TRACKING OUR PROGRESS

Read on to learn how the ES teams have made progress toward the goals of each Area of Focus.

WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT AND DIVERSITY

Concrete goals

• Deploy strategies to increase and monitor the diversity of our job candidate pools.
  • 9/1/23: The Diversity in Hiring task force created a job-posting toolkit and collaborated with HR to generate a baseline dashboard containing de-identified job-posting data. Its current goal is further expansion of these efforts: The group is working toward including dispositioning documentation in the job-posting toolkit, which will enable them to compile more accurate data from the dashboard and give hiring managers up-to-date instructions on navigating candidates effectively through the application-and-hiring process. This will provide leadership with the appropriate metrics to assess the impact of the task force’s efforts.
• Create meaningful and rewarding internship opportunities for IU students to create a diverse talent pipeline.
  • 9/1/23: The Student Internship task force continues to collaborate with ES managers to create valuable internship opportunities. As of fall 2023,  four summer interns had been hired into ES teams that offered them a wide range of opportunities to enhance their professional skill sets. The interns were immersed in learning experiences such as UX design, Azure DevOps, and Cloud technology. Additionally, the task force’s dedicated team provided personalized one-to-one mentorship, ensuring these interns have a strong foundation for their future endeavors. The group was especially excited to showcase the interns’ progress during a show-and-tell event on July 13, 2023. It was a valuable platform for the students to showcase their projects, share what they learned, and demonstrate the skills they acquired during their time with ES. Looking ahead, the task force has approved four internship proposals for the upcoming academic year (fall/spring 2023-24) and anticipates welcoming the new intern cohort by mid-August. These internships offer valuable opportunities for students to gain practical experience in various areas, including application analysis, testing, technical writing, cloud technology, Google Analytics, report-writing using Tableau, and UX design. The task force has created a page for sharing the interns’ experience on the UITS Human Resources website to highlight their work and entice new students and managers to get involved. The group is continuously seeking feedback from managers and students to enhance the internship program and provide a better experience for future interns.
• Create opportunities to engage managers, emerging leaders, and staff to expand skills and retain talent.
  • 9/1/23: The initial proposal to identify and prioritize areas of opportunity is in development. When the draft is complete, it will be circulated among the ES directors for review and revision. The target timeframe for draft completion is the end of September 2023, with a finalized list available for distribution by mid-November.

Specific targets for 2023

• Deploy strategies to increase and monitor the diversity of our job candidate pools.
  • Provide diversity-related training for all managers.
    • 9/1/23: In progress
  • Require dispositioning of candidates (status updates) throughout the hiring process in Talent Acquisition Manager (TAM).
    • 9/1/23: Draft documentation for how to manage dispositioning in TAM has been created. The documentation is being reviewed by HR before we implement the process.
  • Monitor candidate pool diversity over time against workforce diversity, using new dashboard.
    • 9/1/23: The dashboard has been created. The task force is now seeking feedback from AVPs and directors to fine-tune the visualizations. They will work with HR on assigning access and establishing policy surrounding the diversity and inclusion goals.
• Create meaningful and rewarding internship opportunities for IU students to create a diverse talent pipeline.
  • Continue student intern task force to provide guidance and best practices to managers on recruiting, hiring, and mentoring interns and to develop a plan to make this program sustainable.
    • 9/1/23: The Student Internship task force continues to collaborate with the ES managers to create valuable internship opportunities. ES hired four summer interns in 2023, offering them a wide range of opportunities within the division to enhance their professional skill set. The interns were immersed in learning experiences such as UX design, Azure DevOps, and Cloud technology. Additionally, the dedicated team provided personalized one-to-one mentorship, ensuring the interns have a strong foundation for their future endeavors.
  • Launch a student intern showcase, sharing what they worked on during their time in ES.
    • 9/1/23: The task force was especially excited to showcase the interns’ progress during the summer 2023 show-and-tell event on July 13. It was a valuable platform for the students to showcase their projects, share what they learned, and demonstrate the skills they acquired during their internships.
  • Explore and document paths for interns into the UITS workforce.
    • 9/1/23: The task force is working on a proposal to secure ongoing funding and staffing to make the internship program sustainable. A successful funding source would not only enable the continued hiring of interns but also allow for additional work toward identifying ways to provide paths to full-time UITS employment for these interns after graduation.
• Create opportunities to engage managers, emerging leaders, and staff to expand skills and retain talent.
  • Establish town hall or similar report-out opportunities for leadership, staff, and task forces.
    • 9/1/23: The first ES Town Hall took place in May 2023; each director provided overviews and updates related to these opportunities. As part of the event, additional calls for participation were made, and groups were expanded based on staff interest. Additional ES Town Halls will be scheduled on a recurring basis.
  • Revitalize communities of practice by promoting participation and highlighting successes in our leadership forums.
    • 9/1/23: In progress.
  • ES managers will develop intentional opportunities for engagement at the ES team level and share approaches at the ES Managers meetings.
    • 9/1/23: ES Managers meetings are established and will be incorporating opportunities for engagement after the final opportunity list is completed by the ES directors.

