Information Technology Strategic Plan

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Information Technology Strategic Plan

2012 – 2017

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Executive Summary

Technology advances are a driving force which affects every aspect of a modern college institution. From streamlining business processes, to student processing and self-help services to the educational environment, technology advances provide the means by which the College can more efficiently operate, grant students real-time access to the information they require and implement state of the art classroom and distance learning instruction. Like any other infrastructure however, technology

advancements cannot be put in place and forgotten about. Technology requires ongoing maintenance to keep running at peak efficiency. Staff and faculty need to be trained on new systems, policies and procedures. Students will need assistance to make the most of the student facing technologies. College executive leadership will also need to continually review the potential versus realized benefits of a system, and regularly examine upcoming technologies and steer the IT policies to best meet the College’s needs based on current trends and available funding. This strategic plan outlines the current state of the IT infrastructure at Sussex County Community College. It identifies the College’s existing strengths and deficiencies, and offers a roadmap through 2017 for the correction of existing issues, as well as institutional technology goals for that timeframe.

In April, 2011 the College decided to outsource its Information Technology leadership out to All-In-One Network Solutions for numerous reasons. In the year and a half in which All-In-One has been handling the College’s IT needs, there have been numerous issues discovered. While many were technical in nature, the largest issues are related to IT leadership and how it integrated with the College leadership and institutional and student needs. Technology was treated as a black box, something that few people were allowed to know anything about, and which a small number of people were able to dictate College IT needs, instead of asking the majority of the College what they required. The issues created by this methodology can be grouped into the following three categories:

 Lack of an IT oversight committee

 Lack of future budgetary planning

 Lack of interest in continued improvement in existing systems

College executive leadership has seen first-hand the results of these failed policies, and recognize the need to correct the issues if the College is to continue to be relevant to education both within the county and beyond in the future. President Mazur has set ambitious targets for distance learning, online classes and technology inclusion within the College. In order to support those targets, the College needs to learn from past mistakes, and correct policies what have artificially limited the College in the past. It is within that context that this document was drafted.

The single largest issue which this plan covers is the lack of oversight over all College technology. Technology throughout the College is spread around through several different departments, with no committee to ensure that they all are working towards the College’s strategic goals. Different

departments have different priorities and methods to achieve their individual goals. This results in many different departments reinventing infrastructure and systems on their own, while wasting valuable

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funds recreating functionality which exists in another department. This lack of oversight also extends to technology funding. Departments can purchase equipment against their individual budgets, and then it becomes the IT department’s responsibility to support and maintain those purchases, without any prior input of knowledge of the purchase. With proper oversight of all technology related purchases and initiatives, the College can ensure no only that funding is properly allocated, and that sustained funding will be available for the upkeep of all systems and initiatives, but it may be possible to offset some of the costs through local partnerships or grants. Without strong IT governance, none of these benefits are possible.

Once there is a strong, centralized IT governance structure in place, it is possible to ensure the other two categories identified above are resolved. The IT governance committee’s job will be to review all

proposed IT initiatives and purchases, and ensure that there is also a plan submitted for the ongoing upkeep required by the purchase. This includes ongoing maintenance of the system, plans for funding a refresh cycle, or plans on decommissioning the equipment at the end of its useful lifespan. Without planning for the entire cost of a piece of equipment or an initiative, it will be impossible to properly maintain it in the future. The initial cost is just a piece of the overall all total cost, and the full lifecycle cost will need to be planned for and budgeted prior to any new purchases. Only by budgeting for the total cost, will the College be able to sustain its IT infrastructure into the future.

The final category covered by the strategic plan covers the lack of interest in continued improvements in various segments of the College once a system has been put into place. No system is static; they are always changing based on technology, regulation changes or policy and personnel changes within the institution. Historically, once a system was put in, the will to improve it and to continue training the staff and faculty who utilize it all but disappeared. The College has a huge investment in not only its systems, but also in its personnel. Staff and faculty need ongoing training as systems change and improve over time. There needs to be training when systems change so that they are utilized to their full potential. Lack of training and continued education of staff and faculty not only costs the College large sums in additional payroll required to achieve a desired outcome, it also reduces the level of services which can be provided to the students. Automation and process improvements coordinated with technology can streamline processes, reducing the amount of manual intervention required, and streamlining the work required by students just to attend the College, register for classes, or gain access to class materials.

The College’s IT infrastructure and systems have technical and strategic challenges over the next several years to overcome. Ensuring increasingly scarce funds are appropriately spent, systems intelligently maintained and expanded, and that policies and systems are improved in tandem will enable the College to overcome the technical challenges. Ensuring ongoing support and training for College personnel will ensure the strategic challenges can be met into the future. Only by covering both types of challenges will the College IT infrastructure be up to the requirements of future needs.

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IT Governance

The days when a single systems administrator made all IT decisions affecting an entire institution have long since passed. Strong IT Governance structures are critical to running a lean and efficient IT department, while providing all necessary services required by the College’s master plan at an affordable cost. Without such a structure, it is difficult to ensure that all areas of operations are adequate to support future needs and trends. It also leads to unnecessary costs which may not line up with the College’s master plan. To address these needs, the College has developed a two tier

governance structure.

History

In April of 2011 the decision was made to outsource the College’s IT leadership to All-In-One Network Solutions. There were numerous reasons behind the change in IT management, but the primary reason was the internal cost and the level of service delivered by College IT management and networking staff, and the results the College received from that team. At the end of 2010 All-In-One Network Solutions came in and performed an audit, and found numerous issues, both technical and departmental, which were documented in a report for the College. After being brought onboard, All-In-One Network Solutions continued to find issues throughout the College, including numerous unnecessary

expenditures consuming large portions of the IT operating budget. It was also discovered that various parts of what should have been IT (such as the College website, management of the distance learning portal, etc) were in fact not under the domain of Information Technology. Based on all the findings, All-In-One Network Solutions recommended that a governance committee be setup to ensure any funds allocated to IT are allocated efficiently, and contribute towards the College’s long term strategic plan. Prior to the Fall 2012 semester, the College had no IT governance committee. All IT decisions were made by the Executive Director of Information Technology. While the best efforts were made to satisfy budget constraints with computing and technology needs, a clear vision as to how those purchases fit into the College’s master plan was missing. Historically equipment was purchased with little thought to a replacement plan, or additional incurred costs in future years spent maintaining the system. Funds were not allocated based on the priorities of the institution; they were spent fixing what broke that year. Information Technology was run as a purely reactive department instead of a well-planned, proactive department.

