A Note From Bill...
Account Management
Billing Process Improvements
WebEx Upgrade
Bike Racks in Jordan Quad
Employee Referral Drawing Winner
Survey
Tips From Your Admin
Staff Profile
Staff Happenings
Tech Briefings
Tech Training Classes
IT Employment Opportunities at Stanford
Quote of the Week

Past Issues

Will you attend a Stanford football game this fall?

Yes
No

Results from last issue's survey question: Did you leave the Bay Area over Labor Day weekend?

There were 70 responses. 19 said "Yes," and 51 said "No."

Did you know that if you want to order food for a meeting, your Admin needs at least 24 hours notice if food is to be delivered?

Groups of ten or more require three days' notice. Groups of 25 or more require a week's notice.

Jane Marcus started working at Stanford in 1977.

How would you describe your current job responsibilities?

As an Account Manager in the Client Relations group, I'm the first point of contact for a number of major client organizations including the Vice Provosts for both Undergraduate and Graduate Education, Vice Provost for Student Affairs, Vice President for Public Affairs, Admissions Office, Office of Development, Registrar's Office, and Student Financial Services. I help these groups navigate what can sometimes be a complicated route to getting information, help, and services from IT Services. I also facilitate two ongoing groups: IT Services' Support Strategies Planning Group and the campus-wide group, TIPS.

Which aspects of your job do you enjoy the most?

I'm mostly a big-picture person with a natural sense of organization and process. I find it very satisfying pulling together the people and information needed to complete a task or project, especially those involving the greater Stanford community. I also enjoy serving as a translator or interpreter who can explain technology to non-technical people.

What did you do before you came to Stanford?

You're talking ancient history here! I arrived at Stanford in the summer of 1977 having been a high school English teacher in inner city Philadelphia and at an American high school in Iran. My first job at Stanford was as an office assistant in the Public Affairs Office at SLAC. That's where I first used a computer via a "dumb terminal" connected to the University's mainframe system.

Despite my introduction to what now seems like archaic technology, I realized then that computers were going to revolutionize education. During graduate school I studied the use of technology in higher education. I was fortunate to become a research assistant at SCIP—the Stanford Center for Information Processing—the first of many predecessor organizations for IT Services. I've never left.

Lest anyone think thirty years in the same organization would get boring, think again! With technology (and the organizations that support it) constantly changing, there's always something new happening. And, my interest has always been in how people and organizations use technology as opposed to the technology itself. The Stanford community and Silicon Valley have been fascinating environments to work in.

What do you like to do when you're not at work?

I'm very active in my synagogue, Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills, where I just completed a two-year term as president of the sisterhood. In December, I will be installed on the National Board of the Women of Reform Judaism, the women's affiliate of the Union for Reform Judaism. My particular interest has been, and will continue to be, social action with a focus on issues related to mental health and drug policy.

What is your favorite movie, book, song?

Two books come to mind. Tom Jones by the 18th Century English novelist Henry Fielding is a satiric social commentary of its time. Not surprisingly, the Academy Award winning film of the same name is one of my all-time favorites. The other book is Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolution," a brilliant analysis of the social and psychological impacts on the progress of science.

As far as music goes, I'm happy with anything by Bonnie Raitt.

Comings and Goings

Eugenia Lazarenko is leaving the IT Services DBA group for a new position with the Research Compliance office. In her new role, Eugenia will be responsible for the oversight and support of applications deployed to the Stanford research community. Please join me in wishing her continued success in this new career challenge.

- Bryan Wear
Shared Communication Services; Application Support & Database Administration

The following people recently joined Information Technology Services. Welcome!

• Kimberly Korth (Vicki Hallet)
• Gordon Spencer (Jay Kohn)

The following people have left Information Technology Services. Please contact their manager if you need to follow up on any open items.

• Shari Carter (Carolyn Kane)

its in bits welcomes more detailed employee news submissions from all staff. Please submit to itsinbits-submissions@lists.stanford.edu

Tech Briefings

Fridays
2:00–3:30 p.m.

Turing Auditorium

September 21: MS Office 2007

Shane Devenshire (Mentor Training) will be on hand to demonstrate the updated Office suite from Microsoft: MS Office 2007.

September 28: TechPort

Susan McGovern, Learning Consultant with SkillSoft, will demonstrate over 1,500 IT courses and 6,000 unabridged IT books available on the TechPort site.

