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Minutes from the December 2003 CCD meeting
Attending: Craig Adams, Kevin Baradet, Keith Boncek, Wendy Busch, Mitch Collinsworth, Thomas Crook, Paul Davis, Graham Dobson, Sunny Donenfeld, Dan Dwyer, Roger Garnett, John Godfrey, Oliver Habicht, Ray Helmke, Rich Jaenson, Mick LoPinto, Vince Patriarco, Mark Sanford, Jodie Sprouse, Frank Strickland, Craig Trowbridge, James VanEe, John Wolf CCD-Plus-L in attendance: Tom Every, Rick MacDonald, Jason Rhoades, Steve Schuster Other guests in attendance: David Lucas, Don MacLeod, David McCartt, Brian Messenger, John Pfleiderer, Robert Wilkinson Jason Rhoades announced that there would be a mid-year decrease in NUBB charges, due to over-recovering of network rates. He did not share a specific amount, as the decrease is still pending EBG approval. For FY05, CIT has proposed decreases in data port charges, digital phone charges, and audix charges. There may be rate changes in the future (up or down) to continuously recover $1-1.5M year. CIT has not considered adjusting the 2MB threshold to consider a network device active. If this is an issue for you, please contact Jason (jr292@cornell.edu). Jason announced that a 10-year, $57M initiative to upgrade building communication pathways and cabling (EzraNet) has ben approved by the Board of Trustees. Jason made it clear that CIT was the steward of what is essentially a Cornell initiative. In order for a building to be rewired, all tenants (various departments) must approve. CIT will manage the wire plant in buildings that are rewired by the Ezranet project. New buildings and renovations are not included in the EzraNet initiative: communications wiring must be part of the construction project. CIT plans to install Cat 6 wire (certified for Gigabit Ethernet), with pathways sized for any medium for future upgrades. Tom Every spoke about new initiatives in Distributed Learning Services that will benefit the classroom, all of which have received explicit funding through OIT. His intention was to share with the CCDs before sending out a memo to the DDDH group. There are three new projects. The first is a web accessible database for multimedia resources at Cornell, tightly coupled with Resource25. This project would require local units to update their own areas in the db. The second is a large enrollment classroom technology enhancement project, which would focus on enhancing technology in the 16 classrooms at Cornell that account for 1/3 of all course enrollments. Third is a distance learning facilities development project, which would bring common technologies to various classrooms. Tom also introduced a new web conferencing service, licensed with WebEx. Cornell now has access to WebEx's meeting, event, training, and support center products. Departments can go through CIT for a fee to use these services, or pay a one-time fee to do it themselves. Rick MacDonald introduced the CIT Server Farm server hosting service, For a monthly fee, CIT offers housing, cooling, power, and 24x7 monitoring for rack-mountable servers. System administration of servers is available for additional charges. Backup via EZ Backup is available for a separate fee. Those who currently use this service have physical access to their servers (the NOC maintains an access list), but most monitor their servers remotely. CIT also has a new Storage Farm service, mostly internal to CIT at this point. Next year, CIT will publish a tiered pricing model for departments who wish to take advantage of CIT's Storage Area Network. Frank Strickland discussed his interest in negotiating a discounted rate for the Cornell Community for Time Warner Cable broadband. While other universities have had success in this area, it remains a very complex issue at Cornell. Unlike at Cornell, universities that enjoy a TW discount usually already pay for TW services throughout campus. Jason Rhoades from CIT, and Vince Patriarco from Purchasing, are pessimistic that TWC will be agreeable to offering a discount. Furthermore, Cornell HR will not release employee data, as other universities have, to Time Warner. The next meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, January14th at noon in 401 Warren Hall. The primary topic will