Completed Projects 2014

IT Action Plan Projects Completed in 2014

Project Name,
Sponsor & Team

Value to Campus &
Campus Beneficiaries

FY14 Activities & FY15 Deliverables

Milestones & More Info

 Focus on Fundamentals of IT Service Managment
xMatters


Walt Hagmaier, Director
David Rieger, PM

Improve speed and quality of response to IT incidents by automating on-call processes and notifications.

Implement xMatters to automate on-call and problem escalation support requests.


Central IT Units

1) Phase 1: xMatters rolled out in IST.

2) Phase 2: on target for rollout in other IT orgs: CSS-IT, ETS, and SAIT.

1) Phase 1: Completed
June 2014 (IST)

2) Phase 2: Q3 FY14/15 for other IT orgs.

Learn more about xMatters

 Focus on Fundamentals of IT Service ManagmentGroundWorks


Dave Browne, Director, IST-Infrastructure Services

Provides CSS Service Desk and IT management an overall picture of the health of campus IT systems and services. Greatly reduces time to resolution in system-wide outages.

Build development and production environments.

Nov. 2013 - Sysadmin hired

Feb. 2014 - GroundWorks development environment built

Oct. 2014 - GroundWorks production environment built

 Deliver Excellent Customer Service
Customer Service Training


Larry Conrad,
AVC-IT and CIO

IT organizations must infuse customer service principles and best practices into every customer interaction, and raise awareness of these principles with our IT staff.


Faculty, Staff, and Students

Customer Service training for 80 IT Leadership Group members and IST Managers.

Project Completed
June 2014

 Implement Governance and Expand Customer Engagement
One IT


Liz Marsh and
Lyle Nevels
Ben Gold, PM

Improve engagement with the campus IT community to improve partnerships, align strategies and deliver IT services in a more effective and coordinated way. This is done through the development of a comprehensive outreach campaign to build and strengthen the IT community - known as "One IT."


Faculty, Staff, Students

Five events co-sponsored with the OCIO over the past year:

The One IT committee coordinates the IT Summit while volunteers from ITLG and other IT partners sponsor the remaining events.

Phase 1: Completed October 2014

Learn more about
One IT




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 Improve Security of Data & IT Assets
Information Security Strategy


Paul Rivers, Chief Information Security Officer

View draft information security strategy (access to document requires CalNet authentication)

Establish a broad risk-based and campus-wide process for identifying and addressing the increasingly sophisticated threats to institutional data and campus IT infrastructure.

Implementation of the proposed campus information security strategy, which includes:

1. Expanded policy base, starting with a definition of a comprehensive set of information security roles and responsibilities.

2. Assessmentsof critical campus systems and unit compliance with information security minimum standards.

3. Ongoing operational improvementsto provide increased levels of monitoring and protection of the campus network and institutional data.


  • Faculty, Staff, Students

Documented roles and responsibilities for information security, along with assignment of campus staff to new security roles, training for the new roles, and supporting procedures documentation.

Provided self-assessment guidance for critical campus information systems and departments to develop security plans and assess information risk.

Conducted twelve in-depth hands-on reviews of campus information systems, delivering a report containing required remediations and mitigations for these systems to meet campus minimum security standards.

Creating new IT Governance Committee (IRGC) with first meeting Nov. 2014.

1. Policy
On a distributed Campus, information security policy serves as the communication of specific required actions to mitigate information risk. The original information security program was entirely geared towards incident detection and response, rather than proactive management of information risk. The policy expansion effort addresses a range of new topics required in a proactive risk management program, such as how data must be treated in a variety of contexts, risk acceptance standards, translation of Campus standards to off-premise solution providers, and responsibilities of specific Campus roles for managing information risk.