STANDARDIZATION AND AUTOMATION

Concrete goals

• Adopt enterprise platform standards and build a set of software and platform capabilities to support the needs of the development teams.
  • 9/1/23: The Enterprise Platform (EP) team continues to iterate on the capabilities of the platform as defined in the Platform Philosophy document. During Statewide IT, a half-day preconference session provided a review of the platform and resulted in some very useful feedback. Regular feedback is also being gathered through the Platform Stakeholder Group, which has broad representation across Enterprise Systems. At this point, EP is tracking information on 166 distinct applications. Thirty-seven of those applications are platform-aligned and have had aspects of their infrastructure delivered in a platform-oriented way, and 11 different teams/organizations are being served through platform-aligned applications.EP has implemented a detailed FireForm to allow development teams to request new platform-aligned applications. This form deeply integrates into a metadata-driven process and is the starting point for a complex automation pipeline for delivering a variety of infrastructure assets.
• Plan, provide, and enhance standard documentation to guide community work and engagement.
  • 9/1/23: The Documentation task force has been separated out into three separate subcommittees, each focusing on a different area of enterprise documentation. Each subcommittee is conducting discovery for current practices, tools, and existing documentation standards, both within ES and across UITS.
• Consolidate and standardize Linux and Windows systems administration.
  • 9/1/23: On the Linux side of the house, the EP team recently aligned two new systems administrators from other departments into the team. This expands the kind of support the team provides from being primarily centered around enterprise workloads to also include departmental and research-oriented use cases.EP is working toward the creation of a standard Linux offering that will be shared with the larger Linux peer community and will become the new baseline for Linux servers moving forward. This includes a new security baseline done in collaboration with UISO and HSIS to provide a robust mechanism for visualizing the health of the servers EP manages. The plan is to prioritize any server running a version of Linux that is reaching end of life before the end of 2024. These servers will be the first to be migrated to the new Linux standard build. When that is complete, EP will look to bring the rest of the portfolio into alignment. As more system administrators and servers are incorporated into EP, the team will begin the process of standardizing server administration on a reasonable timeline based on need and the resources available.

Specific targets for 2023

• Adopt enterprise platform standards and build a set of software and platform capabilities to support the needs of the development teams.
  • Develop a platform and onboarding process for applications using the ESS Java and .NET architectures.
    • 9/1/23: In progress.
  • Leverage Vault, Rivet 2.0, and GitHub Actions/Azure DevOps for all new development projects.
    • 9/1/23: For new applications being built on Launchpad, the enterprise platform, Vault, Rivet, and GitHub Actions/Azure DevOps are being leveraged to facilitate secrets management, standard UI, and efficient and consistent continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.
  • Populate and validate infrastructure relationship metadata with application owners.
    • 9/1/23: In progress.
• Plan, provide, and enhance standard documentation to guide community work and engagement.
  • Develop and document a standard for new employee onboarding process.
    • 9/1/23: The Onboarding subcommittee has engaged with UITS HR business partners to identify target populations of new UITS employees hired within the last 12 months and all UITS supervisors who have completed hiring in the last 12 months. Feedback surveys have been developed that will be sent to each of these populations; the responses will be compiled into pro/con lists of various onboarding practices. UITS HR has requested that, based on that feedback, a proposed standardized onboarding/orientation process be developed. The initial plan is to define standard onboarding steps that are universally applicable, with specialized tasks that are defined by the needs of different UITS divisions and positions. The final objective will be to identify and recommend standardized toolsets to manage the staff onboarding process, specifically for the ES division but that could be used across UITS.
  • Explore, analyze, and recommend standard tools for technical documentation.
    • 9/1/23: The Technical Documentation subcommittee has completed extensive discovery efforts that include the development of technical documentation categories with prioritization based on impact; surveys of technical documentation standards and tools, for which responses are being compiled; and multiple small-group interview/feedback sessions, with several more currently scheduled. Following this discovery phase, all information will be consolidated and evaluated to determine both consistencies and inconsistencies with documentation practices. The planned outcome is to develop a proposal for documentation standards, best practices, and proposed tools for ongoing documentation management across ES.
  • Create and maintain team system maps. Additionally, aggregate system documentation to support Tier 0 and 1 applications and services.
    • 9/1/23: In progress.
• Consolidate and standardize Linux and Windows systems administration.
  • Develop and document an onboarding process for aligned servers for each OS stack.
    • 9/1/23: In progress.
  • Determine and write a recommendation for the standard enterprise Linux OS platform.
    • 9/1/23: In progress.
  • Begin migration of aligned servers into the enterprise platform standard support model.
    • 9/1/23: Will begin after targets #1 and #2 are complete.