be FERPA and HIPAA. Other topics TBD. Minutes from the November 12, 2003 CCD meeting Attending: Craig Adams, Kevin Baradet, Andrea Beesing, Keith Boncek, Mitch Collinsworth, Thomas Crook, Paul Davis, Graham Dobson, Sunny Donenfeld, Steve Gallow, Roger Garnett, John Godfrey, Oliver Habicht, Ray Helmke, Anita Henry-Wilkins, Janet Heslop, Mick LoPinto, Steve Lutter, Mark Sanford, Barbara Skoblick, Jodie Sprouse, Frank Strickland, Terry Thomas, Craig Trowbridge, James VanEe, Jere Warner, John Wolf CCD-Plus-L in attendance: Linda Croll, Polley McClure, Jason Rhoades Other guests in attendance: <none> The first item of business was an introduction to Linda Croll, OIT, Director, Human Resources and Organizational Development, <llc36>. She has been at CIT since mid-August. Linda expressed interest in facilitating career development for all campus IT professionals. Ideas include identifying IT training needs across campus and developing a CU IT learning/knowledge matrix. Training ideas floated by group included Dell training (enabling Premier repair access), security, project management, and CIT-endorsed products. Centralized research (and purchase) for key components (eg. firewall products). Provide non-student professional IT HelpDesk staff for CU's IT staff to contact. Also, Linda touched on issue of campus-wide equity regarding staff compensation. Surveyed CCDs to figure out why more CU IT staff were not applying for CIT positions. The second item of business was a report on campus-wide WFP-IT from Polley McClure, OIT, VP for IT, <pam28>. Handouts included "IT Workforce Planning Recommendations" (4 pages; 1 pg text, 3 pages tables), "IT Roles & Responsiblities", and "WFP-IT Unit Plan". Polley expects to have these posted to the web within a week or so. [Done: http://www.cit.cornell.edu/oit/Reports/2003/ ] Presentation focused on items Polley was submitting to the Workforce Planning Committee within a week. Polley expects feedback from that Committee in about a month. Regarding Unit Plans, each unit (Dean/VP level) will be asked to evaluate if they can save money, and if so, develop a plan to implement savings. Expected to be due July 1, 2004. Each unit will receive aggregated WFP-IT reports for both campus-wide data and data specific to the unit. (2 sample passed around.) Polley asked the group what they thought of CCD members and the like providing confidential peer consulting to units in order to facilitate the completion of unit plans. Polley also stated that the "Cornell Data and Voice Network Benchmark Plan" would be worked on over the next year. Gartner Consulting has been engaged to (1) compare our metrics to (mostly) private sector companies (providing industry data), and (2) launch (next week) a project in which 25-30 comparable universities will be asked to compare their metrics with ours, providing us with peer, HigherEd data. Polley then answered questions about WFP-IT and other topics from the CCDs. The next meeting is schedule for December 10th (Wednesday). Normal place/ time [401 Warren Hall/ noon - 1:30pm]. The topic is TBD, so more details to follow. Minutes from the September 10, 2003 CCD meeting Attending: Attending: Rob Bandler, Kevin Baradet, Andrea Beesing, Mary Bouchard, Bob Bourdeau, Mitch Collinsworth, Thomas Crook, Dave DeHaan, Ron DiNapoli, Graham Dobson, Sunny Donenfeld, Tim Durnford, Steve Gallow, Roger Garnett, John Godfrey, Oliver Habicht, Mike Hammond, Ray Helmke, Janet Heslop, Geoffrey Hollister, Rich Jaenson, Tracy Mitrano, Jeff Morse, Steve Schuster, Hurf Sheldon, Barbara Skoblick, Frank Strickland, Terry Thomas, Craig Trowbridge, James Van Ee, Dave Vernon, Jere Warner. First item was regarding the election of a new co-chair. Only one of the nominees accepted the nomination due to current work committments. Since we never had this situation before we decided, instead of an election, to have a vote of confidence to appoint Oliver Habicht. The vote was unanimous and Oliver is now the new co-chair. Congratulations Oliver! And "Thank You, Barbara!" for two years of excellent service as CCD Co-chair. Tracy Mitrano provided an update on the policy front. All of the policies mentioned below can be found at http://www.cit.cornell.edu/oit/policy/drafts/. Prior to her joining OIT, only