Committee Meeting - January 8, 2015

Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee
January 14, 2015

Present: 

Dave Wallace (Chair), Darren Bondy (Secretary), Bruce Campbell, Marko Dumancic, Erick Engelke, Bob Hicks, Bill Ince, Dawn Keenan, Robyn Landers, Paul Miskovsky, Carl Nagel, Sati Singh, Terry Stewart, Jason Testart

Regrets:

Andrea Chappell, Dave Kibble

Agenda

6. Next CTSC Meeting

[Will be held Thursday, January 22, 2015, at 1:30 p.m., in MC 2018A.]

Chair’s Remarks

• Wallace welcomed the members back for a new year.
• The joint CTSC/UCIST luncheon is next Friday, January 16^th; look forward to seeing everyone there.
• Next meeting for ad hoc Committee on Technological Innovation will be on January 19^th; Thorsten Heins will continue to chair the committee.
  • The committee will be discussing 3 main areas of focus at their next meeting.
• Ian Orchard gave a presentation today on the new budget process.
  • Updates will be provided on this topic as it progresses.

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting

The minutes from the meeting held on December 11, 2014 were accepted as distributed.

UCIST update (Dave Wallace)

• At the beginning of the new term in September, some changes were made to UCIST
  • New membership and an updated Terms of Reference (ToR).
  • Established a more structured approach to the meetings; introduced agenda templates to help focus the topics on a strategic level.
  • The IT strategic plan and IT directions were reaffirmed.
• A sub-committee was struck that consisted of Andrea Chappell, Ray Darling, Mark Haslet and Mike Hudson.
  • The goal was to come up with an agenda plan for the remainder of the year.
  • Meetings have now been changed to 2 hours, once a month to allow for more in depth discussions as well as more time to review and discuss relevant material between meetings.
  • Adopted a consensus agenda item approach; items that are “information only” are distributed via email and only brought to a meeting if members have concerns/questions.
  • Agenda templates were revamped.
• The 90 minute meetings in between the monthly meeting will be held in the calendar to deal with issues that come up that need addressing; will be cancelled if nothing comes up.
• The use of agenda templates could be beneficial for CTSC as well; information items could be distributed ahead of time and reviewed by members, only requiring a meeting if members have questions or concerns.
• The first UCIST meeting of 2015 will be on January 16^th and will look at technology enabled learning.

Roundtable Reporting

Enterprise Systems, IST (Sati Singh)

• We are doing a strategic planning exercise within IST to build on the IT Strategic Plan and to prepare for next year’s budget.  Each IST group, such as Enterprise Systems, is looking at the next 3 years and beyond.
  • Focusing on innovation but very important to build a strong foundation so we can provide ongoing quality service for our users.
  • Does this align with anything that others are doing on campus? Would be very interested to get the groups feedback on this.
    • Data is very important to everyone; IST should be able to provide data to our customers.
      • Discussion on data and access to data will take place at a future meeting.

Technology Integrated Services, IST (Bruce Campbell)

• We will be migrating from the Solaris/SPARC to Linux/x86.
  • Talked to Oracle and also 3 other vendors about their technology to support this.
  • We are mulling over our options now.
  • Anticipating that in the next couple of weeks we will be ready to issue an RFP
  • We are hopeful that we can complete this migration within the year.
  • Will keep the committee updated on the progress.

Applied Health Sciences (AHS) (Terry Stewart)

• The 2015 Operating plan for the AHS computing office is online now.

Engineering (Erick Engelke)

• We received our first reply from the audit committee that noted various observations.
• Various systems had issues over the Holiday break; would like to acknowledge the hard work Bruce Campbell’s team does to keep these systems up and running.

Science (Paul Miskovksy)

• We have submitted everything for our audit; have not received a response from Deloitte yet.
• Had a disk 100% failure of a disk array at the end of the day on December 23^rd.

Computer Science (Bill Ince)

• Network problems over Holidays.
• Tried to use virtualization on a Mac for an event; it did not work very well.
  • Going to try a dual-boot approach.

Library (Carl Nagel)

• An audit will be taking place in the Library starting soon; this is not an IT audit.

Arts (Dawn Keenan)

• Finally got some of our old servers virtualized.
• We are working on design for a new Finance lab for the School of Accounting.

IT Security (Jason Testart)

• Lot of our efforts have been on strategic planning, Identity and Access Management (IDAM) etc.  
• We want to look at multi-factor authentication soon.

Environment (Marko Dumancic)

• Lots to do at the start of a new term.
• Will be losing our web person for 8 months.

Client Services, IST (Bob Hicks)

• The Student Portal is being launched in Engineering next week; the rest of the faculties will follow in the next few months.
• The DC service desk has been busy since the CHIP has moved over to EC2. The exam scanner will be moving to EC2 soon as well.
• The podium key is still available in the CHIP in MC.

Updates

Email (Bruce Campbell)

• Trevor Bain will lead the Email in the Cloud project; we are hopeful to have a decision made by May.

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on January 22, 2015 at 1:30pm, in MC 2018A.