Area Report for Board of Trustees

ITS welcomes all of our faculty and staff back for the new academic year.  It has been a busy couple of weeks as we supported both opening week activities and the start of fall quarter classes, as well as getting our students supported in their technology needs.

Core Theme 4: CULTURE & CAPACITY: Become an anti-racist college through intentional development of employees, facilities, and systems that support student success and close equity gaps.

• Over the summer, the Infrastructure and System Administration team replaced 91 wireless access points across campus as part of our larger network maintenance schedule. These newer Wi-Fi 7 access points are designed to deliver higher speeds and reduced latency for wireless network users.
• During the month of September, ITS staff worked to provide a couple of supplemental tools to support college operations. A tool was developed to help Public Safety distribute and track the Orca cards under the pilot program being provided to students this academic year.  This system makes the distribution of the cards to students quick and efficient while also providing necessary tracking and reporting for the program.  A second effort was to build a proactive notification tool for supervisors for better awareness of the leave balances for their direct reports, responding to a request from Human Resources and WPEA. This tool is part of a larger suite of audit-style reports the Business and Data Analysis team has begun working on to be proactive about making sure users have clear information to support their work and prevent coding and process errors wherever possible.
• We learned in September that Zoom is ending the significant discounts that they had originally granted to us during the pandemic. The resulting cost increase makes this tool no longer affordable at our current license levels. The college licenses for Microsoft products includes Teams conferencing. That platform has improved and can now support the majority of our use cases, so we are reducing our Zoom footprint and supporting migration to Teams. ITS and Ed Tech are working to build out our documentation and assistance for using Teams.

Report submitted by Chief Information Officer, Tim Wrye