Staff Happenings

Comings and Goings

The Service & Operations Center (SOC) and VAST team are pleased to welcome Kirk Han to IT Services. Kirk joins the Operational Specialists team in the IT SOC as Principal Unified Communications Operations Engineer. He worked most recently as the Unified Communications Team Manager and Solutions Architect at Milestone Technologies. Kirk joins us on February 1, and will be located in Forsythe 145.

The SOC also welcomes Craig Bernstein, transferring from the SUNet Backbone & Network Security Team. Craig joined the Operational Specialists team as Senior Network Operations Specialist. Over several years at Stanford, he's contributed to backbone projects and operations, particularly firewalls and network self-registration (SNSR). Craig will relocate to Forsythe 145 in mid-February.

- Lee Merrick
IT Operational Specialists

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

Tom Chou (Karen Zack)

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

Tips From Your Admin

Please remember that any equipment issued by Stanford is Stanford’s property and that it needs to be returned to Stanford. Managers should collect all equipment from departing staff, and employees who receive a cell phone upgrade should return their old phone to their building admin.

Please contact Cholada if you have any questions or need clarification on this policy.

- Cholada Chenhansa
Administrative Services

Tech Briefings

Fridays
2–3:30 p.m.
Turing Auditorium

Friday, February 3
What's New in Zimbra 7

Friday, February 10
SmartMart and HP

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

Technology Training Courses

Upcoming Tech Training classes of interest to IT Services staff February 1 to February 14:

Note: Click class title for more information or to enroll in STARS.

COMPUTING FUNDAMENTALS

Accomplishing More with Less

Integrating Social Media Tools to Promote Your Department

Accomplishing More With Less - Graduates Class (Webinar)

Overcoming the E-mail Overload (Webinar)

MICROSOFT OFFICE

Word 2010 (PC): Essential Time-saving Skills

Excel 2007 Macros (Webinar)

Excel: Pivot Tables, Level 1: Part 2 of 2
PC (2010)
Mac (2011)

Excel for Finance, Level 1: Part 1 of 2
PC (2010)
Mac (2011)

PRESENTATIONS AND PUBLICATIONS

Mastering Presentations with PowerPoint 2010

PowerPoint 2010 Techniques (Webinar)

Photoshop Level 1

InDesign Level 1

EMAIL AND CALENDAR

Outlook 2010: Managing and Organizing Your Email Inbox (Webinar)

Using Mailman for Stanford Email Lists

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Project 2010: Level 1

WEB DESIGN / CONTENT AND DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT

Editing Websites with Contribute

CSS1: Styling Your Site with Cascading Style Sheets

Introduction to Dreamweaver

The full listing of Current Courses is available at itsupcoming.stanford.edu, or on the Tech Training website. Find us on Twitter and Facebook!

Sign up at 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.

- Don Cameron
Technology Training Services

IT Employment Opportunities

There were no new job postings for IT Services this week.

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.

Quote of the Week

“When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt. ”

- Henry J. Kaiser

News

Atlas Implementation Project Update

The Atlas Implementation project is underway in a big way! The project goals are to replace OrderIT with a new ordering portal based on PMG, to replace the Pinnacle system with Stanford's existing Oracle's Enterprise Suite of products, to integrate many of our fulfillment systems, and to improve related business processes.

Atlas is a joint Administrative Systems/IT Services project, and we'll leverage our established partnership to make this project a success. The project has four phases. Phase 1 will be a pilot release in early July to a few clients, and it will focus on the Converged Communications (telephone) service.

In Phase 2, we'll roll out all the services currently ordered in OrderIT (35+ services) to all our clients with a targeted release date of October 31, 2012.

Phases 3 and 4 will address the remaining services not ordered in OrderIT, decommissioning Pinnacle, and optimizing the new system and related business processes. The Atlas implementation project plans to leverage much of the work from the Atlas Proof-of-Concept and Trio projects.

Phase 1 is well underway. The team is in place and currently working on functional requirements and design specifications. We have started development for data conversions and interfaces. System integration testing starts in March, and user acceptance testing begins in May. In addition, functional requirements and design specifications for Phase 2 start in February.

The Atlas Project is organized into several groups — the Atlas Steering Committee, Atlas Stakeholders, Atlas Partners, and Atlas project team — with several project leads over key areas. The executive project sponsors are Sam Steinhardt and Ganesh Karkala, the business sponsor is Kathy Pappas-Kassaras, and the project management team is Raj Lalchandani and Bernadette Drechsler.

You can find more detailed project information such as the project charter, the executive project status, and functional requirements on the AS Confluence website.

- Bernadette Drechsler
Project Management Office

SHC First Quarter Recap

“Preparation for 9/1...Preparation for 9/1... ”

You might have heard these words often after we signed the Stanford Hospitals and Clinics (SHC) contract. On September 1, IT Services embarked on a new and exciting journey that challenges the way things have been done for the last 20 years. Here's a recap of our first quarter supporting the SHC contract.

We kicked off with a bang: we had a Nortel outage! Our reliable phone system "hiccupped" in the first week, which affected many of our users. Our ITOC, VAST, and I&M teams collaborated in troubleshooting, identifying, and resolving the issue. While this first incident affected our clients and threw us into action, it also highlighted the tenacity, resourcefulness, and cooperation among these teams. This chemistry and mindset set the stage to change how we work and provided exactly what the doctor ordered.

