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| ISC Progress Report, July 2020
Welcome to Summer!
COVID-19 Response
ISC is proud to partner with the entire Penn community to prepare students, faculty, and staff for remote work. Our updated Student Remote IT Support and Remote Work Tools & Guidelines webpages have received thousands of views, and the PennOpen Pass daily symptom checker is launching soon.
Amidst COVID-19, ISC is still focused on
our five Strategic Goals and related projects:
Deliver high-quality services:
PennFlex Phone: PennFlex Phone, the new cloud-based telephony service which will replace PennNet Phone, is now in production! We invite support providers to migrate to PennFlex Phone as early as July, with additional migrations later in the summer. Contact ISC Client Care to get on board. For regular migrations, we plan to begin the process in September. Finally, we are exploring the addition of a new e-fax offering, which will greatly simplify the sending and receiving of faxes.
HireIT Certified Desktop: HireIT’s new Certified Desktop tier provides commodity services to Schools and Centers with an existing local IT infrastructure and support. Services include software, operating systems, driver updates, encryption key management, and custom software fixlet creation for IBM Endpoint Manager (Bigfix). Certified Desktop ensures a standard operating baseline for machines, affording LSPs time to focus on providing IT support tailored to their own specialized environments.
Campus VPN: The new Campus Virtual Private Network service was launched ahead of schedule in March to coincide with Penn’s move to remote teaching and working. The service requires a software client that gives the ability for users located almost anywhere in the world to have an experience similar to being located on Penn’s wireless network. This allows users to access resources that are restricted to campus. In June, we had 2,285 unique Penn users log in to the VPN service.
Virtual Desktop Service: ISC optimized its Virtual Desktop service for increased remote use. The service hosts a desktop operating system within a virtual machine running on a centralized server. This allows IT organizations to rapidly deploy and maintain Windows desktops and applications by providing a unique toolset that streamlines desktop and application deployment.
ISC Service Management: The Service Management Office (SMO) maintains a strategic overview of the portfolio, ensuring alignment with broader strategic goals, a consistent approach, and a positive customer experience. It is a continual process that integrates business strategy with operational performance to synchronize resources, strategies, and schedules - minimizing risk, maximizing resources, increasing customer satisfaction, and reducing costs.
Anticipate future change:
Workday@Penn: Workday celebrated its one-year anniversary on July 1. The team recently partnered with central administration to design processes for the emergency grant program and the change in work location to home address. Year-end guidance included what to do with student worker records, which compensation reports to run, and how to use time tracking reports to help achieve accuracy. Processes for preventing duplicate records during a direct hire or contracting, and for providing August stipends for first-year PhD students, were also developed. A new policy will require security role training be completed within 30 days of the security role assignment. Attention is now turning to data governance to refine reports and encourage data owners to audit and correct their data.
Next Generation Student Systems (NGSS): With the delayed deployment of the new Pennant systems, the NGSS team has taken the opportunity to streamline the project’s organizational structure to increase cross-workstream collaboration and operational efficiencies. Notable changes to the organizational structure include Rosey Nissley as the new project Program Manager, Bill Branan as the Data Access & Environment Technical Project Manager, Isobel Thompson as the Development & Architects Technical Program Manager, Stu Benoff as the Development Lead, and Jing Ding as the Testing, Environment, and Production Turnover Lead. In addition to the organizational changes, the NGSS project has successfully tested Financial Aid integrations as part of Release 1 System Integration Testing (SIT) and continues to advance in both the Release 1 Student Records Integrations Testing and its Release 2 design and build.
Online Accessibility: Penn is working with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) on efforts to make campus websites and applications more accessible for persons with disabilities. Since January, the Web Accessibility project team has assembled a web entity database that actively monitors 473 websites and applications for accessibility issues via the Pope Tech automated tool. Multiple avenues are newly available for providing guidance and support: a dedicated Slack channel, regular weekly office hours, service catalog offerings, and an upcoming relaunch of the central Accessibility site. Along with in-person meetings and presentations, these avenues have allowed the team to identify campus-wide needs and offer tailored remediation or support plans based on a group’s bandwidth, priorities, and technical understanding. The team will also be working to evaluate and improve the accessibility of other applications and courseware prior to Penn’s August OCR agreement deadline.
Penn Research Portal: Work continues on the Office of the Vice Provost for Research’s Research Portal Program, which will provide centralized access to research administrative information and improve the researcher experience in completing research administrative tasks. The program consists of three sub-projects: Grant Financial Management (GFM), expected initial rollout Fall 2020; Conflict of Interest & Extramural Disclosure (COI); and the Research Portal, which will provide improved systems access and the consolidation and presentation of information.
PennERA: In April, a significant upgrade to Penn’s Electronic Research Administration system was completed, and the team is planning to move the application from on-premises to a cloud-hosted environment. This move to cloud will support our Cloud First strategy to accelerate the speed of delivery and drive more value through technology. The effort also involves moving the system to a SQL Server environment for which the system vendor has shown a better record of performance and reliability. In addition, the team has been updating and expanding PennERA’s knowledge base of end-user support materials, including user guides, quick reference guides, and a variety of other training and learning materials.
Protect Penn:
Network Segmentation: Work continues to create a network segmentation plan to logically divide Penn’s network to improve the security of critical systems. We are moving forward by segmenting known guest traffic on our wireless infrastructure. Users on AirPennNet-Guest and those on Eduroam who have authenticated using non-Penn credentials will have their traffic routed through the border firewall. This change will allow us to scan and block any activity that is deemed suspicious.
Identity & Access Management Program: Please see our latest update regarding welcoming André Jenkins as the new IAM Program Manager, Internal IAM project developments, PennPath service offering reminder, and what’s next.
Exercise fiscal stewardship:
COVID-19 Response: The initial financial mitigation efforts across Penn provided some cost savings to the University. However, based on the latest School & Center budget submissions, the University is now projecting a FY21 deficit of $91M. Accordingly, the Administrative Centers have developed scenarios to address planned reductions in central funding. ISC's plan focuses primarily on reduced contractors and capital projects.
Recruit, retain & develop:
Human Resources: ISC's refreshed HR Team is developing a new strategic program to address employee optimization and engagement, management and leadership development, training, recruitment, and HR policies and procedures.
Thank you for your support!
The ISC Leadership Team
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