Created just seven years ago in an ever-changing field, the UC Davis Division of Information Technology is pulled in too many directions trying to meet wide-ranging expectations to best serve the campus, according to a new report. A committee that issued the report after an extensive 10-month administrative review says the division should concentrate more on its leadership role in addressing campuswide computing needs. At the same time, the committee said in its report, academic and administrative departments need to take more responsibility for providing their own basic technology support. The 80-page report, released campuswide this week, makes numerous recommendations for the division to improve its service--including the possible creation of comprehensive service centers, whether virtual or real, to reduce duplication of efforts and save its campus customers frustration and money. However, many of the report's 43 recommendations go far beyond the division itself, with implications for nearly all levels of the campus. The report calls on the new vice provost for information and educational technology, once hired, to work with vice chancellors and deans to sort out their respective roles and responsibilities for meeting the campus's widely diverging information-technology needs. "There is a critical need to develop a common understanding about which levels of the campus are responsible for different types of information technology support," the report says. "Across the campus there is neither a consensus about the support and services the central IT organization should provide nor a clear understanding of the services that are currently available," the committee wrote. At the least, the report says, all campus departments should provide for themselves a "basic level of local technology support." "An enormous contribution" Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Robert Grey, who appointed the administrative-review committee a year ago, called the report an "outstanding product" and an "enormous contribution" to the campus. "This very comprehensive and thoughtful study provides guidance that will help shape IT over the next several years," Grey said in a May 12 letter to committee members. He directed Jerry Hallee, acting associate vice chancellor for information technology, to develop a plan, by June 30, with timetables for addressing the report's recommendations. Those recommendations include: Establishing a clear process for allocating instructional technology funds "to ensure that programs most critical to the academic mission benefit from them"; Making a campuswide effort to improve the performance, reliability, uniformity and security of the campus Intranet, especially for Web-based instruction. "The failure of servers or the infrastructure that supports them represents a potentially catastrophic problem"; Improving customer service and eliminating duplication of services, possibly creating one or more comprehensive "IT Service Centers" and perhaps giving departments more self-explanatory names. The report suggests the division become more like the library in how it provides a broad range of services to its many clients; Improving communications-both within Information Technology and between the organization and the campus-including updating Web pages. A team of Web masters and staff members from across the division is already working on redesigning the Web pages; Requiring every department to appoint and adequately train a "technology-support coordinator" to provide basic computing support. Currently, 332 technology-support coordinators in 224 units participate in the campus's Technology Support Program. The program, while considered a national model, is voluntary and has wide variations in the degree of investment by departments, the committee said; and Possibly reconfiguring Creative Com-munication Services, which currently combines ReproGraphics, Illustration Services and Instructional Media. ReproGraphics' printing and graphic-design shop may not belong in Information Technology at all, the report suggests. All campus administrative units are required to undergo a review at least once every five years to help assure they are cost effective and meeting their goals and objectives. In most cases, those review findings are sent back to the units' administrators for action with little notice to the rest of the campus. Information Technology leaders and employees received their report last month. However, because the division's work touches so much of the campus and because the review involved broad participation of faculty, staff and students, Grey decided to also release the report to the general campus community this week. The report can be read on the Web at http://it.ucdavis.edu/adminrev/report. Hard copies are also available at Shields Library reference desk. Coincides with leadership search The review has coincided with the campus' search for a new Information Technology leader. Carole Barone, the associate vice chancellor for information technology since October 1991, left last fall to become a vice president of a national association for information technology in higher education. With Barone's departure, the job title was changed to vice provost for information and educational technology. "Many among our campus community don't realize how far the operation has come from the late '80s and early '90s," said Hallee, who chaired an earlier review committee that led to Information Technology's creation in 1991. "Carole Barone and the IT folks really brought this technology a long way." Dave Shelby, assistant dean for the Division of Biological Sciences and chair of the review committee, said the panel tried to outline information-technology challenges facing the campus without hamstringing the future vice provost. Councils to take next steps About the same time the review committee began its work, Grey also appointed two councils and a policy board to serve as a "coordinating framework" for governing information technology on campus. Creation of the three panels--the Academic Computing Coordinating Council, Administrative Computing Coordinating Council and the Information Technologies Policy Board--had been recommended in July 1997 by the Joint Campus Committee on Information Technology, a group of mostly faculty members chaired by Caroline Bledsoe, professor of land, air and water resources. Shelby said he was optimistic those councils would go the next step and help achieve consensus about the campus's information-technology needs. Hallee, the acting Information Technology leader who also served on the committee, said the division's directors would meet at a retreat June 15 to work out details for the action plan. Many decisions will be left until a new vice provost is hired, Hallee said, but some changes are already under way. He has asked Information Technology directors to begin discussions with Shelby in the Division of Biological Sciences and Gary Schultz, assistant dean of the School of Veterinary Medicine, who also was a committee member, in a trial effort aimed at sorting out responsibilities for technology support among the division, deans' offices and departments. Hallee said such discussions eventually will be expanded to other departments. "I think ideally we would end up with memorandums of understanding between IT and each college or school," Hallee said. Other efforts focus on more training for all front-line service employees on where to refer campus customers for help, said Paula King, Information Technology's director of planning and coordination. King said the division has been working the past two years to improve its service. "Customer-service training takes time," she said. "Just recently we have had enough of the IT staff attend the training and now have a critical mass who can apply the concepts so that we can really start making a difference." The division also has completed job descriptions and is beginning to recruit for new policy-level analysts to provide additional staff support to the academic and administrative computing councils and information technologies policy board, King said. Instructional technology strategic needs will be getting particular attention, she said. Widespread staff involvement In fact, members of the review committee said Information Technology employees were actively engaged in the review and made many of the suggestions for improvements. The one ground rule prohibited those employees from arguing with others' perceptions about the division. The committee, in conducting its review, held numerous meetings with faculty, staff, administrators and students. But the most well-attended meetings were those for Information Technology employees, Shelby said. "We had a couple meetings where we actually had to turn people away," he said. "It's a highly energized group with a lot of talent, a lot of potential. And they clearly want to do a good job." Shelby said other universities also are struggling to keep pace with the rapidly changing field of information technology. No single institutional model has emerged for UC Davis to follow, he said. However, he said campuses that have been most successful in setting their priorities have done so through recurring, back-and-forth discussions between their faculties and information-technology organizations. "Because the field is changing so fast and it's so expensive and so resource-intensive, you cannot do everything you want to do," Shelby said. "The more people see what the tradeoffs and the challenges are, and the more they participate and understand the decision-making, the better the chances that the Information Technology division will be successful. That's why it's important to make this [report] public."