Check the Tech Briefings home page for future sessions and to subscribe to the mailing list.

Tech Express

Thursdays
12:00–1:00 p.m.
Turing Auditorium

September 27: MS Office 2007

Shane Devenshire (Mentor Training) will be on hand to demonstrate the updated Office suite from Microsoft: MS Office 2007.

For the complete schedule, a map to Turing Auditorium, times, and a list of topics, visit the Tech Briefings site.

Upcoming Tech Training classes of interest to IT Services staff.

FileMaker Pro Level 1, Thu, Sep 20, 9:00–4:00, $275

Web Design: Protecting Documents on the Web and a Bonus Lesson on JavaScript, Thu, Sep 20, 1:00–4:30, $150

Excel for Finance Level 2, Mon, Sep 24, 9:00–4:00, $275

PowerPoint Presentation Skills, Tue, Sep 25, 8:30–12:00, $150

Access Level 1, Wed, Sep 26, 9:00–4:00, $275

Excel Level 2, Thu, Sep 27, 9:00–4:00, $275

Excel Level 2, Mon, Oct 01, 9:00–4:00, $325

Access Level 1, Tue, Oct 02, 9:00–4:00, $325

Adobe Acrobat: The Basics of Using the Full Version, Tue, Oct 02, 1:00–4:00, $195

Techport Open Lab, Wed, Oct 03, 9:00–12:00, Free

Excel Pivot Tables, Wed, Oct 03, 9:00–4:00, $325

Web Design Level 1: The Basics, Wed, Oct 03, 1:00–4:30, $195

Dreamweaver Lite, Thu, Oct 04, 1:00–4:30, $195

Photoshop Level 1, Fri, Oct 05, 9:00–4:00, $195

Special Webinars on WebEx Coming in October (no cost):

Overview of WebEx Collaboration Tools (TOD–3500), Oct 16, 10:00–11:00

WebEx Meeting Center Jumpstart (TOD–3501), Oct 23, 10:00–11:00

WebEx Recorder: Record and Replay Your Meetings (TOD–3506), Oct 31, 10:00–11:00

Sign up at http://axess.stanford.edu.

Classes with low enrollment may be cancelled one week in advance. More information on courses, registration, and training is available at the Technology Training Services site.

- Nancy Baumann
Technology Training Services

There was one new job postings for IT Services this week.

Req. #27134: Senior Application Administrator, 100% FTE, Range 4P4, Anne Pinkowski, hiring manager.

Duties include providing analytical and technical expertise in support of campus-wide enterprise applications. The individual’s primary responsibilities include: application administration and development, product management, vendor relations, applications strategy, security, architecture and design, and technical leadership developing and maintaining solutions and systems for clients.

To view the complete listings or to apply for a position, visit the StanfordJobs web site at: jobs.stanford.edu.

There are other open Information Technology positions at Stanford. To see what other opportunities exist on campus, link to the full list of all open IT positions at Stanford

"Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower."

- Albert Camus

A Note From Bill...

Last week, a contractor damaged a power line feeding Forsythe Hall. This started an unfortunate chain of events that led to loss of power in parts of the Data Center and to service outages affecting much of the Stanford community. The following summary reinforces the importance of redundancy and fallback strategies in avoiding such incidents. It also highlights that in rare events when the unfortunate does happen, it is incumbent on us to provide a calm, coordinated, and well-communicated response as the incident at hand is resolved.  I ask that service areas revisit existing recovery and business continuity plans to incorporate the lessons learned from this recent incident. 

Following is a brief summary of what happened.

Late Wednesday morning, a contractor performing pre-work for a new power feed to Forsythe Hall hit an existing power line with his jackhammer.  Fortunately, he was not hurt.  The accident damaged a connected transformer, tripped electrical breakers, and shut down power to Forsythe through the affected line. The building's generator—tested just six days earlier and setup to automatically start under such circumstances—failed to auto-start. This resulted in about half of Forsythe Hall operating from backup battery power.

Due to uncertainty about when electricians might be able to restore stable/continuous power to the building, many service owners with affected equipment chose to manually power down their machines to avoid a potential hard crash. Backup battery power was exhausted at about 12:15 p.m. Affected machines not yet manually shut down experienced a hard crash. We were able to start the generator at about 12:40 p.m.  Once generator power was established, systems began to come back online quickly. However, some systems were not back online until 6:30 p.m. Although the damaged power line was repaired earlier in the evening, we chose to have the generator continue to provide power to the building until about 8:30 a.m. on Thursday, when we determined it was safe to return to standard power.