SYSTEM METRICS TO SUPPORT DECISION-MAKING

Concrete goals

• Integrate Google Analytics within all enterprise systems, where appropriate, to enable standardized metrics.
  • 9/1/23: The Metrics task force was formed last year, and the task force leads have been meeting continually to work toward the best mechanism for integrating Google Analytics into our enterprise systems and documenting the best practices for doing so. The overall charge for this task force is nearing the end of the proof-of-concept stage, and we anticipate being able to engage more broadly across ES within the next few months.
• Encourage outcome-based metrics definition as a part of new bodies of work, with a focus on actionable analytics.
  • 9/1/23: Pilot projects have been identified by Enterprise Systems directors.
• Architect and implement a single platform for gathering operational and business telemetry data from our applications based on the three pillars of observability: logs, metrics, and traces.
  • 9/1/23: The Enterprise Platform (EP) team is currently in the project-requirements phase of this implementation. The team conducted a session centered around logging that was attended by people from many teams across Enterprise Systems. A lot of useful feedback was gathered, which will serve as the baseline goals for the infrastructure being built for managing application logs. An additional session was held to discuss our goals and requirements for application metrics. The results of both sessions are summarized in the Goals for Observability Infrastructure document. Further topics related to application tracing, alert management, and application performance monitoring will be covered in the months to come. The feedback from these sessions will be used during Q4 2023 to implement solutions for development teams, enabling more-effective management of their applications and providing another information radiator to drive and inform their project work.

Specific targets for 2023

• Integrate Google Analytics within all enterprise systems, where appropriate, to enable standardized metrics.
  • Add support to IU Login and related systems for providing an anonymized analytics identifier attribute.
    • 9/1/23: Identity Management Systems (IMS) now has an identifier for tracking Google Analytics that has been integrated into its Profile API and is available for teams to use.
  • Direct a Metrics task force to document and disseminate the standards for integrating applications into the Google Analytics 360 environment.
    • 9/1/23: The Student Engagement Roster application (which has students, staff, and faculty as users) has been used as a proof of concept for the integration of the tracking identifier from IMS feeding into a shared ES Metrics Google Analytics property. Development work has been completed on this POC, and documentation is in development. Task force leads are working on incorporating this metrics tracking into other applications as well. Conversations continue with the policy and security offices on the proper way to denote this in application privacy policies, and it will be included in the final onboarding documentation.
  • Develop metrics dashboards that tie into the Primary Constituent Data Source (PCDS) and display distinct users per application and constituent group.
    • 9/1/23: Dashboard mockups have been created. Task force members have been familiarizing themselves with Google Looker Studio as the initial platform on which to create proof-of-concept dashboards. Training is underway on that platform. A student internship position has been posted via the Internship task force to hire someone to work on further buildout of metrics dashboards.
• Encourage outcome-based metric definition as a part of new bodies of work, with a focus on actionable analytics.
  • Establish a working group with representatives for each project to collaborate on approaches to collecting and measuring outcomes.
    • 9/1/23: In progress.
  • Identify a pilot project from each director’s area for which outcome-based metrics can be identified in advance.
    • 9/1/23: Pilot projects have been identified by each director.
  • Organize an InfoShare that documents the successes, failures, and lessons learned from this effort.
    • 9/1/23: In progress.
• Architect and implement a single platform for gathering operational and business telemetry data from our applications based on the three pillars of observability: logs, metrics, and traces.
  • Create an architecture for handling application metrics that aligns with the metrics portion of our Goals for Observability Infrastructure, using either Prometheus or Dynatrace.
    • 9/1/23: Feedback sessions on logging and metrics have been conducted with key stakeholders. Future meetings will include discussions about application tracing, alert management, and application performance monitoring. The feedback from these sessions will be used to implement solutions in Q4 2023.
  • Implement a reusable baseline for visualizing application metrics for applications using phase 2 of the Enterprise Platform.
    • 9/1/23: In progress.
  • Work with the Technology Advisory Group (TAG) to define a standard logging format for applications and implement a logging library that supports this format for applications using phase 2 of the Enterprise Platform.
    • 9/1/23: In progress.

