Introducing the UC Information Technology Guidance Committee

The UC Information Technology Guidance Committee (ITGC), formed in April 2006, has begun an 18 month mission to examine the role that IT will play in sustaining and enhancing the University’s academic quality and competitiveness and in ensuring essential business effectiveness. They will:

• Identify strategic directions for IT investments that enable campuses to meet their distinctive needs more effectively while supporting the University’s broader mission, academic programs and strategic goals.
• Promote the deployment of information technology services to support innovation and the enhancement of academic quality and institutional competitiveness.
• Leverage IT investment and expertise to fully exploit collective and campus-specific IT capabilities.

Work groups have been formed around six focus areas. These groups conducted visits to the campuses to asses their current status. At their September meeting, each focus area presented a report on their current analysis and direction. A brief overview is provided below. Complete reports are available on the ITGC website.

Advanced Networking Services

Good planning has made UC’s network resources well-suited to our needs.  Now, research networks need higher bandwidth capacities beyond our current capabilities. The network has become a part of the infrastructure, like water and power, and needs a funding mechanism to guarantee baseline services and a reliable user support infrastructure to ensure the availability of a wide range of network based services to the community, including collaboration, high-performance computing and large data storage.

Common IT Architecture

The initial focus of this group is on business function architecture. Changes in technology present the opportunity to reconsider central vs. campus implementation. Platform-oriented standards will foster interoperability. A service-oriented architecture will allow campuses to share an instance of a business function, rather than needing to operate their own.

High Performance Research Computing

Demand for high performance computing is growing at rate that is taxing existing networks. A UC-grid is vital to providing the capability to perform research regardless of location or discipline.

Instructional Technology

IT has provided instructors with new opportunities to improve instruction. There are trends in the UC system to choose one enterprise course management system, one audience response system, and adopt standards based systems and applications. UC policies on intellectual policy and technology transfer need to be reviewed and revised to be more supportive of collaboration.

IT in Student Experience

Students surveyed about their experience with IT would like to see a more seamless and integrated environment. Some of the ideas suggested were: portals for integrated and easily accessible information, centralized help desk operations, using podcasting for distributing content, and standardization so thatintegration is easier.

Stewardship of Digital Assets

Some of the key questions involving assets were: steward what? what do you mean by stewarding? steward how? And who should be doing it?  Close work with the other focus areas is needed to define the answers.