Relocation status: Architects and Engineers and English Harper Reta Architects were hired by the Data Center to do a feasibility study on relocation of the Center to the building. Together they determined that Hutchison Hall, the current location, is not suitable to house the Center and estimated the cost of the relocation to be between $800,000 and $1.2M. The documents are currently being reviewed by campus leadership.Network21: The last phase of this project is well underway. Although connectivity to designated areas has been achieved in earlier phases bringing total connected devices to 16,000, this segment will bring the campus network to the ATM architecture desired. 3COM switches were selected and successfully tested in December. The RFP for routers has just been re-released. Responses to the initial proposal were inadequate. There is a high level of confidence that the schedule will not be significantly impacted as the inadequacies related to procurement policies rather than technical issues. The project should be fully completed by next fall.Mail delivery problems on the primary server, a Sun E4000, required a return to Solaris 2.5.1 and Volume Manager 2.3. The operating system was upgraded to 2.6 and VM 2.5 over the Christmas holidays. Unfortunately volume usage encountered upon the return of the students in early January revealed problems which could not be immediately solved. Mail delivery capacity dropped from the usual 800 messages per minute to 50 per minute. Sun is currently working on the problem. Y2K compliance is dependent upon the newer OS.
The Unisys is on schedule for shutdown on March 1. Thousands of legacy tapes are being reviewed to determine their ultimate disposition. Another project is nearing completion to replace SNA with FTP for transmission of Data Entry files to the Payroll System at UCOP.
Remote Access Improvement Projects: The campus is employing a number of strategies to improve access to networked resources. See http://cr.ucdavis.edu/projects/netprjct.htm for further information on each effort. Note particularly the "RAMP" project (http://cr.ucdavis.edu/ramp/ramp.htm) which will result in an upgrade to our modem pool.
Year 2000: We have continued to provide educational seminars for various constituent groups on this topic. We have additionally designed, developed, and implemented a Y2K web site for education, updates, and collection of data on software, hardware, and equipment Y2K status (http://y2k.ucdavis.edu) All operating system and application upgrades to central administrative systems are scheduled to be completed and fully tested by the end of 1998.
IT Reporting Project: The division is engaged in an effort to continually improve upon the information that we provide to the campus, and to link service metrics to financial reports. See http://dcas.ucdavis.edu/itrp/ for governance, measurement, and financial data on peer institutions.
Technology Training: Rollout of the CBT training modules is planned for March. We are assessing the results of our initial pilot now. The web interface will be tested by the departmental Technology Support Coordinators and IT staffs in February.
Remedy: Four frontline customer support units (NOC, Data Center, Client Services, and Banner Help Desk) are now using this tool to transfer and track service tickets.
Netscape Calendar Pilot: The division of IT is piloting the adoption of this tool for group scheduling.
Customer Service Training: The second round of Ouellette & Associates training is to occur in early February.
H.R. Activities:
UCD Employment/Outreach has established a new advisory committee this year to help better meet the needs of the campus. IT's H.R. Analyst serves on this group. They are carefully assessing which efforts can have the most impact and determining priorities. Two information items brought before the group to date are: 1) anticipation of establishing background checks as part of the standard employment process (the focus of the background checks is criminal records, not credit or educational history, etc.), and 2) current efforts to map and automate the application and recruitment processes on campus.In the compensation arena, UCD HR&RM now has salary information, class specs and series concepts, and UCD salary statistics available on the web by title code/payroll title. Soon to be added is information on external salary surveys as well. Easy access to this information will enable managers to make thoughtful decisions about new hire salary offers in line with their greater flexibility under HRMI. Participating in the Hay Group salary survey will help assure accurate external salary information on technical positions.
Information Resources has conducted a salary equity scan among its professional staff to assure that individuals performing at similar levels are being compensated appropriately. This scan and subsequent adjustments (a combination of reclassifications and salary equity adjustments) were undertaken to redress the salary discrepancies generated by a combination of small merit pools over time and rapidly rising salaries for recent technical recruits.
Technology Support Program: The distributed support program is developing offerings designed to enable faculty who want to use of technology in their programs. Specifically under consideration are multimedia tool training and custom Eudora classes in order to provide more effective and timely assistance as faculty design and create their materials.
Laptop Pilot Program: IT, in partnership with the Teaching Resource Center, offered ten laptops to faculty who agreed to use them in the creation and presentation of material for a current class. Full support in faculty offices and classrooms, in addition to the laptop, was provided. This is an effort to evaluate both faculty interest and campus infrastructure capacity with regards to the integration of technology in teaching. Assessment of this fall quarter pilot is currently being performed.
Computer Access By Students: The lab management staff published a report which describes the challenges of meeting access needs on campus. That report can be viewed at http://lm.ucdavis.edu/pubs/access/. The campus is considering the creation of additional computer classrooms in order to free IT labs for general access. It is an investment in infrastructure which requires vision and courage given the relatively high cost. The decision will be a significant indicator of the strategic direction of UCD.
Local "Teaching" Resources via the Web: A collaboration of various support and advisory groups has created a collection of resources for faculty accessible by the "Teaching" button on the UCD homepage.
