Ithaca College

Welcome to the October edition of our monthly IT@IC update.  Each month we bring you highlights of efforts that we are working on related to the IT services for the campus community.

 OCTOBER 2017 CONTENTS

• Fiscal Year 19 Technology-Related Budget Requests
• Patching and Core Infrastructure Upgrades
• IT Organization Changes
• Building New Analytics and Reporting Capabilities: an IT – AIR Partnership
• The Last Bit – Keeping Safe

FISCAL YEAR 19 TECHNOLOGY-RELATED BUDGET REQUESTS
As part of our efforts to provide better planning, coordination, and alignment with college needs, IT and the Budget Office are requesting that each department submit technology-related NSOP and capital budget requests for FY19 via the Technology-related Budget Request form located on the IT Project Management Office page: www.ithaca.edu/it/pmo. The form needs to be submitted by October 15.  Please see the 9/18/2017 Intercom announcement for complete details: https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php?story=2017091414520170#.WcLfmlGQzRY.  Also, include the funding request as part of your budget submission in BudgetPak and/or Capital request.

PATCHING AND CORE INFRASTRUCTURE UPGRADES: A KEY PART OF MAINTAINING A SECURE ENVIRONMENT
In late September we successfully performed major “behind the scenes” work on both Homer and Parnassus.  For Homer we moved the applications and related services onto new server hardware, and upgraded the operating system.  For Parnassus we installed the major bi-annual rollup patch.  While efforts like these are largely invisible, they are critically important to ensure that our systems are secure and reliable.

This work takes months of planning, coordination and testing, and easily represents well over three hundred hours of work by IT and staff in business units such as HR, Financial Services, Student Financial Services, Office of the Registrar, Admission, and others.

It’s not glamorous work, but it is vital to help maintain the security, integrity, and smooth functioning of our systems and services.  The necessity of this kind of work is reinforced by events like the recent major breach at Equifax, which was the result of a known vulnerability in a web-application, for which a security update was available but not installed.

We thank everyone who works so hard to make these important undertakings successful.

IT ORGANIZATION CHANGES
Effective October 1, we have made adjustments to our IT organization to better align our resources in order to improve our focus on the work we have to do and to provide more effective and efficient service to the campus.  We are now organized in the following 4 units:

• Teaching and Learning with Technology - Services and functions directly related to supporting faculty teaching and research, and students learning with technology. Led by Dr. Mark Fink.
• Engagement and Client Technologies - Services and functions related to client technologies, productivity tools and efficiencies, and interaction with our clients.  A national search is currently underway for a director to lead this unit.
• Applications and Infrastructure - Services and functions focused on the college’s core applications, technology and infrastructure. Led by Casey Kendall.
• Information Security - Services and functions related to protecting college information and systems from unauthorized activity. Led by Jason Youngers.

With this new structure each unit is better focused on a specific core mission (teaching and learning, client engagement and support, core technology and infrastructure, and security), and has their staff aligned to provide those services. There is of course a critical interdependency across units, but the key resources needed to support the mission of each unit are more tightly integrated.

More details can be found on our Transforming IT web page. 

BUILDING NEW ANALYTICS AND REPORTING CAPABILITES: AN IT – AIR PARTNERSHIP
Periodically we will highlight joint efforts between IT and other departments on campus.  This month Dr. Yuko Mulugetta, the college’s Chief Analytics Officer, provides an overview of a joint effort that our departments are undertaking (with assistance from many others across the campus) to advance the college’s analytics and reporting capabilities.

IC Jumps to the Front of the Line with Exciting New Analytics and Reporting Capabilities!

You do not hear loud sounds of drilling.  You do not see a tall crane lifting steel beams.  But Ithaca College is building a big Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) in the cloud through Amazon Web Services (AWS) RedShift in collaboration with HelioCampus!  

The construction of our EDW began in June of this year under the joint leadership of Gerard Turbide (Vice President-Enrollment Management), David Weil (Chief Information Officer) and Yuko Mulugetta (Chief Analytics Officer).  This project is one of the core strategic initiatives to provide the foundation for Ithaca College to foster a data-informed decision making culture and to become a truly student-centered residential college.

The current ODS (Operational Data Store) cannot integrate functional data streams effectively to understand what is causing certain students’ behavior such as freshmen leaving IC.  The current ODS also cannot time stamp data to allow smooth longitudinal comparisons, for example, the accumulated financial aid expenditures of one day compared to those of previous years on that same date. 

HelioCampus EDW directly addresses these issues and introduces an extensible, high performance data platform with models and dashboards tailored to our needs.  It creates an enterprise data warehouse leveraging a star schema architecture, and integrates admissions, enrollment, student success and financial data not only for operational reporting, but also for advanced strategic analytics.

In collaboration with our IT team, HelioCampus has already established a secure, virtual private cloud (VPC) for Ithaca College where data from our systems is replicated and connected with analytical models and dashboards in the Amazon Web Services cloud.  HelioCampus has also completed stakeholders’ interviews and a business procedures review to ensure that the models and dashboards meet the unique needs of Ithaca College.

We have been making great progress, and the first phase of the project is on schedule – special thanks to Nick Farthing (HelioCampus EDW Project Manager) and the hard work of the following offices:

• Admission (Tom Bloss and Mike Di Brienza)
• Advancement Services (Benjamin Costello and Julie Andrews)
• Analytics and Institutional Research (Claire Borch, Cole Gruberth, Peggy McKernan and Elijah Earl)
• HR (Matt Lewkowicz)
• IT: Engagement and Client Technologies (Bill Liddick)
• IT: Applications and Infrastructure (Casey Kendall, Victor Kuraszewicz, Angel Gavidia, Chuck Cornwall, Jeff LeMay, Dale Riegle and Mark Yowan)
• IT: Business Intelligence (Vanessa Brown and Jose Castro)
• IT: Security (Jason Youngers and Seamus Enright)
• Registrar (Vikki Levine and Tinita Wheaton)
• Student Financial Services (Lisa Hoskey and Jill Moreland)

A progress report will be published again before the end of the fall semester.  Please let Dr. Yuko Mulugetta (Chief Analytics Officer, Office of Analytics and Institutional Research) know at ymulugetta@ithaca.edu if you have any questions related to HelioCampus EDW project.

THE LAST BIT – KEEPING SAFE
Just a reminder that we continue to see increased “phishing” emails to members of the IC community, and they are getting more sophisticated.  We are working with Microsoft, the provider of our Office 365 email environment, to explore technical ways to limit the dissemination of phishing messages, but we also need your help.  When you receive an unexpected email asking for any type of personal information, you should always independently verify its authenticity, for example: by a phone call to the sender’s known phone number or by visiting the company’s Web site directly (and not by replying to the message or clicking links it contains).

We are also currently testing Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for the college email system. Sometimes called two-factor or two-step authentication system, MFA is an additional layer of protection beyond just a password. It helps with security by reducing the impact of compromised passwords, ensuring that the person logging in with your username and password is actually you.  Once implemented, MFA will be required for certain high-profile accounts and optional for others.  More details on this will be forthcoming later this fall.

As always, if you have any suggestions or comments, please send them to cio@ithaca.edu.  Thanks!

-Dave Weil
Chief Information Officer, Information Technology, Ithaca College.