The Information Technology Leadership Council (ITLC) is a standing council with the mission to advise, provide input, and develop recommendations regarding information technology infrastructure, processes, services, standards, and systems to the District-wide Information and Instructional Technology Governance Council. ITLC is also charged with identifying and completing district-wide collaborative projects designed to improve the efficiency and/or effectiveness of information technology use within the District.

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A major part of the 21^st Century Maricopa information technology-related initiative was to develop a district-wide information and instructional technology strategic plan.  The 2011-2016 District-Wide Information and Instructional Technology Strategic Plan for the Maricopa Community Colleges was developed by a cross-functional team of representatives of all colleges and all divisions at the district office.  The planning approach utilized included:

• development of planning assumptions
• identification of driving and restraining forces
• identification of the implications of both planning assumptions and driving/restraining forces
• development of a “future state” vision of how the use of information and instructional technology should add value in support of the Maricopa vision, mission, values, and strategic directions
• development of goals and strategies
• discussion of potential performance measurements

The vision statement for the use of information and instructional technology within Maricopa that was developed by the planning team is as follows:

We Leverage the Power of Technology to Enable Success

To help Maricopa achieve this vision, the planning team developed the following seven goals, along with potential strategies for achieving each of the goals:

Goal #1 Student Success: Provide information and instructional technology solutions that enable student success.
Goal #2 Administrative Efficiency:  Provide information and instructional technology solutions that promote effective and efficient organizational decision-making, communication and operations.
Goal #3Professional Development:  Facilitate a culture of ongoing professional development that fosters the effective use of information and instructional technologies.
Goal #4Innovation and Collaboration:  Promote a culture of innovation and collaboration within the Maricopa Community Colleges to facilitate creative uses of technology, maximize the use of shared resources, and improve efficiencies in the use of information and instructional technologies
Goal #5 Planning and Funding:  Ensure appropriate resources are available for required information and instructional technology infrastructure and operations.
Goal #6 Appropriate Technology:  Ensure all facets of the organization have adequate and appropriate technology to achieve the vision, mission, and strategic directions of the Maricopa Community Colleges.
Goal #7 Information and Instructional Technology Services:  Provide customer-centered information and instructional technology solutions and support.

This plan was presented to the Governing Board in January and distributed to the colleges and the district office divisions in early February.  Between now and mid-March, each of the colleges and each of the divisions at the district office are compiling their 2011-2012 Action Plans for information and instructional technology to align to the new strategic plan.  A consolidated, comprehensive plan will be compiled and published by the end of the Spring 2011 semester.

Click here to view the full text version of the IIT Strategic Plan with full appendices or here to view the full text version with abbreviated appednices

Special thanks to Jan Baltzer for contributing this article

Click here to see an Index of common ITS acronyms

The Network and Security team is comprised of Doug Harper and Paul Kruse - Enterprise Network Engineers, Jeff Caslake - Network Administrator and Ken Yee - Senior Network Technician.

DSSC ITS Network and Security Services is responsible for maintaining and designing a Wide Area Network (WAN), a Local Area Network (LAN) and a Data Center Network that supports the ten colleges and provides connectivity to the DSSC for Internet connectivity, interconnectivity to each of the MCCCD colleges, and direct access to centralized applications such as SIS, CIMS, EIMS and Email.

Network and Security  is charged with the protection of MCCCD’s network.  Security measures are evaluated and implemented to ensure that the network is available and stable.

We strive to keep current with the most advanced technologies in order to provide state-of-the-art Information Technology services to all of our college locations, students, faculty and staff.  In doing so, we work closely with the Colleges to ensure that they have access to DSSC for design, maintenance and troubleshooting.

In March 2010, DSSC ITS Networking completed an upgrade to the existing college WAN and Internet connections increasing bandwidth to provide greater quality of service in the support of teaching and learning.

