Recently, DSSC ITS took the first step towards our goal of increasing our common approach to project management.  12 individuals attended a 40-hour training and passed a rigorous exam covering formal project management principles.  One of the significant concepts was that project managers are placed in the role of creating change and introducing innovation.  This is in contrast to the role of managing operations that is focused on gradual improvement.

We learned our approach to projects should be distinctly different than our approach to optimizing day-to-day operations.  We also gained fresh insights about establishing an initial project charter as well as employing a formal project closure process.

Another group of 12 staff members will receive training in October.  This will lead to an ITS standard for conducting our formally chartered projects.  These changes will not occur overnight, but we have taken the first important steps.

Special thanks to Darrel Huish, Vice Chancellor of ITS, for contributing this article

Click here to see an Index of common ITS acronyms

One of the most important things DSSC ITS is responsible for is backing up mission critical data.  Backups provide protection for student records, email, financial data and human resource data.  In addition, the backup system provides the ability to recover systems that host this data ensuring that hardware and system failures do not result in extended loss of service.  Backups provide assurance that the effort of our staff and the trust of our students is protected.

Over time, backups have been a challenge.  With over 500 systems to protect, the days of attaching a tape drive to a server and keeping track of tapes with a spreadsheet are long gone.  Growth in storage, exceeding 200 Terabytes also creates challenges.  Learning from harsh lessons in the past, DSSC ITS has developed a strong automated backup system that backs up and verifies the success of the backups without human intervention over 18,000 times per year with greater than a 99% success rate.

With continued growth, DSSC ITS is again expanding our backup capability.  The Legato-based backup system that has been in place for the last seven years has grown nearly 10-fold and is showing its limitations.  Over the last eight months, DSSC ITS has studied its backup growth patterns and as a result has developed a new backup system based on state-of-the-art Symantec software and Netapp virtual tape library.  In keeping with our fiduciary responsibility, the existing Quantum tape library, the largest expense of the existing system, will be reused.  The new system is capable of completing full backups of all DSSC ITS systems to disk in less than 12 hours at night then replicates the backed up data to tape.  Once fully deployed, the new system will provide increased protection and scalability over the existing system.

Tapes are currently shipped off site either daily or weekly, depending on content, to protect against the loss of data in the event of fire or other disasters harming the DSSC Data Center.  The new system will ship all data daily to a new facility automatically.  This will improve assurance by removing errors during tape handling and save the cost of the current daily couriers.

The capacity of the backup system is bound both by size and time.  The backup system needs to be able to backup several hundred Terabytes nightly within the time that our systems have the lowest utilization, to make sure that we don’t slow them down when being used by customers.  The new system supports throughput of over 95 Gigabits per second, while typical desktops throughout MCCCD  support either 1 or .1 Gigabit connections.  This is a 10-fold increase over the existing system.  The system can also grow incrementally to accommodate new capacity requirements.

Due to the critical nature of backups, DSSC ITS has spent the last three months testing and verifying backups with the new system.  This provides assurance that during the transition, we will continue to provide MCCCD the deserved and expected levels of data protection.

Special thanks to Rod Marten of DSSC ITS for contributing this article. 

 Click here to see an Index of common ITS acronyms

MCCCD was recently successful in negotiating a contract extension with Blackboard to run through July 2011.  This extension was approved by the Chancellor’s Executive Council (CEC) in order to provide a reliable continuity of service for MCCCD’s eight Blackboard colleges, while also establishing a window of time where MCCCD can consider a change in direction.  CEC looks forward to the potential recommendations from the Alvarez and Marsal Efficiency and Effectiveness study, wherein the MCCCD strategy can be carefully formulated and pursued either with Blackboard or alternative vendors.

Special thanks to Darrel Huish, Vice Chancellor of ITS, for contributing this article

 Click here to see an Index of common ITS acronyms

Beginning in May 2009, a combined DSSC ITS team of HRMS support, CIMS and the Help Desk took it upon themselves to proactively make sure that all returning adjunct faculty members in the fall semester would have full access to the necessary systems and resources before the start of the new semester.  These resources normally include email, HRMS, SIS and Blackboard.

At first blush, this sounds like an obvious event that should occur automatically, but in reality, it is anything but obvious or simple.  The fall semester start up included 4,316 individual adjunct faculty members teaching over 8,400 separate classes.  With this kind of volume, anything can occur and usually does occur.  The vast majority of these instructors, particularly those who had taught classes in the spring or summer, were already established and moved into the fall semester seamlessly.

There are always, however, significant numbers of faculty who are first-time new-hires, returning faculty who have not taught in a year or more (previous fall semester), and of course, faculty who are transitioning from one college to another.  Each of these situations requires some level of manual intervention to make sure that the changes are completed correctly.

Here are some of the activities that took place:

• In the late spring, integration between HRMS and Blackboard was completed.  On a daily basis, Blackboard would sweep the entire employee population and create or reactivate access accounts for all active employees.  This assured an employee with an active job status access to Blackboard.
• In May, reports were developed for DSSC Payroll that would allow colleges to identify all faculty with a future teaching assignment who were not currently employed at MCCCD and did not have active system access.  These reports allowed the college HR offices to proactively review and rehire returning employees far in advance of the coming semester.  By the first week of August, between 200 and 300 faculty were rehired in this way.  Within 30 minutes of a rehire, the employee’s MEID and email account was reestablished and access was granted to email, HRMS and SIS, and by the following morning, Blackboard.  Changes were made to the HRMS system that would allow college HR staff to designate the “intended college” for an employee who was not currently teaching any classes.  In addition, a new procedure was put into place between college HR and District Payroll to better manage current active employees who taught at multiple colleges.  This allowed college HR offices and Help Desks to better facilitate the transfer of email accounts form one college to another.

With the recent roll out of the new College Identity Management System, additional steps are being planned to continue to smooth out and further automate the process wherever possible.

Special thanks to Don Outland of DSSC ITS for contributing this article. 

 Click here to see an Index of common ITS acronyms