In addition to the lack of IT planning, the IT Department does not oversee all aspects of IT at the College. The website falls under the Marketing department. Classroom technology, projectors and

SMARTboards fall under the Media department. The College’s security camera system (which is entirely dependent on the IT infrastructure) falls under Maintenance. The Distance Learning (LMS) system falls under Academics. The lack of centralized control of these facets of IT has caused different departments to spend large amounts of money re-implementing systems which exist elsewhere. This lack of

coordination and various departments tendency to re-implement their own systems (which already exist elsewhere) has cost the College untold sums over the years. By making an overarching committee to review all these areas, the College will reduce costs, streamline services, and ensure that every decision made contributes in a positive way to the College’s master plan.

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Starting in the Fall of 2012, IT governance committees will be formed to address the above issues. All aspects related to IT, regardless of which department they involve will be channeled through the IT Steering committee to ensure all efforts line up with current and future needs and the College’s master plan, and then will be escalated to the Executive Council for final approval. Utilizing this method, all IT expenditures become transparent, and any proposed changes can be examined for unanticipated effects by all departments at the College prior to submittal for final approval to the Executive committee. Using this two tiered approach to IT governance, the College hopes to be able to implement strong controls on all IT related projects and initiatives. It gives the College the ability ensure improvements are not only cost effective, but also have a beneficial impact directly or indirectly on the student population, both in the near term, as well as long term. It gives multiple departments on campus input into IT decisions, providing them with a voice to ensure improvements will be able to support future needs of specific departments.

Executive Council

The Executive Council will be made up of individuals from Operations, Information Technology and the Business and Academics offices. This small group will be tasked with verifying submissions from the IT Steering Committee be cost effective, practical to implement, and aligned with the College’s master plan. The Executive Council will also be able to task the Steering Committee with developing programs to match future technology needs.

The Executive Council will maintain the ultimate responsibility to ensure that all approved technology plans fit within the appropriate budget allocations. It will also ensure that any plan further develops the IT infrastructure and systems towards the College’s master plan, and that sustainability has been factored into the plan and the budget.

Steering Committee

The Steering committee is planned to be an extensive, inclusive committee with the ability to comment on and further develop technology plans before sending to the Executive Council for approval.

Technology plans can originate from the Information Technology department, or any member department within the Steering Committee with a technology need. Once reviewed by the Steering Committee plans can be developed, refined, rejected or approved and escalated to the Executive Council for final approval.

The Steering committee will include an individual representing each department at the College. The purpose of the Steering committee will be to take recommendations by IT (or other departments), and evolve them into a plan that is both feasible as well as which aligns with the College’s master plan. By including every department there will be multiple different viewpoints, suggestions and concerns expressed over issues and plans. This will ensure that nothing is implemented within a vacuum, and that nothing benefits one department but adversely affects another.

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Sustainable Funding

Given the tightening budgets faced by Higher Education throughout the country, maximizing the return on every dollar spent is crucial. While IT infrastructure can be inherently expensive, it is the foundation on which all the other departments on campus operate. Optimizing efficiencies and minimizing costs are just one step which must be taken to keep IT sustainable into the future. Funds priorities need to be established to ensure the funds that are available are used to the maximum benefit of the College. It will also be necessary to look to the community for partnerships or other opportunities which could directly or indirectly benefit both the College and surrounding community.

Prioritizing Institutional Needs

Historically, institutional needs have been defined by the Executive Director of IT with little or no input from other departments. It was the discretion of a sole individual to steer the College’s IT plan, which may or may not have aligned with the College’s master plan. This has caused numerous problems in the past, and was one of the primary reasons to develop the IT governance plan.

With the new IT governance in place, it will be up to the Steering Committee to recommend, and the Executive Council to approve the institutional priorities for IT, with the input of all the departments involved. The committees will evaluate the ongoing needs of the College, staff, faculty and students and future trends and recommend a prioritized list of actions to be taken. This will ensure that all

departments are receiving the necessary technology and support to perform their daily tasks and ensure the students have the most up to date technology possible. This will replace the current methods which are more reactionary with an improved preventative plan based on available funding.

Any new IT project which will be approved by the IT governance committees must contain provisions dedicated to the ongoing maintenance and replacement of any equipment placed into service, or an appropriate decommissioning plan. This way the TCO of the overall plan is known, and both the maintenance costs and future replacement costs can be properly budgeted for. This will ensure that all new technology on campus will have an expected useful lifetime, and will have a replacement or retirement plan in place prior to its initial implementation.

Community Partnerships

Community partnerships will be an increasingly important aspect to the College’s IT infrastructure. Looking at local, community or regional shared service opportunities as well as public-private

partnerships could positively impact the College on numerous fronts, including reducing costs as well as expanding the College’s regional influence, and increasing its regional enrollment.

Given Sussex County’s relative remoteness compared to the rest of the counties in New Jersey, there are certain challenges that all educational institutions within the county experience. Local businesses also experience similar issues. There is no reason why common needs cannot be pooled, and a more efficient shared service model be employed with like entities throughout the county if such a partnership will result in improved services or reduced costs, or both. Opportunities need to be examined whenever possible. The risk of missed opportunities is too costly for the College to continue to absorb.

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Partnerships Opportunities with Local Businesses

The College maintains numerous active relationships with local donor businesses. Those businesses contribute to the College foundation scholarships, or contributes to the College foundation and requests the funds be appropriated in certain ways, or towards specific interests of the donor business. Some of those donations are directed towards technology improvements at the College. Utilizing those funds the College has started building state of the art business facilities. With further donations anticipated in the future, the College will be working with the local businesses to continue developing and expanding the technology base (both hardware and software) to continue strengthening the business department and its facilities which are available to be used by other classes and majors as well.

