Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

A Message from the CIO: June Focus

Posted by amcmahon

Time flies and we are into summer already. It has been a challenging academic year, with budget cuts and enrollment pressure – but you have all stepped up to help make it another successful year for PCC! As I mentioned in my previous communication regarding the 2018 Employee Satisfaction Survey, the fact that we have continued to drive significant improvement in customer satisfaction year-over-year is a testament to your hard work and dedication.

PCC recently completed our mid-cycle accreditation review. Our accreditation is a seven-year cycle and the mid-cycle review is an important leading indicator. Katy Ho and the team did a great job – I worked with Katy on the IT piece and I’m pleased to let you know that we received a very favorable response from the accreditors.

We are starting to plan for this year’s IT InService in August and our third National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM) in October. Ideas and volunteers for both events are welcome – Tracy Walstead is coordinating the efforts.

As mentioned in my March Focus, I encourage you all to visit the President’s communication forum, Inside PCC, to get updates on significant programs and current events such as YESS, the President’s Work Plan, and the reorganization in Student and Academic Affairs.

I hope you all have a great summer and enjoy the sunshine!

Organization

Congratulations to Amy Hanson on her new role as Media Services Supervisor! Media Services has also completed hiring for Media Services Lead positions at all four campuses: Aaron Dunn (Sylvania), Emily Hanson (Cascade), Shally Hartman (Rock Creek) and Pattie Turrentine (Southeast). Congratulations all!

We are still actively recruiting for the IAM vacancy in the Enterprise Applications team. It has been challenging to find technically qualified candidates, but the search is going well.

The hiring committees for the Director of Infrastructure Services and the Director of Application Services positions are in the interview phase .

Compliance

Despite the recent departure of our Internal Auditor, Darrin Hotrum, I decided to proceed with our planned internal GLBA/NIST 171 IT audit. Zeina Boulos is coordinating the effort. IT audits are a new experience for us, so please provide Zeina all the support you can! The audit is focused on Financial Aid – thanks to Jody Potter for her help in defining the business processes and scope.

I have centralized responsibility for vendor and product due diligence in the PMO under Kathleen Freitag. This will ensure a consistent process for evaluating accessibility, insurance risk, information security, contractual compliance, etc. as part of the critical path of purchasing, contracts and vendor engagement (this is a work in progress).

Information Security

We have completed forensic analysis instigated by a December REN-ISAC alert. It was a good learning experience, as we worked closely with PCC’s Risk Management team and a specialized legal team recommended by our cyber-insurance company. After extensive investigation, our legal counsel determined that PCC was not the source of the issue and that no further forensic investigation or corrective action was required on our part. Good news!

Oregon’s new Cyber Security law, Oregon SB 1551 has passed. This brings Oregon’s law in close alignment with GLBA (Gramm Leach Bliley Act) requirements. Given that we already align our cyber program with GLBA and NIST compliance standards, this is not too much of a concern – but good to know! An important change in the law is that breach notification thresholds have become more stringent – 250 breached accounts and 45 days to report.

Splunk is now fully operational and Payam is working on implementing Phase I of our SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) program: perimeter event analytics. Phase II will focus on our mission critical applications.

The server team has implemented YARA reporting on our core servers. YARA is a Federal reporting algorithm that will provide regular reporting on server security vulnerabilities to the InfoSec team.

Enterprise Architecture

We have submitted a strategic request to the President’s Fund: “Secure Business Improvement Platform”. This is a component of our “digitalization strategy” (currently under development). Our goal is to improve opportunity and student success with accessible, consistent, easy to follow processes that reduce frustration and improve communication for students, faculty and staff, reduce errors, and enable new efficiencies. Core to this strategy is the adoption of the AODocs document management and secure business workflow platform.

Joe Cheng is also starting a collaborative effort with multiple stakeholders to document the core infrastructure and application components that compose PCC’s technology environment – with the goal of developing a maintainable current state architecture. This will enable us to map key business and technology decisions against current and future capabilities and evolve to a “continuous improvement” model.

We have put together a small team across EA, Media services and the Bond to evaluate “Podium Design”. There has already been some great dialogue, analysis and documentation that we hope to rationalize into a strategic proposal for the college.

