Information Technology Services Strategic Planning 2007-2012

Information Technology Services at Case Western Reserve University is committed to partnership with the University community to provide robust, innovative, and collaborative information technology products and services. Our leadership and support enable the University to sustain its high standards in teaching, research, and outreach.

Contents 1 Why Strategic Planning Matters 2 Where We've Come From: Please share your view 3 Current State of IT@Case: Please share your view 4 The Vision: Re-Imagine, Re-Invigorate, Re-Invent 5 Broad Themes 6 Service Lines and Allocations 7 Highlighting Important Goals 8 20 Strategic Initiatives: 8.1 Initiatives One-Six: Structured Innovation to Support Teaching, Learning, Research, and the On-campus Student Experience 8.2 Initiatives 7-12: Engagement and Collaboration Services 8.3 Initiatives 13-20: Attending to the 3Cs -- Core Technology, Compliance, and Continuity Planning 9 Improve Identity Management 10 Upgrade Administrative Systems 11 Strategy: Improve Support for Administrative Services 12 Measuring Outcomes 13 Visions of Where We Need/Want/Must Be in 2012 14 IT Planning and Goals for Case Western Reserve University’s Schools/Colleges/and Distributed Units 15 ITS Scorecard 2002-2007 15.1 Overall Satisfaction 15.2 Email Services 15.3 Technology Enhanced Classrooms 15.4 Average Simultaneous Wireless Users 15.5 Academic Research Cluster HPC 15.6 Portal Sessions 15.7 Commodity Bandwidth Consumption 15.8 Software Center Downloads 15.9 Bloggers at blog.case.edu 15.10 Call Answer Time at Case Help Desk

[edit] Why Strategic Planning Matters

All planning occurs within the interstices of multiple contexts. Since our first five year plan was mapped out and approved (ITS Five Year Strategic Planning Framework 2002-2007) we have worked with three University Presidents, three Provosts, and two Senior VPs for both Finance and Development. In addition, we have seen nearly the entire cadre of decanal appointments turn over along with changes in the office of budget and planning. In addition to the changes in senior administration at Case, the university has found itself oscillating between different management styles, shifting priorities, multiple fiscal challenges, and relatively little planning activity. And yet, from both a general strategic and IT-specific planning perspective, the broader parameters of engaging, planning, prioritizing, operationalizing and setting milestones and outcome measures are more important than ever before.

[edit] Where We've Come From: Please share your view

Assessment of Challenges and Opportunities: Listening to our Customers

Please share your view. We encourage your participation by leaving your comments. See Listening to our Customers

[edit] Current State of IT@Case: Please share your view

Assessment of Challenges and Opportunities: Listening to our Customers

Please share your view. We encourage your participation by leaving your comments. See Current State of IT@Case

[edit] The Vision: Re-Imagine, Re-Invigorate, Re-Invent

The imperative to re-imagine Five years ago, almost no one at Case Western Reserve University imagined a university world that would include switched gigabit Ethernet, pervasive wireless, wikis, blogs, P2P software, portals, voice and television over IP, productivity software delivered over the network, self service administrative applications, a help line that would answer with a human voice within 20 seconds 7*24*365, or supporting student learning and success with mediavision courseware, and countless other services that have become, for most, simply, “digital air”. For most, this portfolio of services has become a significant part of the dynamism and positive reality of our lives as students, faculty, and staff at Case. We have done our best to take time out to celebrate some of the accomplishments and contributions that the technology community has made to the experience of being at Case Western Reserve University. But we understand that the cycles of innovation in the technology world are only becoming shorter and the disruptions to common practices are becoming more evident every day. The challenges in creating a workable balance between the forces of change and our capacity to work, study, teach, and continue a thriving research agenda are real, and we take them seriously. We firmly believe that a university information technology vision without a commitment to the process of re-imagining the next five years will necessarily lead to a misalignment of expectations or worse. If few could fully imagine what has been accomplished over these past five years, we would venture to suggest that there is a significant probability that the next five years are even more unknowable at this juncture. But the most important thing we can do in this 5 year planning effort is to encourage a process of re-imagination. We want and call upon your help in that process of re-imaging what services and tools will make us all capable of contributing to the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Re-invigorating our commitments The euphemism of a university in “transition” is “spin” for acknowledging all of the challenges that both ITS and the remainder of the University have experienced. At the core, from our perspective, is the breach of mutual respect and confidence between the university’s central administration and faculty. The fallout of that reality has rippled throughout our university eco-system. As a service organization, ITS has had to confront profound negative impacts of that fallout that have hurt real people and stressed our fragile working environment. Today, among our peers, Case has fewer dedicated IT professionals supporting the research university environment than any other peer university by a factor of nearly 100 percent (the median of our peers is above 180 FTE and at Case ITS has fewer than 100 FTE). The budget environment for ITS is equally challenging with an operating budget of $12.8m as compared to an average (median) of over $20m. With three years of consecutive reductions, our closest peers today are Wayne State $14m and Kent State Universities in terms of IT budget.

A research university committed to a 21st century scholarly agenda must re-invigorate and re-dedicate itself to investing in those enabling platforms that will support strong research proposals, collaboration, and productivity. Information technology is an indisputable driver of research innovation and critical success factor, which has distinguished our offering to recruit world class faculty and the very best undergraduate and graduate students. It is vital that we use this five year planning horizon to re-invigorate those commitments and harness the resources provided through the fiscal allocation process to meet the requirements of our faculty and continue to invest in the people and technologies. Over the past five years, the university operating budget has grown from $600m to over $800m. The ITS staff headcount is down by 30% even after accounting for huge new undertakings like PeopleSoft ERP. ITS’ operating budget in FY07 is less than it was in FY02. It is probably a conservative assumption to assume that in 2012 the University operating budget will be over $1b. What level of investment in IT will support that growth in research, student services and the experience of being at a 21st century university? In 2004, we proposed that Case strive to reach the 33rd percentile among its peers. Today, we are in the bottom 5th percentile as measured by staff and operating budget. Where should we be five years from now?

Re-inventing ITS to embrace change and challenge From an organizational perspective, we understand that the next five years are very likely to involve further re-invention. Technology drivers demand a continuous updating of skills, tools, and knowledge. Agility is an overused term in management text books, but the reality is that ITS will need to continue to re-invent itself and embrace new organizational strategies in order to be positioned to respond to exponentially growing customer expectations against a highly constrained resource environment. Our core strategy as outlined below is to shift away from our inherited “functional” orientation. While we continue to advocate for further investments in talent to support core and mission critical functional requirements like analysts, database specialists, engineers, and programmers, we are, in parallel, going to move to a portfolio management approach being managed by a program management office. The initiative to create a sustainable program management office represents one of our core insights as to how to meet and exceed customer expectations and to remain responsive to what will almost certainly be constant and shifting priorities and demands. Every IT organization in its strategic planning framework attempts to balance its commitments to mission critical services and a differentiated service offering that serves to extend our University’s long tradition of distinction in the area of technology in the 21st century. Our approach over the next five years can be best described as a cross-boundary (ITS+ Schools+Central Business Operations) portfolio approach.

Building on the strengths of the past and fully aware of the challenges that lie ahead of us, Information Technology Services at Case Western Reserve University is committed to the dynamic process of re-imagining, re-invigorating and re-inventing itself to support the mission of the university and the faculty, students (including alumni), and staff who are our customers.

Please share your view. We encourage your participation by leaving your comments. See Reinventing ITS to embrace change and challenge

[edit] Broad Themes

Informing our effort are three major overarching priorities that emerge from our internal conversations. We welcome feedback to either validate these core priorities or to further refine or even introduce alternatives.

