January 2013 IT Town Hall Meeting

The IT winter town hall meeting was held at 3:30 PM on January 17, 2013 in the Procrastinator Theater at Montana State University. The Chief Information Officer, Dewitt Latimer, was the main speaker. Over 80 people attended in person and more than 350 people tuned in and watched the live video stream.

Dr. Latimer referenced the power outage that occurred the morning of Monday, January 14^th. He explained that a routine generator test was being performed when a transfer switch shorted, thus causing the servers/network to crash. Weekly generator tests will now be moved to 4:00 PM in hopes of avoiding another morning power outage.

Dr. Latimer announced updates from the Program Management Office (PMO). The web site is live at www.montana.edu/pmo. On the website you can find the current list of projects and instructions for submitting project requests. The four-campus IT Governance structure is under construction along with individual campus IT Governance Councils. The PMO is now handling IT procurements for all four campuses, under the direction of central purchasing. For assistance with IT purchases, email ITprocurement@montana.edu.

The distributed support model was discussed in the meeting. The IT Center is assisting departments in establishing appropriate IT leadership roles under this model. Searches are underway for an IT Director for the College of Letters and Science as well as for Auxiliary Services. The distributed IT Director will be accountable to both their funding unit as well as the Office of the CIO.

For the majority of the meeting, Dr. Latimer led a discussion about solutions to the campus e-mail problems. He provided the audience with four options for campus e-mail and discussed the pros and cons for each option.

The options are:

1.      Local upgrade

2.      Bring your own e-mail (BYOE)

3.      GApps

4.      Office365

The audience gave feedback and voiced their preference for e-mail options. With a raise of hands, it seemed that most of the audience would prefer to move all campus e-mail to Office365. However, it was acknowledged that the audience did not equally represent faculty, staff, and students. Dr. Latimer will continue to work hard at conversing with different communities on campus so that everyone may voice their opinion on campus e-mail solutions. 

View the presentation slides.

The next town hall meeting will be March 6th at 3:30 PM in the Procrastinator Theatre.