Portfolio Management

The PMO (which now includes the IT Purchasing Team) has been busy managing the technology portfolio and purchasing technology. Since February, the IT Buyers have made 302 purchases totaling 830K. 82% of the total spend for those purchases were for departments outside of IT (partly due to current budget constraints being imposed within IT).

IT teams also completed 31 projects during the same time period – 46% of which were initiated by departments outside of IT. The full list is below, but here is a representative sample:

• SY Bookstore Implementation of replacement security cameras
• FMS Building Automation Lucid Implementation
• FMS Authentication for AiM Assetworks Application
• Pow Wow 2018 – Media Services Support on Sylvania Campus
• TedX on Cascade Campus
• Identity Awareness for VPN Connections
• Data at Rest Strategy
• Provision students into AD

Of the projects being worked on or completed during this time frame, 42% of the projects aligned with the strategic goal “Drive Student Success” and 22% of the projects aligned with the strategic goal “Creating a Nationally Renowned Culture for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”.

The next few months will be focused on year-end activities for FY18, evolving our PMO to include project management, wrapping up the mandated Banner 9 upgrade, and providing video support for our new graduates.

Projects completed since February:

1. Pow Wow 2018 – Media Services Support
2. Mediasite Cloud Migration
3. IS – Identity Awareness(VPN only)
4. FMS Building Automation Lucid Implementation
5. Spaces upgrade
6. D@R – Data at Rest Strategy
7. Enterprise Architecture Establishment
8. WordPress replacement for Contribute sites
9. Implement Community Based Learning Management Solution
10. RC 7/210 Podium install
11. Upgrade K1000 to version 8.0 (dpcy 288926,280263)
12. McAfee Antivirus Platform Upgr to v10.5, Workstation Deployment
13. Authentication for FMS ReADY Request Assetworks Application
14. Authentication for FMS AiM Assetworks Application
15. Retire old MyPCC (Phase 1)
16. Implementation of replacement security cameras for SY Bookstore
17. Implement server patch management using Kbox
18. Banner Extract for FMS Key Requests and Key Management
19. TedX Cascade
20. Install Digital Signage in CA CRC
21. DC 3rd floor HR reception area office conversion
22. Move to SY CC North End
23. Panasonic Projector Replacement/Hangs
24. Application Assessment Grants Data System for Grants Office
25. Service Desk Process Improvements
26. IS – Perceptive Content ImageNow Server Refresh (Dpcy to 279669)
27. UIAG – Provision students into AD (Dpcy 278778)
28. Moving Service Desk and Webteam to SY CC123 and 124
29. McAfee Deployment for Servers
30. Consolidate SE Campuses Licensing Servers To Central District
31. Manage Comms with prospective students to increase enrollment

Client Services Update

The district-wide training of CTS and deployment of JAMF (Apple device management) is currently underway, with the last campus groups being trained and agent deployment starting. JAMF will be leveraged primarily for new Apple machine deployments, software upgrades, and security policy enforcement. Nice work Zack Mallark, Kate Petronis and Dan Montgomery for your help with training!

The Campus Teams are kicking off a new project soon to better support Chromebooks for instructional groups. Chromebook adoption continues to grow at PCC and having standard documentation and processes will help our team be more consistent when responding to requests related to Chromebooks.

Phase I of our “Data at Rest” strategy (F: Drive migration to Google Drive) is in progress. At this time, everyone in IT should be migrated. Next steps include a detailed communication plan to all faculty and staff to remind them to move their content. The planned retirement of F: drive access is end of June 2018. As part of this project, IT will be pushing out Google DriveFileStream to all administrative computers (this enables users to navigate Google files in Windows Explorer). Completion of just this phase of the program will free up TeraBytes of storage on our SAN and save tens of thousands of dollars in forecast hardware upgrades.

Service Desk ticket notifications were recently updated to make them more customer friendly and reduce the number of messages being sent from our Service Management Platform, Kace. Since the change, several customer groups have already provided positive feedback. Next phase of Service Desk improvements includes building out categories to match existing IT services.