2. Assessment
a. Ongoing assessments of critical infrastructure and campus information systems. The assessment team performs 30-50 assessments per year as part of an ongoing effort to ensure Campus systems meet a reasonable minimum security posture as defined in Campus policy or external compliance mandates. These assessments range from reviews to enable receipt of research data from government agencies to critical administrative applications that allow the Campus to accept credit cards. These assessments routinely identify critical issues, and also provide specific guidance and timelines for addressing the issues.

b. New assessment model: information risk impact assessment. In support of the information security theme “security is everyone's job”, it is often poorly understood how non-IT have any role to play in information security. Understanding the impact of a security incident on a lab, school, department or other portion of the University is best done by those who are ultimately responsible for those areas. This impact assessment allows for a rational determination of what resources should be allocated to the protection of different IT assets. A process to facilitate this impact assessment, along with an engagement schedule, will be developed and implemented.

3. Continuous improvements
a. Reporting portal for security incidents. Campus notices for security information will move from an email and ticketing solution to a GRC-style web portal. The portal allows a far more efficient tracking of current security status by eliminating the piecemeal and ill-suited ticketing approach used today, and will enable the development of self-service tools to investigate and resolve incidents according to campus minimum security standards. An API will be exposed to allow groups who wish to develop internal automation around security incident response workflows may do so.

b. Advancing intrusion detection capabilities. The current approach to intrusion detection requires inspection of all data transmitted on the Campus network to detect suspicious patterns. The network is increasingly “going dark” with the use of encryption by even malware and attackers. In addition, this traditional approach to intrusion detection requires significant investment in skilled labor. The industry trend has been to the compilation of reputation data, which pinpoints bad actors on the internet by IP address and time range. Correlating network flow data with this reputational data expands our detection capabilities, does not depend on unencrypted network traffic, can be highly automated, and may even be translated to off-premise environments such as Amazon AWS. Developing these capabilities requires investing in solid architecture and automated data processing frameworks in a way UC Berkeley has not done to date.

Dec. 2014

1. Completed: Development of new info sec charter charter and policy,
standard outline
May 2015: Heavily revised classification policy and standards
July 2015: New campus unit information policy and standard
August 2015: New contracts terms and conditions policy and standards
Oct 2015: Revised Campus training and awareness program with corresponding website organized around roles and responsibilities

2a. Continue the assessment process to maintain the 30-50 assessments per
year; the range allows for different levels of complexity of
assessments. A sub-protect worthy of note here is compliance with
PCI-DSS v3.0.

Specific milestones in this subproject:

  • Gap analysis of PCI DSS 3.0: completed
  • Complete Project Plan for any gaps: March 31, 2015
  • Complete risk assessment of SAC-D merchants: Sept 1, 2015
  • Complete identified Projects: Sept. 1, 2015

2b. July 2015: Engagement model and resources development complete
Sept 2015 – Dec 2015 : Pilot model
Jan 2016 – March 2016 : Model adjustments
April 2016 : Execution of plan to use model to cover Campus

3a. April 2015: Beta of Incident View for a pilot group of security contacts
August 2015: General roll-out of Incident View for Security Contacts
December 2015: Support for Security Incident API for Security Contacts

3b. May 2015: Complete automated incident processing pipeline for intrusion
detection events (“the SOCK”)
July 2015: Production of intrusion detection systems at SDSC
September 2015: Correlation of reputation data to net flow in development
January 2016: Production use of reputation correlation with flow

 Improve Research, Teaching & Learning Technologies
Berkeley Research Computing (BRC)


David Greenbaum, Director
Patrick Schmitz, PM

Launch the new Berkeley Research Computing (BRC) Program to support computationally intensive research and teaching. BRC will include four major service areas:

  1. A new campus Institutional and Condo cluster for high performance computing (HPC).
  2. Cloud-based HPC services.
  3. Virtual workstations to support virtual research environments.
  4. A community of consultants from across campus. Consultants will have a home in both their local domain (e.g., college, school, research group) and with the campus Research IT group.

