Information Technology 2.0

Richard Kogut
Chief Information Officer
UC Merced

As for most campus units, our resources are insufficient to always provide the services and levels of service that our users consider necessary. By improving processes, deploying new or improved applications, shifting priorities, and, in some cases, changing attitudes, we can make substantial improvements. However, IT has been obliged to make difficult choices, particularly in deciding what the campus priorities are and hiring the staff to support those. Keeping the infrastructure and core services operational has to be our highest priority.

Ultimately, staff is needed to significantly augment services. On the IT Listening Tour, we heard a large number of services that the campus would like to see expanded or added. Of those that we feel we cannot address substantially without additional resources, the ones we heard most universally were training, more extensive documentation, and web support. We are aligning our budget requests extensively with the priorities we have heard, and expect that the Budget Committee will appropriately weigh the priorities of all campus needs in their challenge of allocating scant resources.

Continuing Dialogue and Feedback

We understand that we have focused our response from this effort on high-profile issues that affect a large number of users, and that we realize that a myriad of other issues remain. We plan on going back to meet with groups of users, using this report and other feedback we have received from the various groups as a starting point to discuss both progress and outstanding issues.

We have also been working on instantiating a more comprehensive set of IT advisory groups, with whom we can work with to identify user needs, determine priorities, and establish support strategies. The first of these, an advisory committee to provide oversight over general end user computing needs, should be announced imminently. Other committees for administrative computing and instructional & research computing have been proposed.

We are also planning the first of an ongoing series of annual surveys about IT and IT service delivery. Beginning with surveys developed by other campuses, and integrating questions related to specific issues raised during the IT Listening Tour, we plan to create a baseline set of data, against which we can measure progress on an annual basis. We plan on completing a staff/faculty round in early summer 2008, and a student round in Fall 2008, with a single full campus survey in future years.

At a more strategic level, and as another part of our IT2.0 efforts, an IT retreat was held April 30, 2008 where campus leaders from various areas discussed basic principles for the implementation and deployment of information technology at UC Merced. The focus of the retreat was to establish principles that are applicable campus-wide, independently of the current role and organization of the central IT Department.

The experience of the IT Listening Tour has shown that small issues, which may sometimes result from simple misunderstandings about roles, responsibilities, processes, plans, etc., can often be easily resolved, but if not addressed, may fester and weigh down on everyone. Beyond the formal mechanisms outlined above, as well as expanded communications via Panorama, the Happenings Channel, presentation at Deans & Directors, etc., it is apparent that ongoing dialogue in every possible form is essential. We are contemplating other avenues of dialogue such as an IT Q&A and/or complaint discussion list or hot line.

Suggestions on maintaining ongoing dialogues will be welcomed. Also, members of the IT Department, from the CIO on down, are more than happy to participate in any staff, group, or individual meetings to discuss any aspect of information technology. We encourage everyone with a question or complaint to contact the CIO, Help Desk, IT manager, or other IT staff member. If someone has an issue, it would be unusual if others didn’t have a similar one, and it is only by hearing about them that we will know to take action.

Thank You to UC Merced

In conclusion, we would like to thank the members of the UC Merced community who gave up some of their precious time to meet with IT staff, gave us candid feedback, and made the IT Listening Tour possible. Like other IT departments, we will never be perfect, and we will never have the resources to do everything that we and our customers would like. But with good input from our users, we will be able to focus on delivering substantially better service over time.

Rich Kogut

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