CERRITOS COMMUNITY COLLEGE

MINUTES OF

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY STANDARDS COMMITTEE

TUESDAY JANUARY 15, 2008

11:00 A.M. -12:30 P.M. - ROOM SS-137

MEMBERS PRESENT: ML Bettino, John McGinnis, Dean Mellas, Mario Morales, Wes Nance, Bernie Negrete, Patrick O’Donnell, Harry Riegert, Bernice Watson, Lee Krichmar

MEMBERS ABSENT: Lamont Freeman, Deb Moore

The meeting of January 15, 2008 was held in lieu of the planned meeting of January 11, and was brought to order at 11:12 a.m.

MINUTES OF DECEMBER 14, 2007

The Minutes of December 14 were reviewed by members in attendance. There was one correction: Dean Mellas noted that in the last paragraph on page 1 there should not be a hyphen between M and Player in “MPlayer.” It was moved by Dean Mellas, seconded by Bernice Watson, to approve the minutes as corrected. There was no further discussion. The minutes were approved with no abstentions prior to the arrival of M.L. Bettino and John McGinnis who were absent from the December 14 meeting.

OUTSTANDING IT STANDARDS ISSUES

Lee asked for discussion of any outstanding IT issues. She reported that computers have been replaced in the Skills and Language Labs, and four computers in Forensics.

Lee asked if there were any more Standards issues to be discussed. There was no further discussion on this item.

CIS SERVERS PROBLEM

Dean Mellas asked if there is any way new drives could be put on the servers they have in his department that can read the recordable media. Apparently, SmartStart does not work properly. It does not recognize the burned CD’s. Lee said she would check to see if IT has an old version of SmartStart that would work for him. She said if she was able to find one, she would send to him by interoffice mail.

TECHNOLOGY MASTER PLAN

Lee reported she has reviewed the IT Unit and Division Plan and has extracted as much information as would be appropriate for a Technology Master Plan. In the process of building the draft document, she also added in some place holders for the other topics that the committee had agreed should be included and wrote the initial draft document that has been distributed to the members for review. Much of the information contained in the draft she pulled out of the Standard 3C Accreditation Report, which is the majority of information related to the IT Department. This information does not include John McGinnis’s or M.L.’s areas, which are yet to be placed within the draft report. She asked for any initial feedback on the draft.

John McGinnis asked how Lee perceives Library Technology as different from Information Technology. She responded that she sees two sub-categories for his area: 1.) the Library Automation, a focus on Sirsi, and 2.) Everything else, separate from Sirsi, such as on-line data bases and web search data bases. John asked if in the original development and maintenance of his library database, which Ty originally developed, is something that needs to be included within the IT master plan. Lee responded that if our focus is to determine where we are now and to decide where we want to go, that it would be reasonable to include it. She asked if there was any feedback from Mark Wallace as to whether Ty would be given the assignment to make the updates for the library. John said there will be a future meeting with Ty. Lee responded that the real issue with custom development is that if you are going to make minor changes, it should stay with the original developer. But Lee explained that in the case of Counseling Plus there were specific performance problems and integration requirements that were out of the scope of Public Affairs, which is why IT took it over. But because we agreed to take one of Ty’s projects (at his request) it does not mean that by default we will take over all of his projects. She suggested that Ty continue to make the requested changes that John wanted in order that they might be done quickly.

John asked how the decision was made for IT to write the Student ID Lookup Program, a fully web-based program. Lee said the decision was made solely by her. On a fluke she put herself into an email list for "Sign-in Help" just to see how many hits we were getting on that portal sign-in help page, and about 95% of them was “I don’t know my student ID.” It was a small quantity of time to be invested for a large payoff. She assigned it to Bruce Tanner.   Lee did not realize the scope of the problem until she saw what A & R sees. When she realized the scope of the problem, she tried to address it immediately.

M.L. said that is a legitimate concern, though, because in another area, Ty built the program that we used for assigning and requesting equipment delivery and set up. It will need adjusting. It will have to go back to Ty and it may take time to complete. Lee replied that it is very challenging to take over someone else’s development work.

She said they did a complete re-write on Counseling, which took a lot of IT resources; she cannot do that for everything

M.L. added to avoid going into new problems in the future wouldn’t it be better for IT to take them on. Lee said she would be willing, but is not sure if they could. As it is there is a significantly large web development project on the back burner right now, called Planning Plus (an on-line planning application). Lee is trying to take on as much as she and her department can. There are many current timelines that already exist in IT. PeopleSoft has to be done in April and that is taking every developer she has to meet that timeframe.

John McGinnis asked if IKON/Network Printing/vend printing should be in be covered here too? He explained they have their own printing and photocopies, but I suspect it goes beyond just the Library. Lee replied we can add that as a category. John said he would like to use Library Automation as the main heading and then put bullets under that, covering those issues. Lee said she could add another category under IT for network copies/printing. Then the more unique category could be covered under Library Technology. This was agreed upon by both parties.