To further support the mission of MCCCD and student success, DSSC ITS Networking is involved in the design and implementation of a District Disaster Recovery Data Center network.  The Disaster Recovery Data Center network will provide redundant connectivity from two service providers from each College’s main campus and additional Internet circuit from a separate service provider allowing for additional bandwidth and redundant connections.  The addition of this second network allows MCCCD to provide load balancing and fail-over for mission critical applications such as:

• Web Services
• SIS
• EIMS
• Blackboard
• Authentication
• VOiP (Voice over IP)
• Data Backup
• District WAN and Internet Services

Over the past 12 months, the DSSC network has had excellent performance in providing access to information systems and mission critical applications in the support of teaching and learning and student success.  Some network statistics from the past 12 months:

• 100% average LAN availability
• 100% average Data Center availability
• 99.812% Average Internet availability
• 4.75 Terabytes of Internet traffic
• 100% average WAN availability
• 7.656 Terabytes of WAN traffic 

 
Special thanks to Doug Harper of  DSSC ITS  for contributing this article

Click here to see an Index of common ITS acronyms

The ITS In Touch Edition, published October 2009, informed the MCCCD community of an ITS initiative for Project Management Training. At the conclusion of February 2010, 40 members of ITS will have received State of Arizona Certification through this learning opportunity. ITS also invited a member of Business Services, Human Resources and Curriculum to join us in the final session of training to enhance partnerships with those who work closely with our department in systems planning. This sets the stage for a common language and “standard for conducting our formally chartered projects”. Templates were developed last Fall and we are now working to institute these standards across our Division.

Those who will have received State of Arizona Certification by the end of February 2010 are:

Rhonda Barger, Robert Carrigan, Bettina Celis (Curriculum), Gary Chace, Jon Clark, Kathleen Cleveland, Margie Contreras, Miguel Corzo, Phil Cram, Steve Creswell, Bryan Ferguson, Marty Gang, Steve Goozdich, Jessica Green, Linda Hannigan, Doug Harper, Darrel Huish, Charla Hunting, Keli Jones, Jim King, Marjorie Klein (HR), Paul Kruse, Cheryl Laieski, Debbie Lain, Dustin Landagora, Rich Lang, Rod Marten, Jaime Martinez, Tony Martorana, Barb Matus, Joyce McQueen, Earl Monsour, Gary Nusbaum, Don Outland, Jeff Park, Jason Pociask, Pedro Rubio, Thom Saudargus, Chuck Sharp, Debra Stevens, Teresa Summers, Lori Threlkeld, Carl Ward (Business Services)

 Special thanks to Keli Jones of  DSSC ITS for contributing this article

Click here to see an Index of common ITS acronyms

The Library Technology Services (LTS) team provides functional and technical support for the Integrated Library Management systems.  In addition, they are responsible for providing acquisition, cataloging, interlibrary loan, physical processing, and programming services in support of the MCCCD Libraries.

LTS, a team within DSSC ITS, directly supports the teaching and learning mission of MCCCD and student success by providing services that support information resource recovery.  A few other services provided by LTS are:

• ordering and receiving library materials
• creating records for information discovery and use
• maintaining access to district-wide electronic information databases
• maintaining the integrated library management systems software, hardware and associated databases
• maintaining the Interlibrary Loan system (ILLIAD)
• mediating ILL requests
• training college library staff on system functionality
• providing reports and statistics
• managing the licensing of electronic resources
• participating in district-wide library committees

LTS is comprised of two areas: Library Technical Services and Library Programming.

The Library Technical Services area includes Thom Saudargus, Director, Lori Threlkeld, Project Coordinator, Stan Cieplinski, Acquisitions, Kathleen Miller, Cataloger, Robynn Turley, Cataloger/ILL and Rachael Miller, Processing/Acquisitions.

During Fiscal Year 2009, Library Technical Services were responsible for creating 16,908 purchase orders, paying 1,133 invoices, creating 40,032 bibliographic records, creating 37,195 item records and providing physical processing for 33,650 items.

The Library Programming team is made up of Cheryl Laieski, Enterprise System Administrator and David Steele, System Administrator.

The Library Programming area is responsible for all software upgrades and application management of library applications hosted by DSSC ITS, as well as working closely with other ITS departments on hardware maintenance, network access and backup strategies.  During Fiscal Year 2009 the Library Programming area implemented EZproxy, an authentication application to provide remote access to subscription databases.  In addition, they completed  the district-wide implementation of WebFeat, a federated search solution for library resources.

MCCCD consists of 14 separate libraries supporting teaching and learning by providing access to information via multiple channels.  The MCCCD Library Catalog is available 24/7 at Horizon Information Portal.

