Office of the Chancellor > Speeches, Columns and Letters > CU-Boulder Information Technology Services Annual Retreat

CU-Boulder Information Technology Services Annual Retreat
August 1, 2007

A student takes part in an ATLAS classroom lesson.

Good morning, it's a pleasure to join you this morning. Thank you all for participating in this forum and for your commitment to professional development that directly benefits the campus. All of you are important members of our campus community and you have vital roles in campus life in many ways.

First of all, you provide the foundation for communication in our everyday work, through email, Internet access, networking capabilities, and telephone systems, and a host of other services and technologies. You help faculty, staff and students gain valuable skills and knowledge through hands-on training workshops and seminars. You support active teaching and learning techniques, such as clickers, smart classrooms, various audio/visual systems, computing labs, and a whole host of other creative and innovative approaches to the education of our students. You support faculty, students and staff through portals that coalesce important information and increase accessibility to course and business information. You support high-quality research and information technology tools for the CU-Boulder research and teaching community. And your efforts to install wireless systems around the campus are helping to provide the flexibility in learning and administrative practices that will allow students, faculty and staff anywhere-anytime access to web-based resources. The importance of this anytime-anywhere access on our campus cannot be overstated.

There are countless other ways in which you support and enrich the learning and work environment that exists here at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Suffice it to say, we could not do all of the things we do without your expertise and assistance.

The importance of IT security
Equally important in today's rapidly changing globally technological world is IT security—an ever increasing concern and both a personal and professional responsibility for our IT staff.

Information is an essential resource for all businesses today, and is especially a concern for educational institutions. Ensuring the security of the private information contained on our IT systems is vitally important to our students and their families, our faculty and staff, and the integrity of the university. As you know, our security can be breached in a number of ways—through system failure, theft, inappropriate usage, unauthorized access or computer viruses—and we must remain vigilant in protecting all of these areas.

I realize that security breaches are not uncommon across all aspects of the IT spectrum and constitute a growing problem. We here at CU have had to deal with several such incidents over the past few years. I also realize that no matter how good our security policy is, or how well the controls have been implemented, the security of our IT systems depends on you and the people who use them. All of you are our best line of defense, and everyone else in the university is counting on you to continually assess our security threats, implement initiatives to address them, and participate in appropriate training for prevention and response, as you have been doing. But we must do better. As we become more and more global in our research, teaching, learning, and business collaborations, it becomes increasingly more important that our systems remain secure to protect valuable information.

Flagship 2030 update
Speaking of the future, I would like to give you an update on the progress we are making to develop a new strategic plan for the University of Colorado at Boulder, an initiative that we call Flagship 2030 - Transforming CU-Boulder, Transforming Colorado, and to solicit your input for this process. But first, a little background. In my first campus address last September, I announced my intent to initiate a comprehensive strategic planning process for the university, with the goal of identifying the characteristics that we would need in order to continue to excel as the state's flagship institution. This process started with the appointment of a steering committee that held its first meeting in December.

As part of this process, we developed a website with updates, reports, and interactive features. During the spring and summer months we held open forums, conducted community surveys, and solicited input from the Board of Regents and thought leaders from around the state. In addition, I talked with community leaders, alumni, prospective and current students and their families during my outreach tour at the end of July to western and southern Colorado, and we are now seeking input from leaders from business and industry from across the state and nation.

I will present an initial draft of the report to the Board of Regents on August 15th. After that, we will solicit more feedback from the community and a final draft will be presented to the Board for approval at the end of November. If you have not yet looked at the website, I encourage you to do so and to provide input from a general perspective or more specifically as it relates to IT and security.

Future IT needs
Some of the thoughts we have had regarding IT and the strategic plan focus on the fact that managing our IT assets has grown beyond the simple task of tracking hardware and software; it now also requires that technology support the business and academic goals of the institution beyond the basics of computing, networking, and data storage.

We need to examine the technical and human resource hurdles that must be overcome for CU-Boulder to remain competitive in providing 21st century learning platforms that encourage pedagogical innovation. This includes, but is not limited to, a much-improved infrastructure that:

• Provides the next-generation online learning environment, one that is vastly more multi-dimensional than the course management paradigm and supports the social and collaborative nature of learning through advances in networked and broadband communications, among others
• Supports more visual and creative instructional practices, including simulation-based learning
• Provides more interdisciplinary connections between ITS, computer science faculty, and faculty in departments around the campus
• Aggregates individual media—papers, videos, photographs, presentations, etc.—and shared information used in collaborative creative processes
• Provides security against vandalism and spamming

I also envision the university engaging in partnerships with industry to help set an imaginative direction, along with a pragmatic roadmap, for the future of IT on campus, in surrounding communities, and across the state.

Over the next year, I am asking that you focus your efforts on how we can increase the security of our IT operations. I am particularly interested in an analysis and evaluation of the need for greater centralization of our existing systems, personnel and equipment. In addition, I would request that you assume responsibility for the following areas:

• Supervising the Chief Technology Officer, who will have management responsibilities for the Department of Information and Telecommunications Services

• Improving the information technology support service to the academic units

• Enhancing the availability of classroom technology

• Reviewing, prioritizing and addressing data security needs

• Transitioning the ATLAS Institute to new leadership and organizational structure

• Supporting the implementation of the Student Information System

• Coordinating and consolidating technology-based communications, currently housed in University Communications, Mailing Services, and ITS

• Negotiating the Sprint bandwidth use contract

• Completing the current phase of the wireless and network backbone improvement project

• Implementing the new network fee and use allocation model

As a national comprehensive research university, we must have a technological environment of the highest quality. In terms of importance, this is perhaps more important that the "bricks-and-mortar" campus in terms of creativity, flexibility, immediacy, and responsiveness if we are to be competitive nationally and globally. The campus community looks to you to keep us apprised of rapidly evolving technology needs for our current and future students, faculty and staff. The administration has a responsibility to provide the infrastructure to turn these needs into reality, and admittedly, this is an area that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later.

I know you all put in long hours to keep the campus IT systems up and running—I see the times on your emails and when I can't sleep and call, someone always answers the call. Thank you for your dedication and for all you do for the University of Colorado at Boulder. I would be happy to answer your questions you might have.