In attendance:
Jim Coleman, Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor
Bob Shea, Vice Chancellor for Finance and Administration and Chief Financial Officer
Tina McEntire, Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Management
Terri Shelton, Vice Chancellor for Research and Engagement
Donna Heath, Vice Chancellor for Information Technology Services and Chief Information Officer
Julia Jackson-Newsom, Associate Vice Chancellor for Strategy and Policy
Joe Ames, Director of Administrative Technologies and ITS Strategic Alignment Officer
Jeff Whitworth, Associate Vice Chancellor for Enterprise Technology Infrastructure and Chief Technology Officer
Topic: Overview of ITS 2020 Teleworking Strategy
Context: ITS has been grappling with a severe shortage of physical space on our campus for a long time. We have moved and consolidated and reduced the size of our offices and cubicles over the course of many FDC-led space reconstruction projects until we are at the point where we can reduce our on campus footprint no more and we have a critical division wide space shortage. Before the COVID-19 crisis, ITS didn’t have enough space to house our employees. Now we have the additional requirement of social distancing within our spaces to keep our staff who need to be on-site safe.
Our critical on-campus space shortage combined with other several key drivers have led us to revise of our ITS teleworking strategy. These factors include,
- recognition that many (though not all) highly technical positions can yield dramatically improved productivity when working in an effectively managed remote teleworking environment,
- understanding that getting staff who can successfully work remotely settled and productive in their telework environment as soon as possible can yield greater resilience, less work interruption and increased productivity independent of operational conditions on our campus,
- strong ITS leadership focus on moving to a culture of accountability in which ITS staff are measured on performance against institutional, divisional and workgroup goal achievement, and
- recognition that public universities can’t compete with industry in attracting and retaining the top IT talent nationally, and our ability to build a highly skilled future workforce must include recruiting and enabling work outside of our current geographic area.
Topic: Enterprise Identity and Access Management
Context: Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems are the backend technology infrastructure responsible for securely initiating, storing and managing user identities and access permissions. In other words, IAM systems ensure that users are who they say they are (authentication) and that they can access the applications and resources they have permission to use (authorization).
For nearly 20 years, our campus managed student, faculty, staff and visitor identities and access using a solution called CSAM (Computer Systems Account Management) that was developed in-house long ago by programmers in ITS. The CSAM system served UNCG well for a long time, but to say that it is now obsolete is a gross understatement. Upon completion of a robust RFP process, ITS partnered with Moran Technologies (https://www.morantechnology.com/) in 2018 to conduct a campus wide IAM needs assessment, product recommendation and implementation roadmap for replacing our legacy CSAM system with a new modern vendor-provided IAM product suite.
Based on approval of these recommendations by the prior ESC, a multi-phased, multi-year project was launched in Q1 2019 to replace CSAM with Microsoft Identity Manager (MIM). As part of the implementation project, a number of strategic decisions were made by the prior ESC. The rationale, implications and continued viability of the strategic decisions that underpin our campus IAM strategy and ongoing project program need to be understood and validated or revised by the current ESC as the basis for progression of the project work.
Decisions for IAM continued to 11/19.