The IT Services Satellite Operations Center (SOC) convened at 12:15 p.m. on Wednesday and ran until about 7:00 p.m. that evening. It reconvened at 8:00 a.m. on Thursday and was closed at about 12:30 p.m. when it was determined that operations were once again stable. Participants also conducted a full debriefing of the incident on Friday. The response and support from groups across the campus (e.g., Public Safety, LBRE, Facilities, EH&S, Hospitals, and countless others) could not have been better. The SOC is made up of staff from IT Services and other campus departments and organizations who come together during significant events to manage the response and coordinate communication.

I believe that such outages are rare because we recognize that keeping our systems running safely and securely is a fundamental purpose of our organization. We all work hard toward that objective. Still, regardless of how rare, we must carefully look at these events to see where we can make improvements to our processes and procedures that will further minimize the impact of such occurrences to our clients. That effort has already begun. If you would like more detail about the event, or the lessons learned, I encourage you to contact your manager or director.

I want to thank everyone in IT Services, and our incredible partners across the campus, for their hard work and truly collaborative effort. I also want to thank our clients for their patience and willingness to work with us through the event.

- Bill Clebsch
IT Services

Account Management

For those of you who work directly with clients, and others who are just curious, this is an update on the current Account Management program and team.

The brief definitions: the Account Managers (AMs) build and maintain partnerships with clients who use the services we provide. They provide a single point of contact for those clients, help them navigate our services, and negotiate service level agreements (SLAs). The Account Management function also supports a liaison program in an ongoing effort to keep the communication open with those groups for whom we don't have Account Managers in place. This enables us to understand their business needs and to share information with them. The liaison program is staffed by the Client Services Executive Director and Directors.

Over the past months, there have been some changes in responsibility for the AMs and a new staff member has joined the group. Brian Leetham started in May as the primary AM for Administrative Systems (AS) and the Department of Athletics, Physical Education, and Recreation (DAPER). We don't know what we'd do without him.

Liz Goesseringer has transitioned the AS support to Brian, and now has an additional role as Demand Manager for the Data Center in addition to continuing as the AM for the School of H&S. She is keeping track of Data Center hosting requests and working with the Technical Facilities group to accommodate as many requests as possible (see the article in the September 5 itsinbits for more information on the demand management effort).

Phil Reese, in addition to his client responsibilities, is active in the area of Research Computing and continues to serve as the support for C-ACIS—the faculty committee on computing.

Meighan McWilliam, after transitioning the DAPER support to Brian, has taken on a new role as the internal AM for IT Services in addition to her other clients. She's handling all of the orders for our internal projects and operations, which turns out to be a very time-consuming task.

Last, but not least, Jane Marcus continues to manage her client relationships in addition to staffing the TIPS group—a University-wide group of administrative experts. She is also helping to organize the IT Open House and chairing the Support Strategies and Planning (SSP) group.

The Account Management site includes a matrix that maps Account Managers to their clients, and also shows which clients have a liaison assigned.

- Nan McKenna
Client Support; Client Relations

Billing Process Improvements

The Order Management Redesign (OMR) efforts improved the quality of our clients’ ordering and billing experience. OrderIT is now the single point of entry to request most of IT Services' billable services, and those orders feed directly into the Pinnacle billing system. Clients receive email notifications when the order is reviewed, scheduled, or completed. They can also check order status on the OrderIT web site.

One of the key changes of OMR is the creation of the new Service Desk as the client point-of-contact for all ordering and billing questions. The Service Desk is responsible for the initial review of all orders entered into Pinnacle, including confirming that an order is well-formed and that it includes a chargeable Project Task Award (PTA). Once an order is fulfilled, Order Processing runs a quality assurance (QA) task, which includes new triggers to assure accurate accounting, and then sends the order to Billing Services in a Ready-to-Bill status.

Billing Services performs a final QA check on each billable work order and then closes over 100 orders each day. The initial order review process, custom triggers, new QA checks, and an updated interface between Oracle Financials and Pinnacle PTAs have eliminated many billing errors and rejected billing charges due to closed or missing PTAs.