(1) Structured innovation to support teaching, research, and the student experience. A new generation of students and a new qualitative shift in the way the world is using the Net challenges all universities to adapt the way in which we leverage technology to support teaching, research, and the student experience. Over the next five years, ITS proposes making a serious study and assessment of the ways in which the current generation of students (both undergraduate and graduate) use technology in their learning, research, work, and play environment. This will be the foundation upon which we continue our work in structured innovation and invest in technologies that align to the starting point of our students and attempt to engage them in the process of discovery and the love of learning. We know that user-created content has emerged in the past five years as a significant driver. Blogs, wikis, YouTube, Flickr, digital story-telling, tag clouds, Second Life (virtual 3D Web), and Machinima clips are all examples of a trend line that suggests that democratizing tools now exist to support and encourage authoring and co-production along with all the responsibilities that come with such a powerful voice. We believe we are in a position to work with both our faculty and students to build structured innovation solutions to catalyze reflective and critical work in the user-created content domain area.

Social networking is not a passing phenomenon associated with hot properties on the internet like Snapvine, Bebo, hi5, and MySpace. Social networking on the internet would appear to reflect the basic human pursuit of identity, relationship building, and social acceptance. In the academic setting, we propose exploring how social networking can support opportunities to contribute, share, communicate and collaborate as basic building blocks of a positive social network.

Mobile telephony and mobile experiences, as outlined below, is one of our big bets over the next five years. At Case Western Reserve University, more than 96% of students arrive on campus with phones that have more computing, video, and voice services capacity than the most sophisticated, land-line based service offered only 5 years ago. To date, we do not believe we have fully thought through how the pervasive availability of that form factor can be used to both enhance the student experience on campus as well in support of academic-related activity.

A last example of our proposed exploration of structured innovation over the next period of time is in the area of virtual worlds. We believe that virtual worlds, running across network grids, presents an extraordinary platform for innovation and engagement that are effectively limitless. Although it remains to be seen, our hypothesis is that virtual worlds will be this generation of students “birth of the Internet” experience. It stands to be a transformative experience supporting scholarship, research, experiential learning, discovery, interaction, and play. These examples of structured innovation afford Case an opportunity to selectively leverage investments either previously made or made by others (mobile phones or the next mobile entertainment form factor) in support of a unique set of experiences that can project to the various audiences that we seek to reach our continued commitment to innovation, creativity, and the transformation of learning experience at Case.

(2) Moving towards an engagement and collaboration-enabling service organization. While ITS made customer service #1 in its first 5 year plan, the reality is that we had a significant infrastructure rebuild effort to carry out. While the details are noted elsewhere in our [1st Five Year Strategic Planning Framework Scorecard], it goes without saying that we spent considerable effort of both human and capital resources to rebuild the university data network. Shortly thereafter we transformed the telephony infrastructure at the University and implemented VOIP. Simultaneously we installed pervasive wireless across the campus and installed the University’s first enterprise class servers. Over five years our bandwidth consumption went up more than 15 fold without adding a dollar to our internet access budget through our leadership and collaboration with OneCleveland ([1]OneCommunity). We also made some hard choices committing ourselves to a single production data base platform, standards for hardware in the machine room, a common platform for the client and perhaps most notable among applications, we launched the University’s ERP application on the new hardware sitting on top of the new network.

In reality then, while we strove for better customer service, among our top 8 priorities, the first five years were focused in significant measure on infrastructure rebuild (see our budget and line of service report below). The reality is that we need to continue to invest in our core infrastructure. Indeed, one of the central goals for the second five year plan is to work together to create the first capital planning process in the history of the university that enables us to make annual capital investments in the infrastructure plan of the University’s IT infrastructure. We acknowledge that while much was accomplished these past 5 years, we did not complete everything on our original list (for example, the University still does not have an enterprise class data center which places the entire university at risk). Moreover, we must already begin to systematically plan for the replacement and refresh of core facilities that are now as much as 10 and 12 years old.

However, as a strategic investment, it has become broadly acknowledged that IT infrastructure and related capital investments are a “necessary”, but not “sufficient”, condition in determining how we will measure our success in the next five years. Within the constraints of the fiscal situation facing the division and the university, ITS is committed to an engagement with our various customer constituencies, to identify priorities, and to craft a strategy for evolving towards a collaboration-enabling service organization. Our engagement and collaboration strategy is not just a commitment to continue to demonstrate active listening skills. As outlined below, we believe that inducing the university faculty, student, and staff to participate in and make use of the portfolio of collaborative tools that we seek to develop will emerge as an important differentiator between Case Western Reserve University and many others over the next five years.

(3) The Three C’s: Core Technology, Continuity Planning, and Compliance. The third major theme and arc of activity in our second five year plan will focus on continuing to improve our capacity to attend to information security, regulatory requirements, disaster recovery, and business operations. At one level, this is a risk mitigation strategy. The risks are real and the university has a responsibility and requirement to make a judicious review of those risks and take action accordingly. The strategic call belongs to the University’s executive and to the business owners. The operational responsibility belongs to ITS. We need to work together in an explicit manner to meaningfully engage with the executive and management of the university to gain traction in managing the risk portfolio. At a second level, the focus on the three C’s will be used as an internal filtering methodology for identifying those relatively few strategic investments (in contrast to operational investments) that we can develop into “must have” (as opposed to “nice to have”) business cases. Case Western Reserve University will develop over the next five years a capital allocation methodology to invest in its core technology program. The range of core services to be capitalized includes servers, storage, electronics and backbone infrastructure. The university must have a capital investment portfolio approach so there is a process of identifying priorities, developing a business case, and allocating resources in a timely and dependable fashion so as to be able to maintain baseline activities. These core services and the capital allocation process constitute “must have” offerings. Information security and risk analysis is a growing reality in all large organizational enterprises. Over the next five years, the university must consider the minimum requirements to support the daily activities of analyzing, monitoring, responding, documenting, and attending to customer interactions around information security. Drivers for this activity include federal regulations and mandates, operational “must haves” and compliance related activities. Case Western Reserve University faces unacceptable risks related to its business continuity planning. The cost of not having an operational plan with resources invested to implement a disaster recovery and business continuity plan is simply unacceptable. Significant and irreplaceable portions of the University's core business operations are contingent upon robust, reliable, and dependable “uptimes” of applications and underlying databases. The first requirement is to complete a sign off for the university data center requirements. The second order of business is to identify and sign off on our secondary data center strategy so as to have built-in redundancy. Finally, once the facilities are identified, we must reasonably fund investments to move to these new facilities and support warm data and basic server/storage arrangements to allow the university to recover from a catastrophic event in our primary facilities.

Please share your view. We encourage your participation by leaving your comments. See Broad Theme Response

[edit] Service Lines and Allocations

The allocation of ITS’ budget is outlined below in the pie chart and the accompanying breakout of business lines of service (that cross our organizational boundary). These allocations include both our salary (including benefits) and our investments in goods and services.

In Fiscal Year 2012, ITS has proposed that our operational and business profile reflect three metrics.

Financial Metric One: ITS Budget as a Percentage of Total University Expenses According to Educause’s Core Data Project, the average IT Budget as a Percentage of Total University Expenses is between 3.6% and 4.8%. As the accompanying table suggests, Case Western Reserve University will need to stretch to achieve this level of investment. The data as reported for Case includes both ITS’ operational budget and the internal loan for capital investments. We propose that by Fiscal Year 2012, the ITS budget represent 3.11% of the total university budget. By way of an order of magnitude, we estimate the additional investment required by FY12 to represent a total of an additional $5m per year over the current $26m (this is based on a conservative assumption that the university expenses will be $1bn and the 0.5% additional allocation to IT would equal $5m).

