applyuc (UCOP) Service Overview Governance Funding Knowledge Management IT Service Management Operations Strengths and Challenges

Transcription

1 applyuc (UCOP) Business Contact: Han Mi Yoon-Wu, UCO, Associate Director, Undergraduate Admissions, Student Affairs Technical Contact: Candace Jones, UCOP, Senior Applications Manager, Information Technology Services applyuc is the University of California s system wide web-based admissions system for interfacing with freshman and transfer applicants and managing admissions evaluation processes. applyuc has three modules: Application, Administrator and Batch to facilitate the admissions process. Steering Committee: The role of the Steering Committee was to assure funding and executive support, and provide guidance and decision-making on project issues with strategic or long-range implications during the implementation phase of the project. System wide Strategic Admissions Taskforce: The role of the SSAT is to advise the Vice President of Student Affairs on the identification and implementation of long-term costeffective technological and processing enhancements for the undergraduate recruitment and admissions process. Advisory Committee: The role of the Advisory Committee is to provide direction on complex requirements issues and set priorities for the project team. The Advisory Committee meets once a month. applyuc is funded through central UCOP funding streams. The functional team holds a budget of $1.1 million to cover operational costs in UCOP Student Affairs. The UCOP ITS technical team holds a budget of $1.8 million to cover operational and infrastructure costs. Subject matter expertise is managed by the core business partners in Student Affairs. Functional specifications, technical specifications and documentation are stored in local shared drives and SharePoint and are updated and referenced often. Campus partners have access to documentation via SharePoint. The service is managed jointly between Student Affairs and ITS holding weekly meetings to review incidents, requests and upcoming changes to the system. Changes to the infrastructure or code deployments are logged utilizing Service Now. A strong business relationship and partnership between Student Affairs and ITS is a key factor in project success. A robust, scalable technology architecture and infrastructure facilitates our ability to process data without an unscheduled interruption in service to date. In 2014, the system processed over 193,873 applications and over $33 million in application fees.

2 ASSIST Technical Contact: Carrie Gatlin, UCOP, Sr. Application Manager IT Lead UCPath, ASSIST ( is a database and web application hosted at UC Irvine that provides comprehensive advice on transfer between California community colleges (CCCs) and the state s four-year universities (UC and CSU). It centralizes information so that students can more efficiently transfer and be prepared to graduate. UC manages and is the fiscal agent for ASSIST on behalf of all three segments of California public higher education. The ASSIST public-facing site is a key resource for California community college students seeking information on how CCC courses map to requirements at UC and CSU campuses. The administrative components of the system are used by articulation officers at the three segments to populate course data and articulation agreements. The system is used by all nine undergraduate UC campuses, all 23 CSU campuses, and all 112 California Community Colleges. The ASSIST office consists of seven full-time employees housed primarily at the UC Irvine campus. The ASSIST Model consists of an Executive Management and Oversight Committee (EMOC) with a representative from each of the segmental offices. EMOC is advised by an inter-segmental Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) with a technical representative from each segment. The three participating segments jointly fund the annual operating budget for the current ASSIST system and support staff. The segments are also sharing the cost for the development of the replacement system, ASSIST Next Generation. The ASSIST support team maintains an internal Wiki with a list of known issues and information to support incident resolution. Incidents and Service requests are routed to a small team of functional analysts and escalated to technical resources as required. The program manager oversees the queue to ensure issue resolution. Currently is used for these purposes, with a planned deployment of help desk tools prior to Next Generation go live. ASSIST is the backbone of the California transfer function, and was the first statewide transfer database and web-based transfer articulation system in the nation. There are several risks and performance issues involving the legacy ASSIST infrastructure. The ASSIST team is working with the UCI IT team to plan a migration to UCI s virtual hosting service to address these issues while the Next Generation system is in development. The legacy ASSIST system was not designed as a data driven system, so integration with downstream systems is challenging. The Next Generation project will address that design issue and will focus on delivering a set of web services to facilitate interface integration.

