CURRENT PROJECTS

Advising Tool Selection and Implementation

Particulars

• Steering Committee Score: 394
• Divisional VP: Jenn Capps - Academic Affairs
• Sponsor: Carmen Bustos-Works - Academic Programs
• Project Coordinator: Kathy Hudson 

Current State

(why we need this project)

Academic advisors (both faculty advisors and professional advisors) have large advising caseloads, with professional advisors having as many as 80 students. Advisors need to track these students’ progress and provide relevant, timely feedback to facilitate student success. 

The advising rosters that list these students in the PeopleSoft faculty center provide only basic information, and advisors are unable to, at a glance, select which students need targeted communications (i.e., communications regarding specific holds, applying for graduation, information specific to transfer students, etc.). PeopleSoft also does not provide mechanisms for alerting advisors when a new student is added to their roster or of other significant changes such as academic withdrawal. 

Students’ experience of advising varies dramatically on our campus based on advisors’ caseloads and how advisors manage their workload. If the current interface continues, advising will proceed, but with a loss of opportunity for improved service delivery (advising to students) and efficiency.

Future State

(what changes this project will achieve)

Academic advisors (both faculty advisors and professional advisors) have an all-in-one advising solution that can identify at-risk students and provide a centralized data repository around the student.

Strategic Alignment

(why these changes are important)

This project would directly impact student success, supporting advisors’ ability to meet students with just-in-time communications and to stay informed of students’ status. This will improve retention by providing support at the appropriate time, when students may be struggling. As advising caseloads grow with increased enrollment, this need will be all the more urgent.

This change would also improve efficiency for advisors across the university and for the ASCs and other support staff who allocate and track advisees.

The Faculty Advising Fellows plan to monitor the results by checking in with advisors through both the Advising Working Group and outreach to the colleges in order to ensure that the proposed solution is working well for advisors. We do not propose a control scenario, rather a before and after comparison of the interfaces, based on reports from advisors.

Establish a Regional Security Operations Center

Particulars

• Steering Committee Score: 327
• Divisional VP: Jenn Capps - Academic Affairs
• Sponsor: Tom Lukins - ITS
• Project Coordinator: Phillip Rouse

Current State

(why we need this project)

The North Coast region of California is remote and has long been underserved by broadband. This has significantly limited the level of cybersecurity expertise and awareness among the region's institutions and businesses. This project proposes to create a shared North Coast Regional operations center (NCRC) to not only develop a training platform for developing cybersecurity professionals, but to also provide opportunities for collaboration between State, County, Federal, and Tribal institutions, as well as provide education and consulting for the private sector and general public.

Without this project, ITS will not be able to contribute as robustly to providing HSU students with hands-on learning experiences or with helping to address the significant cybersecurity skills gap. HSU will not be able to take a broader role in regional cybersecurity education and preparedness.

Future State

(what changes this project will achieve)

An established Regional Security Operations Center where student analysts are working with both Humboldt State and regional partner data sets as part of a regional coalition of public and private sector entities through the creation of MOUs to further develop resources, staffing, and relevant operational and training goals for the shared NCRC to provide to the region. This includes the development of consulting in future cyclesHire ITS Security Operations Analyst. 

Strategic Alignment

(why these changes are important)

This project aligns with OAA Priority 3 “The Division will provide the program support necessary to ensure that all graduating HSU students have participated in at least one hands-on learning experience”

Data Warehouse Unification

Particulars

• Steering Committee Score: 345
• Divisional VP: Jenn Capps - Academic Affairs
• Sponsor: Michael Le - ITS
• Project Coordinator: Kathy Hudson

Current State

(why we need this project)

The University currently uses 2 separate data warehouses, each using distinct technologies, designs, and resources. This project will unify the two systems using a platform and design appropriate to meet the current and future needs of the university. The ideal platform would both meet the existing analytical and reporting needs of the campus and provide a robust, scalable platform for anticipating future needs in the areas of advanced analytics and machine learning.

Future State

(what changes this project will achieve)

The desired outcome of this project is a singular platform holding all reporting data and business logic for the university. This platform should use appropriate, industry standard tools and design principles, ideally already adopted by other CSUs or the Chancellor's Office. The ideal platform would both meet the existing analytical and reporting needs of the campus and provide a robust, scalable platform for anticipating future needs in the areas of advanced analytics and machine learning.

Strategic Alignment

(why these changes are important)

The Future Forward Strategic Plan makes references to data-informed analyses and data-driven decisions. The Graduation Initiative provides concrete metrics to measure the success or failure of the initiative. Throughout all the planning being done at the university is data. 

In order for Humboldt State to meet its goals and take the steps outlined in the Strategic Plan, the campus decision makers need access to high-quality, highly-available data assets. Currently, time better spent on cultivating and delivering data assets to campus is being spent maintaining niche applications, debugging tools developed in-house a decade ago, and determining which of our two systems holds the information that's being sought. 

We have an opportunity now to move to a cloud platform, requiring no maintenance or upgrading and providing enterprise-level availability, and to use scalable, industry standard tools that will allow us to take advantage of advanced analytical methods and products. If this project is successful the campus will see a reduced time-to-availability of data assets and increased uptime for our data infrastructure.

