Here’s What You Missed is a quarterly roundup that highlights a slice of the accomplishments and milestones achieved across OSU IT over the past four months.
Campus may have been quiet over the summer months, but IT remained busy wrapping up projects and initiatives and freeing capacity in preparation for new ones come fall. Here are a few things you may have missed:
Welcome to our new teammates
UIT hired two positions and welcomed back a familiar face for a third:
- Customer Experience hired Peter Owechko as the HMSC IT Manager
- Office of Information Security hired fomer student Tarren Meyers as a Lead Security Analyst for the SOC
- Welcome back, Diana Lindsley! Diana is serving as a project manager for the endpoint management project and is helping with the Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) project
Summer BBQ
UIT hosted a summer barbecue at the JSB in August — our first in-person gathering since the 2019 holiday party. There were burgers and hotdogs, friendly cornhole competitions, raucous rounds of jenga, and many, many Hawaiian shirts.
Annual Report
Annual Report 2021-2022 has launched! OSU IT has made significant strides over the last year, working to create capacity, build new capabilities and advance the university’s strategic goals and actions. We have done some incredible things together, and this report serves to highlight IT’s accomplishments from across the university.
Security
Tom Ordeman kicked off the Vulnerability Management Committee that will help address and mitigate risk across the university. Questions about the Vulnerability Management Committee can be directed to Tom Ordeman.
Link Oregon + Extension Broadband
Network + Telecom worked with Link Oregon to test and finalize the network architecture to bring Extension locations into the OSU network, greatly increasing bandwidth and digital capacity at these locations. The first to move this summer was the Burn Eastern Oregon ARC.
Lean Six Sigma Training
UIT and DFA kicked off the Lean Six Sigma training in August. UIT’s Carolyn Rothwell describes the training and its impact from her perspective:
“The Lean Six Sigma (LSS) training kicked off in August with a two-day in-person event. The interactive nature of the event helped us move quickly through business process improvement concepts and tools in a fun and practical manner. The Lean method’s alignment with UIT’s mission to create capacity and deliver value was instantly apparent. Focusing on your user is critical. The users define value, and we work to provide it. For each activity within a process, we need to ask if what we are doing is adding value (material changes that deliver value to the user). If not, there is waste in our process that we can work to eliminate. I immediately saw processes through a new lens, quickly identifying approaches that could make quick and impactful changes.
We are moving deeper into the training and applying the 5 LSS phases (DMAIC: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control) to current OSU projects. Leveraging current OSU projects rather than textbook examples allows for valuable hands-on learning with guidance and support. The training and project combination will result in tangible process improvements and develop a depth of knowledge to continue to apply the LSS methodology to many more OSU projects and processes.”
— Carolyn Rothwell, UIT Communications
Google Migrations
- Student Email: New student email creation will be migrated to Office365 beginning November 1, 2022, so all incoming fall 2023 students will start with O365 email accounts.
- Google Storage: The top 100 users of Google Drive storage were identified, and a plan was developed for migrating those users to alternative storage solutions prior to December 1, 2022.
Landmarks + Milestones
- The GSD (Getting Stuff Done) teams wrapped up their work over the summer and presented the results to Andrea and the UIT exec team. Go GSD teams! This work will help inform what goes on the IT Roadmap for the upcoming year.
- The first annual Disaster Recovery failover test was a success, and the failover from the Phoenix, Arizona, production environment was completed in 1 hour and 53 minutes. This is another critical step in ensuring that the university can remain operable even when external disasters strike.
- Digital Research Infrastructure installed the research storage expansion unit in June, reducing storage capacity from 87% full to 32%, allowing for more research data to be stored securely.
- Office of Information Security’s test implementation of Jamf Connect in our environment was successful; this will allow macs to easily authenticate logins against M365/Azure Active Directory instead of using local accounts or having to be bound to Active Directory on prem.
- The Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) project is moving along and OIS is making good progress on the endpoint component of Smart Access. IGA is part of the foundational three, which is critical to the success of our IT Roadmap and IT Strategic Plan.
- The Student Experience CRM RFP was completed and work is now underway, bringing the university closer to delivering a more personalized and streamlined student experience.
Tell us what you think
Summer Features
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Here’s What You Missed: Summer 2022
Here’s What You Missed is a quarterly roundup that highlights a slice of the accomplishments and milestones achieved across OSU IT over the past four months.
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IT Year in Review
University CIO Andrea Ballinger talks about our progress on our Grand Expedition and highlights some of the incredible work the OSU IT community has done over the past year.
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Building the Oregon Connection
Through our statewide networking partnership, Link Oregon, OSU is an active participant and leader in statewide activities aimed at closing Oregon’s digital divide and promoting digital inclusion. IT capabilities at OSU locations across Oregon have increased, including research labs, extension offices, and agricultural research stations.
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Snail Traps + Bird Boxes: How Roots IT enables researchers
In the College of Agricultural Sciences, Roots IT works to solve problems and enable technical support for researchers, providing ways of capturing and storing data while out in the field as well as providing for on-campus needs.
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Highlighting IT Excellence
Many teams and individuals across IT at OSU have demonstrated excellence in their roles in the last year. This highlight is just a fraction of our OSU IT community members who have demonstrated excellence in their work, been recognized for their achievements, or received relevant and important certifications.
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Plenary Recap: Spring22
The spring ’22 plenary, held on June 2, focused on communicating our key activities and initiatives leading into fall 2022, and the ways in which OSU IT is advancing the university’s top goals for technology and data within Strategic Plan 4.0.