two IT policies existed. Abuse of Computer and Network Systems (1990) and Responsible Use of Electronic Communications (1995). Earlier this year two new policies came out: Use of Escrowed Encryption Keys and Mass Electronic Mailing. There are three policies in draft currently going through the policy process. Tracy hopes these will be official by the end of this year. They are Standards for the Registration and Assignment of Domain Names, Security of Information Technology Resources, and Reporting Electronic Security Incidents. Coming soon will be policies on Privacy of Electronic Mail, Network Registry, Authentication and Authorization, and a revision of Responsible Use of Electronic Communications. The Security of Information Technology Resources was modeled after UC Berkeley's policy. It defines 5 roles - director of IT security, unit head, unit liaison, local support provider, and user. Some units may have one person in multiple roles and others may have multiple people in the same roles. It's up to units to determine who should be in which roles depending on the existing IT structure in the unit. A discussion of Reporting Electronic Security Incidents raised the point that if every virus infected computer was reported it could overload CIT. Steve Schuster said he would prefer to know the scope of the problem than not know anything, so he wants all reports. The Assignment of Domain Names deals with first level domain and applies to all cornell.edu names and any name on university servers. There is an appeals process if rejected. The VP for IT, University Counsel and VP for Community Relations (or whatever the new title will be) will handle appeals. Existing names will be reviewed and most may be grand fathered in even if they don't meet the policy requirements. Andrea Beesing then talked at NATs and sidecar forwarding. A handout of her talk will be available on the CCD web site, so I won't go into detail here. Everyone agreed that there is an obligation for the university to protect data so the security hole should be plugged right away. However, alternatives are needed so that university business can continue. Andrea would like to know of any applications that use Sidecar. She already has started a list and will be sharing it with us. Addressing SideCar Vulnerability (PowerPoint) Finally, there was a short discussion on workforce planning and the Gartner report. Many questioned the savings they came up with, especially where they indicated the success probability as medium to low. There will be more discussion on this at the next meeting. The next meeting is October 8. Microsoft will be presenting and providing lunch. Minutes from the July 2003 CCD meeting Attending: Barbara Skoblick, Sunny Donenfeld, Ray Helmke, Keith Boncek, Graham Dobson, Jason Rhoades, Oliver Habicht, Mitch Collinsworth, Dan Dwyer, Roger Garnett, John Godfrey, Hurf Sheldon, Thomas Crook, Alex Nemeth, Craig Trowbridge, Marcy Rosenkrantz, Michael Currie, Larry Fresinski, James VanEe, Michael Swenson, Wes Kahle
Minutes from the June 11, 2003 CCD meeting Attending: Kevin Baradet, Andrea Beesing, Jeff Bishop, Keith Boncek, Bob Bourdeau, Mitch Collinsworth, Paul Davis, Graham Dobson, Sunny Donenfeld, Dan Elswit, Steve Gallow, Roger Garnett, Ray Helmke, Anita Henry-Wilkins, Janet Heslop, Mike Hojnowski, Wes Kahle, Dean Krafft, Rick MacDonald, Lisa Mix, Jeff Morse, Alex Nemeth, Jason Rhoades, Hurf Sheldon, Barbara Skoblick, Frank Strickland, Terry Thomas, Craig Trowbridge, James Van Ee Wes Kahle introduced Bob Bourdeau, the new assistant director of marketing. Lisa Mix did a presentation on Training and Documentation Services. Wes talked about program-based budgeting and its impact on training. Customer Services & Marketing allocates their costs to CIT programs. External customer training must be linked to a program or have costs recovered by charging a fee. There was a discussion on the registration database and how it would be useful for all campus training, not just CIT sponsored training. HR staff in units could track staff development in one central database. Training will be done by CIT staff if it makes sense, or outsourced for specialized needs. Wes said they need to determine demand and needs. A question was raised about policy