OIT has published a report on its activities for 2014-15. Here are some highlights.
Strategic IT Realignment
Over the last 5 years, UCI has undergone a campus-wide consolidation of IT services while simultaneously grappling with unprecedented service demands. Organizational changes that had been postponed were implemented this year. Five new OIT “divisions” were established: Student & Academic Services, Enterprise Applications, Central Services, Enterprise Infrastructure, and Client Services.
Key Initiatives
OIT made significant progress this year on a number of initiatives in support of strategic priorities. Full details can be found in the online OIT 2014-15 activity summary page.
- Infrastructure improvements
UCI started a major network upgrade initiative in 2014 and replacement of our 30+ year old telephone system is nearly complete. The standard email for UCI students is nearly 100% cloud based (Gmail) and the faculty/staff email managed by OIT (Office 365 or Gmail) will be approaching the same metric by the end of 2015.
- Research and education
Thanks to a $500k NSF CC-NIE grant, we have established “UCI LightPath,” a separate “Science DMZ” network dedicated to research. UCI continues to expand the high performance research computing cluster (HPC). In the past year, 20+ smart classrooms and lecture halls in Engineering, Computer Sciences and Physical Sciences had technology upgrades and wireless coverage enhanced. UCI began a pilot of Instructure Canvas with a planned hybrid strategy which will augment our in-house EEE offerings to create a best-of-breed feature set for campus instructors.
- Administrative applications
In July 2014, UCI went live with its new enterprise financial system (KFS). The implementation phase of a major project to replace UCI’s legacy student information systems with the Ellucian Banner platform started in January 2015. OIT worked with a number of units in an ongoing effort to enhance other campus administrative systems, including Kuali Coeus Research Administration, UC-Path, business intelligence using the Data Warehouse (Cognos), Facilities Management service platform (IBM Tririga), and Electronic Document Management (IBM FileNet).