The Hub: Published By, For and About ITS

As ITS Manning construction continues, several interesting milestones are taking place. Continue Reading

The first Town Hall Meeting for 2006 is planned for next Wednesday, April 26, and all ITS staff are encouraged to attend. Staff are asked to gather at 3:30 p.m. in 121 Hanes Art Center for an opportunity to hear updates on current ITS activities from Dan Reed, recent activities of the IT Strategic Planning Committee and divisional progress reports from the assistant vice chancellors. There will also be an opportunity for a question and answer session.Please plan on joining us on April 26!

SPA Exempt and EPA staff are reminded that monthly leave sheets for March are due to ITS HR this Friday, April 21. Please submit monthly leave sheets even if no leave was taken. Send SPA exempt records to Melissa Harris and EPA leave sheets to Diane Strong. Both are at CB #1150.

This is the ninth 2006 edition of The Hub, a weekly newsletter published by, for and about ITS. The goal of this publication is to provide timely information about the services and activities of our department and to support the ITS community. We welcome your comments and suggestions and encourage you to submit your story ideas and announcements to its_communications@unc.edu by 5 p.m. Friday, April 7, to be included in the next issue.

ITS has played a significant supporting role as UNC–Chapel Hill continues preparing for reaffirmation of its accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS), the regional accrediting body. From Tuesday
through Thursday next week, a peer review committee will visit campus. Since campus awareness and support is an essential part of the evaluation, don’t be surprised if you’re asked to participate in a brief interview about reaccreditation. Here’s what you need to know. Continue Reading

In the Service Managers Council meeting today, Judd Knott, AVC for Infrastructure and Operations, applauded four of his staff members who were selected as Exemplars. We’ve got pictures!

Lisa Lipscomb nominated Jay Bazemore, Matt Conley and Derek McGhee in January. Lipscomb oversaw the distribution of more than 400 individual leave reports and appreciated the team’s creating an efficient way for her to send them by secure e-mail.

Roger Monteith was nominated in February for re-designing and re-writing a broken critical process used in the printing of hot memos and General Administration and General Finance. Working “tirelessly and diligently to complete these tasks under difficult circumstances and emergency deadlines so that services were met as scheduled,” Roger wrote, tested and implemented the programs; developed new procedures and trained other employees to use the new system.

Winners of the On the Spot Award for March have been announced. This group becomes the pool from which the winner of the Exemplar Award will be selected.

A group of people was nominated for work on the network connectivity project in the Rizzo expansion. Telecommunications’ Jim Gogan, Todd Lane, Dennis Payne, Lee Edmark, Roy Caudle and David Valleroy were recognized along with Financial Planning and Human Resources’ Karen Parrish.

Ryan Turner of Infrastructure & Operations was named for his work with a console management tool at ITS Franklin.

Lori Mathis of Teaching & Learning has assisted employees at the Kenan-Flagler School of Business with synchronous software.

Congratulations to all!

Please take a minute to read about an ITS success story that arose from the collaborative efforts of your co-workers.

We recently created the ITS System Performance and Monitoring group, a cross-functional, open-forum meeting of database administrators, system administrators, developers and operations staff across ITS. The group’s goal is to improve production performance through active system monitoring, problem analysis and change management processes during daily, interactive meetings.

The improvements already made illustrate the great things possible with the integrated, collaborative culture we are building. By combining the expertise of several groups, the performance monitoring group has already established daily
reports to facilitate group interaction and problem solving, created a process for monitoring and testing planned changes and migrations, initiated collection of performance monitoring data for outside review and prevented many problems from reoccurring by collaboratively conducting root cause analyses.

The group has also modified old processes and developed new ones to improve the flow of information and maximize project efficiency. Roger Monteith releases a daily report of CICS transactions and CPU limits to Enterprise Applications managers to help analyze resource use and modify transactions. The group also collects system monitoring suggestions from peers both from within ITS and outside of ITS to update and advance operations.

Customers have also begun to notice improved support. The group has increased utilization of the Operations calendar and ITS Change Notice system. This has improved communication regarding planned changes and enabled users to find more detailed information if necessary. In addition, mainframe performance has been improved by the migration of FACSII validations and TSM backups to other systems.

Because of its open-forum setup, many people have contributed to this group’s success. A few of the dedicated individuals include Mimi Bennett, Chris Kaman, Ray DeCristofaro, Tony Rall, Simon Spero, Roger Monteith, Jim Etheridge and Bob Lesser.

Thanks again for your continued efforts!
Dan