Principles for Campus-Wide Tool Implementations

Overview

As our campus IT landscape evolves, one of the top CIO goals has become to reduce the complexity of tools and achieve an economy of skills. By narrowing the variation in tools and practices, we can leverage the collective intellect of our development and operations IT community across campus and offer mutual aid. 

 

As we embark on the adoption of campus-wide tools, we have identified the need to follow a set of principles to guide these adoptions. The campus has already adopted several tools of this nature. 

Some examples are Google Connect, Drupal on Pantheon, Apigee API Management Platform, GitHub, Docusign, Power BI, Promap, Erwin, the Atlassian tools Confluence and Jira, and AWS as a cloud campus-wide platform. 

 

This set of principles can guide our IT community in the adoption of campus-wide tools.

 

Principles

 

Shared administration

 

 

  • Each campus-wide tool requires the formation of a cross-departmental administration group with shared or delegated administrative capabilities.
  • The goal is to avoid a single point of failure, promote shared knowledge within UCSB departments, and to preserve the stability of the service.
  • Group responsibilities
    • Manage and monitor the service.
    • Define and allow local control at the appropriate level to distribute the work necessary to manage the service.
    • Review and apply proposed changes.
    • Setup clear guidelines about responsibility escalation.
    • Setup audit logging for core administrative actions.

 

Governance 

 

  • Each campus-wide tool requires the formation or identification of a cross-departmental governance group with defined responsibilities. Governance groups can be formed around tools and areas of expertise.
  • Group responsibilities
    • Review and propose changes to the service;
    • Provide information on upcoming improvements for the products where applicable.
    • Maintain consistency between the multiple groups that use the service;
    • Make decisions about the tool management and administration. 

 

Responsibility matrix

 

  • Each campus-wide tool requires the development of a responsibility matrix to set up clear expectations for each group and role.
  • To follow the campus standards, the RACI method will be used to develop the responsibility matrix.
  • The responsibility matrix will include coverage for individuals to prevent a single point of failure.
  • The responsibilities matrix will be reviewed periodically and kept up to date.

 

Customer service

 

  • With the shared resource model for managing campus-wide tools, we will take advantage of the following areas to handle customer service.
    • Provide self-service as much as possible;
    • Create customer documentation;
    • Clearly identify the help desk and support service model in the RACI matrix;

 

Automation Interfaces

  • Campus-wide tools should provide capabilities for automation to reduce impact on staff, improve ease of use, and provide opportunities for agility and innovation. 
  • Examples include API availability, chatbot capability and scripting capability for bulk processing.
  • Where possible select tools that implement open protocols and APIs.

 

Provide a comparable level of service as individual instances or better

 

  • For campus-wide tools that were adopted from single-department implementations, we will strive to provide a comparable level of service or better as the individual department service, including automations and self-service capabilities.