About IT

 

The Information Technology Mission Statement

We support and enhance the values of a liberal arts education with the seamless integration of technology into the operations, instruction and other endeavors through collaboration and partnerships with all enterprises of the College and its community.

The Information Technology department is committed to challenging itself with more ambitious goals, identifying metrics that move our department forward, and furthering the college’s strategic plans.

Our work is done within the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework. A system that addresses transparency, collaboration and accountability. As part of the transparency goal we are excited to share our work publicly.

IT Goals:

IT OKR HIGHLIGHTS - 2020/21

COVID RESPONSE

• Customer satisfaction results from our Service Desk continue to be high. During the chaos of the COVID pandemic, we maintained 95% positive satisfaction based on survey responses.
• We continue to improve our operational efficiencies and update infrastructure on a regular basis which provides more stable internet, network access, and applications. We were not impacted by any unplanned outages
• We worked with Deans and their Executive Assistants to streamline the bulk and on-off provisioning process for Zoom Pro licenses for faculty.
• The Project Management Team worked closely with members of the Executive Council to create a re-opening dashboard based on a set of linked spreadsheets of to-do lists for reopening.
• The Academic Operations team retooled 142 CAS and GSEC spaces with hybrid learning technology to allow Lewis & Clark to continue to offer the high level of instruction expected by students during the COVID pandemic.
• Remote access to lab computers was a success, students were able to continue safely using computer lab resources during the COVID pandemic.

OTHER HIGHLIGHTS

• 💲 - Negotiated with Telecom vendors and engaged with consultants to guide us on savings while realizing service improvements, which were then accepted to lower our overall exposure.

• 🎓 - Implemented project to improve ransomware resiliency and improve food services during the COVID pandemic. The third project to improve physical access control was delayed due to the COVID pandemic.

• 💡 - a highly successful campaign, we worked cooperatively with the Enterprise Applications team to complete the first phase of our Google Groups audit and have continued this effort into Q3 to target additional group owners. The initiative focused on providing group owners with better information, recommendations and instructions to promote more effective use and management of this campus-wide communication tool.

• 🔝 - The Faculty Technology Showcase is an annual in-person event IT has held for over 20 years where faculty can gather and learn from one another how peers are effectively using technology in teaching, learning, and research across all three campuses. In Fall 2020, the Educational Technology team imagined how this event could be held virtually. We decided to deliver the presentation element of the event by working with presenters to produce videos that shared the various creative ways they have adapted to the new hybrid and online teaching format. During 20-21Q2 (September - November, 2020), the team focused on recruiting faculty presenters, designing and promoting the showcase event, and establishing a process for producing and then publishing the recorded videos. Work done in Q2 can be seen on the final showcase description web page for the 2020 Faculty Technology Showcase (LC password required).

• 💡 - The EA/PMO team enabled Shared Drives on November 1, 2020. We more than met our Q2 OKR, which was to strategically roll out Shared Drives by the end of Q2 and do so in a way that kept support tickets to 5 or fewer per week, in order to improve our service and delight our people. We have only had a handful of tickets regarding Shared Drives over the last three months. Purposefully, we did not announce Shared Drives to the community in order to work out potential issues before widespread adoption, but we are offering it as an option during support conversations. We plan to roll out Shared Droves to the community with the storage matrix in the next month or so.
• 💡 - We created a resource page for Shared Drives and supported an office as they transitioned many of their working folders from LCFiles to the more collaboration-friendly Shared Drive environment. We continue to work internally within our department and externally with other teams to develop strategies for use cases for Shared Drives.

• 🔝 - The Information Systems team concentrated our efforts on planning for migration of Colleague to the cloud, cleanup of manually maintained google groups and an initiative to decrease referrals from the IT Service Desk. In support of these goals, significant design and development of a service desk application was completed, with delivery slated for Q3. This new application puts much needed information and additional control into the hands of our front-line support team.

• 💲 - We got a solid start on our cloud migration planning, with efforts continuing during Q3 to gain essential details and document available options.

• 🔝 - In a highly successful campaign, we worked cooperatively with the Enterprise Applications team to complete the first phase of our Google Groups audit and have continued this effort into Q3 to target additional group owners. The initiative focused on providing group owners with better information, recommendations and instructions to promote more effective use and management of this campus-wide communication tool.

• 💡 - In an effort to improve data backup and resilience, in Q3 of 2020 the IT Infrastructure team implemented a new, more modern data recovery platform. Data stored on LCFiles, and on server infrastructure, are now stored on a Rubrik appliance. For Lewis & Clark the core interest of the Rubrik platform, over other products, is ransomware resiliency. After the first backup, the Rubrik software will only backup changed files. When a file is encrypted by ransomware, the file is changed. If a large percentage of files are changed, the Rubrik software will recognize that behavior and alert the IT Infrastructure team. The Rubrik software enables the Infrastructure team to browse the files of previous backups thus allowing files to be easily restored to the original location, or a new one if preferred. This was a particularly important change in our data backup and recovery strategy as it replaced our local replication strategy, eliminating the need for a secondary storage array on the Law school campus.

• 💲 - Developed a strategy to engage a broker, we have approval from the BOT and President to proceed with selling this asset.