its in bits

A Note From Bill...

This is a very busy time of year for IT Services. In addition to providing our regular products and services, we have some large-scale projects such as Remedy going live, and others in earlier stages such as the Integrated Email and Calendar project. This is also the time of year for budget and funding proposals.

We have also submitted proposals to build an Auxiliary Data Center (ADC) in Livermore and a new Research Computing Facility at SLAC. We have initial approval on the Livermore ADC and hope to begin work this spring. In addition to much-needed Data Center space, the facility will provide a geo-diverse location for our critical systems, giving some protection against a disaster that limits our use of Forsythe. The Research Computing Facility at SLAC has strong support from faculty and was very well received by members of the Executive Cabinet last week. We will be working with a committee of faculty and deans to establish a solid business plan for that facility over the next few months.

We are also working to improve our organization so that we can efficiently deliver better products and services to our clients. At a past Town Hall, we discussed the Strategic Plan that we developed with input from our clients. A Services Portfolio Review team (see related article) is reviewing our collection of services to see how we can focus our efforts on those that matter most. That team will be giving us its recommendations beginning in early March.

Finally, we are looking at how we can streamline our organization and become more efficient in the delivery of our goods and services. We want to do this in a way that allows us to continue to grow and provide the services our clients are requesting. If you have ideas about how we can streamline, or about services that our clients really want from us, please be sure to share them with your manager or let me know directly. This is a subject that we will discuss more fully at Town Hall next Tuesday.

- Bill Clebsch
IT Services

Remedy 7 Launched

With an amazing amount of hard work and perseverance over the President’s Day weekend, the Remedy 7 project team successfully launched the University’s new Remedy system. The cutover was successful, with all tickets from the old system now available in the new system. HelpSU requests that arrived over the weekend were created as the first tickets in the new system. All support staff are now using either the new web client or the Windows client to work in Remedy 7.

Just a reminder for some of the items to be aware of with the new system:

You will now use your SUNet ID and password to access the application.
Customers will receive an automatic email when the incident is resolved with the text of what you entered in the resolution field. Please don’t type “See Work Log.” Instead, supply an brief explanation of what exactly was resolved so the customer will understand.
Attachments are added on the "Work Info" tab. If you add an attachment, be sure to include some text in the Summary field describing the attachment.
If you use macros or do ad hoc reporting, you must still use the Windows Remedy User client. Macros must be re-recorded and reports must be redefined because field names have changed.
You should logout from the web client as you exit. If you simply close your browser, you may have to wait for the 60 minute timeout period to expire before you can login again.

Support staff using Remedy should familiarize themselves with the information collected on the HelpSU for Support Staff web site.

If you would like some additional help, the project team is hosting open lab sessions in the PHIL classroom (in Polya Hall) where you can log in and work in the live system on your tickets. The team is happy to offer guidance, support, and troubleshooting assistance. Open lab times are available Wednesday, February 20 from 1 to 4 p.m. and Thursday, February 21 from 9 to noon.

As a final note, we’d like to extend our thanks and admiration to the cadre of staff and contractors who worked many long days and nights to make this project a success. Our success depended heavily on collaboration that spanned multiple functional groups including Application Support, Database Administration, Systems Integration, Networking Systems, Project Management Office, Windows Team, UNIX Teams, Quality Assurance, Software Licensing, Finance, Help Desk Services, Technical Facilities, Backup and Storage, Documentation, and Campus Readiness.

- Sam Steinhardt, Bryan Wear, and Chris Lundin

Project Management Office Changes

Over the course of the past few weeks, several projects have come to a close or have reached a point where they no longer need a project manager. Several of the contract project managers you may have worked with will be transitioning their projects to staff project managers and leaving IT Services. All of them have done a fantastic job of moving these projects forward and we are grateful for their hard work.

The projects affected are:

Larry Ebert:

Integrated Email & Calendar: Larry will be transitioning project management responsibilities to Bernadette Drechsler. Details on this assignment change are included in the Integrated Email and Calendar article.
Resource Management Tool (Unanet) -- Larry will carry this project to closure over the next few weeks.

