Strategic Plan 2011 Technologies Roadmap

Overall direction description

The UBC Faculty & Staff E-mail service is a UBC-funded and in-house hosted enterprise e-mail service for staff, faculty and student employees of the University of British Columbia.

FASmail will support 15K to 20K users. Current technology consists of Exchange 2010 servers and data stores running on a virtual environment that offers High Availability(HA) and Vmotion capabilities. Database Availability Group (DAG) will be implemented to add HA at the application level. Incremental increase in user mailbox storage as well Archiving will be a big consideration in the next 3 years. The service will deploy the next version upgrade of Exchange after the release of service pack 1.

Overall direction description

myUBC is running on a very old version of uPortal, which is no longer supported by the vendor. The system has not been patched for a long time. It runs on four physical Sun Servers that need to be retired – two servers fall directly under the myUBC portal service while two other servers are shared with the CWL service and are owned by the CWL service. The service has not matured due to the absence of a business owner. With the new and growing demand from business units, a replacement portal is in consideration.

UBC IT will develop a service framework and engage stakeholders in implementing a new portal (also referred to as "Communication Hub") that will serve the global needs of the community.

Overall direction description

The goal of the Voice Service is to provide an integrated, highly reliable communications and collaboration infrastructure for the University.

The UBC IT Voice Service, as it exists today, is isolated from other technologies provided by UBC IT. A higher degree of integration between voice and other collaboration infrastructure, such as email, is required to facilitate real-time and asynchronous communications. At the same time, a movement towards an application-based unified communications environment will enable UBC IT to leverage common platforms for services – providing for the more effective use of resources.

Along with the move to a more integrated communication and collaboration environment, legacy systems are being refreshed with new technology. TDM capability is retained to continue supporting mission-critical services such as the hospital, 911/emergency phones, alarms, etc. VOIP strategy is renewed to accommodate service expansion as well as to support cost-effective alternatives.

Overall direction summary:

Continuity of current functionality (reliable, responsive and cost-effective), provide a campus wide budget system, integrated reporting

Overall direction summary:

Continuity of current functionality (reliable, responsive and cost-effective), addition of new functionality as specified by Functional Owner (e.g. Absence Management, Talent Management), implement common workflow

Over the next 5 years, BIS will focus on ensuring stable, effective and cohesive delivery of application services across the various clients we support. These applications should be consolidated where possible to meet operational efficiency targets while enabling our clients to meet their individual business needs. Additionally, BIS will start the process of migrating applications off aging development platforms (i.e. ColdFusion) to more scalable languages, namely J2EE with IAM integration. We will also begin to develop mobile applications to allow our clients increased accessibility to their customers.

Over the next 5 years, we will focus on virtualizing (centralizing where virtualization isn't possible) all BIS infrastructure across the portfolio. Our initial focus will be on lifecycle management, centralized services and building a more robust and scalable infrastructure layer as a strong foundation for our current and future application needs.

Overall direction summary: Continue to scale up the storage capacity and add Storage Management tools to offer more Tiers of SAN Services.

Highlight overall direction of roadmap: Continue to expand capacity at UBCV and at an off-site location and add management tools to achieve efficiencies.

Highlight overall direction of roadmap: The Virtual Server Service is "hardware agnostic" so we continue to scale to meet the increasing demand for compute resources, higher availability and keep pace with the latest technology revisions.

Overall direction summary: The completion of the new Data Centre will allow for the transition of Research computing and IT services consolidation away from the Dept Server Rooms to the new facility. With this new facility and with offsite Data Centre Space the Klink Facility can be gradually depopulated over the next 5 years. Departmental Server Rooms decommissioning will be ongoing as Research consolidates and as services are centralised.

Life Cycle Maintenance will be ongoing and budgeted accordingly.

Overall direction summary:

The IT Service Centre becomes a customer-focused single point of contact for campus services managed by UBC IT and its partners as required. The unit provides information, monitoring services, technical support, and escalation for all enterprise IT services.