Partnership Opportunities with Local K-12 School Districts

One of the most far reaching goals the College has over the next few years is to build an educational network in Sussex County, incorporating all the K-12 school districts. This network is strategically important for many reasons, including reduced costs through shared services, community outreach and improvements made available to local K-12 schools, as well as making the College a more visible entity within the county, helping to drive enrollment at the College. The College will be leveraging shared services, common platforms and pooling resources from multiple institutions into a centralized location which benefits all involved.

The educational network is envisioned as a hub and spoke configuration throughout the local towns, with a spoke connected to the College. Over that connection, the College will be able to offer internet and NJEdge services, telephone services, video conferencing, and access to all media hosted at the College. The member K-12 institutions will have full bandwidth access to one another (which could be provided over leased circuits or over dedicated fiber running at gigabit or higher speeds). The College shall maintain the primary, redundant internet connections, connections to NJEdge, as well as

(optionally) edge network devices such as shared web filters, spam filters, etc. (with the individual districts being in control over their settings on the device). There is also a goal to offer services such as colocation, disaster recovery and business continuity hosting services, utilizing the College’s upgraded facilities, with the costs being subsidized by the participating K-12 schools.

The College has already had preliminary discussions with several of the K-12 districts in the county, and there is interest in the proposal. The K-12 schools are looking for cost savings, improved bandwidth and services, as well as the possibility for a county wide purchasing consortium for IT equipment. There remains additional data required from the K-12 districts so that engineering estimates can be completed then vendors and providers can provide appropriately engineered quotes, and a final financial analysis can be performed. This will be an ongoing, high priority project within the College over the next few years.

Partnerships with other New Jersey Higher Education Institutions

Some of the basis for creating a county wide educational network is to be able to provide services from NJEdge, the New Jersey Higher Education consortium, to the K-12 school districts. NJEdge was created in 1997 to support higher education broadband an infrastructure needs. It has evolved since then to cover broadband needs including Internet2, phone services, video conferencing, distance learning,

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emergency notification systems, streaming video services and video on demand, as well as consortium pricing on key infrastructure needs which are purchased by a majority of the educational institutions in the state. NJEdge is currently expanding to include many K-12 school districts who want to take advantage of the many cost savings NJEdge provides. NJEdge has committed itself to supporting the College’s effort to expand NJEdge services throughout Sussex County, with the College being the central connection point for those services.

NJEdge partners with Verizon throughout the state. Since Verizon does not have any infrastructure in Sussex County, NJEdge services are currently unavailable. The College is investigating ways to make the service available within the county. The current plan is to have point to point circuits between the College in Newton, and NJEdge’s data center in Newark, NJ. Without partnering with local K-12 districts the costs of bringing this service up to Sussex County would be prohibitive. With partnerships, the College will be able to bring the service into the county, and feed the services to the local K-12 districts, who otherwise would not have had access to all the features NJEdge offers. Not only will this reduce the College’s costs over time, it will offer benefits to the local school districts as well, with reduced costs and increased services.

Reduced Costs through Efficiency Opportunities

Capital expenses spent on IT initiatives are only part of the Total Cost of Ownership. Ongoing maintenance and software or equipment life expectancy also greatly affect the TCO. Improved efficiencies do not only equate to a lower initial cost, but can include a higher up front cost but with a lower maintenance cost, longer life expectancy, or a reduction in staff required to perform a given task. As with community partnerships, all options should be evaluated over the entire anticipated lifetime of the initiative to determine any true cost reductions.

The College has historically stayed true to what has worked in the past, given a level of comfort with the way things had been done. There was little desire to stray too far out of that historical comfort zone. While IT remained in that comfort zone, technology passed the College by. Thin clients, server virtualization, workstation virtualization, disaster recovery and business continuity advances were untrusted, and shunned. By passing on maturing technology, the College has been strapped with additional maintenance costs which could have been significantly reduced. These and other similar technologies, once proven in the enterprise, should be deployed and leveraged to their full potential to either reduce costs, or to increase services at the same funding level. The College needs to ensure any replacement plans examine currently available technology before spending funds on similar technology and equipment at the end if it’s useful life. This will drive down the continued cost of maintenance and refresh costs in the future.

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IT Infrastructure – Sustain and Improve

The IT infrastructure makes up the backbone of the College. Every single department on campus relies on that infrastructure on a daily basis. There is no greater boost to efficiency campus wide then ensuring the IT infrastructure is operating at peak performance. That performance requires yearly maintenance to maintain peak efficiency; older equipment must be phased out in a controlled manor before it fails. Trends need to be identified so the infrastructure can be adapted or expanded to support those trends, and not fail under the load. The College has spent a large amount of money on its

infrastructure, but has not continued with yearly maintenance to keep the systems gradually refreshing so that no equipment exceeds its useful lifespan. The College is now in the position of having over 50% of its desktops and 90% of its network equipment beyond it’s useful life (for desktops), or beyond it’s manufacturers End of Life support (networking equipment).

Sustaining Existing Systems

There are numerous systems on campus which can be grouped into one of three broad groups, with roughly different life expectancies per group. Each of these groups plays a critical role in IT operations, and the College cannot function properly if any of them are not maintained correctly. The groups broadly are identified as Workstations and Servers, with an average of a five year lifespan, Network Infrastructure with an average lifespan of five to ten years, and Physical Plant, which involves electrical and facilities related to IT, which can have between a ten and twenty year average lifespan or more. Proper life cycle management of all three of these groups is essential to maintaining the College’s infrastructure for staff, faculty and students alike.

Workstations and Servers

Workstations and servers are the most visible portion of the IT infrastructure. These are used by faculty, staff and students on a daily basis. Previously there was no proper life cycle plan on this equipment. Workstations were replaced whenever funding became available. Servers were replaced as the old ones were about the fail. A proper life cycle plan needs to be put into place to phase out older machines, and replace them with new ones. This plan needs to conform with projected budgets, and align with the College’s master plan. A viable lifespan for most workstations and servers is five years. Some can last longer with memory upgrades, or replacement hardware, but for budgetary planning purposes it will need to be assumed that the lifespan is only five years.