 RETIRE SERVICES/ELIMINATE TECHNICAL DEBT

Concrete goals

• Create a process to identify, eliminate, and prevent aging, duplicative, and/or unused applications.
  • 9/1/23: In progress.
• Retire redundant modules, code, and applications and discontinue code, processes, applications, and functionality that do not provide enterprise-scale value or ROI.
  • 9/1/23: The Retire Redundant Services subcommittee is currently working to identify operational gaps between MS Teams and our current ES Slack utilization to establish a comprehensive inventory of our transition challenges. In addition, the group is engaging with current Teams users to compile best practices for both the transition from previous solutions and ways to maximize our utilization of Teams. The targeted outcome is to develop a transition blueprint for the adoption of preferred services/tools to allow for the retirement of duplicative services.
• Establish and follow best practices for data hygiene
  • 9/1/23: Originally, this goal was combined with the goal to retire redundant modules, so it was set to be addressed by that subcommittee. After an initial assessment, it was determined that the scope of this topic should be handled separately and a Data Hygiene subcommittee established to focus exclusively on this topic.

Specific targets for 2023

• Create a process to identify, eliminate, and prevent aging, duplicative, and/or unused applications.
  • Establish a task force to create the criteria and process informed by internal and external process research and metrics.
    • 9/1/23: In progress.
  • Document a list of target services that meet consideration criteria.
    • 9/1/23: In progress.
  • Create an ES charter to be shared with stakeholders around this new process to provide visibility.
    • 9/1/23: In progress.
• Retire redundant modules, code, and applications and discontinue code, processes, applications, and functionality that do not provide enterprise-scale value or ROI.
  • Standardize use of MS Teams for chat, instant messaging, and videoconferencing to minimize ES use of Slack, Skype, and Zoom to streamline communications.
    • 9/1/23: The NAME HERE group is conducting outreach and gathering information on best practices related to transition and utilization of communications tools. Additional efforts toward further discovery are in the planning stages.
  • Shut down legacy infrastructure no longer needed or consistent with emerging standards as enterprise systems transition to the platform.
    • 9/1/23: In progress.
  • Migrate Microsoft Identity Manager provisioning into Midpoint and retire FIM.
    • 9/1/23: In progress.
• Establish and follow best practices for data hygiene.
  • Review and update university retention guidelines for diverse types of data, documents, and other stored resources.
    • 9/1/23: In progress.
  • Establish an ongoing schedule to evaluate compliance with university retention guidelines and purge data accordingly.
    • 9/1/23: In progress.
  • Review data cleanliness of Financials data to prepare for future ERP data conversion. Document lessons learned for other ERP areas.
    • 9/1/23: In progress.

 PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE

Concrete goals

• Modernize our Enterprise Systems integration strategy.
  • 9/1/23: Our existing integration landscape exhibits fragmentation, impeding a holistic comprehension of our division’s integrations and APIs. Fostering collaboration and eradicating redundancy necessitates the establishment of a unified perspective on integrations. To expedite the integration of cloud platforms and enhance integration management, NAME HERE group/task force is actively devising a comprehensive integration strategy spanning our division.
• Engage in future planning activities happening across the university.
  • 9/1/23: In progress.
• Engage with vendors and the higher education community to understand trends in the marketplace related to the services we provide.
  • 9/1/23: In progress.