3 Mobile Web Framework (MWF) Technical Contact: Rose Rocchio, UCLA, Director of Educational and Collaborative Technology, Office of Information Technology, MWF, which powers UCLA Mobile, was created in 2010, to help UCLA to implement a distributed approach to a BYOD mobile strategy. The principles of MWF include cross platform delivery, device agnostic delivery, graceful degradation, a unified mobile presence, distributed architecture, and modern web standards. The MWF collaboration grew to include seven UCs at one time, as well as external campuses. It is in currently in production at UCLA, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, and UC San Diego. As a community, MWF has evolved to include the Responsive Design movement, and is now called the Mobility and Modern Web Community, which gathers for an annual conference, see MMWCON. It is also evolving to include a new standard for sharing apps between campuses called CASA. ITLC created a subgroup called the Collaborative Technology Group or CTG. A sub group of this group evolved called the UC Mobile Collaborative Group. The UC MCG meets monthly via a phone to discuss mobile strategy, tools, new efforts and challenges of managing mobile content delivery. In addition, a developers group meets biweekly, that evolved out of our Mobility and Modern Web Conference. The Mobile Web Framework has been funded by UCLA s Office of Information Technology. However, it has had the benefit of significant contributed resources from several other campuses including UCSD, UCSF, and UCSB. The MWF team has largely utilized mailing lists and the cloud based code repository Github.com. The UC MCG team has also leveraged UCLA s Confluence based Spaces collaboration tools. The MWF project has utilized public and private code repositories at Github.com. Issues with the code were tracked in Github since the project is open source and carries the BSD license. The Mobile Web Framework offered UCLA and its UC Collaborators a very economical and engaging solution to going mobile early in the mobile era (2010). The approach of supporting a BYOD philosophy was welcoming to a broad array of UC technologists, who wanted to deliver content into this channel, without bearing the high costs and inconveniences of coding for native or specific devices. It was estimated that MWF saved the UC approximately $1million a year, in costs of delivering the same content using alternative options. UCSD, one of the first campuses to deploy a mobile app, went through a significant effort to select a framework when it transitioned away from the originally native terribly clever platform that Blackboard eventually bought. UCSD compared several alternatives and decided that MWF was the best option, and most aligned with their campus direction of supporting the distributed delivery of mobile content. As a challenge, it has been hard to get certain campuses to collaborate, but it has never been obvious why.

4 Patent Tracking System PTS (UCOP) Contact: Ron Franck, UCOP Innovation Alliances and Services (IAS), PTS is used voluntarily by all ten campuses to manage and track faculty inventions and related patenting and licensing activity. Examples of UC inventions that have been made available to the public by this process include the nicotine patch, the hepatitis-b vaccine, and the Albion strawberry variety. PTS serves as accounting system of record for ~$250 million in annual financial transactions. There are over 800 data tables and nearly 15,000 individual data fields. There are ~225 end users and another ~275 indirect users of PTS data. Note that PTS consumers are in the Offices of Research as opposed to an administrative organizational unit. for PTS is in flux. Currently, we rely on frequent communication with a small user base, including requests to campuses to aid in prioritization. We have designed a rigorous system and process to track our ~800 outstanding enhancement requests, including ranking by requesting campus, ranking by other campuses, and objective measures of risk vs. benefit. Supportive software was implemented 1/28/15. PTS is funded by UCOP. It is self-sustainable but at a level insufficient to deliver all enhancement requests. Frequent interactions including requirements gathering between a project management team with ~45 years relevant experience and a relatively small user base. Programmers have ~30 years subject matter experience. Provided and/or coordinated by a 5-person team at UCOP IAS. Programming is contracted to two outside vendors. Tools include a custom ticketing and development pipeline management system. PTS strengths include it captures cost and subject matter economies of scale that would be impossible at the campus level. PTS provides a modest level of customization to meet unique campus needs while maintaining overall efficiency. Examples: plant patents unique to UCD and UCR, and campus-branded web page skins. Campuses have been willing to share data, subject to appropriate permissions; facilitated by a robust and comprehensive role and permission management module. Reliable integrations with external systems We have some data architecture issues mostly attributable to the age of the system, while most other challenges have as their root cause years of less than optimal funding. A UC system-wide technical architecture to support system integration and cross (multi)-system reporting would be very welcome: Enterprise service bus and API management, Master data management, both for individuals and organizations, and customer relationship management

