Increased Productivity

• Use IT to extend and enhance library services.
• Provide timely and accurate data resources and transaction services that are accessible and usable for faculty, students, staff, alumni, and parents.
• Provide timely and accurate business systems that are accessible and usable for faculty, students, and staff.
• Provide timely and accurate student systems that are accessible for faculty, students, and staff.
• Provide IT services and support to overcome physical and temporal boundaries.
• Study and communicate the effectiveness of the use of IT in academic and administrative processes.
• Enhance faculty, staff, and student IT expertise.

Status of Projects and Initiatives are updated in January, May, and September.

Applications

Integration of Student Records Projects

Various student record-related systems development activities have been brought into a single Student Records program. The Student Records Data Rationalization project, which upgrades the student records transaction system from VSAM to a relational data model and adds enhanced services, was reorganized to provide clear lines of responsibility for each of the deliverables. The work was rebudgeted and replanned as an “agile methodology inspired” implementation project. (Although not strictly an agile approach, we created teams of business analysts and programmers who are jointly responsible for the deliverables.) The new structure, which has now been in place for a quarter, appears to be working well. Productivity and team morale have greatly improved and commitments for deliverables are being met.

With the transaction system (SR2) and degree audit (NDARS) now moving forward, work has started on bringing student data into the campus data warehouse. The next steps will be to coordinate the migration of various campus student data marts into a rationalized model and to architect the student portal strategy to bring all student-facing services, including class management systems, into a coherent framework.

Office for Protection of Research Subjects (OPRS)

UCLA and its partners RAND Corporation and Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science were planning to have the new system for support of institutional review boards (IRB) ready by the end of 2005 for deployment in early 2006. This project has, however, encountered severe difficulties since our last report. Extensive discussions with the vendor are taking place, but at this time it is still unknown how or when the issues will be resolved.

Academic Personnel

The Dossier Action Tracking (DAT) system is a web-based database application that tracks the progress and status of all academic personnel actions through their complex academic review process. The DAT system eliminates duplication of data entry and increases the transparency of the academic personnel review process by utilizing a shared action tracking database. DAT produces an official electronic “historical record” that provides departments with ongoing eligibility business rule automation. Additionally, DAT’s functionality includes tracking of: sabbaticals and leaves, faculty details, waivers and degrees as well as new appointments and recruiting outcomes.

The DAT team is currently in the process of training academic departmental staff to use the new system. Orientation and training began in November 2005 and will continue throughout the next year. DAT will sync up with the School of Medicine’s action tracking system on a nightly basis by the end of the summer.

InfoEd

The Office of Research Administration has successfully migrated from the Coeus contracts and grants management system to InfoEd. Conversion of Coeus data into the InfoEd Proposal Tracking Module was completed in July 2005. Implementation of the InfoEd proposal tracking module primarily affects the internal operation of the Office of Contract and Grant Administration. In later phases the Proposal Development module, which allows online preparation and submittal of research proposals to federal agencies, will be rolled out to the campus research community.

Effort Reporting

UCLA is participating with four other campuses (Berkeley, Davis, San Diego, and San Francisco) and the Office of the President in an initiative to improve compliance with the regulations regarding effort reporting on federal contracts and grants. A new web-based Effort Reporting system is under development, which will replace the current Personnel Activity Reports (PAR). The system is currently being piloted by the Davis and UCLA campuses, and the production release is anticipated in February 2006. UCLA expects to implement the new system for Spring Quarter 2006 effort reporting, which would occur in late Summer 2006.

Campus Data Warehouse

The Integrated Data Warehouse project is nearly ready to roll out to the campus with a roll-out date planned for early April, pending final input by our Functional Oversight Committee. The Committee will meet on Feb. 15. The current plan to be presented at that meeting entails a campus wide forum that will present, demonstrate and discuss the four data marts that are integrated and ready for use along with the Cognos enterprise reporting tool that will be used for accessing the data. The forum will be webcast for UCOP, UC Merced, and anyone who can’t attend that day. We will have a panel made up of campus data stewards, Cognos support staff, and the Campus Data Warehouse team to provide information and Q&A opportunities.

Although the forum/rollout is the major focus for spring, we are also planning our move to SQL Server 2005 and developing the next phase of data marts.

Degree Audit Replacement System

Serving a broader range of students than the current system, the new Degree Audit (DAUD) system will provide services for undergraduates in the College of Letters & Science, the School of Arts & Architecture and the School of Theater, Film & Television, as well as transfer articulation information for all UCLA undergraduates. The new system is designed to replace a legacy system that was created in 1987 and has reached its capacity to accommodate the increasing complexity of UCLA degree requirements. Included among its innovative features and enhanced services will be an automated transfer articulation component, greater integration with the Student Information System, and an XML-based delivery component that empowers the creation of multiple web-based, interactive clients as well as customized reports.

