ITS has published its sixth consecutive annual report. The 2018-2019 Annual Report highlights a collection of the department’s accomplishments. The report provides at least a glimpse into the breadth and depth of ITS’s relationship to the activities, initiatives and services of UNC-Chapel Hill.
Throughout the report, stories showcase the tremendous work that ITS and campus partners undertook to launch ServiceNow.
“Taking this wayward and languishing initiative of a better way to interact with information technology organizations, of asking for help, or reporting a problem, from vision to reality in less than 3.5 months — with more people from outside ITS than inside it — was unprecedented,” said J. Michael Baker, Interim Vice Chancellor for IT and Chief Information Officer.
The ServiceNow project, he said, “has become a best-in-class exemplar for other institutions.”
During the year, a much smaller project also gained much attention and cheers from many in the campus community — the 1-year Onyen password expiration.
Stories in the annual report range from long-term partnerships like the 10-year relationship between the Center for Faculty Excellence and Teaching & Learning to short-term joint efforts like Enterprise Reporting’s data analytics work with Financial Aid and Admissions or with the Operational Excellence teams.
The annual report gives a sense for how ITS furthers individual projects and how ITS prepares the University for future needs. Two such stories that demonstrate these themes are Esports and the UNC Check-In mobile app.
The annual report, Barker said, “also illuminates how we’re accelerating our capabilities with cloud providers and how Research Computing’s relationship with Google Compute Platform is extending and enabling research.”
In still other coverage, readers learn that the Information Security Office continues to improve the risk assessment process and has released an InfoSec podcast. That podcast is like CarTalk for IT security practitioners or anyone who wants to know more about information security.
In two efforts that involved many groups across the University, ITS updated the Financials modules of ConnectCarolina to PeopleSoft version 9.2 and in support of the University’s plan for enterprise Tableau, Infrastructure & Operations’ Middleware Services team deployed in Amazon Web Services an institutionally scoped Tableau system, to campus.
It’s worth noting, Barker said, the things that are not featured in the annual report.
“You will not see stories explaining how ITS is involved every time you view a webpage, read an email, make or change a calendar appointment, have an antivirus update, get a paycheck, record your time, fire up Zoom, post to Sakai, print a term paper, add or drop a class, sit in a classroom where the instructor does anything other than lecture, make a phone call, pay a bill, post a position, report a phish, etc.,” he said. “You will not see a recounting of attacks the firewalls block, nightly backups to local systems, nightly backups to Microsoft Azure, files read or written, sign-ins to anything with an Onyen or with multi-factor authentication, etc.”
There’s a lot of “the other stuff” that is critical for the day-to-day operations of the University, but that everyone expects to occur flawlessly without a second thought, like keeping the lights on. Big or small, high profile or behind- the-scenes, ITS’s accomplishments toward efficient, effective and innovative technology support the work of the University and its academic, administrative and research users.
The 2018-2019 Annual Report was built on WordPress, the University’s central content management solution. The entire report is available in digital format only.