Specific targets for 2023

• Modernize our Enterprise Systems integration strategy.
  • Further reduce dependence on the Shared University Data Service (SUDS) by replacing integrations with loosely coupled integrations such as REST APIs, message queues, or other options proposed by the TAG’s application integration considerations.
    • 9/1/23: The NAME HERE group/task force has compiled and organized all SUDS publications and subscribers. We are currently engaged in a thorough review of this data, with plans to engage with respective teams. These discussions aim to uncover avenues for simplification and provide insights into minimizing SUDS utilization.
  • ES appointed leaders will research enterprise integration platforms, associated strategies, and organizational resource needs to support.
    • 9/1/23: We are in the process of drafting the ES Core Integration Principles. These principles will be shared with the NAME HERE task force, ensuring a collaborative consensus on the envisioned integration landscape for ES in the future.We have actively engaged with multiple universities to explore their integration strategies. These interactions have revolved around subjects like team structure, integration reliability, and the scalability of chosen platforms. Additionally, we have assessed prominent vendors such as Boomi, Informatica, MuleSoft, and Workato. Our focus was to evaluate the capabilities of those platforms to sustain our existing integrations. We have also undertaken preliminary assessments utilizing platforms like Denodo and MuleSoft to gauge their viability.
  • Create inventory of ES-owned integrations.
    • 9/1/23: The NAME HERE group/task force is actively compiling an inventory of integrations owned by ES. Our continuous efforts involve reaching out to and reminding managers within Enterprise Systems to contribute to the inventory list stored in SharePoint. We have cataloged 289 integrations thus far.This inventory will provide valuable insights into our present state, highlight patterns in integration development, and ensure the readiness of integrations for possible adoption of an integration platform by ES. It will also identify any potential redundancy or duplicated efforts across the division.
• Engage in future planning activities happening across the university.
  • Serve on committees and ensure priority of IU 2030 Strategic Plan initiatives.
    • 9/1/23: Campuses are working on implementation planning related to IU 2030 and looping in IT where needed. One example is efforts on the Bloomington campus to increase utilization of the Student Engagement Roster by faculty as an early-alert mechanism for students. We need NAME HERE of anyone who has served on a committee or been involved. This doesn’t show how ES is engaged at all. Who is ES worked on the Bloomington effort?
  • Actively participate in and enable Vision 2024/IUPUI realignment.
    • 9/1/23: Eric Westfall participated in the IT/Systems task force for the IUPUI realignment. IU and Purdue signed the final MOU agreement for realignment on June 14. NAME HERE group/task force is assisting with efforts to identify the work that needs to be done in the following areas to implement the technology changes needed to support the realignment: identity and account management, enrollment, space planning, card services, parking, dining and meal plan, housing, billing, classroom technology, teaching resources, software licensing, library services, transfer of data, support, and communications.
  • Execute the Digital Vision strategic targets.
    • 9/1/23: Remediation to bring university websites to accessibility compliance has substantially progressed. All university sites have been inventoried and scans completed to produce remediation task lists. Remediation tasks have been distributed to two of the seven initially identified groupings, and the remaining lists will be distributed in the upcoming weeks. Site owners are required to submit planning forms within 30 days of notification.University gateway site domains have now all transitioned to the iu.edu domain. An evaluation of university distributed sites is underway to determine what will transition and the action plans necessary.The web content strategy situational analysis is now complete, as are the structural web content and search intent audits. Planning for needed resources to execute and support web content strategy is in development. Enterprise web tools and support is continuing to progress. Siteimprove access has been rolled out to all web owner users. Governance processes for both tools and support structures are in development.
• Engage with vendors and the higher education community to understand trends in the marketplace related to the services we provide.
  • Expand funding for travel and training requests in every division.
    • 9/1/23: In progress.
  • Complete ERP implementation case study.
    • 9/1/23: Members of ES attended the Workday Higher Education Forum at The Ohio State University in May. Other members of ES will attend the Oracle Cloudworld conference in September, where we are expected to learn more about the wider launch of Oracle’s Student Cloud product. Our learning and knowledge-gathering in this area continues, and efforts such as the Data Integration task force have been launched to begin strategic positioning of our IT capabilities to support an eventual ERP replacement, regardless of how far out in the future that may be.
  • Actively participate in Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) constituent groups.
    • 9/1/23: IU actively participates in the BTAA Operations and Infrastructure and BTAA Applications Directors groups. After a long hiatus, the BTAA Application Directors group is reconvening for an in-person meeting in October. Ranji Abraham and Eric Westfall have been included as members of the new BTAA Artificial Intelligence Collaboration Group. Additionally, Megan May received an appointment to be IU’s representative for the inaugural BTAA CIO’s “Project Management Office/Scaled Agile Framework” group for a two-year period.