Progress on CCI action teams and NGN project shared at IT Leadership Team meeting

The Leadership Team met on December 18 to discuss the following projects and updates:

CCI action team updates

Starting with the December meeting, Climate, Culture, and Inclusion (CCI) action teams will deliver monthly progress updates on training, retention, engagement, and other upcoming initiatives. 

Debra Houle shared an update on behalf of the “Ensure Fairness of Opportunity” action team whose focus is on establishing required training and accountability measures for ITS management and staff and leading employees toward a better cultural understanding. Recent efforts include a partnership with Deborah Stanley-McAuley, Associate Vice President for Employee Engagement and Workplace Culture, to develop a customized course on Creating an Environment of Mutual Respect. The course is mandatory for all supervisors and 92% have already completed the training. The team will mail a commitment document to additional participants in January. Online Unconscious Bias training is also required. To date,94% of supervisors and 50% of remaining ITS employees have completed the training. The goal is that all staff, including new employees, complete the appropriate training by June 30, 2020. What’s next? The team is looking at ways to build on this training including: 

• Offering and Unconscious Bias reflection activity
• Encouraging Inclusionary Practices for ITS employees
• Implementing a Mentoring Model
• Recruiting for CCI action teams

Samantha Brailsford presented on behalf of the “Retain the Best IT Talent” action team, whose focus is on retention strategies and enhancing employee engagement. Based on their research with Work Institute, they identified that that 77% of the reasons employees quit could have been prevented by the employer, and that many of those reasons could have been addressed through effective communications. Based on this information, the team recommended a set of six questions for managers to include in their regular one-on-one conversations to gauge member satisfaction levels with the current work environment. Additional details will be available after the pilot concludes. 

IP Addresses and preparing for NGN

Jan Eveleth, Program Director, Next Generation Network (NGN), shared an update on the role that Internet Protocol (IP) Addresses will play in preparing the campus for the NGN project. Most notably is the need for IP Addresses of wired-connected systems located within 25 Science Park to be ready for the NGN transition targeted for the latter part of January 2020. Wireless devices and devices in the Yale Data Centers will not be affected. Specifically, the team asks employees working within 25 Science Park to identify any wired-connected systems that use static or public IP Addresses. Action needs be taken on these systems—they either need to be modified to use dynamically allocated private IP Addresses or, if a static or pubic IP address is required, submit an exception request no later than Wednesday, January 15.

To connect to Yale’s network, all computers require an IP Address. Addresses can be public (visible to the internet) or private (only visible to other devices on the same network). They can also be dynamically allocated using Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) or configured as Static/Reserved. DHCP allocations issue IP addresses only when needed. Static/Reserved configurations are for systems that need to always use the same IP address.

When a Yale building, such as 25 Science Park, transitions to NGN, the default configuration will be a DHCP private addresses, because they are operationally efficient, more secure, and limit the use of assigned public addresses. For the broader NGN effort across campus, the IP address remediation effort will precede NGN building deployments. Distributed Support Providers (DSPs) will work to implement any changes throughout the areas they support, and efforts will be made to communicate and encourage similar advanced preparations from our IT Partners.  

Jan noted that this project benefits from the partnership of many IT teams, including: Endpoint Engineering, DSPs, the Help Desk, Security, Network Engineering, Organizational Change Management, ServiceNow, and Service Management.

For NGN suggestions and comments, please submit an NGN inquiry.

The next leadership team meeting will be held on January 29.