November 2012 IT Town Hall Meeting

The second IT town hall meeting was held from 3:30-5:00 PM on November 1, 2012 in the Procrastinator Theater at Montana State University. The Chief Information Officer, Dewitt Latimer, was the main speaker. 

Dr. Latimer began the meeting with updates from the first town hall meeting. 

• The IT Center is looking to establish a visioning committee and funding model working group. Volunteers and nominations of research faculty can be sent to cio@montana.edu.
• The search for a Chief Technology Officer continues. Currently there are two candidates: Thomas Lamb from East Carolina University and Kurt Eckert from Ashland University. They both have interviews this month. 
• The IT Center updated their organization chart.
• Planning and Programs Office is working with campuses to develop the Enterprise IT Strategic Plan.
• University and Bozeman IT Governance plans were proposed.
• The Common Identification and Password Taskforce implements a four-campus policy which recognized login standards and requires exceptions to it to be vetted through the CIO's office. This should also better integrate the introduction of NetID/password into student and employee on-boarding process to eliminate login confusion.
•  The campus WiFi was improved when core controllers were replaced to achieve higher performance. The login process is now simpler and more accessible. We do, however, still need input as to which buildings should receive wireless improvements first. 

Dr. Latimer addressed new topics after providing updates for the previous meeting's topics. 

He addressed the need for a redundant ISP for the campus-wide area network. Currently, there is no redundancy to the east or in a local loop. We have an ISP running out to Seattle. However, if that were to be cut, our Internet would be lost. We need to have a cable going east to Minneapolis to protect us from losing the Internet. 

OpenMSU will empower staff and faculty to optimize mission support success through long-term, sustainable changes based on thorough data collection and campus input. It is scheduled for completion on November 9. The IT Center looks forward to participating in designing and implementing approved (funded) IT-enabling solutions. Click here to visit the OpenMSU web page. 

Dr. Latimer discussed campus e-mail problems and their potential solutions. His goal is to get all faculty, students, and staff on one system, whether it is Gmail, Microsoft Office365, or Microsoft Exchange. He would like feedback from the MSU community. 

Dr. Latimer addressed the need for improvement for MSU's IP Address Management. 

He also spoke of decentralized versus distributed IT staff. Currently, the campus is running on a decentralized IT staff approach which often leads to duplicate efforts, inefficiently allocated support resources, inconsistent user experiences, and inconsistent adherence to university IT standards. With the distributed IT staff approach, the staff will report to both their funding departments as well as the Office of the CIO. This will minimize some of the problems that are present because of the decentralized approach.

Dr. Latimer led a Q&A for the remainder of the meeting.  Read about the Q&A. 

View the presentation slides.