Information Systems & Technology Annual Report

Enabling student engagement

Formed in Fall 2017, the IT Advisory Board is a group of students who provide feedback to IST on various projects and services. The board meets on a monthly basis to generate ideas, provide feedback, and give the department suggestions for future improvements.

Since starting this initiative, IST has worked with 68 different students, generated over 100 ideas, and implemented more than 20 student suggestions.

Some of the highlights include a new single page site for student technology services, facilitating routine poster runs on campus, including IT promotional items in all first-year orientation kits, redeveloping several web pages, and crafting more easily accessible Wi-Fi setup guides.

IST hopes the IT Advisory Board will continue to serve as a community and environment for students, faculty, and staff to collaborate and advance the student IT experience.

A centralized approach

Over the past two years, IST has worked intently with members of the Student Service Centre team (The Centre) to implement a new queuing and case management system called Q-Flow. This new, tier-based solution will allow The Centre staff to receive student requests and inquires, and efficiently route them to the appropriate team or staff person without losing track of those that require additional time to resolve.

• Kiosks will allow students to self-triage and enter the queue based on what they need. Historically there has been a staff member dedicated to triage, so this will allow an additional person to focus on service delivery for students.
• Digital signage, audio announcements and text messages will be available to let students know when staff are ready to assist them. At peak periods, when there is a wait, this will allow students to relax and do something else like study, rather than just stand in a long line.
• In situations where a student needs to be routed to someone with more expertise for help, case notes of what has been learned from the student so far will be included to avoid making the student repeat their story, and allow for faster service delivery.

Q-Flow provides an important link between systems, staff, and our student community, improving the level of service and customer satisfaction by increasing the speed and quality of service-related processes.

Upgrading our infrastructure

In January, IST's Network Services team began a major campus network Ethernet switching and routing infrastructure upgrade project. This work will provide, for the first time, a standardized deployment with scalability, quality of service, performance, redundancy, and reliability at the forefront. Designed by Network Services, this new deployment will be flexible, adaptable, and capable of accommodating additionally complex and varying requirements that may arise through faculty, staff, and researcher initiatives.

A critical part of this upgrade is the clean up of Telecommunication Rooms (TR) across campus. Equipment in these rooms is being migrated from Zero Administration Network Infrastructure (ZANI), where all network jacks are connected in a 1:1 manner, to Minimal Administration Network Infrastructure (MANI), where only active ports are connected. Deploying new equipment with a port density to support the demand in the specific building (or floor) significantly reduces network infrastructure equipment replacement costs; increases network efficiency across campus; and eliminates unnecessary troubleshooting by the client before determining a port was not live to begin with

At the end of this clean up process, networking equipment is better organized, more accessible, and in compliance with the telecommunication room guidelines established for campus. IST has upgraded and organized 133 of 437 TR's.

Project management, business and process analysis help transform the student experience

Since July 2016, project managers, business analysts, and process analysts from the Portfolio Management group have worked with experts in every IST group, across seven other departments, and with external partners, such as the WalterFedy architects, on the launch of the new Student Service Centre (The Centre). This transformational work included reviewing existing business processes, combining and streamlining them to provide student-centred services, creating a new department and job descriptions, designing and renovating a new space for the Centre, and various IS/IT components, including the implementation of a new queuing system.

The project managers and analysts helped guide and execute the work of the various projects and project teams, including organizing and breaking down the work, clarifying roles and responsibilities, scheduling, managing risks, reviewing and redesigning processes, organizational change management, building and applying knowledge management, procurement and implementation of equipment, and transition of the program work to operations.

Nearly 50 subject matter experts participated in the review and documentation of over 60 student service processes.