Communications Technology Roadmap

Progress

The project team has been divided into two work-groups.

Core Team - Consists of various subject matter experts within ITS who are currently charged with supporting communications technology services from the following areas: technical, customer, training, business office and help desk support.
Advisory Team - Consists of members from the campus community representing their departments as well as the needs of their constituent students, faculty and staff. The Core and Advisory teams will initially meet 2 to 3 times and divide into their committees. The committees will meet periodically to investigate and define the campus user needs, the technical options available, and supporting policy recommendations and funding needs.

The CTR committees have all met at least once and a few themes have emerged from these meetings.

Pricing and funding for central services are not transparent.
Billing for ITS services is not equitable since some services subsidize others.
There is a need for multiple types of funding for services: central funding for public services, billing for large private requests, and billing for small private requests.
There needs to be a process for transforming a private service to a public service, including changes in how the service is funded and communicated. For example, wireless access points were originally funded by departments that were able to afford the infrastructure, but now that wireless access has evolved into a universal demand on campus, there is need for central funding, an architecture policy for delivery of infrastructure, and ongoing support.

Some “common good” services and infrastructure should be available to all of campus. Examples include blue phones, elevator/emergency phones, email, cellular service, and building security.
Some “common use” services should be available to all of campus. Examples include Wi-Fi, easy to use video technology in classrooms, audio and video conferencing, voicemail, and affordable VoIP.
A definition identifying “common good” and “common use” services needs to be developed.
A definition identifying “common/central hosted” and local services need to be developed.
A definition of service “families,” or unified communications, needs to be developed and which services within those “families” will be centrally provided needs to be determined.
The various classes of users need to be identified and what communication features they require to complete their jobs needs to be determined.

Personas work was reviewed on 4/2 and changes were made and posted to the ITS site on 4/3. Next meeting is on 4/9 – Steve Kraal, Pat Davis and Patti Spencer will review the personas with their various constituencies to verify accuracy. I am beginning work with setting up a service catalog.
An emergency response role will be created (Sandra and Steve K. to collaborate)
The results of the personas findings for students should be provided to Admissions. The same is true for new faculty – we should be able to say – this is the communication technology that has been determined that you can count on having when you arrive here, and these services will be supported.

Some communication services are considered to be more like utilities. Services that fall into that category are email from anywhere to anywhere, voice communications to support staff business functions, wired voice services for security, emergency notification in various forms.
Official campus communications typically come via email. In some instances there are constituents whose education level, technical knowledge level, or native language make official communications via email more challenging to receive and understand.
Service catalog will need to reflect these themes.

Are UT employees required to have a UT business number? Identity ‐ what does the number represent? Can faculty/staff opt out?
What is our policy/obligation to faculty not on this campus regarding communication services?

Vast areas of traditionally separate technologies are converging on the Internet.
There are tremendous changes taking place in the industry in terms of both features and costs. This enables new ways to accomplish communications for the university, moving from internal to external providers. Examples include mobiles phones and Google Voice.
While technology may enable change, end-users may not be willing to accept that change.
Technology choices have an impact on university infrastructures, which results in costs.
The technology committee believes there is room to change the historical principals, such as availability, but needs input from others to determine how far that should go.
There exists a technical chasm between "business phone services" and "plain old telephone services."

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