The Kiosk Computer replacement project has finished the image dev phase with customer sign-off. Next steps include completing support documentation and then replicating the new PCC Kiosk image to all Answer Centers across the district. This change saves the college $40,000 per year in maintenance costs and allows PCC IT to ensure necessary security updates and workstation management. Honorary mention to Larry Holmberg who has telling me we should do this since I got here 🙂

The podium digital upgrade project for this summer is starting to ramp up, with the Bond and IT conducting a formal RFP (request for proposal) for 3rd party integrators. Similar to last year, the current plan is to award 1 or 2 integrators to help us complete digital upgrades on approximately 30 classrooms over the summer, moving PCC away from analog A/V controllers and older podium technology.

In the spring, Media Services installed over 44 digital projectors. We plan to upgrade tethering and install another 80 as part of the podium digital upgrade project.

Application Services

The Enterprise Applications team has been focused on migrating student credentials from the legacy Enterprise Directory platform to Active Directory. This is a key milestone in our Identity Management strategic plan. Next steps are to decommission applications that were part of the legacy identity management architecture and simplify our identity management architecture with AD at the center. Planning on the next phase kicked off in April. The team has also been focused on several cross-team projects, such as K2000 implementation, F Drive migration, Helpdesk Improvement, Kiosk Replacement. Some recent business support projects were the application assessment for the Grant Office and authentication for FMS applications. The team has also completed all the technical work in preparation for moving our district scheduling system, 25Live, to the new Cloud-based version later this year.

The Banner team has been focused on finishing the Banner 9 Beta Testing program and opening up Banner 9 for general production use. We had over 50 users in Beta and reaction to the new look and feel was positive.The original go-live date in early May was postponed while we addressed some system stability issues, but we are now live and several hundred people are using Banner 9! This 14-month project required a lot of heavy lifting from IT and the Banner system managers. Special thanks to Mike Arnold for coordinating technical issues during the entire project and especially over the past two months of knitting together loose ends.

Looking ahead, the Banner team has started initial planning for a required upgrade of the Banner 9 platform this summer that will include all system components (Finance, Student & Financial Aid, HR and Payroll). We’ve also started working on a roadmap for projects and key operational tasks that extend out for the next twelve months. There are several large projects looming on the horizon, such as implementation of the Cornerstone talent management system (contract just signed) and a new non-credit registration system (RFP process is drawing to a close).

The Web Team is also involved in the talent management and non-credit registration system projects. In addition, in May they rolled-out Enrollment Rx CRM for prospective student Request For Information (RFI) and events (Welcome Days). The team is now deep into replacing the Admissions form with Enrollment Rx.

Some other ongoing Web Team initiatives are:

• Advising Technology Review Workgroup (part of the Advising Redesign effort of YESS)
• Update to PCC/WebEasy (also supports the MyPCC Course Tool Retirement effort as all credit classes move to D2L Brightspace)
• Implementing Placement (and other ‘ready to register’) information in MyPCC
• New Search function on www.pcc.edu (the Intranet already has the new Search in place)

Infrastructure Services Update

The Network Team went into emergency troubleshooting mode in April as we experienced sudden network performance degradation and intermittent outages. We initiated an emergency network stabilization project that included the redesign of the physical and logical switching infrastructure within the enterprise core, datacenter, and Sylvania Campus switch stacks to improve performance and stability. The team also identified and resolved a configuration issue with our ISP that manifested as the blocking of certain external websites. While there are still underlying network challenges, normal service was quickly restored with these temporary measures.

We are waiting for new core switches to be delivered that will provide a permanent solution and act as the foundation for the network upgrades currently being planned as part of the 2018 Bond. We have begun extensive planning for the next generation of the network, including the physical and logical connections between switches/routers/firewalls/servers at all locations.

Some other achievements were:

• Updated Juniper Software (firmware) at all Campus and Center locations (over 650 devices)
• Performed firewall policy optimization which improved backup performance and tightened security on Threat Emulation (Sandblast)
• Further increased security by enabling blocking mode policy on My.PCC.edu. We will soon do the same to www.pcc.edu
• Implemented YARA reporting on all datacenter servers
• The NOC (Network Operations Center) has started to plan the next phase of SolarWinds monitoring

As always, there is more going on in IT every day than I can possibly capture here – so apologies if I have missed something critical that you are working on…

Michael

Michael Northover
Chief Information Officer
Portland Community College
michael.northover@pcc.edu
W: 971.722.8508
C: 503.601.9425