On March 23, ITS held a town hall meeting to provide an update on what we accomplished last year, and what we’re focusing on for the year to come. It was a well-attended event, but for those of you who were unable to attend, I’m going to recap some of the highlights from that presentation.

ITS Organization
The realigned ITS organization comprises four primary areas.

Campus Relations—Led by Jerome Hilscher, Campus Relations is the face of ITS. The campus community is most likely to interact directly with their staff with personal computing issues, academic technology support, video production, and classroom support.

Infrastructure—Chris Mielke’s team manages and supports the University’s large-scale physical technology including more than 250 servers, 4,500 wired network ports, 500 wireless access points, 800 telephones, 2 data centers, and more than 340 terabytes of storage.

Professional Services—This team, managed by Keren Fiorenza, provides coordinated service and support for the University’s complex enterprise applications like Banner, business intelligence, and blueView, among others. It also ensures that ITS’ complex projects are well-executed.

Administration—The Administration team includes staff who manage the University’s IT budget (Alicia Mann), coordinate centralized technology purchasing (Monita Jackson), ensure effective campus communication (Carla Herling), and protect the University’s electronic information (Peter Lundstedt).

The goal of our reorganization efforts has been to maximize the value that ITS provides to the University.

This past year
Over the past year, we have been able to demonstrate ITS’ value in several ways:

• Nearly 1/3 of all ITS staff are now 100 percent dedicated to academic support.
• The campus wireless network now functions at the highest capacity available today.
• Approximately 80 percent of all malicious email sent to campus is blocked before reaching our inboxes.
• ITS invested $350,000 this year in replacement of faculty and staff computers.
• Over $30,000 has been saved due to print jobs that were sent to print queues but never released at printers.

This summer and beyond
ITS is working on projects that we think will continue to improve campus technology and further maximize the value that ITS provides to students, faculty, and staff.

• In the STEM buildings:
  —New telephones and network infrastructure
  —Instructional technology installation in 37 classrooms, labs, and other spaces
  —Electronic access to building doors
• Personal cloud file storage for everyone on campus
• An additional $100,000 in classroom improvements
• A pilot laptop checkout kiosk program
• Two large, multi-year projects:
  —Upgrading from Banner 8 to Banner 9 (a complete redesign along with significant changes to the user interface)
  —Replacing blueView with a new online communication and collaboration system

Finally, I want to reiterate ITS’ commitments to you. We will:

1. Reduce our backlog of service requests and maintain overall lower levels of open issues.
2. Focus on providing reliable enterprise technology services.
3. Ensure that we meet our promised response and resolution timeframes.
4. Partner with you to find reasonable and supportable long-term solutions.
5. Strive to understand issues and requests before we begin work.
6. Confirm that we have completed your request to your satisfaction.
7. Improve our communication related to support requests and technology changes.
8. Work as a team to provide technology-related services on behalf of Drake.

Regular status updates on these and other upcoming projects will be provided in future issues of OnCampus.

I hope you have a safe, happy, and productive summer.

—Chris Gill, Chief Information Technology Officer