Since there was no replacement plan, in the summer of 2011, a full 51% of the PCs and Workstations on campus were more than five years old, with some reaching twelve years old. Many of these systems were still in use in College computer labs and offices. These old systems continually had failing parts which needed to be repaired because they were still in production. The College budgeted to replace approximately 120 workstations in 2012, which is less than 18% of the total workstations on campus. With those new systems in place, the percentage of PCs in production which are more than five years old has been reduced to 41% (this number takes into account the number of PCs increasing in age another year, passing the five year threshold). This is a good first step towards a sustained replacement plan for existing equipment, but the funding required to replace one fifth of the workstations and servers on campus each year cannot be counted on due to reduced state and county funding, and a

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decrease in College enrollment. The College will have to look to technology improvements such as virtualization in order to achieve the required replacement plans given the estimated budgets over the next several years. Even with technology improvements, it may not be possible to put the College into an appropriate refresh cycle in the next five years without additional funding due to the age of the majority of equipment on campus.

Network Infrastructure

The College’s network infrastructure has been neglected, as the workstations and servers have been. Since they were installed and little though was given to the network switching equipment again. This lack of planning now leaves the College with network infrastructure equipment which will no longer be supported by the manufacturer by the end of 2013. Since network equipment usually has a ten year usable lifespan, the life cycle plan will cover a ten year refresh period, where virtually all of the equipment will be approaching that age at the start of the new refresh cycle.

The College’s core network infrastructure consists primarily of Nortel BayStack 470 switches. The switches are no longer manufactured, manufacturer support for software has already ended, and the manufacturer’s support of the hardware will expire on November 30th_{, 2013. The College has been}

purchasing these switches used, even after the End of Support notification was given by Nortel at the end of 2010 and with no replacement plan in place, other than to stock several spare switches. The College will have to develop a life cycle plan for all networking equipment, over a ten year span. Primary MDF closets in each building will be given priority, since the rest of the building relies on the equipment in those closets to connect the building to the rest of the campus. The plan will then have to spread out to the remaining IDF closets in each building in subsequent years. There will also have to be a reserve in the IT operating budget large enough to absorb the replacement costs of several switches a year in case switches fail before their refresh can be performed (provided the College does not have any spare, operational switches which have already been refreshed which are viable spare units). This is more of a concern the first year or two of the refresh cycle, because after that the College should have a supply of old, but still functioning switches which can be deployed as needed until the full refresh cycle can be completed.

Physical Plant

The physical infrastructure upon which IT relies heavily is the power and cooling systems throughout the College. Physical plant infrastructure such as Computer Room Air Conditioners, A/C compressors, electrical distribution systems all have a much longer life expectancy then both workstations and network equipment. Much of this equipment, with proper maintenance can run for twenty years or more. The largest challenge IT faces with the physical plan infrastructure is not it failing, but exceeding available power and cooling capacities.

Over time power loads increase as services offered increased. Where more power is consumed, there must be additional cooling, which also consumes additional power. Stressing either system can have an adverse effect on IT equipment (brownouts or power spikes can damage electronics, and heat can damage electrical components). Maintenance is required to keep the cooling systems working properly

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and efficiently, and to verify that no electrical circuits become overloaded over time, and that power load is properly balanced on the supply conductors feeding the panels.

Proper maintenance plans are not in place to ensure clean power delivery to the IT equipment, or to ensure the A/C units are operating properly and maintained on a regular basis. Maintenance is performed on an as-needed basis which puts the infrastructure at risk for failures and unplanned outages. While not strictly part of the IT strategic plan, IT must ensure that facilities creates a plan to properly maintain, and perform preventative maintenance on all IT related equipment and service feeds.

Improve Existing Systems

Workstations and Servers

Even with sustained funding, the College does not currently have the budget to maintain a five year replacement cycle on all workstations and servers as currently deployed. The solution to that will be virtualization. Since a many of the College’s servers were out of warranty and had failing hardware, virtualization has been heavily utilized in the last year. There have been over twenty servers

consolidated on hardware which cost the College the same as performing a straight replacement of ten servers, with additional capacity to spare for future virtualization needs. In addition, additional server blades now cost the College about 40% less than equivalent stand-alone servers.

Combining server and desktop virtualization with thin clients (which have a ten year life expectancy) will greatly reduce the ongoing costs related to workstation replacement. Currently a new, top end server is capable of running fifty to sixty or more virtual workstations, at the cost of less than ten standalone workstations. Thin clients will need to be purchased for each station however. On the first refresh cycle, there is little cost advantage to virtual workstations and thin clients, but since the thin clients last over ten years and have no moving parts, the second refresh cycle’s cost is only the cost of a server (which will be capable of running many more virtual workstations then the previous server was capable of). This is an example of leveraging existing technology to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership in future years to manageable budgetary levels.

A further cost savings is how easy it is to provision a virtual workstation. If a lab required new software, it can be automatically deployed to the entire lab, or to the entire College in a matter of minutes, from a central location. This ability will relieve the IT department from having to manually redeploy images to machines every summer or when required software changes during the course of the year. This will free up IT support staff to work on other issues sooner, and increase their overall response time for all other issues.

Year Budgeted Amount Budgeted Items

2013 $105,000 150 Virtual Desktops and 3 Server Blades

2014 $211,000 150 Virtual Desktops, DR Blade Server Chassis, 6 Server Blades

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Network Infrastructure

Over the next several years the College will be upgrading or expanding numerous parts of the IT infrastructure backbone. The College upgraded the fiber backbone between all buildings over the summer of 2012. Taking advantage of the improved connectivity and bandwidth made available by the new fiber, the College has plans to upgrade network switches, the current phone system, the current security system, expand existing wireless access and supporting increased wireless device densities throughout the College. The College is also planning on expanding the software infrastructure to enable linking various separate systems in use at the College together with Single Sign On technologies.

Due to the age of the majority of the switches on campus, and given the intent to roll out an upgrade VoIP phone system, the current network switches will be phased out, with replacement switches supporting Power over Ethernet (PoE). PoE will be required prior to upgrading the College’s phone system. Due to the number of switches on campus, this will be a phased approach, with MDF closets in each building being upgraded first, followed by other IDF closets in order of the determined phone rollout. The new switches (at least in the MDF closets) will be upgradable to take full advantage of the new fiber cabling the College had installed in the summer of 2012.

