ISC Progress Report, March 2018
Welcome to Spring!
Here’s a brief report on many of our major activities,
organized by our five strategic themes.
Increase Value Through Differentiation & Innovation
Two-Step Verification and Password Reset Project: 16,000 people across campus are now using Two-Step Verification, including more than 9,000 staff and contractors, and 2,500 faculty. Password policy compliance is roughly 98% for faculty and staff. HireIT: HireIT, which provides high-quality IT support services to Schools and Centers, handled 1,733 tickets in Q2, where 53% were resolved in one day or less. Notable is the 13% reduction in the number of tickets that took seven or more days to resolve. HireIT continues to expand Field Services, branching out to include ad hoc AV support with the addition of the Kleinman Center as a new client. At the February grand opening of the
Penn Biden Center, Vice President Biden and Dr. Gutmann thanked the Penn team that made it all possible. Biden gave a special shout out to the AV and said even the White House Situation Room didn't have as much capability!
Project Management Office: The PMO hosted a
Project Jam session on Lessons Learned in February, including project managers from the PMO, ISC, and Wharton. On March 23rd, a
Project Partners SIG meeting will include a Skill Builder presentation, and focus on project estimating and budgeting. The most recent PMO project status report is available on the PMO website at
PMO Dashboard.
Virtual Desktop: The Virtual Desktop service hosts a desktop operating system within a virtual machine running on a centralized server. A priority fix of the service was kicked off in June of 2017 to provide redundancy and increase stability of the service. We created an entirely new cluster to meet the increasing needs of the service. Currently 75% of our clients are utilizing the new environment.
PennO365: The PennO365 advisory team has been upgrading the service across campus:
- Microsoft’s Advanced Threat Protect security feature is being evaluated and we hope to integrate it with Splunk.
- We are integrating O365 message tracing and authentication logs into the Splunk service, giving the security team greater insight into threats to the Penn community.
- The exchange.upenn.edu domain will be retired on June 30th. Client Care is assembling a communications package with regular updates to take place throughout the first half of this calendar year. Clients wishing to retain an Exchange address can use the Forward-Only service.
- We are working with a set of clients to enable SharePoint for use by Schools and Centers.
Business Optimization, Harmonization & Transparency
Technology Roadmap: ISC’s Technology Roadmap was updated in January to help Penn’s technology professionals make contextual decisions within the overall University technology environment.
Data Center Project: ISC Technology Services is working on several
Data Center-related projects this year. Major improvements to our Pennovation Data Center are underway, and we are working with clients and service owners to migrate assets from the 3401 Walnut Street Data Center. We are evaluating sites for a possible on-campus co-location space that clients and service owners might use for on-campus redundancy. The final component of this multi-faceted program will be the decommissioning of the 3401 Walnut Street Data Center by December 2018.
Apptio: More than 140 people across campus are now using the Apptio Bill of IT. Several additional ISC services have been onboarded, including
Virtual Desktop,
PennNet Phones, as well as Ben Financials and Atlas applications for flat rate billing. The Service Financial Dashboard is now available in Apptio.
Strengthen & Optimize IT @ Penn
Human Capital Management: The
Human Capital Management (HCM) program aims to increase Penn’s HR and Payroll work efficiency, enhance response to changes in regulatory and compliance issues, improve the user experience, and strengthen information quality and access. Check out the HCM Update for the latest news and developments.
Continuous Improvement
Cloud First
Cloud First: Please see our latest update regarding Cloud First team reintegration, the program retrospective lunchtime learning video, recent progress, new web content, and cloud-related events.
Thank you,
The ISC Leadership Team
