University of Wisconsin CIO Council

November 15, 2007

Teleconference

Attendees
Act 20 Reporting Working Group
Oracle Maintenance Renewal
WiscNet Board Meeting
Meeting Dates

Attendees

 

Act 20 Reporting Working Group

The Act 20 Reporting Working Group that was formed at the ITMC meeting earlier in the week, has a conference call set up for November 26th. Meanwhile, Ed Meachen and Debbie Durcan will also be meeting. Jack Duwe inquired about the mechanism for submitting campus strategic plans to the Board of Regents (BOR). Ed Meachen explained that in these cases, materials are usually submitted to UW System Administration (UWSA) and, in this case, the Office of Learning and Information Technology (OLIT) in particular. He would then work with the appropriate UWSA liaison, probably Debbie Durcan, to come up with an appropriate mechanism for relaying the plans to the board.

The BOR is required to submit two reports to the legislature that will likely include action items that are crafted with the assistance of the UWSA.

Ron Kraemer explained that Chapter 36 explicitly recognizes the BOR as the governance body for the UWS. This makes the BOR ultimately responsible for IT projects.

Jack Duwe suggested looking at the statutory reporting requirements for the Wisconsin state agencies to see how their new responsibilities correspond to those of the UWS. It appears that Wisconsin CIO Oskar Anderson has a similar view to the UWS CIOs in that responsibilities for projects, and project reporting, include the endusers and functional groups, not just the IT departments. In some cases, state agency contracts are directly with outside vendors and don't involve the Wisconsin CIO's office.

Normally, strategic plans reflect the culture and vision of individual institutions. They typically take a long time to develop. The Act's language does not specifically call for the development of a new institutional strategic plan each March 1. It could be satisfied by the submission of the current strategic plans and lists of current projects. An alternative approach would be to develop an IT strategic plan template that each UWS institution would complete with materials from their internal campus plans. The latter approach would require more work than simply submitting a link to an existing plan. In either case, it is important to remember that there is an important distinction between ongoing processes, such as keeping a system up-to-date, and new projects, such as the HR system.

The reference to each of the UW Colleges as an individual entity is problematic.

The statutory requirement is to deliver strategic plans to the BOR, with Ed Meachen as their representative, by March 1, 2008. There is not a requirement for the BOR to discuss the plans by March 1.

Oracle Maintenance Renewal

Doug Flee, Lori Voss and Nina Boss provided an update on the Oracle maintenance renewal.

Maintenance contract renewal discussions have been restarted with Oracle. The maintenance caps in the current Oracle contract expire in February 2008. The goal is to not lose any rights that exist under the current contract. Over time, the licensing metrics have driven up the costs in an unexpected fashion because of their dependence on the IPEDS reporting cycle and mechanisms. Other Oracle customers have been experiencing similar difficulties with tying costs to IPEDS reporting and Oracle is open to looking at alternatives.

A second major consideration is the ability to unbundle and license certain software options on a less than systemwide basis.

A third issue is updating the ten-year old language of the license which includes names of specific platforms and products that have morphed into new offerings.

Oracle also has issues that they would like considered, including extension of the current contract to cover the licensing of additional products, which may not be feasible. There is a line by line review of the maintenance contracts at the state level. There are procurement processes that must be followed for acquiring newly developed features and for maintenance contract costs that go higher than the annual projections that are approved via governor's waiver.

Meanwhile, UW–Madison has released a middleware RFP. Gartner is willing to assist the UWS in determining what discount levels are possible from Oracle and other vendors.

WiscNet Board Meeting

John Krogman presented a brief update on the November 13^thWiscNet Board meeting that was held at the Heidel House in GreenLake following the ITMC meeting. The WiscNet Board approved a new revenue model for the next two years which will result in savings for WiscNet members. Also, the Advancing Networking group will be sending out recommendations for the development of community area networks.

Meeting Dates

The next meeting of the UWS CIO Council will be a teleconference on December 13th at the Frederick Center at

1950 Willow Drive

at UW–Madison. Meeting dates, the directory of UW CIOs, and CIO Council meeting summaries are available at: www.uwsa.edu/olit/cio/.