Once the new switches have been installed, the College will begin to look at the feasibility of replaceing the current phone system with a VoIP system. A newer system, aside from all the new features which will be provided to the users, will take advantage of the new campus fiber backbone for data instead of existing, older copper cables between all buildings. A newer phone system will also allow the College to streamline the services feeding the existing phone system and significantly reduce the College’s monthly phone bills.

Also taking advantage of the newly installed fiber will be a new campus wide security system,

incorporating audio and video feeds, and emergency phones. The new system, which is currently in the design phase, could also include door card access systems, and building access systems. It will expand coverage to many areas which are not covered by the current system. This will improve safety for all faculty, staff and students within buildings, in common areas and in parking lots. This upgrade will also rely on upgraded MDF closet switches in each building to take full advantage of the upgraded fiber throughout campus.

Finally, the campus wide wireless network will be upgrades. A new wireless controller will be installed which will allow for the addition of a sufficient number of access points to cover not only the internal buildings, but many of the centralized outdoor areas in which students tend to congregate. The updated controller will also support enough access points to support the increased wireless device densities which will occur as more students bring wireless phones, tablets and laptops to the College. Increased wireless coverage and the ability to handle increased device densities will be required before any wide spread Bring Your Own Device initiative can be possible.

Software upgrades currently in the planning stages include campus wide Single Sign On capability. Currently students log onto College computers with one account. Then they log into their portal with

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another account. Webmail is a third account, the Webstudy distance learning application a fourth account, and Rave is a fifth account. Merging those systems together with a single sign on and password reset portal will provide a single account the students must remember to access all College related sites. IT will also streamline support for students who forget a password. Currently different departments provide password reset assistance for different systems, so students must try several different

departments to locate the correct one to reset the password in question, or must visit all departments to change all their passwords. This is inefficient from an IT standpoint, and disruptive to the students, who may only have several minutes between a class to take care of an issue.

2013 $206.358 Replacement core network switch in B Building (Relocating current core switch to A Building DR center)

New Wireless LAN Controller and 25 Wireless Access Points Replacement primary switch for E Building

Replacement primary switch for L Building

2014 $71,967 Replacement Primary switch for D Building 15 additional Wireless Access Points

2015 $88,461 Power over Ethernet switch blades for Buildings D, L, E

Power over Ethernet edge switches for Buildings A, B/C, D, L, E 15 additional Wireless Access Points

Physical Plant

The College currently has two plans related to physical plant in varying stages of completion. The first project is a major upgrade to the primary data center in B Building. The second plan is the creation of a smaller, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity data center in A building. When complete, these two plans will allow the College to continue to operate in the event of a total loss of the B/C Building, containing the primary data center. Lesser issues to the building will be handled through redundancy within B Building.

The existing primary data center has long doubled as an office for networking staff. Cooling was insufficient, as was power. A project will be going out to bid in the Fall of 2012 to upgrade the available power coming into B/C Building and upgrading the building’s main switch gear. From there, a

distribution panel dedicated to IT will be installed, feeding all the servers, Computer Room Air

Conditioners, compressors and networking equipment. As part of the bid, the College is also looking at the feasibility of a backup generator, large enough to power the data center, phone system, networking equipment, and administrative offices indefinitely.

To protect College operations in the event of a fire or catastrophic loss of B Building, the College also plans on creating a backup data center in A Building. A Building is on a different power feed from JCP&L. In the Halloween snowstorm of 2011, the entire campus was without power for three days, except for A Building, which never lost power. Due to the separate electrical feed in A Building, the College has chosen that location for its backup data center. When the College fiber backbone was rebuilt in summer

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of 2012, A Building and B Building were directly wired to each other building on campus, so in the event B Building was lost, operations could continue from A Building. Tentative plans call for a small data center to house critical College systems required to maintain operations, the necessary cooling and UPS power to maintain those systems, and a generator to keep the data center operational if necessary. Further plans will be developed in the future as funding becomes available.

2013 $0

2014 $105,000 Disaster Recovery Site UPS

Disaster Recovery Site A/C Upgrade

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Faculty and Staff Professional Development

One of IT’s primary responsibilities, aside from implementation and support of a reliable IT

infrastructure, is enabling users to properly take advantage of all the College systems have to offer. For faculty and staff, this includes software and systems used as teaching aids in classrooms. The College has in the past had IT user groups to discuss and instruct users on the latest hardware and software available. While beneficial, these groups were not attended by a majority of the faculty and staff body. A goal over the next several years is to extend training and support to all faculty and staff in IT and related systems. The more efficient in transferring knowledge the faculty become, the more the students could potentially get out of a class experience.

The overall categories which IT will help support in the future broadly fall into two categories, Productivity training and Instructional training. Productivity training focuses primarily on staff, and includes things such as report writing, cross department training, and ERP system training. The

Instructional training category is for faculty and adjuncts, and covers technology usable in the classroom or software used in preparing for the classroom. This includes technologies such as the Learning

Management System, SMARTboards, projectors and PowerPoint, as well as technical support for experimental instruction methods which instructors may want assistance in.

Productivity Training

Productivity training encompasses the business software in use at the College. This is primarily the Jenzabar CX platform. The purpose of this training will be to make the end users more efficient in their daily jobs, and to try to remove them from the vacuum of their department and let the user see how their job affects other areas of the College. President Mazur has identified cross department training as a necessity in certain offices, with the specific goal of streamlining student applications and enrollment. A key area to train staff on will be the upgraded report writing tool, Cognos. The College will upgrade Cognos to the latest version in the Fall of 2012. This will enable more end users to create the reports they need on their own, instead of having to rely on the IT department to create a custom report for them. It will also allow publishing of created reports to others within the department, and allow the user running the report to tailor specifics of the reports at run time, such as date ranges. Features such as this will allow staff to reduce the amount of data manipulation done outside the system in time consuming and error prone processes.