Financial Metric Two: By Fiscal Year 2012 The Ratio of Students to Central ITS Staff FTE will be 60:1 According to our peer review, the ratio of the size of the student body to central IT staff is among the very highest of the doctoral extensive universities. In FY07, our 99.5 FTE produced a ratio 78:1. If we include the 10 staff under the supervision of PerceptIS' Help Desk and Call Center, the ratio drops to 70:1. This is still the third highest ratio among our peers. By FY2012, we aspire to reach a goal of 60:1, which is still 20% higher than the current ratio for our peers (currently at 50:1). If we estimate that the student body in FY12 will be equivalent to 5000 undergraduates and 6000 graduate students, that will generate a metric measure of 183 professional ITS FTEs, including our Help Desk and Call Center. In FY06, the average (mean) peer central IT staff payroll for doctoral extensive institutions is 208 (and 221 additional FTE among the decentralized schools and colleges and other administrative units).

Financial Metric Three: By Fiscal Year 2012 The Distribution and Quantum of Fiscal Resources will Reflect the Portfolio Approach and Key Initiatives. As a result of the metrics above, we anticipate that in FY2012 Case Western Reserve University will allocate $26.6m to ITS. Of that allocation, we propose that in FY12 $6.6m be part of the ITS permanent capital portfolio reflecting recurring capital investments in the university network, servers, storage, media services, and enterprise software services that can be capitalized. The remaining $20m in operations are reflected in the business service lines and the strategic direction outlined in this planning framework.

Investment Targets for IT Operating Funding FY2012 ($20m)

• Teaching, Research, and Learning $3.8m
• Enterprise Applications and Decision Support $6.2m
• Core Technology $7.0m
• Customer Support and Service $2.4m
• Leadership and Outreach $600,000

Core Capital Investments for IT Funding FY2012 ($6.6m)

• Network Capital Investments $3,600,000.00
• Server Farm Depreciation and Refresh $700,000.00
• Storage Farm Depreciation and Refresh $900,000.00
• Technology Enhanced Classrooms $200,000.00
• Research Computing $300,000.00
• Business Continuity $500,000.00
• Dynamic Media and Broadcast $400,000.00

It is important to note that the proposed capital investments above do not include capital expenditures in the backbone infrastructure refresh and build out which remains associated with University Facilities and Planning. In addition, the capital investments listed above does not include internal loan payback for the PeopleSoft ERP implementation.

Please share your view. We encourage your participation by leaving your comments. See Financial Metric Comments

[edit] Highlighting Important Goals

At any given time, ITS supports a portfolio of more than 250 projects associated with its role in operations, security activities, decision support, instruction support, leadership initiatives, and customer service. We have focused in this 5 year plan to a series of 20 initiatives that are mapped directly back to the three broad strategic themes. More detail regarding ongoing operations accompany this strategic plan in our IT business plan for FY08.

Initiatives: Outlined below are 20 strategic initiatives to advance the three core themes identified above. Each initiative has a description, recommended strategies and attempts to answer the question what makes it strategic along with a short set of insights on how it benefits the university along with outcome measures.

[edit] 20 Strategic Initiatives:

• Structured Innovation (1-6)
  • Assessment and evaluation on the impact of new technology on learning outcomes
  • Focus on learning spaces (physical and virtual) that engage, develop, and retain learners and lead to student success
  • Faculty and staff development
  • High performance computing baseline service offering
  • Advanced network research support
  • Mobility and converged platform for collaboration
• Engagement and Collaboration Services (7-12)
  • Best of class web 2.0 collaboration solutions
  • Email
  • Calendaring
  • File sharing
  • IM
  • Meeting Spaces
  • Dynamic media
  • Web, video and audio conferencing
  • Blog
  • Wikis
  • Course management
  • Forums
  • Search tools
  • ITS Program Management Office
  • Space plan
  • Renewal of IT Governance
  • University Circle Innovation Zone
  • Cleveland 2.0
• The Three C’s (13-20)
  • Case IT architecture 2.0
  • Upgrade key administrative systems
  • Focus on data warehouse enabling decision support
  • Expansion and improvement of enterprise data centers
  • Sustainable plan for production and development IT equipment, including redundant production systems
  • Continuous upgrades and renewal of fiber backbone infrastructure and related electronics
  • Contingency planning
  • Augmentation of information security services

Please share your view. We encourage your participation by leaving your comments. See 20 Strategic Initiatives

[edit] Initiatives One-Six: Structured Innovation to Support Teaching, Learning, Research, and the On-campus Student Experience

One straight-forward definition of technology is “anything that is invented after you were born.” For nearly 20 years, higher education has been talking about a new generation of students “who will” have grown up with technology and who will come to the University with a different set of expectations. That generation is now on campus. Yesterday’s analytical insight on future demographics are today’s real challenges. The challenges and opportunities inform not only the undergraduate experience but significantly the graduate, post-graduate and the expectations of a new generation of faculty who do not view technology related to their scholarship as anything but an entitlement.

A new generation of student has entered higher education adept at multi-tasking and can quickly and efficiently access and analyze information to solve problems. Students come to the University with skills and experiences that make them technologically literate, but not necessarily informationally literate. These students are adept at using technology for social networking and entertainment and have expectations that these technologies be readily accessible, reliable, transparent, portable, and easy to use. In support of their learning experience, it is the University’s responsibility, therefore, to develop new skill sets, abilities, and knowledge that will empower the students to develop academically. At Case Western Reserve University, ITS and ITAC will continue to develop and support students with instructional technologies such as MediaVision Courseware, Blackboard, Case Blog and Wiki, new dynamic media initiatives and desktop videoconferencing.

Faculty at the University has an array of skills, needs, and abilities in using technology to support teaching and learning. Some have embraced technology as a tool, while others remain unsure of its benefits. It is the responsibility of the University to provide appropriate technologies to meet needs of the faculty and provide evidence of technology’s effectiveness in promoting student learning. The University has made a commitment to provide these technologies to faculty through their support of efforts such as MediaVision Courseware, Blackboard, and the technology enhanced classrooms. In addition to the provision of the technologies themselves, Instructional Technology and Academic Computing has plans to provide extensive faculty development and support in the use of technology in teaching and learning. Finally, through assessment and evaluation efforts, faculty will be provided information regarding the educational effectiveness of these instructional technologies.

Every research university in the country has made significant investments in computational and advanced network-based research activity. The Division of Information Technology Services, with support from the Office of the Provost, has provided a limited set of services in the area of advanced research computing since May 2005. In that time, over 80 members of the research community at Case Western Reserve University have taken advantage of the high performance computing services, with high utilization rates that demonstrate a demand that exceeds the current supply of computational power. In addition, researchers have found ITS services in database hosting services and ultra-high bandwidth networking to provide needed support for their work.

Consultation with users of these resources confirms their assessment of relevance and importance to their research and to the university at large. Analysis of peer institutions shows that many are centralizing high performance computing resources in order to achieve economies of scale and the ability to tackle very large computational problems. We believe that it is incumbent on the Division to be responsive to the demonstrated demand on the part of our faculty and to be proactive in providing readily accessible advanced research computing services to the broader University research community.

The final initiative among the structured innovation efforts associated with the second five year plan is ITS’ commitment to work with the University community to innovate and support mobility and mobile technology experiences related to teaching, learning, and research platforms. Through research and dialog with multiple constituencies we will invest our modest research and development efforts to support and distinguish the mobility experience at Case Western Reserve. As the University exists for the primary purposes of education and research, it is appropriate that ITS increase its investment of significant resources to providing technology and support specifically targeted to the areas of Academic Computing and Computational and Advanced Network Research. By FY2012, we will add more than $1m to the annual operating investments to support structured innovation. We will also provide continued capital investments in areas like technology enhanced classrooms and research computing, representing the first time in the history of Case Western Reserve University where these core services will enjoy core funding.

