About DoIT

Progress Report 2004-2005

Office of the Chief Information Officer and Division of Information Technology

This report highlights some of the significant IT challenges that we faced this year, identifies a very few selected accomplishments, provides additional facts and figures concerning ongoing IT activities, outlines the division’s strategic goals for the coming year, and supplies story ideas as requested.

Challenges

•Participation in the campus APBS (Appointments Payroll Benefits System) was a significant challenge for the Madison IT leadership and for DoIT in the past year. DoIT was expected to contribute significant technology resources to this initiative, but no vision, no direction, no project management, no voice whatsoever. This expectation continued as we routinely reported our sense that the project was failing. We do not know the future of this large and costly project at this time, however a partial assessment of whether it should be continued is underway.

•The State’s network plan and its effect on the future of WiscNet to provide a solid network for the UW System and for our colleagues in education State-wide has been a significant technology challenge during this past year. UW-Madison has successfully bypassed the political and technical dilemma posed by the State’s direction for its research network connection to Chicago, but several key concerns continue to exist. All of the campuses in the UW System are currently connected to one another through WiscNet. Moreover, a good many of the IT capabilities that other UW System campuses require are dependent on connections to the UW-Madison campus. As a result, it is imperative that the UW System as a whole has a solidly working network. There is no clarity yet on what the network design of the future will be in the network environment that DOA has outsourced to SBC.

•The DOA and legislative initiative to remove IT purchasing authority from the UW was a challenge. DOA proposed taking authority away from the University. Working with system and UW-Madison state liaison officers, we were successful in having that provision removed. While we had less success in our attempt to have an SBC initiated provision removed that would further limit the UW System’s ability to make the correct network decisions, we succeeded in amending this legislation to ensure UW-Madison’s continued ability to build out its research network capability and to preserve WiscNet (at least for now). We had no success in removing the State’s authority to mandate that all telephony decisions/acquisitions continue to be handled through DOA. The UW System and UW-Madison may need to take up this issue again as our costs for voice services rise and as technology makes other options not only possible, but more practical and cost effective as well.

Selected Accomplishments

The Information Technology Academy (ITA) Program, whose mission is to train students in information technology skills and prepare them for competitive university admissions, serves high school students from under-represented demographic groups in the Madison area. Begun in 2004, the program has graduated 25 students to date, 24 of whom were admitted regional colleges. Twelve ITA graduates have received full tuition scholarships to attend UW-Madison since the program began. Eight ITA graduates are currently enrolled at UW-Madison and another four graduates of the Spring 2005 class will enter UW-Madison in the fall.

WiscWaves went “live” this year, enabling UW-Madison to deploy network resources to meet the specific needs of our researchers. This 320-gigabit-capable system is capable of transporting massive amounts of data very quickly (at 10-gigabit-per-second speeds) from UW-Madison to the advanced research networks that converge in Chicago (at the “Starlight” hub), and from there, to destinations across the United States and around the globe (including facilities in Switzerland, Japan and Russia). WiscWaves also positions UW-Madison to take full advantage of the National Lambda Rail (NLR), a fiber-optic infrastructure that will soon link the national research community. UW-Madison and its peer institutions within the CIC are collaborating on the acquisition of the Chicago Fiber Ring to provide the eleven participating institutions with redundant connections to NLR and other research and education networks. In the coming year, this CIC collaboration will result in a working Ring with multiple lateral connections into seven downtown Chicago buildings, allowing UW-Madison to provide the connections our campus requires without impacting other CIC participating institutions. The collaboration is estimated to have saved $13.2 million dollars over the total cost of each institution acquiring similar resources on its own.

DoIT’s Digital Publishing and Printing Services (DPPS) launched Badger Accessibility Services (BAS) this year, helping students, faculty, and staff to locate and create accessible audio and text-based classroom materials. DoIT is also offering the new service (for a fee) to other universities, colleges, public schools systems and municipalities within the United States. In the first year of operation, DoIT has acquired thirty national accounts and garnered wide recognition for the program among the national accessibility community.

Learn@UW, UW-Madison’s course management system utility, is now the sole provider of centralized eLearning services for the entire UW System, following the successful migration of UW-Milwaukee's Desire2Learn installation to the UW-Madison Learn@UW this year. In addition to hosting Learn@UW courses for the entire system, DoIT delivered over 1,100 timetable courses in Learn@UW for the UW-Madison campus during academic year 2004-05.

MyWebSpace is a new web hosting service implemented by DoIT in the fall of 2004. Students, faculty and staff can take advantage of MyWebSpace for hosting web sites, storing documents, sharing files and the like. By this spring, 17,000 members of our UW-Madison community were taking advantage of this service.

