With Jim Shaeffer's departure in November, President Kupchella named me interim Chief Information Officer. Prior to opening the position, the Cabinet will review the CIO role including the responsibilities, place within the organization, and part time or full time effort.
During the interim, the President highlighted areas for continued action: 1) strategic plan objectives; 2) University Information Technology Council guidance for campus IT; 3) IT issues for the 2007-2008 biennial budget and 4) Student Technology Fee awards. The UITC will meet monthly during the Spring Semester.
In the December meeting, UITC members reviewed those strategic plan objectives that are already active. They also re-affirmed the current funding requests for a campus portal implementation, campus network improvements, and campus IT initiatives. The Council also recommended that a budget and plan for a student IT literacy initiative be developed and submitted.
UITC has two additional sub-councils, Network and IT Managers. The two sub-councils gather and exchange information on operational issues and advise UITC about the campus network and campus IT planning, respectively. The sub-councils typically meet monthly during the semester. The UITC web site will be reworked over the next several weeks so that Council and Sub-Council Minutes are posted.
I continue as Director of ITSS with responsibilities for UND and HECN services. For UND, some of the notable changes staff members anticipate completing by the end of the spring semester include:
a) Updated versions of U-Mail and U-Calendar applications and one signon to get to both (paving the way for adding more applications to one signon);
b) Discounted software sales for students at the Telecommunications office in Carnegie;
c) Improved network security for campus open ports and wireless use;
d) Addition of staff to support ITSS web database development offering;
e) A reader-friendly UND Student Acceptable Use Policy (adapting from NDUS 1901.2 Acceptable Use Policy); and
f) Written Incident Response procedures for handling IT emergencies, attacks or violations on our campus.
I hold out hope for campus funding of the fy06 portion of the campus network plan. That funding would allow ITSS to develop a campuswide wireless plan, add wireless connectivity, complete in-building cable upgrades and update firewalls. Additionally, we're working with the IT Research Subcouncil on a position to help support researchers in their use of the Computational Research Cluster.
ITSS HECN staff members continue to work on maintenance of and improvements to ConnectND and ancillary systems. ITSS hosts ConnectND Student Administration and ancillary systems. Developers here and at NDSU hold responsibility for developing Student Administration systems and NDUS Finance and Human Resource systems though the latter are hosted at state. Additionally ITSS HECN staff members help coordinate wide area networking for NDUS campuses, operate a ConnectND help desk and host ODIN systems.
We hear your concerns about e-mail spam and continue to look at other effective and affordable services or models while continuing to tweak the current model. We had made some progress earlier in the year but changing spam methods and growing volume mean that more are slipping through to mailboxes without labeling. Given the ability to delete certain known spam, there is a lot of spam that doesn't come to your mailbox. We continue to have challenges responding to new methods automatically and don't have the staff needed to make daily adjustments nor money in the budget to purchase a service. We appreciate your comments about this matter. In addition to ITSS staff researching best methods, the IT Security Office is assembling a campus email administrator task force to address email security, SPAM, viruses, etc.
I wish you all a great Spring Semester. Your comments and questions are always welcome.