Some additional MCCCD Libraries Statistics:

• 422,470 Bibliographic records (unique titles)
• 682,384 Item records (books, DVDs, magazines, journals, etc.)
• 48,500 electronic books
• 25,249 electronic journal titles
• over 2,600, 000 Searches
• 236,915 Checkouts

Special thanks to Cheryl Laieski of DSSC ITS for contributing this article

Click here to see an Index of common ITS acronyms

The Enterprise Systems team (a.k.a. Systems team) is responsible for the physical technology assets, including servers and storage, used by DSSC ITS to provide services District-wide.  The team provides the stable platform that supports all enterprise information technology services as well as the large enterprise systems including SIS, Email, CFS, HRMS and EIMS.  Additionally supported are 37 websites and over 150 departmental systems that range from roof repair tracking systems to student transfer information systems.

The Systems team, managed by Richard Lang, is composed of three overlapping specialties: 1) Unix-type systems (Linux, Solaris, HPUX), supported primarily by Robert Carrigan and Chuck Sharp; 2) Windows systems, supported by Kevin Sprague, Larry Davidson, Bruce Barry and Josh Brown.  Kevin and Bruce are also responsible for storage; 3) Michael Cervantez, the newest member of the team, participates in both the Unix and Windows groups.  Together this dedicated team represents over a century of experience.

The Enterprise Systems team manages more than 600 servers ranging from virtual machines to 32 CPU Unix high performance servers.  Management includes industry and financial analysis to predict the most efficient way to provide computing power to our customers.  It also requires matching the available computing options to the needs of application specialists and database administrators in ITS.  Once equipment has been purchased, the Systems team supervises the installation of the equipment and prepares it for use.  This includes installation of a quality checked operating system configuration, up-to-date patches, anti-virus, backup software and monitoring and control software.  Depending on the application, various levels of support are provided to application specialists who are installing application software.  Including redeployment of existing servers, this process is done more than 200 times each year as needs change and old equipment is replaced with new.  In addition to installing new software, maintenance of patches is challenging at this scale.  Over 12,000 patches are applied over the course of the year.  Through adoption of a high level of automation, this can be done efficiently by a relatively small staff.

The Systems team also manages a large storage area network (SAN) providing reliable, high performance disk storage.  Over 140 Terabytes of storage are provided by this system.  This is equivalent to about 40,000 DVDs.  This storage is used by 60 high performance servers and can be quickly redistributed to other servers as needs arise.  Storage is matched to various systems balancing cost effective, high capacity storage and more expensive, high performance storage with the needs of specific systems.  Storage is also located on separate arrays for redundant systems preventing the loss of a single disk array from causing data loss.  Periodic analysis of the arrays verifies they are performing as designed.

Enterprise Systems also provides many behind the scenes services needed for information technology to function.  Active Directory and DNS systems allow servers to see each other and for people to utilize them.  Anti-virus systems protect both servers and desktops from catching bugs and interrupting service.  File exchange systems allow for the secure exchange of information between MCCCD systems and outside agencies.

An industry leading monitoring and management system helps ensure that all of this equipment continues to provide reliable service.  Agents collect performance data from each system, which is then available for use in diagnosing problems.  In addition, an automated system reviews the data each night and reports extreme events.  This has allowed the Systems team to identify viruses and hung programs before they impact end users.  Automated systems in the storage arrays and backup libraries provide notification of hard drive problems before a hardware failure occurs.  Servers also report component or impending failures, allowing them to be corrected quietly in the background.  In addition to looking at the details of the servers and storage, a transaction test system mimics end user activities to provide near real-time data on the end user experience.  While the former systems assist in the daily activities of the Systems team, this system provides information needed by MCCCD IT leadership to project system upgrade needs.

Every effort is made to prevent problems, but when they do occur, the Systems team as well as other ITS teams have the technology to resource the necessary people and processes to respond on a 24/7 basis.  DSSC ITS staff members are usually diagnosing and repairing problems, either remotely or on site, in less than one hour of any reported failures.

The Enterprise Systems team tracks industry best practices and methodically implements appropriate new technologies.  DSSC ITS was an early adopter of server virtualization, leading to a reduction in cost of nearly 80% for many new and replacement servers.  This has allowed departments with limited budgets to be able to adopt technology that would not have been feasible without virtualization.  This system and its development have been recognized with the DSSC Innovation of the Year Award and was a finalist for the Computerworld Best Practices in Infrastructure Management Award.  Always trying to increase efficiency, the Systems team recently adopted a Netapp filer for desktop file sharing.  Using its technology, which eliminates the storage of duplicate copies of data, we increased the efficiency of desktop file storage by nearly 30%.