Michael Dave:

Kerberos: Michael will carry this project to closure; estimated to be mid-May.
Workgroup & Org: Michael will carry this project to closure; estimated to be April.
Guest Accounts: Michael will carry this project to closure; estimated to be March.
Work Anywhere Toolkit: Michael will transition this to Steve Loving this week.
Building Security: Michael will lead this project through May, at which time we will transition it to Andrew Leman.

Heather Ramamurthy:

SharePoint Infrastructure: Heather will transition this project to Steve Loving in the coming weeks.
Big Fix Macs: Heather will transition this project to Shirley Hodges in the next couple of weeks.
Forsythe Provisioning: Heather will transition this project to John Freshwaters in the next couple of weeks.

Additionally, new and existing projects will have the following assignments:

CMDB Project: Pam Ross began this project last week.
Pinnacle Upgrade: Pam Ross is starting on this project this week.
Porter Drive: Bernadette Drechsler will transition this to Greg Steiger.
Building Security: As mentioned above, Michael Dave will start this project, and it will transition to Andrew Leman on May 1. This will allow Andrew to continue his project manager role for VOIP e911 and the SIP pilot projects until they are closed.

We have built in sufficient transition time to make this go smoothly and do not expect any of the changes to affect the project timelines. If you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions, please feel free to contact me.

- Joyce Dickerson
Project Management Office

Integrated Email and Calendar Update

After careful consideration, we have decided to transition the project manager responsibilities for the Integrated Email and Calendar (IE&C) project from Contract Support staff to Stanford staff. Bernadette Drechsler, who most recently has been managing several Data Center-related projects, will assume the IE&C project manager role from Larry Ebert.

Bernadette has direct experience leading complex projects of this scale at Stanford and this experience, combined with her operational management background, will position her well to guide this project successfully. Bernadette and Larry will work closely for the next several weeks to ensure the transition goes smoothly.

Please join me in thanking Larry for his high degree of professionalism and outstanding efforts in leading the IE&C Discovery project and preliminary stages of the current implementation project.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me or Jan Cicero.

- John Freshwaters
Shared Application Services

Client Satisfaction Hits All-Time High

Our January measure of client satisfaction with IT Services support achieved the highest overall score since we began collecting monthly data in September of 2006. The Overall Satisfaction response average was 5.44 (out of a maximum score of 6). With the emphasis the organization has placed on responsiveness, it is very nice to see that the score on Timeliness was also the highest it has ever been.

Each week, we randomly select 150–200 Remedy tickets that have been resolved by IT Services groups during the previous week. The clients who submitted the tickets receive an email request to fill out a short survey on the Web. The responses are tallied on a monthly basis. This gives us about 600 requests sent out, and we usually receive about 130–150 responses.

The survey has five questions:

Please rate your level of satisfaction from Very Satisfied (6) to Very Dissatisfied (1).

Timeliness of the service provided
Extent to which your problem was resolved
Customer service attitude of the staff providing the service
Technical competence of the staff providing the service
Overall satisfaction with the service provided

There's also a Comments field box where clients can (and many do) write a note expressing appreciation (usually) or frustration (once in a while) about the service they received. Believe me, they often tell us what they think.

These results, and measurements of our performance, availability of systems, and other data are available (courtesy of folks in DDD and UNIX Systems).

- Tom Goodrich
Help Desk Services

New IT Service Alerts in Production

On February 4th, we changed to the new Service Alerts application and process for communicating service interruptions. This new system formalizes the communication process from initiation to resolution and all of the updates that take place. In particular, it provides for parallel, but separate, internal and external communication.

Email notices are still the primary alert mechanism for outage information, but there is now a dynamic web site that displays current and recent outages. It is our hope that people will start to use this web site as their first reference for IT Services outage information.

The new process places a strong reliance upon the Production Control Group (PCG), as it requires them to react immediately to each internal service alert and to provide the public communication required. The PCG have some new tools in place to tie service alerts into their existing monitoring infrastructure, but they’re on the clock with each alert as their goal is to ensure that the public communication occurs within five to ten minutes of an internal announcement or update. The team has adapted well to the new process and are showing themselves to be well-suited to their communication role.