5 UC Review Technical Contact: Emily Deere, UCSD, Executive Director Enterprise Information Systems, ACT, UC Review workflow data storage system is an online faculty merit review application that is a shared service available to UC Campuses. The application and review data resides at the UC San Diego campus. The data is hosted and maintained by the campus DBA and security teams and participating campuses are able to submit requests for updates. Each campus is responsible for developing and maintaining data feeds and web services to support the application. Development and technical support is done by UCSD development teams. Participating campuses at this time are UC San Diego and UC Irvine. A formal governance program is in place for UC Review including an Executive Sponsor for each participating campus, management teams and PMO Office all working together to provide direction, review results, and identify and execute adjustments to ensure achievement of planned outcomes. UCSD Academic Personnel is funding 3 full-time developers for the ongoing development and support of UC Review and Recruit. UC Irvine Academic Personnel is funding one full time developer. UCSD s IT project management and code repository application, Team Forge, is used for knowledge management purposes. UC Irvine has access to it to this repository. Service management processes start with Tier 1 cases routed to the respective campus AP offices via a contact link on the UC Review site that points to the specific campus help desk of the user. For this first tier, a Business Unit Lead acts as first line of support for all end-user issues. If an issue cannot be resolved at the campus AP office, then a request is sent to UCSD ACT help desk through and is managed from our service management application, Footprints. Full executive support, frequent high-quality communication and clear roles and responsibilities aid in overcoming challenges and create an environment for success. The team uses a collaborative requirements and verification process to ensure campuses have input into the future direction of the service. Some challenges involved UC Irvine s requirement for customization and branding of the application. The development team extended the application to allow customization and branding for multiple campuses and yet still maintains one code base. In addition, interfaces with multiple data sources add to the complexity. Additional challenges include the differences each campus has in the review process, level of change allowed, reviewers in the process, etc. This has led to a constant set of unique requests from each campus that makes it hard to provide to additional campuses.

6 Supplier Search Technical Contact: Bill Sweetman, UCSD, Financial Systems Director, The Supplier Search shared service project is in the development phase at this time. This tool provides an easier to use and more feature rich search function over the search tool provided by the SciQuest ecommerce application, offering a simple way to filter for small/diverse businesses, search for a supplier based on the kinds of items they sell, and display contracted suppliers to the campus community. UCSD developed and deployed this application for campus use in UCSD will be piloting this new shared service with at least one campus in The UCSB procurement business owners have nominated their campus to go first. However, IT buy-in has not yet been secured because they don t know what level of work/support will be required. TBD TBD The business & support team manage requests, projects and releases in an application lifecycle management (ALM) tool hosted by the IT department, TeamForge. Incidents and service requests are first reported to the local campus help desk as a Tier 1 case. Escalation to Tier 2 is sent to UCSD s help desk, Footprints application, where depending on the nature of the case will be routed to the business office for response or IT department for investigation/resolution. Designed as a self-service and data driven application, campus administrators can control their campus user experience without creating services requests. The branding of the application is different per application as is the data and filtering functionality presented by the tool. There are administrative pages which allows provisioned users to control this without any work from UCSD s business office or developers. Hosting the application on a single instance reduces overall hardware and system administration costs and complexity of the software development life cycle.

7 Time Reporting System (TRS) Technical Contact: Ying Kussmann, UCI, UCPath IT Lead and HR IT Manager, Office of Information Technology, Stakeholder Contact: Radhika Prabhu, UCD, Project Director Accounting and Financial Services, Time Reporting System (TRS) is a web-based time reporting system. TRS is designed to collect employee work hours, acquire supervisor's approval, perform calculations in accordance with UC policies and collective bargaining agreements, and upload work time electronically to the Payroll Personnel System (PPS). The system is being converted to support UCPath. TRS is in use at the following UC locations: UCI, UCD, ANR, UCLA, UCOP and UCM. At this time, TRS does not have a formal governance model. There is instead a collaboration framework approved by all participating locations. Once a quarter the locations meet to discuss, approve and prioritize changes. This framework has served well in supporting system implementation and maintenance for over three years. The team is considering updating this model as part of the TRS UCPath Conversion Project to a more formal governance model. The current TRS system does not have a formal funding model or a central resource pool. The UCPath TRS Conversion project does have a central resource pool. UCI s wiki is used for documentation. All locations have access to TRS content in the wiki. TRS uses three tools for collaboration. 1) UCI s Jira is used for issue tracking and task assignment and is primarily used internally at UCI. TRS issues reported by other locations are tracked in Jira by the UCI team. 2) UCD s SubVersion source code repository (to be migrated to Git) is used to host the common code base. All locations have access to the TRS code base in the source repository. 3) UCI s wiki is used for documentation. The knowledgeable members of the TRS Work Group and their active participation has been key to the success of the project. The dedication and expertise of the UCI technical lead has been instrumental as well. Some challenges include, UCI currently carries a heavier load from a development and project management perspective. A more balanced resource utilization approach may be needed and the current funding model should be revisited. There may be value to have more formal governance and sponsorship on TRS for overall sustainability.

