to be based on topics that came up during a Microsoft team’s extensive visit to campus a few months ago. The second day is a discussion around a potential opportunity for UCF to be part of a new Microsoft program about how it relates to educational institutions.
  • Another change that you can look forward to is significant changes in the area of communication. Our methods, tools, and practices for communicating with our students in particular are in need of a tune up. I am putting together a working group that will involve representation from undergraduate studies, graduate studies, SDES, and others, to look at how we communicate to students across the institution. The group will focus on how we can perhaps reduce the number of redundant communications, how the content of those communications can be made more understandable, and make communication more effective and actionable.
  • Faculty are beginning moved into Research I building and will continue moving in stages throughout the month of January. There are four clusters, two colleges, and three research centers moving into this building. There are 60 labs, 71 offices, and 4 graduate student spaces in the building.
  • Trevor Colbourn Hall is under construction and expected to be completed in August or September.
  • There are two downtown buildings, one is ours and one is Valencia’s. The downtown campus is expected to open in the fall of 2019.

Todd McMahon and Brad Jones from the Office of Instructional Resources gave a presentation on Multimedia Support.

  • The board of trustees has set aside money for significant course redesigns, which incorporate active learning classrooms.
  • We are starting basic with our active learning classrooms. This includes putting up multiple dry erase boards, monitors, and movable furniture.
  • We have a place called the sandbox where we are going to try out the best active learning classroom technologies.
  • One of the main ideas in an active learning classroom is BYOD (bring your own device). The traditional computer in the classroom might not exist anymore, and instead that computer will be whatever the professor brings to the classroom. Students will also be bringing in their own devices and using them to interact with the classroom technologies.
  • This year we are going to be leveraging the UCF network a lot more than we have in the past. We have doubled our port count with the new active learning classrooms. The NVX technology is a virtual IP switcher, which allows us to take any input or output and put it anywhere on the network. In order for the NVX system to work, the network infrastructure has to be foremost thought.

Meeting Adjourned at 12:05pm.