Update: UO to start using 2-factor identification, someday. No word on whether they’re also going to make me change the duckweb password I’ve used for assigning grades and direct payroll deposit since 1995.
Town Hall today at 1 in the Knight browsing room. Thanks to an anonymous reader for forwarding:
From: Jessie Minton <[email protected]>
Date: May 24, 2019 at 5:00:41 PM PDT
To: “[email protected]” <[email protected]>
Subject: [IT-Pros] CASIT and CMET to join Information Services
Two UO IT groups, CASIT and CMET, will be joining Information Services. Initial work to transfer all staff and open positions to IS has started, with in-depth work beginning in June.
These changes do not signal a shift in how Transform IT’s User Support Services (USS) implementation will occur. USS will continue to take a service-based principles approach with all campus IT services, including those provided by CAS, CMET, and Information Services.
A draft of the transition plan lists the following changes:
-
- Ben Brinkley reports to Noreen Hogan, and Loring Hummel, along with the web services team, continue to report to Ben Brinkley. CMET’s Canvas and LMS administrators will also report to Ben Brinkley.
- CMET’s audio/visual design and engineering team will report to Andy Vaughn in the Technology Infrastructure team.
- Sam Crow’s CASIT support team reports to Patrick Chinn.
- Chad Little (CASIT computer lab management) and Tyrone Russ (CASIT buyer) will report to Sara Stubbs. CMET’s video production team and classroom technologist will also report to Sara Stubbs.
- Liz Pehaim (CASIT account technician) will join Information Services’ business team.
I will present the upcoming User Support Services implementation project at a town hall on Transform IT on Tuesday, May 28, at 1:00 p.m. in the Knight Library Browsing Room. (The event will also be available via streaming for Portland staff in White Stag 150.) I will share the vision for the USS implementation project and touch on how the transitions will happen. This event will be a great opportunity for anyone to ask questions. If you prefer sending in a question ahead of time, please email it to [email protected].
I want to take the time to note that these changes are designed to strengthen the work, the collaboration, and the university. We will continue to work with our partners across campus to provide excellent service. Take care and I look forward to connecting with everyone soon.
Jessie Minton | Vice Provost & Chief Information Officer [email protected]
They are planning to eliminate it. Page 16: “Once Two-Step Login is implemented, the number of general campus credentials should be reduced to one and the separate DuckWeb login should be eliminated.”
Fine, I’ll just line up at the payroll office for my stack of $20 Tubmans.
context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Tubman
*like*
Just a quick shout out for Marianne nicols and the late Cathleen Leue, who together, designed and implemented casit on a shoestring. Let’s hope this centralization works even half as well as casit did on its shoestring budget.
Respect.
too true and never fully appreciated what they did.
Thank you for remembering Cathleen
But there will still be Duckweb? There will still be a way to see our pay stubs in advance, etc. etc.?
No. The Trustees and Brad have no idea how to keep to a budget. From now on UO will operate on a strictly cash basis.
Remember when UO was going to buy all the Trustees ipads using academics money, because presumably the Trustees are all too poor to afford their own? Good thing common sense prevailed. UO bought them all Windows tablets instead, because one Trustee’s husband worked for Apple’s competitor. Thanks for your shared sacrifices.
This is *ridiculous*. And insulting when they’re offering 0.5% after a year of 0% cola and want classified to pay three times the amount for insurance than administrators and managers do.
It’s not as though the managers have representation; rest assured that they will almost certainly not end up with a better deal than the SEIU folks on the insurance front.
Make no mistake, as IT centralization spreads across campus, the UO will be les nimble, less inventive and less responsive. Please say farewell to knowledgeable local IT support and hello to centralized bureaucracy.
Change is hard yes. But there is still a demand for all the excellent expertise, and people are not getting laid off. so maybe there will be more consistent services across departments. More efficiencies, and opportunities.
Will this reorganized 3ntity have a running user grade average as casit has maintained? The standard should at least be the one they set,4 on a 5 point scale.
Now now, don’t worry. Your local IT support staff will still be there, well… they’ll be a short 5-7 min walk from your building. So just grab your desktop and cart it over to the many help-desks that will be setup on campus, and let them help you.
“Of course, you can still ask questions in the hallway”.
But… first you have to find the hallway where the IT people may be found.
While folding campus wide IT related functions back into IS makes sense (ask old timers just exactly WHY CASit had to be created in the first place, WHY CMET grew in the library, WHY lab management moved to the Library) emailing this to IS staff at 4:30pm and the rest of the “IT Professionals” after 5pm on the Friday before a three day weekend smacks more than a little disingenuous. And, in the current state of campus-wide opacity, suspect.
It’s not about “change is hard”. That more than a little patronizing.
How do you know no one is getting laid off?
We’ve already lost many really great people, and we’ll lose more.
IS effectively down graded some classified IT positions and effectively turned other classified IT positions into OA positions.
Other IT positions do not get filled.
Rebranding does not make an unwieldy and user-unfriendly portal/black hole any less weirdly or usable. Rebranding won’t change the top down management and communications. “IS” is still the “Computing Center”. Rebranding won’t make the one-size-fits-all philosophy go away.
Why is “consistent services across departments” is necessarily a good thing? Perhaps “sufficient or better services across departments”? Do you really think the IT needs of a Physics Dept is “consistent” with a Romance languages Dept?
We know people will not get laid off because enough people are quitting in frustration to make that unnecessary.
They’ve already have laid off classified IT personnel.
It’s really unfortunate that layoffs are not made public.
Not only is change difficult but so is giving up privilege. As I understand the thrust of Transform IT, this is about the democratization of service. Those of us with near immediate assistance from local IT experts need to empathize with campus colleagues who go without and really need the help that centralization will spread across the “haves” and the “have-nots.”
So is Johnson Hall going to give up its special IT support as part of this?
Will athletics give up its special IT support? How about the Jock in the Box?
Athletics and Administration: The untouchables.
Go to the Transform IT website, go to Documents, open the “User Support Services Recommendations Report” and go to page number 14. There you will see 6 recommended physical locations. Now open the “User Support Services slide deck” from May 29th, and go to slide 16. There you will find 7 locations.
The additional location? Autzen Complex.
What does this mean? Well, Athletics will be included in Transform IT, of course, but in reality nothing will change for them. They will “report” to the USS Campus Leader (title TBD), but they will remain in their current locations, and I assume that anyone in Jaqua can be a “satellite office”.
So, top down centralization is democratization. It may be many things, uniformity, possibly even better, but democratization it is not.
Wonder how this will effect FASS-IT since their business model is to gain customers?
What no one has mentioned here yet is to me, the most critical potential negative result – how will research computing and researched based IT now be supported? Fortunately, in science we have a few postdocs that can still re-write a UNIX kernel overnight and its likely we will have to depend more on that and less on UO IT services when it comes to the dynamical flow nature of research (what happens when your data suddenly becomes inaccessible?)
One thing that has been going, on, however, is that more and more of us are using cloud services for data management, and backup and the like, since the UO is viewed (and in some cases has proven) themselves to be unreliable and solution-space ignorant in some cases.
Of course, however, the KC will get its own IT, independent of
everything else. This will like include scientific programming services, which are no longer really offered at the UO (they were briefly under CAS IT from about 2012 to 2015).
As it happens, I may have need of an overnight UNIX kernel at some point. Names (or at least initials) please…
Don’t go looking to IS for UNIX (CASit didn’t support it, either).
IS does not support computing services except those that are “business” oriented, not research or instructional (except in the case of expensive data storage and limited VM).
The current CIO (as well as the previous two) are/have been oblivious to their own cluelessness.