Finally, ITS commits to working with vendor partners, commercialization activities, facility use, and other entrepreneurial activities to bring $1m of documented in-kind contributions of goods and services associated with the six structured innovation initiatives by FY2012.

Please share your view. We encourage your participation by leaving your comments. See Initiatives 1 -6

Recommended Strategies

Each of ITS’ five year goals includes a short list of operational strategies that outline tactical or transactional efforts to advance the broader strategic goal. In the area of structured innovation to support teaching, learning, research, and the on-campus student experience, our recommended strategies include:

• Develop formalized relationships with academic deans, associate deans for research, the office of research and technology transfer and commercialization and the provost office.
• Through collaborative tools like the wiki and folksonomy efforts across the university, identify, recommend and disseminate useful information and insight on existing and emerging technological tools that support the academic mission of the university.
• Continue to develop and refine funding model that supports maintenance and sustainability of existing and future investments of both research-oriented and academic technology.
• Continue to maintain expertise in emerging technologies through professional development and collaboration.
• Create an ongoing culture of assessment and an active research agenda that promotes and improves effective use of academic technology.
• Continue development of learning spaces (physical and virtual) that engage, develop and retain learners.
• Develop and expand e-learning and dynamic digital media technologies.
• Faculty and staff development.
  • Working with the Provost and the President to establish faculty and staff development as a “leadership priority” and one worthy of related resource investment. Attempt to support the realignment of the University’s reward systems to meaningfully incorporate structured innovation in the tenure, promotion, and upward development of Case Western Reserve University’s faculty and staff.
  • Create a “distributed” series of lectures and workshops involving both Case and external researchers using high performance computing in cooperation with existing departmental and school-based seminar/colloquium series.
• Direct research support.
  • Engage with researchers in securing external funding related to use and growth of the high performance computing infrastructure by providing pre-award consultation and assistance with research computing endeavors.
  • Engage in post-award participation in funded proposals requiring high performance computing and hosted database services.
  • Increase the awareness among faculty of ITS potential to support their research computing needs.
  • Implement a program of faculty support, including both central and distributed efforts, through investment by schools, colleges, departments, research centers, and individual researchers into a shared, cooperative support organization.
  • High performance computing and advanced network research activities.
• Establish baseline services and resources for a “core facility” in advanced research computing and advanced network research activities, including executive leadership, technical operations staff, infrastructure services, and high performance computing hardware and software, leveraging existing ITS resources to the extent possible.
  • Create shared-ownership model to permit and encourage investment using external funding in order to grow the resource to its optimal sustainable level.
  • Increase awareness of potential uses of high performance computing in research via a series of lectures and workshops.
  • Formalize governance of the core facility using the existing Advisory Committee on Research Computing, the Faculty Senate Committee on Information Resources, a technical advisory board, and an ownership board representing University investors in the shared, cooperative organization.
  • A small and effective R&D effort will be in launched in FY08 to begin to frame the opportunities for mobility-based learning and university-based experiences. ITS will establish this initiative as an integral part of a five year RFP for mobile phone services which will be concluded over the summer of 2007.
  • Continual upgrades and expansion of wireless data network - Since the inception of the Case Wireless network in 2003 the usage has continued to grow. This trend will continue as new wireless devices are being invented, and wireless data and communications converge. Therefore, Case has a commitment to continued support of our existing wireless network and new wireless technologies, as well as the continued expansion to campus and community areas where the Case community chooses to work. By working with partners such as OneCommunity, Case’s ITS will continue to lead the way in the area of mobile computing both on and off campus.
• Continual improvement in cellular coverage on Campus - Far outweighing the usage of the Case wireless network is the usage of mobile telephones within campus facilities. Also, as the trend toward convergence of wireless networking and cellular continues, we expect that devices in the near future will be able to seamlessly switch between the third party provided cellular network and the Case wireless network. Therefore, we have teamed up with our partner Sprint on the performance management of the Sprint / Nextel PCS wireless network throughout the campus and surrounding communities.
• Improve mobile access to applications and services - Provide better support for interacting with mobile devices such as cell phones and other small form factor devices. This would include the ability to format web pages appropriately to the size of the display on the user device. Support interactions between applications and users via SMS (Short Messaging Service) and other mobile specific protocols.

Please share your view. We encourage your participation by leaving your comments. See Recommended Strategies 1-6

What makes it strategic?

• Enables the identification, evaluation, application and communication of emerging technologies
• Enables the university community to gain and apply knowledge to critical activities through the use of recommended technologies
• Maintains “world class” technical capability, expertise and reputation that differentiates Case from other institutions
• Seeks to further its collaborations and partnerships with other institutions, vendors and corporations
• Maximizes resources by investing in enterprise technologies removing entry barriers to the use of digital/multimedia resources
• Availability of computational resources beyond the standard desktop hardware and software has caused provisioning of high performance computing to become increasingly important in a broad spectrum of research areas.
• A reliable, actively maintained central high performance computing resource can be leveraged into significantly higher levels of research funding as demonstrated by our peer institutions.
• A reliable, actively maintained central high performance computing resource can be an attractor to draw the highest quality faculty and students to Case.
• Shared investment among administration, schools, and research investigators helps to eliminate artificial barriers to long-term excellence in multi-disciplinary domains.
• Centrally-administered and hosted database services improve the reliability and affordability of both large and small data management efforts in research, and relieve individual researchers from the burden of providing their own personnel, hardware, software, and space for these IT-related needs.
• Engaging ITS in the pre-award phase permits optimal resource planning by both research investigators and ITS.
• ITS as an active contributor to research programs permits better long-term integration of ITS into the research activity of the University.
• Distributing research computing lectures and workshops throughout departments and research centers permits discipline-specific efforts and encourages inclusion of computationally-oriented topics in future department-based lectures, seminars, and workshops.
• Involving external researchers in faculty and staff development related to high performance computing facilitates collaborations with world-class researchers already engaged with their IT communities.
• Mobility-based services supporting the teaching, learning, and student experience will enable Case Western Reserve University to be well positioned in continuing to advance our tradition as a innovator in IT and to continue to attract students and faculty interested in leveraging mobile platforms to advance research and the learning experience.
• Mobile computing has become a way of life for the Case community. Approximately 90% of the incoming freshman in Fall 2006 brought wireless capable laptops with them to the university. The ongoing efforts of the ITS in the area of Wireless networking and mobile computing directly affect the Case Faculty, Staff and Students ability to collaborate, research and work anywhere on the campus

Please share your view. We encourage your participation by leaving your comments. See What makes it strategic? 1-6

Measuring Outcomes

• Ensure all University learning environments are equipped with appropriate technologies
• Information gathered from assessments are published and incorporated into technical innovations and improvements
• Creation of a Faculty Development Institute for the purpose of deeper and broader understanding of teaching and learning with technology
• Creation of a new dynamic media production facility to become the central resource for professional video and rich-media production
• By July 2012: Grow high performance computing processor count to the optimal sustainable level and achieve an ongoing direct contribution from research grants and/or other external sources to $1M, with total associated grant funding in excess of $5M. Distributed operation of campus research computational and storage grid. Active involvement of the core facility in experimental efforts in *Partner with mobility vendor to create a university research and development facility for mobility-based learning and research activities, including an annual activities agenda.
• Rate of usage continues to be the best indicator of the performance, availability and support for mobile computing.
• Additionally, annual surveys and procurement records are also generated to determine the numbers of mobile devices distributed throughout the Case Community.

