Departmental Self Review - UCLA Academic Senate

a) 10 rooms with ceiling installed projectors (near completion)b) Central control of on/off function and trouble shooting for classroom computers.Staffing:2 Full-time staff.One staff with good computer skills. Need to perform @ 25 hrs of computer maintenance perquarter. This will alleviate the IT dept.Timeline: Immediate Through Next 5 Years.Initiative Eight: Identify Opportunities posed by the UCLA IT Refocusing InitiativeThe IT Refocusing Initiative is an overall review of the Information Technology supportstructure at UCLA. It seeks to reduce future expense and mitigate operational and securityproblems by regionalizing or centralizing some areas of IT functionality traditionally handled bydivisions, schools, and departments.Three major areas are currently under review:1) Departmental Email Service. The UCLA campus has many different email systems due to thefailure of the central campus IT establishment to move beyond mainframe-based emailsystems during the early 1990s. The current proposal before the campus asserts thateconomies-of-scale can be used to produce a more robust and compatible system. The Schoolof Nursing will need to move to a new email platform over the next few years, largely to gaingroupware capabilities. Issues remain on whether new campus system will be in place intime, and cost has yet to be determined. Opportunities may also exist to move to the MCCSExchange email system as well.2) Departmental Network Management. This is a complex initiative that proposes to move coreLAN management to an external group. Core networking refers only to router and switchequipment – not servers. Core networking currently accounts for about 5% of IT staff time.This is a critical area however, as academic units occasionally need quick network changes.Outsourcing this area also has ramifications for security measures. Concrete proposals in thisarea are at least a year away.3) Departmental Data Centers and Security. This proposal suggests that network serverequipment be aggregated and housed into a series of special data-centers. These centerswould possibly have special power, security and cooling arrangements. This is an expensiveproposal, and detailed plans are not yet available.Each of these areas may represent an opportunity to outsource some parts of the school ITinfrastructure over the next five years if services, costs, and guarantees are adequate. Towardsthis end, a consensus needs to be developed within the school on how campus proposals shouldbe evaluated.289