Thank you, and keep the feedback coming!

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

 

The Program Office hosted three listening posts June 3-5 to gather feedback on the draft project charters. The turnout was very good, and we'd like to thank everyone who took time to attend, share comments, and ask questions! The feedback will be helpful to the project leaders as they revise the charters and begin to work on more detailed project plans, which will also have a comment period. You can continue to submit feedback through the project pages of this website through June 10. The Steering Committee is expected to approve the revised charters in mid-June.

Time to register for Tech Forum!

Registration for Tech Forum runs through June 11. The free conference takes place Monday, June 15 at the Iowa Memorial Union. Any member of the UI technology community is welcome and encouraged to attend, and we have a great program planned. A registration survey is available through the Tech Forum website, along with a schedule and presentation abstracts.

This year's theme is "Efficiency & Transformation in Higher Ed IT." We’ll have OneIT project updates and a five-CIO panel on efficiency activities at Iowa State, University of Northern Iowa, University of Michigan, and here at the University of Iowa.

The Iowa Flood Center will explain how they use high-performance computing to predict flooding across the state. You can also attend sessions on resiliency, laptop encryption, tracking cyber criminals in online social networks, and UIeCare (a new virtual clinic option offered through UI Health Care).

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Town Hall and Listening Posts Scheduled

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

 

Drafts of OneIT project charters are available on the project pages of this site. You can send comments to the project leaders and Program Office through the website; we’ve also scheduled a town hall meeting and three listening posts to share information and collect feedback.

Town Hall for IT Professionals

This event is geared toward UI IT professionals. The Program Office will discuss the project charter process and walk through a couple of the charters as an example. Attendees can ask questions and share comments. Associate Vice President and CIO Steve Fleagle will talk briefly about overall OneIT activities.

  • Wednesday, May 27, 10:30 a.m. to noon, C20 Pomerantz Center

Listening Posts Open to Campus

The posts are open to IT professionals and anyone else on campus that is interested in the projects. Program Office staff will gather feedback on the draft charters and answer questions.

  • Wednesday, June 3 – 3:30-4:30 p.m., 2520D University Capitol Centre (UCC)
  • Thursday, June 4 – 3:30-4:30 p.m., via Skype for Business  (https://meet.uiowa.edu/chris-clark/NR96N962)
  • Friday, June 5 – 9-10 a.m., 217 College of Public Health Building (CPHB)
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Eight Draft Project Charters Available for Comment

Thursday, May 14, 2015

 

Project Charters: Drafts of eight OneIT project charters are available for public comment on the project pages of this website. Feedback should be directed to the Program Office and individual project leaders. The rest of the draft charters will be added as soon as they are ready. The Steering Committee is expected to approve the revised charters in early June.

Project-Management Workshop: On May 5 and May 7, about 60 OneIT project leaders and managers took part in a project-management workshop led by experts in the College of Business. The workshop was a success; the team-building and change-management sessions seemed to be particularly well received. It was great to see people energized and ready to focus on the tasks at hand. 

Data Center & Server Project Progress: Some projects, especially those initiated prior to the efficiency review, already have progress to report. The Data Centers and Servers Project is a good example. Two servers from a physics research group were moved to the Information Technology Facility, along with five racks of hardware that were housed in MacLean Hall. The ITF will soon house data storage for the art and journalism departments so old servers can be decommissioned, and a high-performance computing cluster is being installed for chemistry.

ISU/UNI Collaboration Discussions: IT leaders from the three schools will meet June 10 in Ames to continue discussing collaboration opportunities.

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Kickoffs, Project Charters, Project Management Workshop

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

We continue to make good progress on OneIT implementation planning, and have several items to share.