The most recent Enterprise Systems project was to develop and deploy a state of the art backup system to protect all of the data and services offered by DSSC ITS.  This system has the capability of backing processing at 96 Gigabits per second, which is almost 100 times faster than a typical network connection found at work or home.  This speed is needed to complete backups during the night as to not impact our customers during the day.  It will store backup data on both disk and tape, allowing for both rapid recovery and the low cost and stability of a traditional tape backup.  When complete, the tapes will automatically be created and stored at an off site location.

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

Click here to see an Index of common ITS acronyms

Did you ever wonder….

• who manages the Peoplesoft/Oracle environments that MCCCD uses to pay their employees?
• who makes sure that SIS is up and running 24×7?
• who mantains the Oracle architecture that keeps track of our Purchase Orders?
• who makes sure that a student who registers on the Web can access SIS in a matter of minutes, to sign up for classes?
• who supports the database architecture for 45th day, Year End, CDS, IRIS, DSS, RDS, etc.?

One of the teams in the engine room running the machinery that ‘keeps the trains running’ is the MCCCD Enterprise Application and Database Administration (DBA) team.  This is the technical teams behind the applications.  They install, configure, patch, maintain and monitor the Oracle and Peoplesoft applications behind our Enterprise Applications. They are the technology layer that our infrastructure, functional and development staff interface with on a daily basis to keep systems like HR, SIS, CFS and others running smoothly.  The MCCCD Enterprise Application and DBA team is part of District ITS working in what is known as the Common Services Area.  They are currently responsible for the day-to-day operations of all our mission-critical applications.  The environments they manage and support is one of the largest Enterprise architectures in higher education and is comprised of the following:

- 120+ Oracle and SQL Server databases running on multiple operating systems such as Linux, HP-UX, Solaris and Windows.
- 33+ production and application servers.
- 11+ process scheduler servers.
- 60+ development, QA, Training and upgrade instances.

Their primary mission is to ensure that the Enterprise Applications serving MCCCD faculty, staff and students are up-to-date and running at peak performance.  They manage and support all our Enterprise Applications, including: SIS, HRMS, CFS, BDS, Resource 25 (R25), EIMS, BOEXI, RDS, CDS and DSS, among several others.

The team is organized as follows:

Linda Hannigan - Assistant Director Strategic Information Technology.  Linda is the manager of the Enterprise Application and DBA team.  In addition to day-to-day management of this team, Linda is responsible for several SQL server databases.

Bryan Ferguson - Senior DBA.  Bryan’s primary responsibility is HRMS.  He makes absolutely sure that we have a system available to generate paychecks every other week.

Joyce McQeen - Enterprise Application Designer.  Joyce’s primary responsibility is SIS.  She makes absolutely certain that staff, students and faculty have a system available every day for registering for classes, paying tuition and posting grades, among other activities.  Joyce is an Oracle Certified Professional DBA.

Gary Chace - Senior DBA.  Gary’s primary responsibility is CFS.  He makes certain that MCCCD can do business on a daily basis using our Financial systems.

Tony Martorana - Senior DBA.  Tony’s primary responsibility is SIS DataGuard/Fail-over.  In addition, Tony is our backup DBA for CFS and the peson responsible for the daily health checks of SIS and several SQL Server databases.

Jeff Park - DBA.  Jeff’s primary responsibility is R25.  In addition, Jeff is our backup DBA for HRMS and resident engineer/programming expert.  If a vendor cannot build it, Jeff certainly can.  He is an Oracle Certified Professional DBA.

Jaime Martinez - DBA.  Jaime’s primary responsibility is the EIMS databases.  In addition, Jaime is our backup DBA for SIS and our in-house expert in Oracle RMAN backups.  He is our most decorated in-house DBA to date, holding a countless number of certificates.

Miguel Corzo - Director, Strategic Information Technology, Common Services.

The team responsibilities include:

- Support for production, Development, Test and QA environments for multiple database vendors, software releases, operating systems and hardware platforms.
- Deployment, administration, configuration, management, recovery and availability of all MCCCD Enterprise Applications.
- Performing database and server security, performance tuning, capacity planning and assisting with application upgrades/bundles and production migrations.

 Special thanks to Miguel Corzo of DSSC ITS for contributing this article

Click here to see an Index of common ITS acronyms