Researchers and support staff

In FY14 we will launch this new program in partnership with the Vice Chancellor for Research, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the College of Engineering, the D-Lab, and faculty Principal Investigators across campus. The campus' new Institutional/Condo cluster will be installed and condo contributions accepted. In partnership with EECS, we will begin analysis and investigation into cloud-based HPC needs and approaches. We will pilot virtual workstations in partnership with the D-Lab and I School.

The HPC was launched in May (Savio Cluster) and Principal Investigators have been contributing hardware ($400K) and already doubled the size of the cluster. Cloud computing for research is in definition phase /requirements gathering (looking to fill gaps in existing options). The consulting services are being built out beyond the collaboration with campus consultants that is already occurring.

Phase 1 Completed: Project Launch
Spring 2014

New pilots and services will be rolled out each quarter thereafter through FY15.

Visit the BRC Website

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 Improve Research, Teaching & Learning Technologies
Digital Humanities


David Greenbaum, Director
Quinn Dombrowski, PM

In partnership with the Dean of the Arts and Humanities, improve support for Digital Humanities teaching, research, and instruction.


Researchers and support staff

Create a new high-level DH Council to engage humanities faculty and leaders from the Library, I-School, New Media Center, ETS, and D-Lab. Provide new consulting services to campus faculty and students. Create new summer fellowships to learn digital methodologies and tools. Create a new campus DH website. Hold workshops and campus forums. Develop a long-term program to sustain DH support.

Completed Project
June 2014

Received grant from Mellon for $2M most of which is going to faculty and students. The program also received funding from the vice chancellor of research.

Visit the Digital Humanities website

 Improve Research, Teaching & Learning Technologies
Research and Academic Engagement (RAE) Strategic Planning


David Greenbaum and Jenn Stringer

In partnership with ETS and the Library, build a new peer benchmarking and strategic planning process to deploy campus Research and Academic Engagement (RAE) services. These services include the full range of research, teaching and learning technologies for faculty and students.


Researchers and support staff

Compare UC Berkeley's research, teaching, and other academic engagement services with 10 peer universities. Develop concise service definition, criteria, and recommendations for improvement. Present this peer benchmarking data to campus academic leaders to get feedback about priorities. Use this process to help improve campus IT Strategic Planning and Governance.

The project raised its visibility by presenting at Educause conference and conducting a workshop. The creation of the Content & Collaboration workgroup came out of RAE work. The project provided campus leadership with an accurate picture of where UCB is compared to our peer institutions and has helped determine where we will invest in improvements. Phase II continues through FY14/15 to develop campus strategic plan to build technology action plan for research teaching and learning services, which will be vetted by IT Governance process and help campus leaders make better technology decisions.

Phase 1 Completed: Project Launch

Benchmarking completed March 2014. Conversations with campus leadership carried out spring semester 2014.

More info on RAE

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 Enable Campus Shared Services
Endpoint Automation


Ben Gross, Manager EEI, IST-Client Services
Vanessa Kaskiris, PM

Increase CSS-IT's ability to schedule and deliver endpoint devices at scale. This improves overall utilization, effectiveness in support of campus customers.


Staff in CSS and the units they serve

Automate infrastructure for configuration and management of campus computers. Release components and services to enable scalable and efficient support by CSS-IT and departmental IT.

In FY14 we integrated pieces of Berkeley Desktop (Windows and Mac) to make CSS work more efficiently. This achieved the first steps in a managed workstation that allows for user control to update a standard set of software, and have updates and security patches made automatically.

Quarterly Updates

Berkeley Desktop website

CSS website

 Continuous Improvement of IT Services
Berkeley WiFi Upgrades and Expansion


Michael Green, Director, Telecommunications - IST
Isaac Orr, PM

We want to make sure that as campus wireless usage expands, the WiFi network is robust. The network group continues to upgrade and enhance our internal infrastructure and connectivity to other institutions to better support teaching and research.


Faculty, Staff, Students

Improve Wi-Fi Network by completing AT&T Wi-Fi Project, refreshing older access points (~1000), and deploying new Wi-Fi___33 Services (EDURoam, Open Guest Access).