  • Kickoff Meetings:  The Program Office met with all OneIT project leaders and managers to discuss project framework and review project planning templates. Teams were asked to prepare the first two deliverables: a draft project charter, and a list of stakeholders.
  • Project Charters: First drafts of charters for seven of the projects are expected the week of April 27, and the remainder during the week of May 4. A review period will follow as input from the OneIT Steering Committee, IT leaders, and the IT community is gathered. Charters will be finalized in early June.
  • Project-Management Workshops: Also on the week of May 4, OneIT project leaders/managers and other campus IT leaders will take part in a project-management workshop. Topics will include: change-management, project planning/scheduling, communication, project execution, monitoring, team building, and leadership. This will help to convey processes, clarify expectations, and ensure consistency across OneIT projects.
  • Savings Tracking: A mechanism for tracking savings realized through OneIT initiatives is in development. OneIT leaders will soon begin collecting and compiling data for FY2015.
  • Retirements: 18 UI IT professionals were approved for early retirement. Some of those positions will be rehired, but the early retirements will be helpful in achieving savings goals.
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Project Leaders, Timeline, Committee Charters

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

We are making steady progress in establishing the framework for OneIT implementation.

  • The Steering Committee and Program Office have drafted and approved charters.
  • The Steering Committee is meeting regularly and has named co-leaders and project managers for 14 of the 16 projects.
  • We made some slight revisions to the project list.
    • VOIP and Office 365 were combined to a Communication & Collaboration Project.
    • Establishing a central IT Project Management Office was split off from Governance to become a distinct project.
  •  The Program Office has outlined a high-level timeline for the implementation process.
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FAQs, End-User Support, ISU/UNI Collaboration

Friday, March 20, 2015

New Frequently Asked Questions are posted to address questions asked at the recent town hall meetings for IT professionals, including a pair of questions that comes up frequently: Why isn’t implementation moving faster? When will details be available? 

The first end-user support workshop with Chazey Partners took place on March 2 and focused on examining current processes. Later this month, the same group will gather to work on future state models. Reports from Chazey will be shared as soon as they are available.

The group reports from our collaboration discussions with UNI and Iowa State are now available on the OneIT SharePoint site.

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Steering Committee & Project Office formed

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

A OneIT@Iowa Steering Committee has been formed to make strategic decisions and coordinate the OneIT initiatives. The team includes IT leaders from distributed units and ITS.

To succeed in implementing the OneIT@Iowa initiatives, we must coordinate the efforts of individual projects, track progress, collect metrics, and complete other project-management tasks. For large-scale projects, the best practice is to create a Program Office to assure consistent support across all sub-projects. We have established a Program Office supported by three IT leaders with considerable project-management experience. They will also serve on the Steering Committee.

The group's first task will be to establish leaders for each project area. Project team leaders can then pull together the right people for their teams.

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Starting Work with Chazey Partners

Friday, February 27, 2015

University TIER leaders have been engaging with Chazey Partners, the firm hired by the Board of Regents on a 12-week contract to validate the university plans and provide advice and assistance in the self-implementation process. We identified areas where Chazey’s capabilities complement ours; for IT, initial discussions indicate that Chazey can help us in five areas:

  1. Developing a set of metrics to track both savings/efficiency and quality of services
  2. Validating our project descriptions in terms of the opportunity and savings estimates
  3. Advising on the structure and governance of project implementation
  4. Developing the service model for end user support
  5. Developing future state models

On March 2, Chazey will lead a workshop focused on end-user support to better understand our current environment and start to examine opportunities for improvement.

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Implementation Planning

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

It has been about a month since the Board of Regents accepted the universities’ proposal for self-implementation of the TIER efficiency review objectives. In that time, the Board office and the universities worked to finalize contracts with Chazey Partners, the consulting firm retained by the Board to provide the universities with assistance and advice throughout self-implementation. We worked with the Board office and UI staff to get organized for kicking off implementation efforts. With that in place and our high-level OneIT@Iowa proposal approved, the campus IT community can now focus on developing detailed plans for implementation. Here are some updates on recent or upcoming meetings and discussions, and what’s ahead.

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Message from Associate Vice President & CIO Steve Fleagle

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Steve Fleagle
On January 9, the state Board of Regents accepted the university’s proposal for implementation of the Human Resources, Finance, and IT business cases identified in the TIER efficiency review. 

The IT section of the proposal includes project descriptions in 16 areas. These descriptions were developed by a team of IT leaders from central and distributed units who came together to identify projects aligned with the four IT business cases approved by the Board, and then developed project descriptions, schedules, and savings estimates. We called the plan OneIT@Iowa, a reflection of the future state for which we are striving on campus.

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