Please share your view. We encourage your participation by leaving your comments. See Recommended Outcomes1-6

Impact on the University Community

• Faculty interested in and committed to outstanding learning for their students will have institutional support and capacity in advancing this important university goal.
• Advancing the commitment to assessment as an active component of our effort will help attract research opportunities as well as advance our ability to better support student success at the University.
• Establish the University as a competitive institution in one or more computationally-intensive research areas.
• Dramatically incresase external funding in computationally-intensive research areas.
• Increase regional partnerships with private sector entities engaged in computationally-intensive research areas.
• Attract world-class faculty and high quality post-doctoral fellows and graduate areas in these areas.
• Reduce use of scarce prime campus space for hardware in favor of location in hardened University data centers.
• Remove the existing burden of research computer administration from faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and graduate students, and provide for those needs with trained IT professionals.

Please share your view. We encourage your participation by leaving your comments. See Impact on the University Community1-6

[edit] Initiatives 7-12: Engagement and Collaboration Services

Over the next five years, IT organizations within higher education will have no choice but to transform themselves, yet again. The first dimension of the transformation challenge will be measured upon the extent to which IT organizations are able to demonstrate their capacity to support collaboration tools in support of the academic, research, administration and outreach mission of the University. The second dimension represents more of a stretch for organizational transformation over the next five years. Those IT organizations in higher education who earn the right to be viewed as thought leaders and engagement partners within the campus community and its decision making culture will become the exemplars within the academy. These twin goals of evolving towards an engagement and collaboration service oriented organization are at the heart of ITS’ next five year planning framework.

Over the period from 2002-2007 ITS focused on becoming a better communication organization focused on providing a more reliable and robust experience for the University. Over the next five years communication and experience represent necessary but insufficient conditions in the ITS planning framework. When we attempt to communicate, we work hard at making sure that the segmented campus community constituencies know about our service offerings and the expertise we provide the University across its service lines. The reality is that most of the way we measure our communication goals are “one-way” (how much and how well did “we” communicate to “you”). Likewise, when have sought to provide a reliable and robust experience for the various stakeholders in the university environment, much of how we measure that experience are around reliability and up-time measures (not asking nor really knowing how or if we can support a positive experience). We really have never asked nor had capacity to ask “so how are our customers experiencing our services and what can we do to augment that experience.” Again, communication and experience are the foundation upon which ITS aspires in the 2007-20012 strategic planning framework to add more value. ITS’ strategic goal is to develop capacity and focus in order to support a series of initiatives that will induce the campus community to participate.

An engagement and collaboration service offering is our definition of a platform that will induce faculty, students and staff to participate. By 2012, what is today the emerging new paradigm of ‘mass collaboration’ will have moved will beyond the peak of the ’ hype curve’ and into the core DNA of the best organizations in the world. Organizations that engage their core constituents in the ability to co-produce in the research and learning environment, and to contribute to the success of the organization in an authentic manner will be tomorrow’s best of class universities. The IT community at Case Western Reserve University believes that technology can significantly contribute to the development of a platform for engagement and collaboration services. Emerging into a competitive and attractive institution for students and faculty will require a leadership commitment to use that platform and to take seriously the challenge of reimagining and reinventing the way we conduct daily business and the delivery of our core mission in both the research and learning enterprises.

In addition to thought leadership, reflecting the opportunity for engagement, collaboration, and business process improvements, ITS is serious and committed to responding to the articulated needs of the university community regarding its desire for engagement and collaboration tools. The direction that ITS will be taking over the next five years might best be described as a “best of class” approach. We do not believe that there is a “one size fits all” solution for collaboration services. We are also very much aware that as we develop and introduce new collaboration tools that without human and financial capacity to meaningfully engage with the university community, most tools will not be embraced or likely to be fully subscribed to in the faculty, staff, or student toolbox.

As we architect our strategy for the university, another important informing principle is that Case Western Reserve University’s “platform” will likely remain only one of a number of platforms supporting engagement and collaboration tools. Our strategy will be to maintain a commitment to interoperate and keep our systems as open as we can within the resources and technical capacity of the organization. As we roll out instant messaging services for the university we will make sure that the major IM clients are supported. As we think about calendaring, email, telephony, video conferencing and other collaborative services, we want to support as much easy to use self-service as the university community is prepared to accept and embrace.

In this second five year plan, ITS embarks upon a renewed effort to support project activities through a portfolio based Project Management Office (PMO). Our PMO effort is much more than a series of excel spreadsheets with the names of our 250 current projects and associated timeline. The PMO is a commitment to a model of internal and external communication, assisting with the prioritization of projects, deliberative effort in developing a full life cycle costing model for projects, and finally, the PMO will play an important role in aligning customer expectations with IT resources. It is also our conviction that managing cross boundary portfolios of projects, including the all important ongoing process of business process re-engineering represents an important new skill set and challenge for both IT and the rest of the University service provider community.

The PMO is an integral part not only of ITS’ operations focus but also the commitment in ITS to renew the governance process for IT at Case Western Reserve University. The ITS Planning and Advisory Committee and its sub-committees, including the Council of Technology Officers, Academic Advisory Committee, Faculty Senate Committee on Information Resources, Academic Research Computing Advisory Council, Data Warehouse Advisory Committee, ERP Liaison Committee, and Student Advisory Committees will all be reviewed with an eye to the efficacy of the governance process both within ITS and between ITS and the remainder of the decision making process within the University. Focus on engaging our customer base is of paramount importance in this second five year plan. Our capacity to evolve an organization focused on this portfolio of activities is not only based on leadership, direction, and organizational dedication. Creating a culture that sustains structured innovation draws upon, in no small part , our ability to plan, build and operate a nurturing the workplace of the future. Space and workplace activities at Case Western Reserve University are locked in an architecture and space reality of the mid-20th century. Innovations such as the flexible telecommuting program known as CASEworks is an important but insufficient condition to building a workforce and workplace of the future. If we are to support innovation and forward-looking engagement service offering, space and facilities planning is of significant importance.

During the next five years, with the support of the University Architect, ITS proposes engaging in a formal 5 year space planning effort. Significant staff leadership was mobilized in the planning of an aborted move to downtown Cleveland. We propose re-engaging with the ITS staff to locate,build/rennovate, or refurbish a 30,000 square foot working environment. These parameters account for current staff and work-related needs along with projected growth requirements. This effort will be informed by ITS’ vision of supporting an innovative, inviting, and collaborative work environment where the self-direction of the ITS staff in creating their own working environment for today and being an instrumental part of the planning for the future will model a new space planning philosophy for the University.

Advancing a culture of engagement relevant to Case Western Reserve University extends beyond the boundaries of the formal institution and extends to the innovation activities in University Circle and beyond. ITS’ leadership in the birth and distinction of OneCommunity (formerly OneCleveland) provides us with an example of the ability of the university to leverage its IT resources to provide both the university and the community around us with value, opportunity, and distinction. ITS has been a contributor to recent activities to define and support University Circle as a declared “Innovation Zone” by the City of Cleveland and the County Commissioners. Beyond the designation, University Circle is a natural connected community with an unprecedented “sandbox” opportunity for solutions providers seeking proofs of concept and entry into the high tech marketplace. Finally, Case and a collection of dozens of civic leaders from private industry, the tech industry, banking, media, and the public sector have embarked upon a program called Cleveland 2.0. This initiative places Case Western Reserve University at the center of a provocative effort to engage Greater Cleveland in a re-imagination and re-invention initiative focused on building partnerships to leverage technology in order to attend to community priorities.

Recommended Strategies

As in the first set of initiatives, outlined below are a series of recommended operational and tactical goals that help to inform the broader strategy of developing and supporting an engagement and collaboration platform.