Electronic grade submission became a reality this year through a successful collaboration between DoIT and the UW-Madison Office of the Registrar. Working closely with the Office of the Registrar, DoIT deployed and supported a pilot service for exporting grades from the Learn@UW (Desire2Learn) course management system directly into the Student Information System. The participating campuses, UW-Madison and UW-Green Bay, reported that the pilot was a success, and the service will be expanded to include other campuses in the coming year.

A firewall strategy to protect the campus network was defined by the CIO office, members of the campus technology community and key DoIT staff this year. A three- tiered zone structure was defined. A pilot implementation in Zone 2 (local area networks) is now underway. Maintaining security at the borders between departments and groups of machines (Zone 2) involves the implementation of firewall capabilities for the campus, including creation of standards and guidelines for firewalls in this zone.

DoIT’s Voice Services group rolled out a unified messaging service this year. It is a software-based system available to all voice mail users at no cost beyond the standard cost of voice mail telephone service. Among other benefits, the new software system allows users to receive a copy of their voice mail messages in e-mail message form as an attached audio file that they may play back using their favorite e-mail client. There are currently over 1,000 users and it is expected more users will be added in the coming year.

Facts & Figures for 2004-2005

The Selected Accomplishments section above highlights only a few of the initiatives that took place primarily during FY2004-05. Over the past year, DoIT personnel also continued to make significant improvements to existing services and to implement ongoing projects not mentioned above. The following facts and figures are included in this report to convey some sense of the division’s sheer size and the variety of IT activities for which DoIT personnel are responsible:

21st century network: – In 2004-2005, approximately
- 725 Cisco switches were installed in 305 Telecommunication Rooms on campus in 2004-2005.
- 819 Cisco switches are scheduled for installation in another 362 Telecommunications Rooms on campus in 2005-2006
WiscMail Service:
- 52,085 (97%) eligible students have active accounts
- 19,707 (59%) of eligible faculty and staff have active accounts
- 9% increase in faculty/staff usage in 2004-2005
- Daily message volume jumped from ~2 million to ~3million in 2004-2005.
- WiscMail spam filtering identifies more than 40% of messages as junk mail.
My UW-Madison (MUM):
- 40,883 daily logins on average for 2004-2005
- 93,727 total daily logins for peak usage period (at start of academic semester)
- A complete review of the portal statistics is available online at https://my-team.doit.wisc.edu/stats/info_2005/.
DoIT Help Desk:
- 108,000 cases managed by Help Desk in 2004-2005 (a reduction in cases from the 112,000 handled in 2003-2004)
- 924,545 visits to Help Online searchable website in 2004-2005
- In 2004-2005, the Help Desk implemented a popular new service that provides automated self-service NetID password management, reducing by half the number of calls to the Help Desk requesting NetID password resets.

Strategic Goals for 2005-2006

In June 2005, the DoIT senior staff met in a full day planning session to identify the information technology goals for the academic year 2005-2006. In addition in June, M-TAG (Madison Technical Advisory Group) a group of IT leaders from schools, colleges and divisions met to identify key strategic IT goals for the coming year.n There was a grat deal of coherence between the goals identified by each group.

Ongoing Top Priorities

Campus Network: robust campus IT network, both wired and wireless
Security: campus IT infrastructure that balances access with security and is based on inter- and intra-institutional collaboration
Technology-Enhanced Instruction: innovative academic technology applications and instructional support
Customer Service and Support
Enterprise Systems: world-class support for mission-critical academic and administrative applications (Course Management, Payroll and Benefits, Student Information, Grants Administration, Financials, Library, etc.)
Web Portal / Integrated Systems: consolidated services and integrated workflow
Business Continuity: reliable disaster recovery for enterprise data

Planned Upgrades/Expansions of Existing Services

Campus Network: continued implementation of 21 st Century Network, including wireless capability
Security: expansion of integrated role-based identification management and security policy development and implementation across the campus
Technology-Enhanced Instruction: expansion of new Learn@UW electronic grade submission and electronic transcript services; enhanced customized service to meet needs of faculty members and instructors.
Customer Service and Support: expanded WiscMail and WiscMail Plus services
Enterprise Systems: major upgrades to the Integrated Student Information System (ISIS) and the Shared Financial System (SFS)
Web Portal / Integrated Systems: major upgrade of the My UW-Madison (MUM) Web Portal framework

New Initiatives

Campus Network: strategic planning for future support of Internet telephony, handheld devices, simulation-based learning applications, etc.
Security: deployment of Campus-wide Firewall Service

Enterprise Systems: implementation of a Grants Administration System for the Graduate School
Web Portal / Integrated Systems:

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) methodology for improved integration of major application systems and services.
Work-flow Integration: selection and implementation of a work-flow system

Internal Objectives

To achieve these goals next year, DoIT will commit itself as an organization to the following internal objectives:

Increased consistency in project management processes across the division
Reallocation of resources to achieve operational excellence
Promotion of standardized project management tools and processes division-wide
Increased divisional awareness of the University culture
Enhanced professional growth and development opportunities for DoIT employees.