ITLT meeting recap - November

The November IT Leadership Team meeting covered three main topics: ITS organizational updates, the life-cycle refresh (LCR) program, and an update on the Dataverse project.

ITS organizational updates

Jeremy Rosenberg and Frank Mathew provided an overview of the new central IT organization effective November 1. The duo, who recently stepped into expanded roles on the Senior Leadership Team (SLT), including leading ITS, shared a new organizational chart outlining promotions (including new SLT members John Coleman and Hadar Call) and additional responsibilities. They also clarified roles and direct reports for their teams, explaining the strategy behind implementing previously drawn-up succession plans.

With the establishment of Campus Services as a new Operations unit, changes to the SLT were instituted by Vice President for Information Technology and Campus Services John Barden to ensure the smooth running of the organization. Lou Tiseo, approaching retirement, will continue in his current role for a short period before passing oversight of Foundational Technologies over to Jeremy. Frank Mathew’s responsibilities now include IT Support Services and oversight of ITS Human Resources, Finance, and Administrative operations.

Lifecycle Refresh Program

John Eberhart, IT Director, Technology Support Services at the School of Medicine, presented a detailed overview of the current lifecycle refresh system and highlighted areas of process and endpoint improvements. Poor user experience and the varied processes within each unit were identified as critical obstacles to LSR’s service delivery goals. However, it was the enhanced device requests requiring customization that presented a challenge.

By creating a unified selection of deployments and approvals, the project team could accomplish its goals of delivering service devices within four hours and yield significant savings in labor. To this end, the project team developed a website for device selection, mandated business reasons and approvals for customizable devices, and created a shared workflow through ServiceNow. These would expedite the Hardware Asset Management and Deployment process from bulk purchase to client pick by up to two hours. Additionally, a warehouse at 344 Winchester utilizing a dual processing line could be expanded to the entire campus. By January 2024, the pilot team anticipates undertaking a warehouse search (engaging Internal Medicine on the process), and by July 2024 a university-wide rollout is anticipated to be completed.

With the new initiative, IT begins its tactical strategy to prepare the university for this new transition in how device orders are fulfilled. Maintaining a frictionless process and incentivizing clients to adopt new behavior by requesting simple pre-selected options as devices represent a significant culture shift in IT’s service offerings. Additionally, changes were made to the procurement process to align with this new strategy with IT managing funds and allocation.  

The Dataverse project

Dale Henderson, Senior Director, presented updates on the research data management and shared how the Library IT staff currently supported the university’s researchers. Upon completing scholarly work, the project team ensured that the data was accessible to the public for seven years by adding a digital code. They assisted with data archival processes and managing the many data repositories across the varied academic departments at Yale. The project also guided the academic community on security and privacy to maintain compliance with federal laws.

The project began as a proof of concept from Kay Ratanasaka’s Infrastructure group and has allowed for reduced data dependency and showed IT’s ability to build viable products. The potential for Dataverse to handle access to data was also discussed, along with a proposed plan to integrate it into Lux.

Ask IT Leadership

There were no questions during this session, but attendees were encouraged to share their feedback with their various SLT leaders.