The IT Service Centre will:

• Be a Tier 1 support unit, performing monitoring activities, and handling all requests and incidents effectively, supported by standardized processes and procedures.
• Setup 'satellite' Service Centres across campus to meet the needs and demands of the campus community and be the primary interface for face-to-face customer interaction.
• Be location independent, thus agents need to be able to remotely log in to handle calls etc.
• Have multi-channels of communications available to customers who can choose whatever channels they prefer. (voice, fax, email, web)
• Align with the IT Service Management Program to incorporate ITIL processes and policies.
• Establish well- defined service levels to measure the service delivered as well as the Service Centre's capability and performance in providing the service to customers or end-users.
• Implement an effective Knowledge Management practices which enables the process and service /product information be readily available to agents.

Overall direction summary:

The 5-Year end state for the Database Administration unit is to provide to the Campus Community an enhanced Database Service that enables the Campus Community to implement the systems, technologies, and services desired in a robust, efficient and reliable manner.

This will be done by providing a centralized database service that is available to the organizations/groups/individuals that require database services. It will do so by taking advantage of the Virtual Systems service, related infrastructure and the evolved growth and sophistication of the other UBC IT units such as the IT Service Centre. The services provided under the umbrella Database management service will be robust (in that it will be able to maintain uptime in the face of maintenance windows) but also highly available, when desired, in that multiple instances of the same Database server will be concurrently available to accommodate load or failure of a particular component in the service stream. Database services will be also be available using three different technologies lines with enterprise level expertise. There will be sophisticated service level monitoring and enhanced Tier 2 support via the ITSC (OC) and the service will be available 24*7, 365 days a year.

With the implementation of succession planning, ongoing training and the deployment of a Microsoft SQL/MySQL server team, the Database Administration unit will have expertise in the three technology areas offered and will be able to offer this to the campus community where required. The Database Administration unit during the period under consideration will also explore technical alternatives and related technologies to identify and deploy, where possible, credible competing technologies with the potential to improve existing services and/or replace existing technologies. The enhancement of the knowledge in the DBA unit lends itself to providing a superior level of support and enable UBC IT to meet its overall objectives.

Database Services will be constructed to enable application teams and similar to perform their work more efficiently and become more effective in their use of database services by the use of self provisioning and also by gaining an enabler to rapidly test and deploy updated applications via the ability to quickly deploy production instances of databases in test environments. The expertise present in the application teams will be further enhanced via the development of an application DBA training program that will enable application teams to knowledgeably use database services to the extend desired.

Overall direction description

UBC Events was launched in September 2008. It is a centralized online public events calendar system that serves the entire UBC community: Students, Faculty, Staff, Alumni, and Visitors. UBC Public Affairs, UBC IT, and Student Development collaborated to implement a common solution that addresses event scheduling and publishing needs of the community. UBC Events incorporated over two hundred and forty separate event providers into its calendaring system in its inaugural year on campus, bringing UBC closer to its vision of a "connected community."

The application has become so popular and has matured as a service. A growing demand for additional and enhanced functionality has called for major service upgrades. New features will be released in the next couple of years. In addition, a major backend system refresh will be planned for.

Overall direction summary:

This roadmaps outlines the continued implementation of a standard service management practice that includes process development and tool suite implementation to support the core service management practices (Service Desk including Self-Service, Service Catalogue including actionable Request Fulfillment, and CMDB to support incident, problem and change management) for IT and non-IT services.

It is envisioned that the technology implemented and the processes developed within this program will support a campus-wide model to manage services in a customer-centric and cost-effective way. The objectives of the program and supporting roadmap are:

• To improve customer-facing IT service support and delivery to the UBC user community by implementing new service management processes;
• To provide a solid foundation upon which additional future IT Service Management processes can be built and continuously improved;
• To improve accountability to the UBC user community by establishing metrics to report on the effectiveness of the delivered service processes;
• To reduce duplication and minimize redundant costs and effort by efficiently and effectively sharing resources (people & financial) across multiple IT departments.

Overall direction description

A number of new and existing buildings are using or planning to use digital signage (LCD/Plasma TV's) to convey information to occupants and visitors.

As the use of digital signage proliferates, standards will need to be developed to use this resource effectively and efficiently. A common platform, with signs linked via the UBC computer network, will allow for visual creativity with standards to help create a common visitor experience. Further, an integrated network facilitates a consistent and reliable posting of emergency information.