The flexibility of the new system's modular design makes it possible to expand degree audit services to all students whose course records are maintained within the central campus administrative system and to provide administrators with the resource allocation data needed to inform efficient class-planning and other audit-related services.

Having received approval from the Integrated Student Systems Management Oversight Group, a phased approach in which integration with the Student Information System is initially minimized to conserve Registrars' and AIS staff resources for the benefit of the SR2 project is underway. Once the SR2 project is complete, a later phase of development will reconsider system interfaces in light of the new SR system and the increased availability of SR staff support resources.

The College Information Services office and its partners in Student Affairs are on track for the successful completion of the first phase of the new DAUD system to support the new Fall 2007 freshmen class. Work continues on the encoding of both graduation requirements and transfer articulation in the DARS vernacular. An initial assessment of people and processes affected by the introduction of a new DAUD system has been completed; component specifications for the production system have been completed, and the search for two additional programmers to support code development is nearly complete with one programmer hired and final interviews for the second position scheduled.

Common Infrastructure

Enterprise Directory and Identity Management Infrastructure (EDIMI) Project

The EDIMI project is currently performing final testing to validate phase I data loading and updating processes while systems teams prepare the hardware/software for production rollout. A test version of UCLA's web authentication service (ISIS) now uses the directory as its user attribute data source. The campus's Shibboleth server is also being prepared for a limited production rollout. URSA and CTS teams are continuing development work to integrate its systems to update the Enterprise Directory via its web service interface.

In addition, we are in the process of scheduling a Functional Oversight Committee meeting for this project. This will be a review of major issues that are coming to bear on the next phases of the project. We will know more about the current status after this meeting which will be held in February 2006.

Email Model

A new policy on establishing the use of email as an official means of communication for UCLA is in development.

All employees will be required to have entered into the Enterprise Directory a UCLA email address, though (a) they may still forward their email from that address elsewhere and (b) they may opt out of the published campus directory. Emeriti staff, like emeriti faculty, will be able to retain their email accounts, and retired staff will be able to have a persistent email account (forwarding only).

Implications for staff who do not now use email in the workplace (e.g. groundskeepers, food service workers, etc.) are under consideration, with the expectation that they will eventually be included in the policy. Also under consideration, is which directory fields staff can be permitted to update themselves through a self-service web directory application.

Students are also covered under the email policy. Development is underway for an official address email and a common (UCLA) logon thru the student transaction web (URSA) . Graduating students are eligible for lifetime email forwarding and several thousand graduates pursued this option in a targeted rollout.

Repositioning Information Technology Initiative

The UCLA Repositioning Information Technology initiative is moving forward on several fronts.

Security

The campus has created an Applied Security Task Force, comprised of technologists from seven distributed IT units. The primary goal of the Task Force is to become the authoritative security resource to the campus. Toward that end, the Task Force will:

• Design a way to work in an applied way to triage security incidents.
• Become a resource for security-related issues, e.g., a task force looking into encryption.
• Help units with security, e.g., penetration testing or network reviews.

ASTF members have already begun piloting the implementation of eEye’s vulnerability scanner, Retina, within their own units, with the expectation of being able to roll out this product with technical assistance to other campus departments by February 2006. As part of the pilot, REM servers - which aggregate, categorize and measure data collected by Retina and other eEye products - are being installed both centrally and in test units. REM will provide UCLA with much greater capability to profile the campus environment.

The ASTF has just begun meeting on a bi-weekly basis and is focusing on creating a communications plan that will include a web presence and a public relations campaign to make the campus aware of this new resource. The ASTF has also begun developing an emergency response plan for how to quickly notify the campus of network attacks and the best way to protect against specific attacks.

Murphy Hall Pilot

The campus has received an official go-ahead to consolidate Murphy Hall networks and email systems. This is a particular challenge given the number of networks at Murphy Hall. The Office of Information Technology is facilitating the effort and is in the process of forming work groups for the detailed design of a structured wiring plan for the building, a consolidated network design and a new security model. In addition to reaping cost and efficiency benefits at Murphy Hall, this pilot is particularly valuable because it will help set a course for a broader repositioning effort across the campus.

CNSI Next Generation Network Design

The campus is in the process of creating a team that pulls technologists from across campus to work together to design the next generation network. As part of this project, the group will focus specifically on the California NanoSystems Institute building, which is currently under construction. The challenge in this project is how to take a number of distributed networks and pull them together to create a shared management model. The CNSI is a multi-disciplinary organization and the fact that it is in the Court of Sciences makes it a good pilot for the campus to figure out how to build out an integrated security model and an integrated management model for an advanced services network.