OIT on schedule with annual goals
A list of six goals were outlined for the Office of Information Technology at the beginning of the year and progress toward those goals is going according to plan, said Roger Rehm, vice president for information technology.
The first goal, as outlined in the executive summary of the OIT annual report, is to support the opening of the College of Medicine.
Rehm said admissions and support systems for desktops and classrooms are all set. Working on simulations for medical procedures is the next step.
"These days, they do a lot of things without actually doing things," he said. "There are suites of software that deal with simulations so they don't have to work on people."
The second goal in the report is to upgrade the university's communication and collaboration infrastructure, which includes addressing problems with the new websites and doing an overhaul of telecommunications.
"What a faculty member wants from telephone services is different than what an office worker, someone who sits at a desk all day, wants from telephone service," Rehm said. "It's both a challenge and an opportunity."
OIT is also working on a contract with Microsoft for a free cloud-based email system for students and alumni, with plans to have it in place later this year.
Students and faculty utilize separate servers for email currently, and that will remain the case, Rehm said. Some changes could make things much easier for communication though.
"The intent is we can make it so students and faculty can see each other in search results, which has never been done before," he said.
The third and fourth goals in the report are to improve and expand access to university data and to develop comprehensive policies to support the protection of that data.
Rehm said this is being done by transferring university data to a digital warehouse, allowing it to be systematically archived to provide on-demand access.
In order to keep data safe, Rehm said the major focus is to just raise awareness about potential threats, such as junk mail or phishing attempts. Phishing attempts are emails that mimic university or bank emails in order to try to steal login credentials.
"We're trying to raise awareness, make people know if it's a real email or not," Rehm said. "A lot of it we can stop with better screening; a lot of it we can stop with better controls. It's kind of a cat-and-mouse game, we change and they change; we change and they change."
The fifth goal is to aid in student recruitment and retention. The major project OIT is working on, along with the Registrar's office, is the implementation of online degree audits. These audits, to appear when registering for classes, would allow students to view a comprehensive list of what classes and requirements have already been taken.
"It would be an online worksheet, pulling directly from the university so you don't have to keep track of it yourself," Rehm said. "It would make it much quicker and simpler for students to know where they are in their degree, and make time with advisors more valuable."
The final goal in the report is simply to continue to improve OIT services, which Rehm said is arguably the most important of all goals outlined in the document.
"If we don't make those changes (for OIT), we won't do these other goals," he said. "We've heard clearly that communication with the university must be better. For us, that stuff has to be procedural because there are things we do over and over. We could communicate well one time, but not the next time. If we don't do it as a procedure, it doesn't stick. We want to add enough formality to the process to make it stick"