• Working together with the Council of Technology Officers and other key governance bodies including the ITS Planning and Advisory Committee (and related sub-committees), ITS will develop an open-ended portfolio of engagement and collaboration technologies to form the platform that seeks to induce the university to participate in the life and business of the campus.
• If supporting engagement and collaboration technologies is indeed a high priority, Case Western Reserve University should take a serious look at focusing its investment in human, financial, and technical resources in supporting them. There are at least two kinds of engagement and collaboration tools. The first set is those that “support” communication and the basic transmittal of information and data. A set of engagement and collaboration tools includes, but is not limited to: Email, Calendaring, Instant Messaging, File Sharing, Office Productivity tools (like word processing and spreadsheets), and related search tools.
  • As these basic collaboration tools become commodified, ITS recommends that the university community determine whether such services are “core” to our service offering or whether we might re-direct relatively scarce resources to support value-added services (such as those outlined below) and look to others to provide basic collaboration services.
• The second set of engagement and collaboration tools are those that” enable” co-production. By co-production we mean enabling technologies that are premised on blurring the line between consumers and producers of learning, teaching, research, and knowledge itself. While such tools exist in the consumer marketplace, ITS at Case Western Reserve University takes seriously the recommendation that how the University frames the opportunity to offer these enabling tools is at the heart of the call for inducing the university community to participate.
  • These emerging enabling technologies will evolve into the essential character of the next generation of Internet tools combing collaboration, communication, and a profound commitment to democratize the creation of value within the University eco-system.
• The development of professional skills to support engagement and collaboration technologies is a critical investment in the University’s future.
• Supporting the proposed Institute for Faculty Development will be critical to the prospects of both early adoption and more pervasive use of these engagement and collaboration tools.
• The development of an engagement and collaboration platform can foster and support trans-disciplinary participation in an unprecedented manner. Active collaboration research endeavors should be identified and supported so as to leverage and innovate on these platforms.
• Over the next five years, ITS will take a four prong approach to implementing good project management across the ITS division
  • Education:
    • Train ITS staff in basic knowledge of project management and consistently use the same terminology.
    • Provide support and mentoring to the project managers
  • Processes:
    • Create and maintain a consistent project management methodology and form processes for all IT projects.
    • Manage IT project portfolio to ensure projects are within the strategic framework.
  • Tools:
    • Provide tools for the ITS staff to help manage their work activities and to help create project plans.
    • Provide tools to easily monitor the status, requirements and risks of a project
    • Prioritize projects and process improvements under the key strategies with a combination of short, medium, and long term projects
    • Build in time for unexpected projects that will push prioritized projects further down the list
• Determine priorities for staffers who have multiple functions (operations, development, project management, emergency projects).
• Add depth to the breadth of the organization, just as the infrastructure strategy is to have redundant hardware, we need depth on the human resource side as well
• Work closely with PerceptIS to coordinate response times on trouble tickets so customers are pleasantly surprised at the service levels delivered.
• With technology partners (Sprint, IBM, Cisco) ensure that Case is on the leading edge of innovative technologies for higher education
• Propose that all new projects and products are introduced via our Project Management methodology and are properly prioritized and funded for implementation as well as for sustainable operations.
• Customer Outreach:
  • Provide increased Customer Satisfaction with project-related work through increased communications, collaboration, training, and awareness.
• Recommend that a university-wide effort be launched to investigate and, if appropriate, develop a university project management office.
• Support a comprehensive review of IT skills and job classifications to support the goals of these initiatives and the broader goals of the 5 year plan.
• Renewal of the IT Governance model at Case Western Reserve University will be an important predictor of the probability of success in achieving these ambitious goals to support and induce participation with highly constrained resources.
• The University’s engagement with University Circle Innovation Zone should now be elevated to a leadership priority.
  • Explore shared service models with other UCI institutions
  • Co-sponsor an annual UCI-wide IT-Innovation Zone event.
  • Offer an organized, regular training schedule related to emerging new technologies to UCI member organizations.
  • Induce UCI institutions to become the driving force behind Cleveland 2.0.

Please share your view. We encourage your participation by leaving your comments. See Recommended Outcomes 7-12

What Makes it Strategic

• Provides Case Western Reserve University with a strategic road map to meaningfully invest in and support collaborative services
• Enables the university to continue to occupy its position as a technology innovator in support of its teaching, research, and outreach missions.
• Attends to the explicit articulated demands of faculty
• Enables faculty to have teaching strategies, leveraging technology that aligns with student expectations around the availability and efficacy of collaborative tools in their learning environments.
• Focuses attention on key investment opportunities around tools in order to induce key constituencies to participate and collaborate in support of their respective missions.
• Provides direction on key staff resources to be hired as part of ITS’ comprehensive five year staffing plan.
• Enables the deployment of platforms that will support open source research and entrepreneurial activity.
• Supports key administrative system goals associated with providing tools for both decision making and the process of making decisions.
• Structures the insatiable demand-side requirements against a finite amount of supply-side talent and resource.
• Focuses attention on the relationship and interdependency of the university and its neighbors.
• Introduces a replicable and scalable model for managing cross boundary projects.
• Continues to provide a framework for expectation setting for ITS staff regarding the challenges of a continuous “change” agenda.
• Provides customers with a framework for expectation setting associated with the values of the ITS organization towards integrity, transparency, and the role of IT on the university campus as both enabler and change agent in support of broader institutional goals associated with collaboration.

Please share your view. We encourage your participation by leaving your comments. See What makes it strategic? 7-12

Measureable Outcomes

• ITS will engage in an open planning process that will establish quarterly goals with respect to the delivery of collaboration tools
• Each quarter, ITS will release at least one new collaboration tool in coordination with other developers and IT partners
• ITS will promote shared demonstrations of collaborative tools both on campus through the proposed Faculty Development Center, along with active conference presentations between ITS and other University staff, faculty, and students.
• Working with PerceptIS and other University and vendor partners, ITS will sponsor a monthly brown bag on practical tips on collaboration tools.
• The Office of the CIO will co-host with UCI partner institutions (and others) a quarterly forum on collaboration tools and their relevance to the UCI Innovation Zone and other opportunities to support collaboration across Greater Cleveland.
• Cleveland 2.0 will emerge into a sustainable “innovation practice” and “platform” over the period of the next five years.
• ITS commits to supporting the continuous development of both in-class innovation and collaboration through a renewable investment and support for Case Western Reserve University’s technology-enhanced classrooms as well as an explicit strategy for inducing participation in the virtual worlds environment in support of research, teaching, and the student experience.
• ITS will have had basic training in project management and will be using same project terminology across the division
• Evaluate and purchase Project Portfolio Management software tools.
• Project templates will be created and used by the staff in the division
• Best Practices for project management will be defined
• Identify and implement 10 improvements in our processes to improve our service performance
• Work with Perceptis and continue to improve our processes in Tier 1 support to resolve issues

By June, 2009

• Project manager will work towards Project Management Professional (PMP) certification
• Implement Centralized Portfolio Management
• Measures and benchmarks for successful project management will be created
• Fully support dashboard analysis and project analysis.
• Best practices for project management will be fully implemented
• Create processes for continuous improvement in serving our customers

By June, 2010

• Continue staff training in best practices of project management
• What If scenario will be available for resource management and capacity planning.
• Review measures and benchmarks and identify and implement improvements in project management.
• Begin working with customers and provide education in the processes of project management and business process re-engineering

Please share your view. We encourage your participation by leaving your comments. See Measurable Outcomes 7-12

Impact on the University Community

ITS at Case Western Reserve University seeks to maintain the university’s distinguished reputation as an attractive environment for world class researchers, inspiring teachers, and cohorts of the most innovative and creative students from all around the world. The focus on evolving into an engagement and collaboration-oriented service organization takes the investment and vision of ITS’ role at the University to another level. In addition to our ongoing commitments to open and transparent communication and to the availability of reliable and robust services, over the next five years, ITS will emerge as a though leadership organization having earned that role by assisting and inducing the multiple university constituencies to participate in and leverage the continuous roll out and support for collaboration tools.

