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CITC Reorganizations and Training Initiatives*
Data Center Operations Reorganized
According to Dr. Maurice Leatherbury, Associate Vice President of
Computing and Chief Technology Officer, a consulting group was asked
to study the CITC’s storage and backup strategies recently, and one
of their recommendations was that the data center operations be
reorganized to better reflect the changes that are increasingly
impacting it. After careful consideration of the recommendations,
the following organizational changes have been made:
- The CITC Operations & Infrastructure Services group has been
moved to the Administration and Compliance
division.
- The Infrastructure and Technical Services group has been
moved to the Enterprise Technical Systems
division.
- Production Control has been moved to the AIS Application
Infrastructure Management
group.
The reasons for making those moves are many, including, according
to Dr. Leatherbury:
- The CITC’s data center operation is expanding rapidly
as we add large amounts of storage, virtualization, and a
massive new research computing cluster (224 servers!,) and it is
less and less dominated by administrative computing needs.
Moving it to Administration and Compliance where the other
facilities functions reside will consolidate all facilities
functions into a single division.
- The rapid expansion of the data center, and the possibility
that we’ll add yet another data center site at the Health
Science Center to house backup disks adds more responsibilities
to Steve Vocelka’s [Assistant Director, Operations &
Infrastructure Services] already full plate, impelled us to free
him up from server and applications support to concentrate on
maintaining the outstanding service that he and his group give
to the CITC and the campus.
- The infrastructure that Nancy Fisher’s group [Infrastructure
and Technical Services] supports has grown large and well beyond
the administrative applications that the current organization
structure was designed for when we first put it into place (see
the first bullet point above.) Putting her group into the same
one that supports other enterprise-wide services such as e-mail,
directory services, WebCT, VMware, etc. aligns her group’s
mission with similar missions in Tom McElwee’s division
[Enterprise Technical Systems].
- The job scheduling and report distribution functions
supported by the Production Control group are almost exclusively
in support of administrative applications and belong in the AIS
Application Infrastructure Management Group.
"I sincerely believe that these changes better reflect the
changing nature of the CITC than our current organizational
structure and that they will streamline the management of our large
organization. The ultimate goal, it should go without saying, is to
improve the great service we [the CITC staff] already provide to the
campus," stated Leatherbury.
AIS Launches Staff Development Training Program
Staff development training tailored specifically for
information technology staff is usually not provided by human
resource departments. A new training program recently
began for Administrative Information Systems (AIS) staff
employed by the UNT Computing & Information Technology Center
(CITC). The EIS Training, Communications, and
Administration (EISTCA) team is responsible for the development
and delivery of the classes.
The idea for the program originated with John Hooper,
Executive Director for the AIS division. Goals for
selecting topics to be taught were enhancement of systems
analyst skills, communication within teams and with functional
users, and IT management as a career path. Another
possible topic in the future could be business analyst skills.
The AIS management team in
cooperation with John Hooper decided which learning topics were
appropriate for their team members. Programmers and programmer
analysts are taking the systems analysis class. The
communications topic is open to all AIS staff.
Attendance for all nine hours is required for completion of the
course. Content is a mixture of lecture and learning
activities, supplemented by documentation for each student.
It is expected to take about 12
months for all AIS staff to go through the available training.
Feedback from the attendees is sought to ensure staff needs are
being adequately met. The
instructors for the program are Cathy Gonzalez and
Martin Richards.
* Information for this article was
provided by Dr. Maurice Leatherbury and Cathy Gonzalez. Dr.
Leatherbury provided the information about the Data Center
operations and Ms. Gonzalez provided the information about the AIS
training initiative. -- Ed.
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