Instructional Training

Instructional training is focused on technology usable by faculty or adjunct instructors in the classroom, or in preparation for the classroom. This includes technology available in the classrooms, such as SMARTboards, projectors, PowerPoint slides, etc. The goal of instructional training is to provide the faculty and adjuncts relevant training to make the most with the technology available in the classrooms on campus.

Instructional training goes beyond just technology in the classroom. It covers training on the College’s Learning Management System, WebStudy, as well as assistance for instructors looking to push the technology envelope and do things which have not been done within the College yet. In cases like that,

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IT will support the instructor in every way possible to give the instructor the best opportunity to develop modern and cutting edge instructional practices.

Learning Management System Training and Digital Course Material

When first implemented, Learning Management Systems were relegated to distance learning classes. Over time instructors have learned the potential such systems bring to even in-person classes. While the College has slowly been pushing the LMS into in-person classes, the majority of in-person classes have little more than a syllabus online. By offering assistance and training in the functionality of the LMS, the IT Department is trying education the instructors on what others are doing with the LMS system, even for in-person classes.

One of the realities of having a large adjunct population at the College is that many also teach at other institutions each semester. Because many institutions have different LMS systems, the adjuncts may not have the time to build multiple, high quality course shells for each class at each institution. In an effort to increase usage of the LMS, the College will be investigating standards based course shell import and export files as a requirement for any future LMS system. Such standardized files will allow faculty and adjuncts to create a course shell in one LMS system, export it, and re-import into another system. The hope is that this will make creating a shell once and importing it at multiple locations a viable option for adjuncts and drive further adoption of the LMS system.

Many of the instructors either do not understand how to work within the LMS system, are intimidated by it, or just choose not to use it. When the system was first implemented last year, originally faculty and adjunct staff were given one-on-one training in the system, but the school year started prior to everyone receiving the appropriate training. The remainder of the instructors were shown a brief presentation on how the LMS worked, and what was capable in it. By providing follow up training and support, the College’s goal is to leverage the LMS as much as possible, driving more and more materials online for the students. This will make the material available to the students enrolled in the class 24 hours a day, seven days a week from any device with an internet connection.

Experimental Instructional Methods Support

While many of the faculty and adjunct staff utilize technology to some extent, some will try to push the technology and the instruction to new heights. The College fully supports advancing teaching

methodologies with a proven benefit to students. Since instruction of this type rarely has a set of requirements to go along with it, the IT Department will facilitate as best as possible any request by an instructor under these circumstances. While not all requests will be able to be granted, IT will

accommodate as best as possible, given the available resources.

This experimental instructional support could evolve into a group related to how to best utilize

technology in the classroom, made up of faculty and adjunct members. While IT does not get involved in instructional materials or methods, IT would be happy to contribute to such a group looking to expand and maximize the use of technology in the classroom.

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Student Enrollment and Success Initiatives

The College’s primary function is the education of its students. The College’s IT Department’s primary function is to support the systems which allow that education to happen. That goal has not always been well served however. Currently there is limited functionality within the Jenzabar ERP system to help increase student enrollment (through application tracking and continual outreach to the student to increase the likelihood of enrollment), or to ensure that students who do enroll stay enrolled and successfully graduate from the institution. Also, once the student is enrolled, they are given numerous different portals to go to for a variety of reasons, many times with each portal requiring different credentials. When students finally locate the proper portion of the portal they were looking for, there are many functions that other institutions allow to be done online (such as register for classes) which the College does not universally allow for a variety of reasons. There is a lot of the student interaction with the College which could be streamlined and made more student friendly through appropriate use of the IT systems.

Student Enrollment

The current Jenzabar ERP currently handles the student lifecycle management from application through graduation. The system however is weak in dealing with students who have applied, but who have not registered. Once a student does enroll, the system does not have any method to flag a warning on a student if an instructor or counselor sees a change in student behavior. Such a change could indicate the student may be about to drop out of classes or College, or that something external is going on which is impacting their education. Another area the system is weak on is planning out a student’s entire College career up front, and being able to use those metrics to determine how many sections of which courses will be required prior to opening registration. By improving these areas of the ERP system the College will be better able to maintain (and increase) enrollment, and ensure that the students who do enroll successfully complete their courses through to graduation.

Modern ERP systems have the ability to stay in contact with all students who applied, up until the point when they cannot register anymore. Constant communications can help encourage the student to register for classes and attend the College. While the current ERP keeps track of applicants, it doesn’t offer any meaningful way to capitalize on the applications, or follow through with the students until they register. The College gets hundreds of applicants each year who never register for classes. Having software which can help in converting even a portion of those students to enrolled students would greatly benefit student enrollment.

Once a student is enrolled in classes, the current software does not have any feature in which an instructor or counselor can identify a troubled student, and allow a counselor to intervene prior to the student dropping classes or quitting college altogether. If a student is distressed or distracted and they bring those feelings into the classroom, it will often impact their performance. An astute instructor can notice the change, flag the student in the system, and counseling can try to intervene and see if there is anything that can be done to help the student through the issue. This could help the student cope with the issue, and continue their education. Currently, there is no early warning system prior to the student dropping out or quitting their classes.

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Another important feature which is available in newer ERP systems (but not in the current Jenzabar system), is the ability to recommend a several year course schedule to all incoming students. This gives the students a roadmap through graduation to follow. It allows them to see how far they have actually progressed towards their graduation and a sense of accomplishment for what has been already

completed. It also allows the College to know with some level of certainty the minimum number of students who will likely be taking individual classes prior to opening registration the next semester. This will allow for more efficient scheduling of smaller classes which otherwise may not have been run, even if a group of students were relying on that class to graduate. Improving the scheduling will allow the College to better allocate resources and ensure that any classes required for students to graduate can be run for them in time. The end result however, is easier scheduling for students due to the availability of appropriate, required classes.