mandates. For example, the new security policy assigns responsibility for IT security to units, but many staff need training to comply. Andrea Beesing talked about vanity email. Larry Fresinski sent the CCDs the 3 proposed options under consideration. Not many CCDs responded, but the ones who did leaned towards option 2 - eliminate the current nickname feature. A few people mentioned that they chose this because there was no option to do nothing, which some preferred. Andrea explained that this was not included because the current 'fuzzy' matching is not reliable or secure and it relies on a Ph to LDAP gateway that CIT wants to eliminate. If the current nickname feature is eliminated, email address in the form of firstname.lastname@cornell.edu will no longer work. Many CCDs spoke up in favor of retaining this specific functionality. Mike Hojnowski talked about EZ-Remote. Ricky Stewart sent the CCDs the RFP analysis, so I won't describe it here. Based on the results of the RFP and Hojo's analysis, he is proposing the following:
The CCDs support this proposal and we thank Hojo for his efforts in including us and listening to our concerns. There was a brief discussion on the WFP external review of administrative computing documents that Sunny sent to the list. Everyone appreciated that Polley was willing to share this with us. Roger Garnett updated us on the Alumni Affairs PeopleSoft project. They are doing a full database conversion now and expect to go live on July 28. Minutes from the May 14, 2003 CCD meeting Attending: Sunny Donenfeld, Barbara Skoblick, Keith Boncek, Oliver Habicht, Graham Dobson, Roger Garnett, Steve Gallow, Wendy Busch, Andrea Beesing, Don MacLeod, Rick MacDonald, James VanEe, Alex Nemeth, Craig Adams, David DeHaan, Steve Schuster, Mitch Collonsworth, Hurf Sheldon, Terry Thomas, John Godfrey, Ray Helmke, Betsy Hillman, Paul Davis
Minutes from the April 9, 2003 CCD meeting Note that we will be meeting next in 401 Warren on May 14. Attending: Keith Boncek, Mitch Collinsworth, Mike Colunio, Mike Currie, Graham Dobson, Tim Durnford, Dan Dwyer, Dan Elswit, Roger Garnett, John Godfrey, Janet Heslop, Richard Hine, Rob Hubbert, Helen Mohrmann, Jason Rhoades, Barbara Skoblick, Frank Strickland, James VanEe, Pam Warner. Dan Elswit, from Environmental Sciences, talked about using group policy to centrally secure 500 desktops (his presentation will be put on the CCD web page). He discussed how they use group policy to control computer security and do Windows (2000 and XP) updates and for various groups of users (public computers, faculty, grad students, etc). Dan said that it took a while to set it all up, but it saves a lot of time now. He said they have a 5% failure rate installing service packs. There are still occasional problems with users who restart their computers while installing. There was a lot of interest in pulling together a user group to share information on managing Windows systems. Dan is interested in trying to start such a group. Stay tuned for details. Helen Mohrmann talked about ASP (Administrative Systems Planning Group). She is the chair. The group consists of representatives from administrative computing areas: Dave Koehler, CIT Mark Mara, CIT Rick Banks, Alumni Affairs and Development Lyman Flahive, Office of Human Resources Mike Whalen, Budget & Planning Dan Dwyer, Office of Sponsored Programs Wes Buchanan, Payroll Steve Lutter, Financial Affairs David Yeh, Student & Academic Services Their responsibilities include developing and refining the mechanics of the SPAR (Systems Project Approval Request) process used to allocate the $50 million designated for administrative computing projects, formulating a rolling 5-year plan, consider strategic issues of interest to all areas (e.g. infrastructure standards), and identify cross-organizational issues. Projects in excess of $500,000 need approval from the Capital Funding and Priorities Committee (consisting of the President, Provost, VP for Budget & Planning, VP for Administration/CFO, VP for AA&D) and those in excess of $2 million must be approved by the Board of Trustees. There was a comment that colleges and research units are not represented. Some CCDs felt it was important for our group to know what's happening regarding