CIT Annual Report 2014

Message from the CIO

CIT is driven by our community’s needs. Whether it’s expanding and improving wireless coverage, bringing faculty together to learn how to use technology to enrich student learning, or helping an office to improve their business processes using technology, everything we do involves meeting a need. This year’s annual report shares many of the needs that were met this year.

This year we have had three new faces join CIT. Travis Kershner came on board in July 2013 as a Network Analyst and his primary focus is on the wireless network. Justin Hugg joined us in August 2013 as a Programmer Analyst and works on the development and new applications and modification to existing applications. Our new Assistant Director and Manager for Instructional Resources is Michele Messenger who arrived in December.

CIT remains focused on security. Phishing, in particular, continues to be a problem. This year, in collaboration with the College’s Information Security team, we focused on phishing awareness with the goal of establishing on-going effort to raise awareness from the newly admitted student to the emeritus professor. We’ve had some fun distributing stress “phish” at the employee wellness fair and at student orientation. The team has some new ideas for this coming academic year.

Helping offices to improve business processes is very rewarding work for CIT staff. This year we completed an Argos reporting/Paperless project with Admissions. Paul Jackson and his team members, Paul Anderson and Justin Hugg, worked to fully automate application-processing procedures. Manual and paper based procedures were eliminated. This project has been transformational for how Admissions processes applications and the benefits and value has been great.

Information technology is a game-changer. It is transforming the way we teach, learn, work, communicate and even how we think. This year CIT has secured the services from Gartner to help provide us technology-related insight into our business decisions through their research engagement services, research, webinars, events, and conferences. So far, we have sought their expert opinion on a web development project, transitioning to a new learning management system and on an Advancement donor location project. We also participated for the first time in the MISO (Measuring Information Service Outcomes) survey, a web-based quantitative survey designed to measure how faculty, students, and staff view library and computing services in higher education. The assessment tab of this report gives details on our MISO results.

This coming year, the College is welcoming a new Vice President for Enrollment Services and searching for a new president. As student demographics change, data-driven decision making and the need for help from CIT in delivering data in a meaningful way will become a new higher priority. CIT looks forward to helping.

Communication is always a challenge. CIT is very active on Twitter (Follow CITGeneseo). We tweet upcoming outages, info on new technologies, IT alerts such as a current phishing attempt, and other technology related news.

Sue Chichester

Chief Information Officer and Director, CIT