Student Success through Technology

While technology itself cannot ensure student success at any college, it is an invaluable tool to help students succeed. Technology upgrades planned for the next several years will improve the student portal, further enabling students to perform online functions which used to require a visit to an office. In addition to ensuring required tools are accessible to the students, those tools should be accessible on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones as well. Since mobile devices are becoming a larger and larger portion of student life, the College will also need to reach out to its students through means other than e-mail as a primary form of communications. Social media, text messages, instant messages all will play a role in keeping students up to date on their progress, even if to just inform them that an

important e-mail in their inbox, or a message on the portal that needs attention. Students graduating high school have grown up with mobile computing, and expect to continue to utilize it. The College will need to evolve its communications strategies to continue to communicate with incoming students. Planned upgrades to the Jenzabar ERP will include an improved student portal as a key component. Not only will the functionality of the portal be addressed, but the upgrade will enable full mobile device support to the entire portal. The portal currently in use has limited functionality in certain areas. Some functions never worked properly and were disabled, while other areas do not operate off fresh data and were misleading. The solution to inaccurate information was to stop displaying it to the user, by

disabling entire features. This methodology was used at the time due to lack of resources to identify and resolve the underlying issues. Those types of fixes no longer work for the College, and need to be corrected. With the upgrade to the ERP system, these issues will be resolved, and features will be re-enabled. Even on the existing portal, some of the processes are not fully automated because there is a need for someone to verify the information being entered is accurate (ie. ensuring Mickey Mouse is not applying to the College in the online application requires human intervention). The existing ERP has limited functionality to verify information automatically, so it was left up to different departments to check incoming records for accuracy, and then allow the process to continue. Newer systems have more advanced options to verify the authenticity of the information entered, as well as business

partners who will actually perform lookups on entered data and respond back if data does not align with publically available databases. With upcoming versions of the ERP the College will be able to allow students to perform a much wider range of account maintenance then is currently possible, and they

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will be able to perform those actions from their mobile devices as well. This will allow students to become more self-sufficient, and make it ultimately easier to apply to the College, and register for classes immediately, even if it is outside of normal College business hours.

The College currently is facing a communications breakdown with students. Students who are enrolling straight out of high school are the first wave of students who grew up with social media. Numerous national studies have shown that many of these students rarely use email, and only then as a backup form of communications. The College has seen first-hand evidence supporting those studies: three weeks into the Fall 2012 semester, less than 12% of the students have logged into their College provided email accounts once. Text messages, instant messages, and social media are the channels they use to communicate with friends and family. The College has a Facebook and twitter presence, but most communications still go through e-mail and US mail. In previous years, over 50% of the College’s

student emails were bouncing College e-mail correspondence because the mailboxes had not been used for over 90 days, and had locked themselves out. Older communications methods such as e-mail, which appropriate for confidential information, are no longer a good way to interact on a frequent basis with new students.

The College has been looking at future features in the ERP which will integrate social networking and text messaging into the communications portal, along with e-mail and standard mail in a way that still maintains privacy laws such as FERPA. The College is also trying to increase the use of the portal, to enable messages and alerts to be placed in the portal alerting students that there is information they may need to act on. As much information as possible is being placed into the portal, in an attempt to ensure students log into it frequently, whether to access webmail, the LMS, or to check their account balances. The College has had some early success in driving additional student traffic to the portal by enabling pseudo single sign on functionality with some other portals, and will continue to take steps to increase student traffic through the site.

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Distance Learning and Learning Management Systems

Embedding technology into classroom instruction will be a major theme over the next several years. With readily available mobile devices (such as tablets and smartphones), ensuring that the existing systems are compatible with other Learning Management Systems and compatible with a variety of devices students are likely to have becomes critical. The current distance learning system, WebStudy, is used primarily for distance learning; it has not been widely adopted for use with in-person classes. Incorporating systems such as WebStudy into in-person instruction will be a necessity when students have near-constant, always on access to technology. Once students have near universal access to WebStudy, the College needs to ensure consistent, high quality content is available through the LMS. The College will be encouraging instructors to build full featured shells, and not just use it as a storage location for the course syllabus and homework assignments.

Improving Institution-wide Utilization of WebStudy

With mobile devices becoming ubiquitous in the classroom, there needs to be content and educational material available to access using those devices. WebStudy currently works fairly well on mobile devices, but it is not fully functional. For any Bring Your Own Device initiative to be successful, the LMS needs to be fully functional on a tablet or smartphone. By utilizing WebStudy with in-person classes, the in-person students gain the same a centralized location for all their coursework that the distance

education students utilize.

The advent of technology in every classroom in the form of a projector or smartboard greatly enabled instructors to create exciting, relevant materials for use in the classroom. Extending those options to each student through a Bring Your Own Device initiative will open up an entirely new realm of possibilities. With those possibilities however come some limitations. Faculty and Adjuncts need to spend appropriate time creating and customizing their Webstudy course shells. Course material selection which is supported on numerous devices becomes critical. Better support from IT and Distance Learning departments for faculty and adjuncts to familiarize them with the technology and potential of that technology will be paramount. Ensuring all the materials are compatible with, and properly loaded into WebStudy will increase the volume of IT support calls from faculty and adjuncts. There will be many facets of the College which will need to work together to maximize the potential of utilizing an LMS within the classroom, especially on student devices, but the benefits to the students when done successfully will be tremendous.

On mobile devices, Webstudy currently works well with regards to reading/downloading materials from Webstudy. On some devices, such as Apple products, it does not allow for uploads back into WebStudy (such as uploading a paper). While the majority of uses will be downloading material or participating in discussion forums, for the solution to work to its maximum potential students will need to be able to upload files into WebStudy. The College has already requested that feature, and will continue to push for it into the future. The College will also be evaluating other LMS systems which better integrate with the College ERP system, and as a requirement, and potential new system must allow tablets and smartphones to be fully operational mobile client devices.

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Improving Distance Learning Courses and Materials

A students experience in an online or in-person class within WebStudy currently is inconsistent at best. All instructors are required to at least post their syllabus, but many do little more with the LMS then that. Distance courses, by virtue of having no alternative, build out the course materials much better. The College needs to ensure that students have a consistent, high quality experience in the LMS for all their classes. This can be done through a combination of better training as well as ensuring that the LMS system in use supports industry wide import and export formats to allow faculty and adjuncts to reuse course shells they had built before.