During the first quarter, we saw lots of discussions, anxiety, and areas to clarify — such as how to implement the contract expectations and how the contract changed many aspects of our daily work. As part of a successful organization, we learned, we interpreted, and we adjusted.

On the customer-facing side, the IT Services SHC account team partnered with the SHC’s Office of the CIO (OCIO) to define the governance framework, perform outreach, and develop relationships with SHC clinical management and staff. The account team officially became the glue between IT Services, OCIO, SHC clinical departments, and SHC's network service provider, Accenture.

A major component of the contract includes the implementation of the transformation projects. These major projects allow our SHC customers to have more dependable, redundant services with the ultimate goal of achieving efficiencies and delivering excellent patient care.

The Amcom 4.6 upgrade was the first of these transformation projects. Overall, this project was a resounding success — it laid the framework for building a solid partnership between IT Services and Accenture. The partnership is critical to our success because Accenture is the network service provider to SHC, and we need to work with them continuously.

Our goals during this rollout included providing accessibility to SHC end users and reporting on our SLA metrics through
4-HELP, the SHC portal, and the SHC dashboard. The dashboard has been a hit, providing the OCIO instant visibility into our performance. We need to continue to promote 4-HELP and the SHC portal — they'll require consistent promotions to increase their utilization.

This first quarter was a learning experience for our organization. Our first priority was to truly understand how to be a service provider to a healthcare provider and deliver on a financially driven SLA. While we have had our ups and downs, we feel we are much better able to understand our client’s needs as well as our own strengths and areas for improvements. 2012 is a key year as we implement some of the major transformation projects such as Unified Communications Call Recording. We're learning and transforming continuously to become a proactive, responsive organization in 2012.

- Randall Chong
Client Relations

Down on the Farm(Share)

A new resource is available to Stanford researchers and students. On January 20, IT Services launched a high-performance computing Linux cluster for use in research requiring high-speed computing. The new cluster is called the barley cluster, augmenting the current corn and cardinal resources, and is free of charge to anyone with a full service SUNet ID.

As a part of this rollout, we've made a few other changes. First, our shared computing environment has been formally named FarmShare. FarmShare includes the barley, corn, and cardinal machines.

Second, we've updated and substantially rewritten the service catalog entries for the service; Shared Computing Environment now replaces the old UNIX Computing Resources pages.

Third, the support team created a wiki at farmshare.stanford.edu. The wiki contains the bulk of the technical information and documentation, allowing us to make quick changes and updates as the service evolves.

- Nan McKenna
Service Management

Campus Lockdown Test a Success

During the winter break, the Application Support team performed a test of the campus lockdown functionality of the Lenel OnGuard system. The purpose of this test was to ensure that if we ever experience a campus situation that warrants the need for a campus lockdown, we could perform that task as well as set expectations on how long it would take from the time of execution.

The results were fantastic! All wired devices locked down in only three seconds and the wireless locks secured after one minute, resulting in a complete campus lockdown in just seconds over a minute. Technicians out in the field ensured that the doors were secured.

We consider the lockdown test to have been successful. However like anything in IT, we did identify some areas for improvement, and we hope to repeat the lockdown test after we make them.

Thanks to all the individuals involved. It was important work for the University.

- Anne Pinkowski
Application Support

Celebrating Service Milestones

A reception was held on January 26, 2012 to honor our employees who achieved years of service milestones to Stanford University of 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, and 40 years during calendar year 2011. The reception provided an opportunity to formally thank the people listed below for their dedication and contributions. You can view the short tributes that were on display around the room.

Please take a moment to congratulate the following staff members on their Stanford anniversaries:

  • 45 Years of Service: Lea Roberts
  • 35 Years of Service: Kusum Kumar
  • 30 Years of Service: Melissa Fulkerson, Jim Knox
  • 25 Years of Service: Narlen Blue Arm, Bill Clebsch, Dave Delia, Gayle Delia, Bob Drewes, Laura Hamai, Jay Larson, Judy Pincus
  • 20 Years of Service: Mark Branom, Christine Capper
  • 15 Years of Service: Russ Allbery, Jim Brown, Anthony Hom, Cynthia Mijares, Misty Rivera, Anita Yen
  • 10 Years of Service: Dani Aivazian, Sarah Ansaldo, Nilda Bonet, Elma Buni, Cindi Cabal, Jason Griffie, Rodolfo Lota, Stacy Lee, Yue Lu, Giovanni Moraga, Paul Murray, Araceli Pulido, Ryan Quintos, Victoria Sarem, Suzanne Schiessler, Kim Seidler, Adam Seishas, Antonio Villegas, Bruce Vincent, Janis Welch, Ammy Woodbury

- Nancy Ware
Strategic Planning

IT Services Holiday Pictures

Just before the Winter Break, IT Services celebrated with two parties. The Holiday Party was held at the Faculty Club, and the Holiday Breakfast took place in the Polya conference rooms.

Want to relive the magic? See the photos. The password is ITS2011.The password is case-sensitive.

- Nancy Ware
Strategic Planning

About its in bits

A regular summary of IT business, news about personnel, and pointers to other information of interest to IT Services staff. its in bits is published by Information Technology Services 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, February 15, 2012.