Project Completed
Oct. 2014

CalVisitor and Eduroam services are available.

Campus Wi-Fi Options

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 Continuous Improvement of IT Services
Inter-Building Campus Communication System (ICCS)


Michael Green, Director, Telecommunications - IST

Working to ensure that all areas of campus have consistent access to the campus network and the Internet.


Faculty, Staff, Students

Continue ICCS (Inter-Building Campus Communication System) buildout.

Complete targeted for FY13-14 are Lower Sproul tie-in to Rec Sports zone and tie-in for Kroeber, Morrison, Hertz, Music Library and both faculty clubs to Wurster zone.

Project Completed
June 2014

 Continuous Improvement of IT Services
Riser


Michael Green, Director, Telecommunications - IST

Improve poor telecommunications infrastructure (wiring closets, riser connectivity and pathways) in older buildings whereby improving network speed and quality of service.


Faculty, Staff, Students

Continue campus wide Riser project.

Complete targeted buildings for FY13-14 are Chemistry complex, Minor, Giannini and 1995 University.

Project Completed
June 2014

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 Continuous Improvement of IT Services
Integration Architecture Buildout


Bill Allison, Director
Tom Tsai, PM

Implement and adopt a standardized integration architecture for all systems of record, which provides better data for research, administration, and students.


Faculty, Staff, Students

Provide standardized integration architecture and support.

24/7 integration hub and associated processes deployed.

Project Completed
July 2014

 Continuous Improvement of IT Services
Content & Collaboration


Bill Allison, Director
Noah Wittman, PM

Portfolio alignment for content and collaboration services will improve collaboration, coordination, and sharing of information, to facilitate inter- and intra-organizational communication, research and learning.


IT/IT Leadership, Faculty, Students, Staff

Design and implement new Content / Collaboration program.

Support model and organizational design options have been identified and recommendations have been  provided to the CIO & DCIO.

Outcome of project is a bi-weekly operations meeting to identify next steps and partner on new initiatives around campus collaboration. A roadmap for bConnected was developed to show how and when products will be released.

Completed Project
Jan. 2014

Go to Collaboration Tools

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 Continuous Improvement of IT Services
Imagine


Bill Allison, Director
Marlita Kahn, PM

Establish a standard enterprise campus service around document management and workflow to improve staff utilization and provide cost savings, enable employees to access, share, and distribute information in a collaborative environment.


Faculty, Staff, Students

Leverage the Imagine Service to strengthen and broaden document management and workflow. Establishing campus service that improves data management. Develop secure workflow, expand user base, and develop better functional sponsorship.

Rollout PL2 data storage capability. Rollout Integration Server to leverage webservices integration with other campus systems. Work with SIS project to integrate ImageNow with SIS implementation. Work with Office of the CFO to create new implementations across that department. Expand implementation functionality for Office of Undergraduate Admissions, Haas Undergraduate Admissions and Student Services. Create new implementations for Supply Chain Management and EH&S.

Project Completed

View Imagine Service Overview

 Continuous Improvement of IT Services
Windows XP Abatement


Bill Allison, Director
Vanessa Kaskiris, PM

Replace all Microsoft XP endpoint devices and move campus users off of Microsoft XP machines by April 2014. We are creating infrastructure to get to a place where we can handle continuous updates.


Faculty and Staff

Implement Windows XP abatement plan to replace all Windows XP endpoint devices.

Project Completed
April 2014

View project website

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 Continuous Improvement of IT Services
Consolidated Financial View


Jenn Stringer, Director
Norm Cheng, PM

Provide students with an easy to understand, comprehensive picture of their student-related financial status. This will lower the cost of serving students while increasing service quality and functionality.


Students, Advisors, Staff

Implement the Consolidated Financial View project (CFV) in CalCentral.

View final project status report.

