Committee on IT Infrastructure (CITI) Meeting
November 3, 2006
Meeting Summary with
Follow up Email on the Meeting by Jim Davis

 

CITI Attendees:  Sue Abeles, Neal Axelrod, Mitch Creem, Glyn Davies, James Davis, Rick Greenwood, Nick Hernandez, Tom Lifka, Sam Morabito,  Steve Olsen, Gary Strong, Rhea Turteltaub

Guests: Ross Bollens (AVC), Anita Cotter (Registrar), John D. Min (Business & Admin Services), Nick Reddingius (OIT), Michael Schilling (CTS), Don Worth (AIS)

Presenters:  Karen Cangialosi (UCSD-Administrative Computing & Telecommunications), Beth Surrell (UCSD-Registrar/Student Affairs)

At the August CITI meeting it was agreed that CITI would use the meetings for the remainder of the year to discuss seven cross-unit infrastructure systems and/or initiatives as institutional projects.  For the November meeting Nick Reddingius presented the Institutional Web and Portal Initiative.

The initiative most directly responds to the strategic principles of “Student Integration” and “Increased Productivity” but it is also expected to be a significant enabler for initiatives in the “Scholarly Interaction” area. It is one of several UTIPP-2 initiatives to upgrade the University’s information technology infrastructure in the coming decade.

The initiative mitigates security and other risks associated with obsolete technology and will at the same time improve the student experience at UCLA by:

  1. providing a consistent and seamless interface for students’ administrative, instructional and research interactions with the institution, and
  2. migrating all of URSA and related content of MY.UCLA to that platform. The result will be a campus-wide system that is integrated, seamless, and easy to use.

The action requested at the meeting was to endorse the approach and provide a $250,000 budget to start the planning phase of a student portal to deliver the administrative back-end applications currently served by URSA and/or MY.UCLA.

The traditional response to the current collection of systems is to rewrite URSA and portions of My.UCLA and to continue to add ad hoc processes to the existing systems.  This initiative proposes a different approach by unifying URSA and My.UCLA services into a portal, making use of standard interfaces for consistency, and integration into the administrative systems.

Nick Reddingius introduced Beth Surrell and Karen Cangialosi who have been instrumental in the web and portal development at UCSD.  The presentation served to demonstrate an example of the type of consistent representation of the University that this initiative seeks to define.

Karen Cangialosi gave an overview of the UCSD portal.  Beth Surrell demonstrated the student portal, highlighting the ease of use, convenient link features to related areas of interest and consistent transition between the different tabbed areas, making the system easy to navigate and for students to conduct business.  Some of the benefits that UCSD has experienced in eliminating many of the paper processes with the implementation of their new system include students settling into classes earlier and faculty spending less administrative time with students.

May 2007 is the milestone for the planning phase to be completed and presented to CITI with the project requirements definition and the recommendation for the development of the project.

CITI input and recommendations:

Follow up email on meeting by Jim Davis:


Sent: Monday, November 27, 2006 9:47 AM
To: Citi@lists.ucla.edu
Subject: [CITI] Sent on Behalf of Jim Davis - November 3,CITI Meeting Summary and Next Steps for "UCLAStudent/Parents Integrated IT Systems Experience" project.

Dear CITI,

Our November 3, 2006 meeting did not resolve next steps on addressing distributed systems and interfaces to integrate the student/parent electronic experiences with UCLA. Clearly, there is a need to continue the discussion to reach resolution. This message attempts to parse the discussion into key questions raised and then propose actions to address them for a next CITI discussion potentially in January.

Could you please review this summary and indicate your agreement, conditional agreement or disagreement with the summary and proceeding as recommended.

Based on notes and my interpretation of the meeting, the key points/questions/observations from the meeting are as follows:

1. CITI is generally in agreement on a campus priority to address several key systems that collectively make up the student and parent experiences with UCLA and in regard to the "business" of being a student, i.e. financial, housing, advising, scheduling, meeting degree requirements, etc.

2. With regard to the presentation and discussion at the Nov 3 meeting, the agenda was primarily organized around endorsement of the 'overall' need to address the student experience. The proposed need for $250K is one time funding to give UCLA the capacity to define the scope and scale of the problem and approaches under short, near term and long term aspects. The meeting discussion, however, centered on the specifics of planning itself and how that could be approached.

3. The UCSD demonstration took much longer than anticipated, resulting in a rushed attempt to discuss these planning funds in the last 15 minutes. Additionally, the presentation/discussion was also rushed and did not adequately cover the details for the recommendations.

4. The following questions about the $250K and the project planning structure were not resolved:

A. What is the breakdown of the $250K with respect to project management, consultation and tools?

B. Why are development and analysis tools being included in planning funds?

C. Realistically, planning cannot start until January, is it then realistic to expect a May deliverable and how would $250K be used in 5 months?

D. Why this much funding for planning when people are saying there are some easy fixes to address recent student and parent feedback.

E. Is the URSA component of the project really driven so strongly by Microsoft's planned pull of support of visual basic? Are there good ways to mitigate so that UCLA can plan? How can My.UCLA move so easily from .asp platform to .net when it is so hard and expensive for URSA to move from a visual basic platform to .net.

F. Is the project organization appropriately structured with the right people? Is it organized for campus planning?

G. Are the key sponsors really behind this project?

H. What does it mean that $250K is needed for capacity to plan as a campus?

I. There is a need to review exactly what are the major components that need to be planned out. There is a need to separate out and explain the work process components across units, the portal components and platform components and the relative difficulty of dealing with these. There was confusion about what is difficult and what is not.

5. There was considerable confusion about:

A. The terminology, "student portal" vs. underlying work flow processes that are organized and accessed through a portal. Is the project about a portal (relatively easy) or about systems integration?

B. Some easy short term interface changes to address student/parent comments vs. working out a different systems architecture to accommodate integrated workflow across systems and units and then provide access through a single portal architecture.

6. There was also considerable confusion infused into the discussion about:

A. Endorsing the release of funds to plan vs. the eventual funding of a full initiative.
B. Endorsing plans that are being brought to CITI piecemeal vs. reviewing a collection of plans against an expected budget.

________________________________________

Proposed actions:

1. At the December 12th CITI meeting, Steve Olsen and I will reprise expectations for CITI planning and will provide an overview of progress. This addresses point 6 above.

2. We are renaming the proposed initiative as the "UCLA Student/Parents Integrated IT Systems Experience" replacing the label "Student Portal." The objective in doing this is to convey that the project includes (1) integrating underlying processes that exist in distributed units and departments, (2) shared decisions about more modernized IT platforms, and an integrated architecture, (3) interoperability among several systems, updated interfaces to the new SR2 system, and change out of the existing student records data base (SRDB), (4) a student portal for students and parents to access the integrated functions,(5) some short term fixes to address immediate concerns and (6) more complex planning to address a new, sustainable architecture. This addresses point 5 above.

3. We are targeting the January meeting to 'continue' the CITI discussion on the UCLA Student/Parents Integrated IT Systems Experience" project and re-raise a recommendation for planning. The next two months will be used to do some additional planning, articulate the specifics of the proposed plan and approach, demonstrate the situation at UCLA more deeply than just at the level of the access portal, work through questions about the project structure, and address the questions raised in point 4 above.