Please share your view. We encourage your participation by leaving your comments. See Impact on the University Community 7-12

[edit] Initiatives 13-20: Attending to the 3Cs -- Core Technology, Compliance, and Continuity Planning

No IT organization can ever lose sight of the fact that at the foundation of the mission of its role at the university is an unrelenting commitment to and support for operational excellence. No amount of rhetorical commitment to structured innovation or organizational transformation into an engagement and collaboration-centered service organization is possible without dedicated and sustained investments in the core technology, vigilance with respect to our responsibility to adhere to compliance requirements, and an unwavering commitment to support continuity planning as a risk mitigation strategy in support of the core business of the university.

Today, there is a growing set of earned expectations that the core technology at the university simply works. Period. The perception has emerged after five years of systematic investments in and support for the core technology infrastructure of the university. Network services have been transformed into reliable transportation supporting everything from productivity tools, gaming, advanced research, immersive experiences, collaboration tools, and other entertainment. The core utilities that customers have come to expect like the ERP system, email, calendaring, web services, and the Blackboard course management system have all reached a level of reliable service that we are both caught by surprise and disconcerted when services fail to provide the expectation of “always on”. Core technologies require a systematic capital investment strategy in order to be able to maintain the level of service that the university has become accustomed to over the past five years. Moreover, we must take seriously the challenge that a smaller and smaller ITS staff is being challenged to support a larger and larger more complex and sophisticated set of core technology tools. Over the next five years, ITS has proposed an incremental directional strategy for building both technical and human capacity to support the expectations of an aspiring modern 21st century research university.

In the aftermath of 9/11 and the multiple corruption and financial scandals in both the private and public sector accounting world, Case Western Reserve University has no choice but to be vigilant and to investment in its capacity to document and execute on the necessary systems to support checks and balances on our financial and administrative systems and reporting requirements associated with security, safety, and the many new compliance realities that inform our world in the early part of the 21st century. At Case Western Reserve University, the Chief Information Security and Policy Officer has been asked to assume that role, in addition to a portfolio of operational duties. In order to balance the daily real and important fire fighting that goes on in a complex and sophisticated user environment like Case Western Reserve University and at the same time attend to the growing importance associated with our various compliance activities, ITS has prioritized the capacity building in this office area so as to meaningfully support the various officers of the corporation along with staff and faculty of the institution.

Notwithstanding the impression that ITS services are reliable and robust, no enterprise organization like a university can afford to be cavalier and ignore the critical importance of a comprehensive and integrated business continuity and contingency planning effort. The reality is, from the perspective of ITS, it is not a matter of whether or not systems will fail, but only a matter of when. When we do experience operational interruptions it is critical that we have a tested and well architected recovery plan. ITS takes seriously the need to develop and test such capacity over the next period of time and assigns this to be a very high priority. Central to ITS’ embracing of this effort as a key initiative is our equally significant conviction that ITS will need to partner with the “business units” of the university to specify all the business requirements associated with this plan. Business continuing planning is too important to be left to ITS alone.

Recommended Strategies

• Expansion and Improvements to Enterprise Data Centers - The current server rooms are being over utilized and have exhausted all consumable resources such as power, cooling and space. Additionally, these current server rooms were originally designed without redundancy of these critical infrastructure systems which would greatly contribute to maximizing the available uptime of our mission critical services such as Electronic Mail, Calendaring, ERP and the Case Web presences. Projects to add additional space as well as upgrade our existing Data Centers will be identified and designed to resolve these issues for at least the next ten years.

• Sustainability plan for Production and Development IT Equipment - Currently, approximately 45% of our production Servers are over three years old and beyond their warranty period. Of these, more than half have over five years in service and repair parts are either non-existent or costly. In order to resolve this current situation and prevent a similar scenario in the future, the ITS is planning an effort for the consolidation and systematic renewal of production servers over the next four years. We anticipate working with the budget office and garnering support from the senior executive of the university in establishing an ITS “capital budget” in order to address this historic gap in funding and supporting the University’s core server environment

• Implementation of new technologies and redundancy in Production systems - Related to the sustainability activities, a number of our critical services are relying on single servers, or similar single points of failure which increase the risk for downtime. In order to reduce this risk, and increase the overall stability of the IT services, a plan to introduce redundancy in all critical services should be implemented over the next 5 years.

• Continual Upgrades to Fiber Backbone Infrastructure - The Case network is the primary delivery media for all IT services on and off campus, and a fundamental component of our network is the fiber backbone infrastructure throughout the campus. A large portion of this fiber optic cabling is approaching twenty years old, and is due to be replaced or supplemented. As part of this, an effort to provide redundancy through the addition of new fiber pathways is also being incorporated into this plan.

• Contingency Planning effort - A number of activities are required for the successful implementation of the Contingency Planning effort. These activities include the development of the Business Continuity, the Business Recovery, the Continuity of Operations, the Disaster Recovery, and the Incident Response plans as well as integration of our Information Technology (IT) plans with the planning efforts across the campus for non-IT contingency planning.

Please share your view. We encourage your participation by leaving your comments. See Recommended Strategies 13-20

What Makes it Strategic

• All of these activities are driving toward a common goal of maximized uptime of Case Western Reserve’s Information Technology Services. Specifically, by improving the reliability of the equipment, improving the efficency of operations, planning for the fallback of failed equipment and improving recovery time, the service uptime can be maximized.

Please share your view. We encourage your participation by leaving your comments. See What makes it strategic? 13-20

Measureable Outcomes

• A well formalized and practiced contingency plan for all information technology services provided to the Case Community.
• The rate of uptime is the primary indicator of success for this goal as the number of planned and unplanned outages would decrease following the outlined improvements.
• A fully implemented, 10,000 square feet or better, tier 2 or better, Enterprise Data center on or near campus to house all of the primary IT infrastructure equipment necessary to support the CASE IT Business Continuity Plan.
• A fully implemented, tier 1 or better, Enterprise Data Center off of campus to house all of the redundant equipment and data necessary to support the Case ITS Business Recovery Plan.
• An executed plan which includes the operational budget for the periodic replacement and maintenance of all production IT infrastructure equipment and software as defined in the CASE ITS Business Continuity Plan.
• A fully redundant network of fiber backbone from the Core out to the distribution level of the Case network.

Please share your view. We encourage your participation by leaving your comments. See Measurable Outcomes 13-20

[edit] Improve Identity Management

Identity management at Case currently is a combination of loosely vetted policies, privacy (FERPA) rules, various middleware services (kerberos, AD, LDAP, SSO), and access (badging, parking, CaseOneCard) services that are not connected in a single conceptual design to achieve the goals of:

• identity vetting
• user access credentials (and associated maintenance activities)
• person registries
• encryption key management or PKI, as appropriate
• access and authorization controls, to include abuse resistant controls (e.g. multifactor authentication)
• chain of trust

To measurably improve identity management, an architecture must be defined and implemented that will meet the needs of the current and future IT environment. Value propositions will be measured in time to implement and number of constituent it systems that have transitioned to ID Management supporte across campus and slightly beyond to the federated environment.

Recommended Strategies

• Implement a project to identify key data indicators that will be a core identity architecture to support
  • user access to Case IT enabled resources
  • integration with standards based federated identity management capabilities (such as Shibboleth and SAML)
  • support for loosely affiliated persons (e.g. affiliate IDs)
  • compliance with university policy restricting SSN use to financial transactions only, and possibly other personal identifiers that may bring a risk of loss or disclosure.
• Systems analysis and requirements gathering:
  • Evaluate the current middleware architecture for strengths and weaknesses, to identify potential requirements in an abstract form
  • Evaluate various vendor platforms for potential requirements
  • identify non-ITS stakeholders (academic support, research computing, special projects) for impact or possible requirements conflicts
  • identify infrastructure constraints, make trade-off decisions
• Create an incremental delivery program that aligns the identity management needs of centralized IT investments. A basic phase approach can be
  • create policies for apply to common IT resources
  • begin core infrastructure development on the basic identity architecture
  • deliver key valued requirements in each delivery package to supported stakeholders
  • Evaluate the possible unified approach to physical access controls and logical access controls in a common badging/authentication system as a capability.