As with any new system, training is essential. When WebStudy was rolled out, there was a good one on one training plan in place, however instructors were not trained fast enough, and the semester started without all instructors receiving proper training on the system. When rolling out any additional features, sufficient time must be dedicated to training the end users. With Learning Management Systems, this is doubly true. Faculty and adjuncts need to be taught how to effectively utilize the tool in the classroom, as well as how to build course shells within the system. Instructors must adapt to best utilize the features of the tools available, and many instructors who may have never used an LMS in a classroom before will require more help than those who have used them. The College must ensure adequate time for training of the instructors, and provide time for the instructors to create their course shells prior to the start of a semester. Failure to do this, will adversely impact the entire initiative. Many of the College’s adjunct instructors also teach at other Colleges throughout the year. While it may be impractical to expect the instructor to create different course shells for each course, customized to each LMS at each institution they teach at, the College needs to make sure its LMS supports industry standard import and export formats. This way, an instructor can create a course shell for another class they are teaching, possibly even at another institution, and load it into their course shell at the College. This allows the instructors to minimize the amount of redundant work they do (creating shells for the same class at numerous different colleges with almost identical content), and maximize the time they put into the materials which go into the course shell. This is a good way to encourage instructors to increase the quality of their LMS content since they can reuse their work elsewhere easily.

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IT Efficiencies on College operations

College departmental policies have evolved around the features in the software ERP system currently in use at the College (Jenzabar CX). The system was originally setup many years ago and over time, changing priorities, changing staff, and changing requirements have caused the system to become more of a hindrance then a benefit much of the time. Due to legacy decisions made long ago there are numerous weak points in the system which require manual workarounds. Those workarounds are inefficient, error prone, and require more staff to perform and verify the results.

Identify ERP-Related Process Inefficiencies

The technical foundation of the College is its ERP system, Jenzabar CX. All business processes College wide rely on that software. For a variety of reasons, the software no longer closely matches business process flows, and has numerous stumbling blocks in efficiently processing students through the system. Any improvements to the Jenzabar system which result in higher efficiency could reduce College

overhead or allow staff to better serve the students. There are many departments which could be overstaffed due to the inefficiencies of the current system (software and business practices), or which are not providing the level of service to the students they should because of the time spent correcting issues within the system.

Starting in the summer of 2012 the College brought Jenzabar and Ellucian onsite to review the College’s current software, policies and implementations and asked them to make recommendations on how to best resolve the current issues (Jenzabar), or how Ellucian Colleague could resolve many of the ongoing difficulties the College is experiencing. While the results of those reviews are still pending, the data learned on systemic issues around the College has been beneficial.

It was learned that many processes require external manipulation of the data, often in Excel. The data is then cleaned up (due to various changes in data formats and layouts over time, many reports are not consistent and need to be adjusted), and re-imported back into the system. Tasks as simple as course description updates require Word documents passed around manually for approval, and then the descriptions are rekeyed into the ERP before going live. Double data entry is not only time consuming, but also error prone.

There have been numerous issues like this discovered at a high level. Inefficiencies such as these would normally fall onto the MIS department at the College, who is responsible for upkeep and development of the ERP system, to resolve. One of the larger issues discovered however, was that users had been doing things in a certain way for so long, they never thought to mention it to the MIS department. The question was never raised to see if there was a less time consuming, error prone or more efficient way to go about these tasks, so they remained a mostly manual process.

Over the next one to two years, the College will be upgrading Jenzabar to their new JX platform, or will be migrating off Jenzabar to Ellucian Colleague. The migration to either system will require the data be cleaned properly. Either system will be implemented with the College’s current needs and pain points taken into account. Both systems fully integrate the portions of the existing system which has not been integrated well over time. Both systems support user created reports, integrated document

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management systems and a friendlier, faster, more intuitive interface. Upon the successful completion of the upgraded (or new) ERP software, all the major ERP inefficiencies will be resolved through changes to the procedure, improvements to the software, or both.

Identify Business Processes for Automation

Another area of inefficiencies is related to automation. There are certain policies in place throughout the College which are highly automated, with process flows, automatic notifications, etc., and there are policies that still rely on a manual flow of information, and manual tasks, actions and supervision required to advance the workflow. As the ERP issues are resolved, overall college workflow automation will be high on the list to improve. It will result in an increased efficiency, and reduce the number of issues which need to be manually maintained.

Many processes throughout the College could benefit from a clean digital workflow. Processes such as a new hire are currently all manual. Notifications go through HR, who then does their work, and then notifies several other departments such as facilities to setup a workspace, IT to create accounts and deploy computers, department heads to notify them of a new hire, scheduling to assign the hire to a class they will be instructing, etc. This entire process is manual and time consuming at this time. This is an ideal workflow which can be digitized with proper rules, to route the details necessary to the

appropriate departments.

Over the next several years, the College will be enabling more and more automation workflows to speed up policies, reduced errors, and reduce paperwork through the use of a document management system. Once the workflows are tested and working properly, it will reduce the time required per user to

perform their specific portion of the workflow. They will no longer have to worry about who has done their part of the workflow or not, who gets the next part of the workflow, etc. The system will handle all of the routing, reminders to users that there is an actionable item waiting for them, verifying the data, loading the data into the proper places and save any attached/required documents for auditing

purposes. This not only reduces the amount of time required on a workflow, due to checks required as part of the workflow, it will also reduce errors, and time required to track down and resolve errors which used to be introduced by the manual process.

Identify Poor or Missing IT Policies

When All-In-One Network Solutions was hired in April, 2011, there were no policies left in place by the former Executive Director of IT. Since that time, policies have been recreated as issues arose, due to other pressing issues. For any IT department to be successful, they must get ahead of the issues. In the upcoming years, setting policies to cover all facets of IT will be critical. Between the IT Department and the Executive Council, policies will be defined, approved and put into place so that the entire College knows the rules by with the IT Support staff work within.

One of the key policies driving support efficiencies will be the standardization of College hardware. Currently there is a mix of PC vendors, each with different warranties, warranty procedures, phone numbers, etc. From a support efficiency standpoint, the IT support staff need to learn not only how to troubleshoot each machine, they need to keep images for each one up to date, and need to know how

Information Technology Strategic Plan