infrastructure so we can be prepared for changes. Helen mentioned that Keith Boncek had done a presentation for ASP on the CCD standards. Since some CCDs are on ASP, we can ask them to keep us up to date on relevant issues. Updates on other topics: Keith Boncek said the results of the administrative systems survey shows that there are more administrative systems supported in units than centrally, with about the same number of FTEs in each. Keith and Sunny will be meeting with the external review team and will be representing both the CCD groups and their own units (AF&F and Campus Life). Roger Garnett asked what the CCDs thought about the new PO requirements for kerberized passwords. There was a lot of agreement that it caused a number of problems and would force units into running their own email servers. Everyone asked that Don MacLeod meet with us on this issue. I will try to schedule him for May. Minutes from the March 2003 CCD meeting Attending:Sunny Donenfeld, Ray Helmke, Keith Boncek, Graham Dobson, Steve Lutter, Jason Rhoades, Terry Thomas, Janet Heslop, Frank Strickland, Oliver Habicht, Mike Hammond, Dean Krafft, Anita Henry-Wilkins, Kevin Baradet, Paul Davis, Mitch Collinsworth, Rich Jaenson, Randi Rainbow, Dan Dwyer, Roger Garnett, Tim Durnford, David Dehaan, Ricky Stewart, Barbara Skoblick, Andrea Beesing, John Godfrey
Minutes from the February 12, 2003 CCD meeting Attending: Sunny Donenfeld, Barbara Skoblick, Dean Krafft, Ken Sandlan, David Semo, Rich Jaenson, Craig Trowbridge, Wendy Busch, Steve Gallow, Paul Davis, Oliver Habicht, Janet Heslop, Alex Nemeth, Marcy Rosenkrantz, Jason Rhoades, Rick MacDonald, Roger Garnett, Dan Dwyer, Terry Thomas, Mike Hojnowski, Don MacLeod, Kevin Baradet, Mitch Collonsworth, Ray Helmke, Graham Dobson.
Polley's questions for the CCDs: Are there things we could do that would help lower everyone's costs, for example, are there unrealized opportunities for economy in bulk licenses, training or hardware purchases? What specific service areas are there where CIT and unit IT staff could be more efficient if we had better coordination/communication? What mechanisms of coordination/communication would work best? Are there ways that your units (CIT and distributed departments/schools) could organize/manage their IT work differently that would help to slow the rate of staff growth without compromising level of service? Are there types of IT work now being done by both CIT and unit IT staff that could be better performed by one or the other and would result in improved efficiency? Minutes from the January 2003 CCD meeting Attending: Barbara Skoblick, Sunny Donenfeld, Hurf Sheldon, Ray Helmke, Keith Boncek, Mitch Collinsworth, Mark Sanford, Jere Warner, Roger Garnett, Paul Davis, Janet Heslop, Frank Strickland, Terry Thomas, Oliver Habicht. *****REMINDER***** We will no longer be meeting in 310 Rhodes Hall. The February meeting will be held in McManus Lounge (room 166 in Hollister). Future meetings will be held in 401 Warren. We'll remind everyone prior to each meeting. Keith Boncek asked for feedback about the recent emergency communcations regarding the power problems. He asked if 'message blaster' was a good way to reach people. Message blaster is used for ultra-critical communications. The messages are approved by Hal Craft in consultation with other university officials. These emails go to netids of all faculty, staff, and students. If anyone has any feedback for Keith regarding this topic, please let him know. The group discussed using audix or phone trees in addition to message blaster. The group discussed the workforce planning survey that Polley shared with us. Paul Davis had sent Polley an email on behalf of Engineering regarding the survey and he was asked to share it with the CCD list (he has done this). Keith and Sunny are part of the internal committee that will review costs associated with administrative computing (this was part B of the IT WFP effort). They represent two of the largest units on campus - AF&F and Campus Life. Others on the committee (organized by Dave Koehler) are Helen Mohrmann, Agelia Dumas, Cathy Dove, and Mark Mara. We made a list of topics we'd like to cover in future meetings:
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