What makes it Strategic?

The university has been using SSN as a key identifier in many IT systems where it is not absolutely necessary. The transition from this approach will be heralded by a new SSN use policy which is driven by privacy concerns and the risk of identity theft. The broadening of our ‘network borders’ will require us to have a ‘standardized’ approach which has hooks for interfaces with external systems (e.g. shibboleth, external vendors, etc.)

Identity management, if not delivered well, will hinder all IT projects and strategies, and create opportunities for financial loss for the university.

Measurable Outcomes

• buy in from key stakeholders on ID management requirements and priorities
• five possible solutions to known requirements by the end of summer FY07
• three limited scope pilot projects
• operational test and evaluation of a viable pilot project, followed by a production scope ramp-up plan
• delivery of a solution- within this 5 year plan timeframe, optimistically timed to support the deployment of PeopleSoft Student System

Please share your view. We encourage your participation by leaving your comments. See Identity Managment

[edit] Upgrade Administrative Systems

Affect on the University and Community

Recommended Strategies

• Investigate the possibility of migrating to Oracle Fusion
• Create a methodology and timeline for keeping the systems up-to-date with patches, bundles, maintenance packs and versions

What makes it Strategic?

• Continue to provide applications to support the administrative business processes to faculty, staff, students and affiliates

Measurable Outcomes

• In 2007, upgrade EPM (data warehouse and budgeting) to Version 9.0
• In 2008, upgrade Financials to Version 9.0
• In 2008, upgrade HCM to Version 9.0
• Refresh the hardware

Please share your view. We encourage your participation by leaving your comments. See Upgrade Administrative Systems

[edit] Strategy: Improve Support for Administrative Services

Affect of the University and Community

What makes it Strategic

• Continue to provide applications to support the administrative business processes to faculty, staff, students and affiliates

Recommended Strategies

• Improve business intelligence analytics with the continued development of the data warehouse and reports. Market the value and train the end-users on how to use the data warehouse
• Begin creating views of integrated data from the ERP systems, Financials, Research, Student and HCM
• Investigate data sources outside of ERP critical to the University
• Implement the Student Information System
• Business process re-engineering - the analysis and design of workflows and processes within and between organizations

Outcome Measures

• In March 2008, students will register in the new system for Summer and Fall classes
• In 2010, applicants for employment at Case will be using the new system
• In 2009, supervisors will be using the new system to evaluate their employees
• In 2011, the facilities system will be replaced including space inventory
• In 2008, student data from the new system will be available in the data warehouse
• In 2012, workforce analytics (HCM) will be implement in the data warehouse
• In 2012, new data marts available in version 9.0 EPM will be available in the data warehouse

Please share your view. We encourage your participation by leaving your comments. See Improve support for administrative services

[edit] Measuring Outcomes

A culture of evidence is important to any organization. By the very nature of the work and service supported by ITS, it is particularly important to building an engaged and collaborative organization that we maintain a scorecard. Measuring outcomes a transparent and readily available manner will allow the University community to readily review and analyze the ITS portfolio. We look forward to feedback from our customers as to what range of services are working and what improvements need to be attended to in order to maintain quality service commitment.

Through the process of developing this planning document, we have identified a core of 30 key metrics that reflect the scope of this plan and will be the basis of real time reporting on our service portfolio, along with our financial metrics.

Please share your view. We encourage your participation by leaving your comments. See Measuring Outcomes

[edit] Visions of Where We Need/Want/Must Be in 2012

Developing a vision for the future, for better understanding how ITS can align its stewardship of the University’s investment in IT services is a matter of collective wisdom and insights. In this section of our strategic planning effort, we have used the collaborative software platform of our campus wiki and invited students, faculty, staff, and our own management and staff organization to share their vision of where Case Western Reserve University needs to be in 2012. As the old adage goes,’ if you don’t know where you going, any path will do.’ ITS is committed to listening to the voices and words of the University community as we chart and develop operational plans to accompany this strategic planning framework.

Please share your view. We encourage your participation by leaving your comments. See Visions of Where We Need/Want/Must Be in 2012

[edit] IT Planning and Goals for Case Western Reserve University’s Schools/Colleges/and Distributed Units

Like most research universities in the United States, Case Western Reserve University has investments in dedicated and skilled IT staff in multiple schools and administrative units outside the central ITS organization. Through the strategic planning process, ITS has invited these individuals and organizations to share their key initiatives and planning activities related to their service line offering and strategic initiatives. We present some of the key findings of that engagement effort not only to enumerate the list of important technology initiatives underway across the University, we also continue to hold a deep conviction that as an IT service community, we have an obligation to maintain structured dialog and operational planning alignment with all the IT professionals at Case Western Reserve University.

ITS believes that there is more that we can deliver as a cadre of IT professionals to Case Western Reserve University if we align our activities. With continuing financial pressures likely to inform the next five years, along with growing customer expectations, ITS believes that the entire IT community along with those to whom we report have a compelling reason, indeed an obligation, to better align the service offerings. In addition to the goal to reduce the amount of redundant service lines, re-direct spending at the distributed unit level to enable innovation and customized solutions at the school and administrative unit level, there is an important IT maturity curve that informs our line of reasoning and planning. Both central and non-central IT investments need to evolve demonstrable changes in the value chain of IT service offerings in the marketplace. Services that were core, like desk top support or school-level network services are largely commodified today. There is an important alignment effort that needs to occur in order to enable schools and decentralized units to redirect dollars “locked” in these lower level values chain offerings towards more value-add services. Information technology spending outside of central ITS amounts to at least $10 million a year. While this is a significant investment, as a whole, the distributed units across the University are significantly undercapitalized.

Over the next five years, ITS proposes that systematic dialog with the School and College Deans and senior administrative leadership take place to develop plans to raise the level of investment in IT services at the unit-level by no less than 3% a year leading to at least $12 million per year in non-ITS technology spending in the schools. We hasten to add that the most desirable outcome would be to see those marginal new dollars be dedicated to value-added services and investments in new specialized content specialists and technically proficient decision support analysts. In addition, ITS proposes that on aggregate, over the next five year, IT leadership in the schools and units systematically identify 3% each year of services that are no longer “value-added” services and enter into service level agreements with ITS to provide those services (assuming that ITS receives the resource finding outlined in the financial planning section of this plan). The net of this two-part effort would lead the schools and colleges to increase value-added services by 40% over the next five years. The impact of this “new investment” will be significant and propel the distributed IT organizations across the university’s into valuable partners and leadership positions across the University. As we review the major 5 year initiatives of the IT organizations in the Schools, Colleges and administrative units, it is our hope that decision-makers will take the time to review these efforts and work together with both their own IT staff and the central IT organization to realize the value of leveraging technology and IT services to meet the mission and goals of supporting our faculty, students, and staff colleagues over the next five years.

Please share your view. We encourage your participation by leaving your comments. See IT Planning and Goals for Case Western Reserve University’s Schools/Colleges/and Distributed Units

[edit] ITS Scorecard 2002-2007

[edit] Overall Satisfaction

[edit] Email Services

[edit] Technology Enhanced Classrooms

[edit] Average Simultaneous Wireless Users

[edit] Academic Research Cluster HPC

[edit] Portal Sessions

[edit] Commodity Bandwidth Consumption

[edit] Software Center Downloads

[edit] Bloggers at blog.case.edu

[edit] Call Answer Time at Case Help Desk

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