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HelpUCSF Campus Report May 2006
UC Information Technology Leadership Council
May 9-10, 2006
Administrative Systems Advisory Committee (ASAC) Five-Year Plan
A number of activities continue as reported in our last update. The most significant is the go live of the Research Administration System (RAS) that occurred on April 24, 2006.
RAS includes five PeopleSoft modules (Grants, Projects, Contracts, Billing, and Accounts Receivable) that will facilitate pre-award and post-award management. A memo from the project's executive sponsors, Executive Vice Chancellor Washington and Senior Vice Chancellor Barclay, announcing the successful implementation of RAS is available in PDF format (application/pdf, 21.9 kB, info).
UCSF's growth in sponsored research demands administrative excellence, while our decline in core administrative funding necessitates achieving efficiencies. RAS aims to:
- Improve administrative service delivery by enhancing individual staff effectiveness through the provision of innovative technology
- Achieve process efficiency gains including eased departmental coordination and enhanced reporting capabilities
- Advance UCSF compliance and risk management through an integrated improvement approach that comprises policy, process and technology
RAS components benefit Principal Investigators, Grant Analysts and Department Managers in these ways:
Proposals/Awards: Proposals are generated into awards in one integrated system that provides departmental and central administration staff with access to the same set of accurate, standardized and up-to-date information that is integrated with our core financial systems. Streamlined process reduces award set-up time to less than five days from current cycle time that can exceed 40 days.
Post-Award Management: Departments can generate a variety of reports including budget status reports with projections from the campus reporting system. This reduces data entry into multiple departmental systems and minimizes monthly reconciliations to central systems.
Billing and Accounts Receivable: Automated billing processes to generate monthly bills when due, replacing manually intensive processes. Billing is integrated with an Accounts Receivable module with robust reporting capabilities.
For more information, visit the UCSF Link Web site at http://ucsflink.ucsf.edu.
Information Security
ITS Enterprise Information Security (EIS) continues its efforts to secure UCSF's enterprise information resources.
- Security Education Awareness and Training (SATE):
- SATE program has been further defined and developed.
- Security Awareness Handbook has been distributed to the Campus community
- FY2005-06 Security Roadmap Projects Status:
- Perimeter Security: Project implements a "security layer" at the network edge. No vendor was able to meet the original RFP and a new RFP is in progress.
- VPN Enhancements: Project implements SSL (Secure Socket Layer) VPN and upgrades to IPSEC (Internet Protocol Security) VPN. ITS EIS is on target to complete by the end of the fiscal year.
- IDS Phase 1: Project implements IDS (Intrusion Detection Systems) sensors at the UCSF Data Center border. ITS EIS is on target to complete by the end of the fiscal year.
- Centralized Logging: Project implements a repository for log management. ITS EIS is on target to complete by the end of the fiscal year.
- ITS EIS is defining a joint project for securing information on medical devices in collaboration with representatives from UCSF Medical Center.
- Changes to UCSF Campus Administrative Policy 650-16: Information Security
and Confidentiality are proposed and pending approval to include addenda that
cover:
- Roles and responsibilities
- Minimum standards for network connectivity
- Incident handling and response procedures
Information Technology Strategic Plan
As previously reported, the members of UCSF's CIO Group (the executive subgroup of the IT Governance Committee composed of the clinical, academic, and administrative IT leadership at UCSF) have been mapping out strategies not only for their individual organizations but also for the IT governance body and the enterprise as a whole.
On May 4, 2006, two members of that group, Randy Lopez and Jonathan Showstack, presented a proposal to the UCSF Chancellor's Executive Committee that outlined creation of a new, combined organization to be called the Office of Academic and Administrative Information Systems (OAAIS) that will address the existing and emerging information needs of UCSF's campus, including those in the academic community, in an organization that combines a new emphasis on academic research, education, and administrative needs with the current activities of Information Technology Services.
Showstack and Lopez will jointly direct the new organization, reporting jointly to Executive Vice Chancellor Gene Washington and Senior Vice Chancellor Steve Barclay. Washington and Showstack will be primarily responsible for academic information systems; Barclay and Lopez primarily responsible for business systems.
To read the entire proposal go to http://its.ucsf.edu/about/itlc/it_transition.pdf.
On March 15, 2006, ITS closed the last of 16,580 accounts on its legacy UNIX email system, completing a process that began in December 2004 when ITS announced its plan to significantly enhance existing email services by transitioning UNIX customers to a centrally-supported Exchange system known as mail@UCSF. The mail@ucsf system is integrated with a UCSF-wide global address list that is shared across the School of Medicine and Medical Center email systems. Departments with locally-operated email systems also had the option of moving their email users to one of the central servers run by ITS, the School of Medicine, and UCSF Medical Center.
Highlights of the new system include:
- Centrally funded for campus faculty, students, and staff
- Macintosh and Windows compatible
- Robust and reliable web access
- Security: systems is fire-walled, scanned, and backed-up
- Secure email meets HIPAA requirements
- 24x7 server and Exchange support
- Highest-availability hardware
- Discounted Blackberry wireless service
- Accounts up to 500 MB
- ITSA email address continuity: the ITSA address to remain valid indefinitely
The new email addresses are in the firstname.lastname@ucsf.edu format, providing convenience (no need to look up complicated email addresses such as those built around student ID numbers); mobility (staff can take an email address from department to department; students to postdoctoral or faculty positions), and unity (a sense of belonging to the University as a whole, not just a department or school).
During the transition process, ITS Customer Support Services (CSS) staff held a number of Town Hall meetings to provide the campus community with complete information and to answer technical staff and individual users' questions and concerns about the up-coming change.
ITS CSS staff first worked with departmental Customer Support Coordinators (CSCs) to complete the transition of whole departments from the UNIX system to mail@ucsf. (Over 7,500 accounts in 57 departments were dealt with this way, and a total of 2,410 became mail@ucsf customers.) Next, current students' accounts were reassigned, and all new students arriving in fall 2005 received a mail@ucsf email account.
The next - more challenging - task was to contact all account holders who did not have a CSC. ITS CSS identified 9,050 customers who remained on the UNIX system. To facilitate the transition, staff built a self-service Web interface where customers could register for a new account and provide necessary information about, for example, mail forwarding preferences. Over the next three months, 1,500 accounts were transitioned this way.
Web sites for departments, labs, and other official UCSF organizations that had been hosted on the UNIX server in association with the old accounts will be hosted on either ITS or School of Medicine servers.
The current breakdown of accounts administered by the three major email "providers" at UCSF is as follows:
Medical Center IT: 7,304
School of Medicine ISU: 4,886
ITS: 10,561
Grand total: 22,751
NGMAN: Next Generation Metropolitan Area Network
UCSF is in the last phase of negotiations with the two final bidders in the NGMAN process for fiber and DWDM services/equipment. In addition, we are preparing to release a vehicle to procure the Layer 2/3 Ethernet equipment for the NGMAN network. Migration to the new network is expected to begin in 2006.
Technical Support Partnership (TSP)
Implementation of the Technical Support Partnership (For a full description, see previous report at http://its.ucsf.edu/about/itlc/1_31_2006.jsp) is well underway:
-
TSP Successes
- Clarified support responsibilities
- Delineated technical support roles
- Developed two core curriculum classes
- Developed system to track contact info
- Integrated role/contact info with IT Service Management (ITSM)
- Broadened communications
- Made enterprise ITSM solution available
-
TSP Next Steps:
- Complete TSP curriculum classes
- Allow roles maintenance via Web
- Provide for department maintenance of roles
- Expand roles/ITSM integration
- Link roles table to payroll system
- Link individual customers to specific technical support providers