Area Report for Board of Trustees
Welcome to June! We are in the home stretch of the 2023-24 academic year. Executive Cabinet continues our strong efforts to advance the budget planning and strategic planning processes during Dr. Mosby’s leave. We are grateful to our Acting Co-Presidents, Drs. Lardner and Penn, for their continued guidance and partnership.
In the coming weeks we will have much to celebrate on campus, most importantly, our graduates! We are all very excited to participate in the commencement ceremony on Thursday, June 13th. The return to ShoWare Center is an exciting one. We want to express our extreme gratitude to this year’s commencement planning team for the heavy lift that a change in venue brings. THANK YOU!
The Office of the President includes three departments on campus, Human Resources, Information Technology Services (ITS), and Title III Strengthening Institutions Grant. For the month of June we invite you to learn more about the important work our ITS department is currently focused on. Please continue reading for a report out from Tim Wrye, Chief Information Officer.
Information Technology Services
Due to increasing ransomware incidents in higher education and non-profits, IT Services has prioritized the security of our systems and data. Our participation in the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) Cyber-Hygiene program has already helped us identify and mitigate several risks.
In response to tighter email validation requirements by providers, our Infrastructure and Systems Administration (ISA) team, along with the IT Security and Compliance Officer, have recently enhanced the security of our email systems and those of our third-party vendors to more accurately identify authorized senders for Highline emails.
Despite these efforts, social engineering, particularly through phishing, remains a significant threat. Training employees to recognize and report phishing attempts is our strongest defense. However, participation in our IT Security awareness training is low, with only 23% of employees completing all activities this academic year. In our phishing simulations, which include “spear phishing” exercises, 30% of these targeted emails accounted for 53% of employee clicks, indicating a need for better response training. ITS will collaborate with supervisors and Human Resources to improve employee participation and performance in cybersecurity training next year to help address this gap.
The ctcLink College Collaboration Group (cCCG) has been prioritizing a long list of Enhancement Requests (ERs) for ctcLink over the past few months. Highline’s ctcLink team collaborated with campus subject matter experts (SMEs) to determine Highline’s votes on these system improvements for HR, Finance, and Student Information systems. Meanwhile, a team of college staff is organizing workshops to align processes across colleges, helping everyone use the system more effectively.
After a series of trainings, configuration sessions, and vendor negotiations, we ported the first college phone lines to Microsoft Teams last week. Initial tests have been very positive. We plan to migrate the rest of the campus and retire our legacy phone system by the fall. This new system will let employees use their campus phone numbers remotely and eliminate the requirement for long-distance dialing for calls within the US.
Report submitted by Executive Director, Office of the President, Danielle K. Slota