8 UC Recruit Technical Contacts: Shohreh Bozorgmehri, UCI, Director of Students and Academic Services Division, ; Max Garrick, UCI, Mgr IT Ops, UC Recruit is a software service for staff and faculty to efficiently manage academic recruitment planning, search, approval, and reporting processes. UC Irvine hosts, supports, and enhances the system for all the UC campuses. The UC Recruit Board ( Board ) is composed of leaders from Academic Personnel and Diversity offices from the UC campuses plus UCOP. The Board is responsible for project prioritization, budget recommendations, business process standardization, assigning subject matter experts ( SME ) to projects, and authorizing the use of the UC Recruit management reserve. Each campus plus UCOP contribute 1/11th of the cost to build, support, and operate UC Recruit. UCOP has also been instrumental in funding startup costs and high-priority enhancements. Funds are provided to UC Irvine s Office of Information Technology to pay for salaries, benefits, staff expenses, travel, infrastructure, and indirect costs. The UC Recruit team provides training and support to key administrators at each campus. The team also maintains in-tool help documentation, a comprehensive User Guide template that campuses may rebrand, and a project site that catalogs product enhancements, screencasts of product demos, integration guides, and API documentation. Academic Personnel Directors, Diversity Officers, or their designates submit enhancement requests via a Google form. These requests are automatically added to the UC Recruit Enhancement List (a Trello board) for further definition and prioritization by the Board. The project team (including SME) execute the project using the Scrum methodology and demos/releases every 2 weeks. Incidents are also managed within the Scrum framework. Reaching decisions is a highly collaborative process between Board members and the project team. Helping campuses see how product changes impact policy, process, workload, and training is a continual challenge. The project team uses Scrum to quickly change directions in response to feedback provided by the Board, campus administrators, and end-users.

9 UC Risk & Safety Shared Services Technical Contact: Safa Hussain, UCD, Director Information Technology Services, Provides comprehensive IT solutions in support of Risk Management and Environmental Health and Safety (EH&S) for ten UC campuses and five medical centers. Services include applications development, quality assurance, design, business intelligence, cloud hosting, service desk, system rollouts, project communications, elearning, and video production. The governance is based on the following: 1) Board of Directors provides counsel on major policy decisions. The Board is chaired by the Chief Risk Officer. 2) UC directors of each program (UC EH&S Leadership Council, Risk Managers Leadership Council, etc.) decide overall program vision and priorities. 3) Functional Workgroup is charged by program directors with determining and prioritizing the features set for a system. 4) Technical team and architects decide and prioritize technical debt. Centrally funded from the relevant risk programs (general liability, professional liability, etc.). The knowledge management is captured at the following levels: 1) Project level in Confluence based on contributions from the subject matter experts, who are appointed by the directors of the program. 2) Knowledge base managed by UC ERM Service Desk using the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) process implemented within ServiceNow. Incidents and service requests are initially captured in ServiceNow. DevOps methodology is employed by the operational support and product development teams to continuously deliver new functionality and bug fixes. Strengths: 1) Mature governance model with clear separation of concerns and responsibilities. 2) Strong Agile culture with innovative development teams. 3) Proven model with the rollout of 16+ systems UC wide since Weaknesses: 1) Lack of a central identity management and a systemwide person identifier resulting in investment of additional effort into developing a solution and workarounds, creating frustrations for the end users. 2) Initially garnered inconsistent support from some UC campuses. 3) Viewed as a UC Davis team.

10 UC Transfer Admission Planner (UC TAP) Technical Contact: Brian Alexander, UCD; IT Director, The UC Transfer Admission Planner (TAP) is an online application that allows students interested in transfer to UC to provide information about themselves, their academic history, and their transfer goals into a single website where UC admissions staff and local California Community College counselors can access. Students receive self-advising information about course transferability, UC requirements, and major preparation requirements per campus. California Community College counselors have access to their student s TAP for advising, evaluation, and communication purposes. UC TAP has been in existence since 2010 and all nine undergraduate UC campuses utilize it. The UC TAP project is governed by a combination of OP and campus stakeholders. It formed naturally out of an established committee on UC Transfer initiatives. Different stakeholders focus on different aspects of the project. Project funding comes from OP, split across different stakeholder groups (admissions and academic preparation). OP funded the pilot projects and continued to provide ongoing funds vs. recharging campuses. The technical staff has a very deep understanding of admissions business processes and receives direction from OP and campus experts on policy/procedure changes. UC Davis has an MOU with OP and the technical staff serve roles of project management, technical operations, and user support. In-house tools were developed to capture incidents and track their status/completion. For most campuses, the project fills a need that didn t exist. The rest were won over by a better solution. The UC Davis staff delivering solutions has a very high level of business expertise which lends credibility and an ease to work with. Initial challenges involved buy-in for a UC project at a local campus (web domains, accounts) and HR challenges in the area of staff classifications/compensation.