News
ASCIT reorganization focuses
on ‘front-line’ IT services
The ASCIT (Academic Services) division within the Office of the Chief Information Officer is being reorganized to focus its efforts on providing front-line IT services to UB faculty, staff and students.
Under the reorganization, part of the UB 2020 IT Strategic Transformation Initiative, ASCIT will be renamed CIT Client Services (CITCS) and will oversee the central help desk, public sites and administrative desktop support—in essence, becoming the “public face” of services provided by the Office of the CIO.
Nancy Kielar, chief of staff in the Office of the CIO, will serve as acting director of CITCS.
“The transformation of our central client-service group is aimed at improving our ability to deliver services to our faculty, students and staff, and position ourselves to meet future needs,” says Thomas Furlani, interim associate vice president for information technology.
The quality of service provided by the organization, Furlani notes, “is a key factor in the institution’s perception of central IT. User satisfaction, Help Desk efficiency and meeting changing client needs are all drivers for continually seeking improvements in the support services we provide.”
A new Workstation Support Group is being formed within CITCS to provide a more focused approach to the delivery of workstation support and to better serve clients in CIT, Facilities and University Business Services, as well as the workstations in the classrooms and public computing sites. Daniel Deakin, manager of technology research, Enterprise Infrastructure Services, has been named interim manager of the Workstation Support Group.
Furlani also announced two organizational realignments within CIT. The IT Classroom Design, Install and Repair Group, led by John Pfeffer, now will report to Operational Support Services (OSS), a move designed to consolidate service delivery and improve efficiency.
In addition, the Visual Media Services Group and UBLearns Support Group have been reassigned to the Teaching and Learning Center (TLC) in the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs. Relocating these groups to the TLC is designed to raise their visibility within the university community and better serve faculty.
“The reorganization of ASCIT is the latest project in the larger IT Strategic Transformation Initiative,” says Provost Satish K. Tripathi. “Other projects in the initiative that have been successfully implemented include the consolidation of UB’s more than 80 separate telephone systems into a single Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service for the university’s phone system, consolidation of e-mail servers and file servers, virtualization of servers across the university, and migrating student e-mail to Google Apps.
“The IT Transformation Initiative has simultaneously has helped us to reduce costs while improving our delivery of IT services to faculty, staff and students,” Tripathi says.
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