Davis FrontDoor: A tentative title for a significant project which will provide a Web page for every course in the catalog dynamically retrieved for each student according to their schedule. The information will be that which is contained in the SIS database but opportunities for faculty, and potentially students, to link additional information will be afforded. Student Affairs is sponsoring this project which is in the early stages of design.
The December conversion to client/server was almost a non-event. The deployment using six Citrix servers (Dell 6000 with 200 MHz quad processors, 2 GB RAM, 9 GB disk) revealed some hardware problems with the Dells and bugs in the Oracle runtime software. The problems, however, were minor given the scope of deployment and the immaturity of the technology employed. Over two hundred concurrent users, with capacity to grow, are manageable with this configuration. This conversion tested our hard and soft skills. Continued and candid communication with all customers, as well as the early establishment of a dedicated Help Desk, created an environment of shared responsibility and tolerance for difficulty.DaFIS:Full implementation of robust security, including the re-introduction of one-time password capability, is taking longer than expected. Our utilization of Sequent database servers complicates the implementation of kerberos-based systems. We are seriously considering replacement of that platform.
SCT announced the next critical application upgrade is to occur in December of this year. We are considering alternatives to this treadmill including reduction of site-specific modifications as well as full application replacement.
Seven months into production, the first significant release of enhanced functionality is scheduled to be released on February 16. DaFIS Release 2.0 will consist of changes requested by the users in the first Customer Feedback Survey which was conducted mid-fall, 1997. Among the consistently requested changes that are being included in Release 2.0 are: the ability of account managers and/or delegates to change data fields while a document is in routing; streamlining the vendor invoice document so that the accounting lines are less burdensome and so that district tax calculations do not require a special process and so that the electronic documents display more information. In addition, routing rules are being moved to tables instead of being hard coded in documents; similarly, business rules are also being moved to a table. The latter two changes will make it easier to make changes to the system as UCD business or organizational changes require them.Degree Audit: Funding has been approved to complete a degree audit system. Degree Navigator, offered by Decision Academic Graphics, Inc. of Canada, continues to be the favored product of the group reviewing the available packages. A group will visit Michigan State University next month to review their implementation.The Customer Advisory Team came into existence in January and is busy organizing its work so that the changes that are sponsored for Steering Committee review represent the priorities of the users all over the campus.
From the customers viewpoint, the commodity code features of the Purchasing System were cumbersome so early attention was paid to resolving those problems. Also, the Decision Support System is continuing to evolve in its delivery of meaningful data in meaningful ways to our user community. This is largely viewed by the campus decision makers as the most essential and useful feature of DaFIS so its continued development is critical. Feeds from service department systems are being evaluated and we are working with the owners of those subsystems so that the data that is delivered to the ledger is the data that the users want to see when they do queries against the DaFIS databases. We are continuing to work with the Office of the President to provide more data at a lower level of accounting than what is currently available. This relates primarily to expenditure data at the project/PI level.
Internal audit, in concert with the faculty of the Computer Science Department of the School of Engineering, conducted a review of DaFIS network access controls in fall and is now partnering with IT in a review of database access security. The former review contained useful suggestions that the department is now employing. The latter study was commissioned by the Accounting & Financial Services Department at around the time the system was about to go into production.
An access control alternative for Decision Support is currently being reviewed by the campus leadership as an alternative to hard coding the base system. Training on Decision Support is continuing.
Other planned functionality such as the development of an imaging technology application of original invoices has been postponed for the remainder of this fiscal year to allow the campus to become comfortable with the complexity and sophistication of the DaFIS system.
Visitors from University of Arizona and Indiana University and Indiana University/Purdue University (IU/PU) have recently visited the campus to review the functionality delivered by DaFIS.
Application Code Management: The applications development unit is currently installing code version control software (PVCS). This will provide a single repository for all source code and the multiple versions of modifications that have been applied to it. The PVCS system works in conjunction with the Oracle developer package which results in a simplified interface to the repository. All major project developers in various locations and departments will have access to this new service. The PVCS repository is located in AFS space which provides for this diverse functionality.
Payroll Web-Based Report System: A system that provides departments with access to a variety of Payroll data via the web is being developed. A general design has been completed. The general report requirements for the new system will be defined as a result of a series of facilitated sessions with campus departments. The look and feel of report design will be modeled after DaFIS Decision Support reports. The new system will include a value-based security system which will limit user access to authorized data.
Implementation of the Payroll Committed Salaries System: A decision has been made to implement this system (Payroll releases 1113 and 1124) as soon as possible in order to re-establish the ability to create payroll liens for staff salaries. This functionality was lost with the arrival of our new FIS. The implementation will include the installation of the base system and customization to adapt the system to incorporate our chart of accounts. The new system should go into production in time to process March payroll data.
Data Administration Project: The group charged with advising the Executive Vice Chancellor on an approach to implementing the data administration function has completed its work. The committee is recommending two pilot projects in order to test the feasibility of implementing a permanent data administration function. The development of the two pilot projects will test six data administration activities: Strategic Data Planning, Data Element Definition, Data Standards, Access Policy, Office of Record, and Data Access. A "Student Outcomes" pilot project will be a strategic data planning effort to conduct an analysis of student outcome measures and create a plan for making them accessible to campus planners. A "Student Data Warehouse" project will implement a repository of historical, summary, and detail data and make the data accessible to appropriate users.