News and Announcements

Information Technology Architecture Committee — Recommended priorities list

Gordon Adams, College of Chemistry
Patricia Donnelly, Boalt Hall School of Law
Peggy Flens, University Relations

This is an excerpt of a larger document that can be viewed at http://itac. berkeley.edu:4259/ITAC/priorities.html. If you have comments, we encourage you to speak to your departmental ITAC representative. ITAC membership can be viewed at http:// socrates.Berkeley.EDU:4259/ITAC/members.html.

As the primary campus forum for development of a shared vision of how information technologies can best support UC Berkeley, the Information Technology Architecture Committee (ITAC) works with the Berkeley campus Chief Information Officer (CIO). The ITAC also functions as an advisory group for the e-Berkeley Steering Committee. The ITAC consults with campus constituencies, including the Academic Senate Committee on Computing and Communications, on topics under consideration. The ITAC membership is in a unique position to provide considerable strategic knowledge and support for vital technologies that will provide ongoing benefit to the Berkeley campus.

Each year, more technical projects are on the table for consideration. Human and financial resources vary with each budget year, but continue to remain limited. Understanding that the campus must make difficult choices between different services and operations, we felt that ITAC's unique perspective could provide some campuswide guidance as to which of the competing priorities we view as most critical. If the campus has discretionary funds or chooses to redistribute resources, we want to ensure that it is clear where this committee would like to see the focus of support.

On June 25, 2002, ITAC proposed to regularly and formally prioritize campuswide IT needs. The membership agreed that a subcommittee should be formed to propose a process for accomplishing this goal, and that the ITAC as a whole should determine what is needed from this subcommittee, what the process should be, and what goals should be achieved.

The goal of this exercise (which we hope will become an annual process) was to select a short list of compelling campuswide infrastructural technical projects and to communicate those recommendations to the Berkeley campus through the Chief Information Officer. In order to receive campuswide support, the process needed to be completed prior to the beginning of the annual IST January budget process.

The project recommendation process was very simple:

  1. An ITAC subcommittee was selected to create and implement the prioritization process. The subcommittee solicited no more than three project recommendations from each ITAC member.
  1. The following information was requested for each project on the list.
  1. The subcommittee developed an unranked list of projects. These were distributed to ITAC membership for review.
  1. ITAC membership met and discussed each technical project to gain clarity.
  1. Each ITAC member was asked to cast six votes for projects on the unranked list. This resulted in seven clear winners. Members volunteered to write project descriptions for this document.
  1. This document was distributed to membership for review, comment, and approval.

Recommended priorities list

After starting with a larger list of projects, the ITAC committee agreed to recommend campuswide support for the following seven projects during FY 2003–04. (Detailed project descriptions were too lengthy to include here. However, they can be viewed at http://itac. berkeley.edu:4259/ITAC/priorities.html. )

  1. Improved Network Infrastructure
  2. IT Security Support Service for Campus Departments
  3. Campuswide Authentication and Authorization Service
  4. Student Data Warehouse
  5. Information Technology Skills Development and Training
  6. Bandwidth Increase for Commercial Internet Access
  7. IT Disaster Recovery Planning

The costs shown in this document are only ballpark estimates. More accurate cost information requires more input from the affected units. We hope that the campus can use this information to help secure the necessary funding for all these projects. Please be aware that although these projects all received support, it is clear that the top two are of overwhelmingly greater priority than the other five. The top two are large, expensive projects already receiving substantial resources; however, the funding is not adequate to achieve the forward progress deemed critical by this committee.

As part of this process, we look forward to a report back from the CIO about how our priorities fit within campus budget strategies. If adequate funding cannot be secured this year, we would like to know what long-term strategies he has to meet these pressing needs.

[ iNews | Issue Contents | Search BC&C | BC&C Main Menu | IST | UC Berkeley ]

Berkeley Computing & Communications, Volume 13, Number 2 (Spring 2003)
Copyright 2003, The Regents of the University of California