Lee asked if John was going to provide a copy of the Division Plan for the Committee. John agreed and this will be provided in the near future.

Lee asked for any other questions on the Library. There was no further discussion on the Library.

She passed out copies of ML’s division plan.

Lee said when she started building the draft for IT’s area she felt confident there was some value in staying consistent in how the unit plans flowed -- as far as the different categories was concerned. Then with M.L.’s Division Plan, she realized she had to figure out how to co-mingle Media Services and other categories in his area into the report. Lee was not sure if the committee wanted to get into that detail for the 3 areas or not? She thought it would be most appropriate to hand off this to the Committee asked how John and M.L. want their pieces co-mingled. ML and John both agreed to write and send the electronic version of their pieces to the Lee to fit into the draft document.

John said he would add something brief about what their issues are and add the three bulleted points (previously discussed) and anything else that should come up.

Lee asked M.L. how he feels about the three pieces for his area. She said she has place holders for his area that include Media Services, Electronic Classrooms Online Collaboration, and Learning Environment for Talon Net. M.L. added “Technology Training.”

Bernie asked what it is we want this to be. What direction are we going? He said he gets a sense we tend to use this term “plan” by the reporting of what we are doing and not that same sense of what we plan to do, and are these things really tools to plan our future. Lee mentioned she felt if we cover what we currently do and then what we plan to do in the future, that we would be making a great start. Lee asked Bernie if there were any specific areas he would like to see added, to which he answered, “No” and stated that it was interesting to find out all this information. He then concluded with, “I guess the next step is to figure out what it is that we need to do on a continuing or on-going basis, and how to meet the institution’s needs in the different areas.”

John McGinnis suggested that it is essential to get everything down in a document as to what we are doing. John suggested that we have to get it all down in one place before we can get to the next step. Lee said she is open to what the committee wants. Documenting what we are currently doing definitely has value.

Harry asked if first we need to find out what funding will be available. Lee responded that funding over the next couple of years is going to be tight, and this makes it more important for us to pick and choose what technologies we want to really focus on. She said that through the years she has been given very little external direction. She said she tries to make sure the IT department remains as flexible as possible. Lee reported that one of the most incredible things done strategically is virutalizing our IT environment. There is a lot that has to go on behind the scenes.

Lee said she doesn’t know how we go about finding what technologies the divisions/ departments hope to move forward in accomplishing. With the online planning form, there might be some transparency, because they will be like Capital Outlay. And managers will be able to look at the others’ plans, and that might help.

ML the most important thing is support for students or faculty and the institution. ML would like to have items mentioned about the larger support areas, so that there is the philosophy that we will not bring anything forward that does not include support. It is an important piece of what we do. When we are careful that we are having support in place, things go better. M.L. expressed a desire for emphasis in this area.

Lee suggested that under Technology Training there could be a sub-category for Faculty and Student Support. The heading could be changed to Technology Training and Support. She asked if he was okay with the other sections and M.L. said he would have to work with it. ML will email Lee with the section names and content he recommends.

MASTER PLANS FROM OTHER SCHOOLS

Lee reported that master plans are very unique to the environment and she is not finding much value in reviewing other schools’ plans, but offered them to the committee for review. A lot of them go into environmental issues, the population that the college serves, the overall strategic plan, institutional commitments, prior plans, and comparisons. Our areas are very different. For example, the Mira Costa Institutional Commitments were imbedded in this plan. This year we won’t have any comparison to prior year plans. The majority of the Mira Costa Plan is Goals and Objectives oriented.

M.L. suggested that we place an emphasis on the areas we are committed to. For example, we are committed to providing higher education, modernizing faculty offices, upgrading student support, offering computers to students who may not have one at home, etc. Lee said that would be a good inclusion..

Lee asked for other suggestions on the draft. She added that we also have put in a section on software applications that we support, which isn’t totally complete, but we have a good starting point. These are broken into sub-categories: custom applications developed by IT, third party applications that we interface to, standard applications used by students and faculty, and instructional application, and Patrick has been assigned to expanding these categories in this area.

A question came up about Macintosh computers and Lee said we do have reference to them in the draft.

Tim is going to be working on Premiere and other specific assistive technology applications.

Dean Mellas said that he feels it is important that everything be tied back to the strategic plan, and in support of that; from that all of the rest develop.

The consensus of the group was to allow Lee to send the draft to Jo Ann in order to gain from her perspective that we are moving in the right direction.

CODEX MEDIA

Lee asked for an update on any of the Codex Media types not working. Patrick said he looked into it and discovered that the region code wasn’t set on the DV Drive. Lee reminded the committee that we were going to wait for someone to raise a problem; none that she knows of have come up yet. Codex Media will not be raised on the agenda again unless it is raised as an issue by one of the divisions/departments.

NEXT MEETING

Our next meeting will be 2/8 at 9am. We will discuss future meeting date/time/location changes at the next meeting.

The meeting was adjourned at 12:27 p.m.

Submitted By: Patricia Childress, Administrative Assistant