Monthly billing rejects are down significantly and the total billing reject amount has decreased from $150,000 at this time last year to less than $8,000 for all of FY07, thanks to the efforts of Judy Pincus, who corrected PTAs on inaccurate monthly recurring charges (MRCs). 

Before OMR, clients had difficulty reconciling the financial expenditure statements from Oracle to the billing reports available on the OrderIT web site. The billing reports were long, difficult to decipher, and only available in PDF format. In addition, most services were grouped together under one expenditure code: "58210 Voice Services."

As part of OMR, 58210 expanded into seven expenditure codes. Clients can easily distinguish among services such as Voice, Network Access, Campus Card, or Construction Projects and then reconcile the Oracle financial statements to the new IT Services billing reports available on OrderIT. Clients rave about the new summary and detailed billing reports available in PDF or downloadable Excel format and they appreciate that the reports are also available by departmental organization (ORG). In addition, OrderIT users can now capture and schedule billing reports. For each account or organization, clients can set up a report to run each month and have that report emailed to them automatically without having to visit OrderIT to set up the report each time.

The training guide is updated with instructions and a video helplet was created to guide users through the capture and schedule process. Individual billing questions have dropped dramatically since the new client reports became available. Since OMR go-live, 90% of the recorded billing questions have been handled by the Service Desk and 10% were handled by the Billing Services group.

The OMR project goals included greater consistency in orders and order fulfillment of billable services, efficient order tracking, improved accuracy in billing, a single location for clients to order services and, most importantly, providing a better overall client experience from the time the order is placed through order tracking and fulfillment. Our clients are experiencing positive results since OMR has fulfilled these goals.

- Christine Soldahl
Finance and Administration

WebEx Upgrade

The Stanford version of WebEx is scheduled to be upgraded to the latest version of the online web collaboration tools in October. There have been enhancements and changes made to Meeting Center, Support Center, and Training Center—the three most widely-used tools at Stanford—plus changes to Sales Center and Event Center.

Some of the enhancements include redesigned screens for starting, joining, and ending meetings, as well as expanded controls and options for network-based recording. Meeting Center now supports up to six cameras simultaneously. In Support Center, used by our Help Desk and CRC staff, there is a new Customer Support Representative dashboard that includes methods to connect customers to the support session without requiring them to download the entire WebEx client.

We have arranged an online briefing to cover the changes and enhancements, which we think all current and prospective users would benefit from seeing. The "webinar" is scheduled for Thursday, September 20, from 1:30–2:30 p.m. via WebEx.

If you are interested, please send an email to Lori Wisneski and she will email you the WebEx invitation to this online update meeting.

- Chris Lundin
Client Support; Help Desk Services

New(er) Bike Racks in Jordan Quad

For all of you biking enthusiasts who are helping us to reduce our General Use Plan travel numbers, or who are using bikes around campus, I am pleased to announce that we will be installing upgraded bike racks across Jordan Quad. These will be a style that has a wheel-well and permit easier securing of your bike than the various models deployed around Jordan Quad today. Check out the racks by the MLK buildings if you'd like to view the model first-hand. The first four locations will be:

• Old rack between Spruce and Cypress
• Spine racks in two locations at Pine rack between Polya and Forsythe
• Racks in front of Forsythe

These should be done in the next couple of weeks. Following this we'll replace the busier racks at Polya.

If you are pleased to hear this news, please thank Christopher Kittle and Chris Lundin, without whom the upgrades wouldn't be going forward.

If you have concerns to express or questions about the replacements, please feel free to contact me.

- Jay Kohn
Shared Communication Services

Employee Referral Drawing Winner

Digant Kasundra is the winner of the Employee Referral $50 Visa card drawing for the month of September.

- Nilda Bonet
Human Resources

A regular summary of IT business, news about personnel, and pointers to other information of interest to IT Services staff. Coordinated, compiled, and published by the Communication Strategy and Standards Team. its in bits is published on the first and third Wednesday of the month.

Submissions are due by Noon on the Friday before the scheduled issue, to itsinbits-submissions@lists.stanford.edu for consideration. its in bits is distributed via email to its-all-staff@lists.stanford.edu and the subscription list itsinbits-subscribers@lists.stanford.edu People outside of IT Services can self-subscribe via mailman.

The next its in bits will be published on Wednesday, October 3, 2007.