| LINKS | Administrative
Computing Steering Committee Minutes of Meetings: March 2, 2000 Present: Brace, Cossey, Gleason, Klein, Manchester, McCann, DR., Tobiessen. Review last meeting minutes: 1. Replacement computer needs. Following up last week's discussion, Doug Klein encouraged all offices and responsibility centers to make known their computing needs, either at the time of submitting their budget requests, or sooner, in order to help assess the scope of the replacement problem. Last week, Dave R. noted that 117 administrative computers fell below the P166 threshhold. We need to know which offices cannot do their jobs because of this. Kathy McCann pointed out that we should be looking at all IT needs, including things like printers, scanners, servers, and not just the computers themselves. Dave R. asked that we remember that new Datatel products will require computers that support graphical user interfaces, and that we need to assess which administrative computers will have to be upgraded or replaced to continue to access Datatel information. Finally, Doug Klein expressed the hope that most or all of the administration could standardize on windows machines. This is a major task, given that there are 76 Macs on administrative desktops. Two offices which would be willing to switch are the Dean of Students and the CDC. Replacement machines are likely to come available in the near future using OCS replacement funds (about 8 machines), machines coming out of academic labs and classrooms (about 26 machines), and through a recent gift of "low-mileage" used machines from IBM, negotiated by Bob Balmer, Dean of Engineering (10 machines). An additional 8 machines is being budgeted for out of administrative departmental budgets. This makes a total of about 50 computers which will be upgraded within the next six months. Ironically, one of the stumbling blocks to getting these new and recycled machines deployed onto desktops is a shortage of technical support staff to clean up, re-configure, and re-install these machines, as well as a lack of physical space to do the work. 2. Budget. There are several things happening that will affect budgeting for IT. First, the College is moving to a capital budgeting system. The finance office is working with Dave Cossey, Doug Klein, and Dwight Wolf to define what "capital" means in the IT arena. There will also be a new set of object codes to be used exclusively for IT purchases, so that we can in future accurately track exactly what we spend on IT. Second, finance is still working out the details of exactly how capital funds will be budgeted and allocated. Judy Manchester will keep us informed of any new procedures. 3. Optical records management. Kathy McCann has expressed interest in exploring the possibility of adopting an optical records storage and retrieval system at Union. We brainstormed which offices would find this capibility most useful. The list includes College Relations, the CDC, the pre-health professions advisors, the Registrar. Other possibities are Finance and Human Resources. Admissions is unlikely to need this capability. Kathy reported that other schools using this technology include Penn State, Duke, U of Texas, Susquehanna University, West Point, Loyola Marymount. The ability to do a full text search on a scanned document (as opposed to a downloaded one) does require an OCR component. As expected, the quality of the original is relevant then in the success of the search. Two things are clear: (a) we do not now have funding for his, so it is in the proposal stage, and (b) hardware costs are only the tip of the iceberg. There are tremendous labor costs in scanning and indexing documents so that they can be found again. Kathy McCann said that her office manages over two million documents. Dave Cossey pointed out that legal documents, to remain valid, must be stored in a way which cannot ever be changed. While the initial costs are high, the long-term benefits are also high. Records storage becomes less expensive in the long run, and searches for relevant documents becomes vastly easier, and can be performed by anyone with access to the retrieval system. Kathy will assemble representatives from the offices who would get the most benefit from such a system to try to decide whether it is a case worth persuing. Next meeting: Thursday April 13, 2000, 11:15 am. |
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