We are currently in a “trial mode” deployment phase whereby all internal communications are forwarded to clients, just as we have done in the past, and the public communication is reviewed internally. After the successful trial period, we will enable the public communication module via email, the public Service Alerts web site, and stop forwarding the internal communication. The final stage of deployment will be to integrate Service Alerts with the new Remedy 7 application, in order to streamline the incident and problem management process.

You can create, update, and resolve service alerts and view the public communication on the internal service alerts site.

When we go live with the formal external communication site, it will be located at: http://italertsu.stanford.edu.

We welcome any questions, comments, or feedback on the new process or application. There is a HelpSU link from the Service Alerts help page, or you can query me directly via email.

- Scott Wildy
Application Support & Database Administration

Services Portfolio Review

All top-performing organizations and companies regularly take stock of their service offerings. This is done to pinpoint areas for improvements or additional investments, as well as to identify opportunities for innovation or to pilot new directions. We see some of the drivers when we contemplate the top ideas in our strategic plan—such as the convergence of voice, network, and data solutions—or the rapidly increasing requests from campus clients for solutions that enable them to easily collaborate no matter where they may be working. We also need to take note of how changes in technology contribute to expectations for increased self-service offerings, changes in the role of mobile devices, or in pressures to provide new solutions to secure data and content.

In early December, a small team was formed to review the current set of services offered by our organization. The team was asked to provide a clear recommendation regarding which services IT Services should continue to offer, which services need a change in focus or strategic direction, as well as which services should be discontinued. In addition, the team was tasked with proposing an on-going governance model for conducting this type of review.

The team members include: Sam Steinhardt (chair), Heather Flanagan, Fred Hansson, Shirley Hodges, Nan McKenna, Mark Miyasaki, Molly Reynick, Bruce Vincent, and Nancy Ware. The team has been meeting twice each week and expects to complete its work by the end of March. A preliminary review of the team's work will take place at the March 7th Leadership Team retreat.

The team took the following approach to getting the work done: identify the list of services, create a common definition of the service, answer a consistent set of questions about the service, and arrive at a recommendation. For each service, the team asked the following set of questions:

Does this service meet client needs?
Can we deliver the service?
Is this service financially viable?
Is this a service that should be delivered by a central IT organization?
Is there a clear, strategic value associated with this service?

As of this writing, the team has completed its initial review of each service. From now through the end of February, the team will be taking a step back to confirm that the recommendations make sense when considered in the aggregate, not just as individual or discrete pieces. Early in March, the team will present its findings to the entire Leadership Team and implementation plans will begin to take shape. At the end of the day what matters most is that our services combine to provide solutions to help clients get their work done.

You can expect to hear more about the outcome of this process following the March 7th Leadership Team retreat.

- Sam Steinhardt
Finance and Administration

IT Services on MediaWiki

A new IT Services internal Wiki is now up and running. This installation of MediaWiki, the application that runs Wikipedia, is designed to test the platform as a location for our organization's intranet, for inter-group collaboration, and as a candidate for a centrally-supported Wiki tool for the Stanford community.

This pilot effort began last autumn when, in support of a CRC proposal to begin using a Wiki-based discussion forum for client communication, Client Support's leaders asked DDD's technical team to install and test MediaWiki in AFS space (the University's central web infrastructure). Developing from CRC's WebAuthed and externally hosted model, DDD successfully installed and ran MediaWiki privately within AFS space before progressing to this department-wide implementation.

Wondering about the next steps? Wikis for communicating and collaborating with clients, and an IT Services-provided Wiki tool or hosted service, are not in formal planning. But ideas have been bouncing around for over a year among DDD, CRC, Integration, PMO, UNIX, and Strategy & Architecture team members. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Jump in: http://itservices.stanford.edu/group/allstaff/wiki

New to the whole Wiki thing? Feeling timid? Try editing for the first time in MediaWiki's hosted sandbox.

Special thanks to Marco Wise, as well as Nuriya Janss, Dodi Lota, Sean Mahanay, and Tim Torgenrud, for providing the concept development and technical expertise that got this pilot going.

- Dave Ream
Documentation, Design, and Delivery

Windows Systems