Project Completed

Phase I - launched Jan. 2014

Phase II - enhancements June 2014

Watch video on how My Finances works

FAQs on this project

 Continuous Improvement of IT Services
CalCentral


Jenn Stringer
Eli Cochran, PM

Improve the student experience by providing an online portal where they can receive timely personalized information. CalCentral provides a single place to access their bConnected accounts and information about their academic, financial, and co-curricular lives at Cal. CalCentral answers the questions: where do I need to be, what do I need to do, and what do I need to know in one online location.


Students, Advisors, Faculty

Implement CalCentral and continue to expand features for all user groups.

Surface bConnected, bCourses, academic, financial aid, and other critical campus tools into one location.

Phase 1: Completed and successful with 10,000 daily users (13,000 at launch). Have integrated bConnected calendar with scheduling, and looking at adding final exam schedule information.

Currently focusing on Phase II work. As of Oct. 9, 2014, 40,016 users have logged into CalCentral at least once. 15,877 users on the hotplate (our cache warming system). That means that in the last 10 days 15,877 unique users have logged into CalCentral or about ⅓ of the total campus community.

Campus wide release completed Jan. 2014. Upgrades and new features are ongoing.

Visit CalCentral

Video: My Academic Blocks

Video: My Finances

CalCentral Project Site

Follow CalCentral on Twitter

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 Continuous Improvement of IT Services
Contracts & Grants


JR Schulden, Director
Tracy Okamura, PM

Improve financial transparency around contracts and grants accounting. Everyone involved in award financial management will benefit from the expanded functionality and integration of the new C&G system, which includes integration to C&G contract management.


Faculty, Staff, Students

Implement Grants & Contracts PeopleSoft modules to integrate functionality with BFS and other systems.

Thirteen conversion scripts to run ahead of cutover. Starting work three weeks ahead to convert data.

March 2014 - Cutover

May 2014 - System Available

Project Completed
July 2014

Overall, the campus is seeing the benefit and it has improved regulatory/ compliance requirements.

 Continuous Improvement of IT Services
Campuswide Adobe Creative Cloud Offering


Bill Allison, Director
Ben Gross, PM

Campuswide offering of Adobe Creative Cloud Suite via Software Central at no additional cost.


Faculty, Staff, Students

Multiple methods for access and download in place.

Project Completed
Oct. 2014

Learn more and download software

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 Continuous Improvement of IT Services
SIS Project


Phase 1
Larry Conrad, AVC-IT and CIO

Liz Marsh, Director, Strategic Initiatives and Chief of Staff

Phase 2
Angela Blackstone, Project Executive 

Patrick Furze, Executive Director

Improve the student experience by providing modern student information systems that help students have a complete view of their information.


Students

Implement student information systems replacement program.

Phase 1(pre-implementation): vendors will be selected for the software solution, system integrater, and quality assurance partner.

Phase 2 (implementation): the selected software is installed, tested, and moved into production.

Thanks to the dedication and hard work of our procurement team, the University signed a contract with Sierra-Cedar, a consulting firm or "System Implementer," whose experienced team will partner with campus experts in building a new Student Information System (SIS) that meets UC Berkeley's needs using Oracle® (PeopleSoft Campus Solutions) as the technology platform.

Phase 1: Launch Completed
Aug. 2013 - Aug. 2014

Phase 2: ImplementationSept. 2014 - Jan. 2017

View deliverables and full timeline

Visit SIS Replacement Project website

 Continuous Improvement of IT Services
Citrix


Walt Hagmaier, Director, Infrastructure Services
Norm Cheng, PM

Virtualization will improve security and usability of enterprise applications, improving the user experience of these applications.


Faculty, Staff, Students

Virtualization of enterprise applications.

  1. Deliver CalTime and BAIRS virtualized.
  2. 100% of enterprise applications virtualized.

Project will continue into FY14/15 and have already completed virtualization of CalAnswers, BAIRS, CalPlanning, PI Portfolio, and CalTime virtualization is planned.

  1. April 2014
  2. June 2015

More about Citrix Services

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