12/16/2008

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

Agenda

• Tabulating CSS Resources on IS&T Projects, by Jan 7
  • CSS Supports other projects where it is not tracked.  Pat will be reaching out to
  • Good to come up with a nominal "rate" for Training team to have spent on the project.  To roll up Thalia, say, we need to be able to say "the Help desk spent 20 hours" creating support.  "Helpdesk Resource" rate, "Training Resource rate", "Pubs Resource rate" -- JUST during the project.
  • We need to pay attention to Ongoing Service Costs, where we have 75 services and a capacity model for 30.  
• About Surveys
  • A big fan of surveys if we demonstrate that we actually do some things with the surveys.
  • Show that you are acting on the comments.
• Interactions between Groups with respect to Service Outages
  • Transparency about our processes is the win -- be open about outages, own up to it, and then elicit cooperation. 
  • Glitches in our services -- it needs to be okay to notify downstream service providers that an outage has occurred.  Five days of downage for, say, the network feed is unacceptable.  We tend to burden ourselves to avoid burdening others but it increases fragility in the event of staff outages.  Succession planning needs to be built in to our organization.  When you leave the whole organization dead in the water with your absence, they come to resent you.
  • we never groom anyone from the inside for future leadership positions.  That's a failure in leadership.
• Budgets
  • You should know your budgets.  Anne does not operate the budget; the FBC does not operate the budget.  Decision-making is your responsibility.  No more "Anne can you get this for me".  There is a dashboard report that FBCs will be able to use and also the Team Leader and Manager.  You will be held responsible for your budget.  The goal is to make you as self-sufficient as possible.
• MIT-wide task force convened by Terry Stone et.al.
  • Tim McGovern was chosen for CSS to be our man in the group.
  • Maija Ahlquist also from ISDA.  Steve Buckley is the alternate. 
  • Criterion of broad experience across MIT and long history with us.  There are some fifteen subgroups.
  • Historically, "education" and "research" have been off the table in favor of "overhead" or "administrative". 
  • The IS&T budget number has not been given out.  MIT is looking for $150 million over three years.  (That "three years" is very important.)
• Cost Reductions Thinking
  • Be prepared to think about "if I had half the money I have, what would I do?"
  • If IS&T invested a few dollars, what could we take on?  VoIP?  Exchange?  How can CSS take on more work? 
• Organizational Aesessment proposal
  • Jerry is thinking actively in a back and forth with Terry Stone, who has a lot of experience with IT org assessments.  Still looking at January. 
• Exchange...
  • Preparing ourselves is done. 
  • If we decide to deploy Exchange, we'll have an action plan (led by Deb)
  • Email / Calendaring is not just Exchange. Future of webmail, future of techtime.  A service roadmap needs to be articulated by the end of February.  IT-SPARCC will need to be presented to.  An accounting of costs for the transition ought
  • Decisions need to be made before the end of February, in order to prepare next year's incoming students for the environment they're going to come to.
• Proposed Agenda Items process
  • please use this meeting as a forum for discussing things.  Bring your items.
• Round table Items
  • Oliver
    • HIPD going in front of TAP this week
    • Hardware printer recommendations will sponsor an IAP event to discuss printer recommendations.  Dell, HP and Xerox will be invited for print-off and discussion.  Chris Gresham is the platform coordinator. 
  • Mary
    • B7 is bring recabled in January and is impacting ATIC one day or so. 
    • Accessibility layer to the campus map in PDF is ready.  Nicely printed handout is currently unfunded.  Will be added to the interactive map later.
  • Barb
    • RT to Brio canned reports project is still ongoing.
  • Rob
    • Helen Rose is going to meet with John and Rob to get her input into the RT in Brio report process.
  • Chris
    • Dell Asset Tagging is just about to begin.
    • Dell will track Recommended Model variations and add an Asset tag to it, even if customized based on the recommended specs.
      Wilson asked if we could quantify the time saved to Property in having tings pretagged.
  • Mark
    • Exchange work is going smoothling and working on Drupal.
  • Anne
    • will be on vacation next week until after New Years.  Make sure your cost object-related forecasts are more or less accurated.
  • Jana
    • Telephone Help is starting to have a client sat of its cases.
  • Tom Jagatic for Security
    • Service outages of the network traffic feed.  Trying to do what they can do with what that have.
    • Pursuing one case they found out that someone was a DITR customer and it would have been good to know about that relationship. 
    • IE 7 vulnerability going around -- be careful about where you go with your browser.  IE usage is about 43% based on certificate renewal data.  Consistent message going out from us.
  • Jeff Reed
    • Last minute project to create a blog to gather the cost ideas for MIT.  Can lock it down to certificate holders; alumni are sketchy about certificates. Jeff's developer is home for the holidays.  Amon?  He's sick too.  Touchstone?  Too fast a timeline to absorb it.  Need to gather data all January in time for a financial conference Feb 15.  Israel Ruiz wants the community to be able to vote on ideas.  Google moderator could serve.  Google never deletes anything as that's very expensive; they only hide things; but there does not seem to be any risk from this approach as Google hidden data has never been hidden.  Google Moderator is not a slam-dunk but it's on the list of possibilities.
    • Q2 billing is due immediately; Quentin will execute the billing.
    • Webinar on Wednesday.
  • Wilson
    • Wilson travelling all next week.  Chris Lavallee will be Designate