Departmental Self Review - UCLA Academic Senate

Recommendations:All new campus initiatives need to be subjected to careful scrutiny as systems that are outsourcedwill be difficult to recover in the event costs or performance are not up to the schools needs. It isrecommended that all outsourcing proposals be subjected to the following process duringevaluation:1) Technical excellence of the system. If the external units cannot adequately duplicate keyfeatures of currently deployed systems then such systems should remain local. Only featuresactually to be deployed should be evaluated. Future unscheduled enhancements should beevaluated as such.2) System cost. If external units’ systems are significantly more expensive than current systems,without offering additional needed features, then systems should remain local. Costs shouldbe specifically enumerated over time as with an external commercial contract, withlimitations on increases permitted each year.3) Service level agreements. Specific service support levels need to be enumerated in writing sothat ongoing service is assured of meeting acceptable minimums. Penalties should beincluded in service level agreements in case contract performance is not rendered at agreeduponlevels. If external support levels cannot be guaranteed at adequate levels, then servicesshould remain local.4) Collateral Damage. If external systems require extensive modification of related localsystems, these costs should be factored into any analysis.5) If all criteria can be met, then system functionality can be outsourced.Some political capital can conceivably be made by making the above evaluations at the propertime. Reduced expense or increased support might be available to ‘early adopters’ of newsystems. This should not however result in the recommended review process being ignored.Recommendations for each specific proposal are:EmailEmail represents the most concrete proposal to date. Currently the Business EnterprisesExchange email system will be consolidated into a single larger system which will then beexpanded for general campus use. Features, storage space and per-user annualized costs are stillto be determined. A date has not yet been officially posted for this system to be fully operationaland available to academic units. When operational, this system should be evaluated to determineif it will meet school needs. If the annual expense is attractive, Nursing users could be migratedto the campus system. An alternative to this model exists in the MCCS Exchange system, whichis fully operational. It may be possible to arrange to migrate to this system instead of a newcampus system. Once again, overall costs will need to be determined compared to currentNursing costs of about $30/mailbox per year.Network ManagementNetwork management is a longer-term proposal and as such few specifics are available. Ifservice levels and cost are reasonable, and security issues such as firewall access can be290