ITAP Review of Two Projects...and more

Jottings from Ray Kuntz, Director of ITS 2013-03-15

Over the past two weeks, the ITAP Committee has completed the review of three of our top project initiatives in the college:

Alumni Lifetime email (sponsored by Jackie Stern)
On-Line Registration (sponsored by Cheryl Chase)
eAdvising (sponsored by Cheryl Chase)

Upcoming presentations over our next two meetings (over the next month) will be :

Student Retention Alert sytem (sponsored by Joyce Stern)
Data Warehouse

ITAP is a committee composed of members of each functional department. As cited in an earlier post (the names of the ITAP Committee members are posted there, too), the purpose of ITAP is review and prioritize project initiatives cross-organizationally. What we all desire is for the highest priority initiatives to be completed, cross organizationally. This team gives Senior Leadership that perspective. Great, great presentations by the functional departments teamed with their ITS colleagues. Strong, perceptive, questions from the ITAP members. This Committee is working well!!! I am very grateful to them. We will post the presentations on the ITS website. Once we have the first five initiatives reviewed and scored, a summary will be presented to the Senior Leadership team (January). We will seek approval and funding at that time. Resource requirements will be loaded into the ITS resource plan, pre-allocating resources, and we will drive the approved projects to completion on the planned dates. Progress!! Meanwhile, given the modest scope of the Alumni Lifetime email project (20-40 hours), we are proceeding ahead with that initiative. Delivery date for this project is February 15, 2013. Student's grinnell.edu email's will be forwarded to an external email account (gMail, for example) upon graduation. Alums will be able to use a self service tool which we are creating to update their email forwarding addresses. We also have acquired the hardware and are in the process of implementing the software to support caller id on campus. This is a facility that has been requested by several departments. This project is scheduled to go live over the next month. Rural Iowa will place some constraints on us, however. As our calls are routed through differnet local phone companies, caller id will be dropped off for about 40% of our calls due to the fact that local providers do not carry the necessary technology to pass caller id though.