Science Network

Particulars

• Steering Committee Score: 367
• Divisional VP: Jenn Capps - Academic Affairs
• Sponsor: Duncan Hughes - ITS
• Project Coordinator: Kathy Hudson

Current State

(why we need this project)

As HSU transitions to a polytechnic university, we need to establish a dedicated network for data intensive scientific research. In order to handle very large data sets, these networks are handled separately from the main campus production network in a few key ways, most notably the network needs to bypass the campus firewall, instead it is connected directly to a few trusted research consortium networks. 

We will need to add additional switches to multiple campus buildings to support this new, separate network, as well as border gateway hardware. Many networks of this type also incorporate dedicated storage nodes, which are purposely built to handle extremely high speed, low latency transfers.

Future State

(what changes this project will achieve)

This project will directly deliver functionality called out in the Technology & Infrastructure implementation group charge to: "Expand research infrastructure and networking, enabling our researchers and students to process, store, and move large data sets." This project and the campus commitment to matching funds will enable an application for the next set of NSF Campus Cyber-infrastructure funding grants https://epoc.global/cc/

Strategic Alignment

(why these changes are important)

This project will directly deliver functionality called out in the Technology & Infrastructure implementation group charge to: "Expand research infrastructure and networking, enabling our researchers and students to process, store, and move large data sets." This project and the campus commitment to matching funds will enable an application for the next set of NSF Campus Cyber-infrastructure funding grants https://epoc.global/cc/

The project also supports Division of Academic Affairs Outcome 2, 2: “To support HSU’s successful conversion to a CSU polytechnic university, the Division will launch new academic programs, increase infrastructure and technology capacity, and address other priorities identified in the polytechnic prospectus, including an inclusive and participatory continuous improvement process.” High speed connectivity from the campus to the Pacific Research Platform as well as potentially to Humboldt’s direct partners such as Charles Darwin University in Australia also enables additional grant seeking activities that we would otherwise not have.

Self-Service Hourly Timesheet Entry

Particulars

• Steering Committee Score: 421
• Divisional VP: Sherie Gordon - Administrative Affairs
• Sponsor:  Alexis Collins
• Project Coordinator: Phillip Rouse

Current State

(why we need this project)

The intent of this project is to assist the timesheet processing procedures in being more efficient and allow employees to take on more responsibility with time entry. Currently, the process is a combination of manual and electronic and there is no standard practice across departments for collecting hourly employee time. The current system allows for too many errors. Supervisors forget to report time, time is not submitted in a timely manner, chartfields are incorrect, and incorrect amounts are being reported.

Failure to implement this system will be a loss of efficiency, failure to provide excellent customer service, and the potential for a high rate of turn-over. Especially with the move to being a Polytechnic Institution, we need to allow for hourly employees to enter their own time. Without this feature, more timesheets will be lost and there will be more errors when processing time due to an influx of timesheets being submitted.

Future State

(what changes this project will achieve)

All hourly employees are able to enter time and supervisors are able to approve the time in a new, streamlined way. 

Strategic Alignment

(why these changes are important)

Our proposal directly impacts students and staff alike. We are unique in this because hourly employees work in a variety of different capacities. 

Through having self-service time-entry, we will be able to enhance student success by giving them more responsibility and accountability for the hours worked. This will directly impact a student's success post-graduation. By teaching them this skill while being a student worker, we are enabling them to be more successful in future careers. 

This proposal will also enhance operational efficiency. Currently, it takes more than a week from the time payroll receives timesheets from departments to the time they are fully processed and ready to pay. Additionally, this involves a large amount of paper being used as well. Being able to have a digital timesheet entry platform would help reduce the carbon footprint and save some paper in the process.

Transforming Cal Poly's Computer Budgeting/Purchasing/Refresh Sys

Particulars

• Steering Committee Score: 350
• Divisional VP: Jenn Capps - Academic Affairs
• Project Champion: Breck Robinson
• Project Coordinator: Kathy Hudson

Current State

(why we need this project)

The current process for routine funding, procurement and replacement of computers is inadequate and inefficient. The current is completely inadequate because:

• Many departments do not have funding to purchase new computers or replace old ones. Outdated computers hamper student success, reduce faculty and staff productivity, require substantially more effort to support, and often pose a higher security risk.

• With the current decentralized systems, it is a significant challenge to determine which computers need to be replaced, order them, and have them installed. ITS also has to customize computer offerings to meet the needs of different departments (the customization takes time and non-standard systems may be more difficult to support). A significant amount of staff and faculty time is wasted with the current processes.

• We are required by the CSU to track our computer assets and we are not currently able to do this as well as we need due to inefficiencies and inconsistencies in the current decentralized process. Incomplete/ incorrect asset data hampers the ability to responsibly budget and plan for computer refresh cycles.

Future State

(what changes this project will achieve)

Cal Ply Humboldt has an efficient, standardized, sustainable, easy-to-use process and system for the centrally-managed budgeting, purchasing, and deployment of new computer systems for staff, faculty, labs, and classrooms. Departments will no longer have to struggle to find funding for critical new computers, and huge amounts of staff time will be saved in multiple departments. Finally, students, faculty, and staff will have reliable, highly-functional computers to use for their academic and administrative work.

Strategic Alignment

(why these changes are important)

This project proposal ties directly into our polytechnic transformation "Technology & Infrastructure Narrative". This project will significantly aid HSU in providing the technology infrastructure that is a key/core component of becoming a polytechnic university.

It also relates directly to the goals of Chancellor Castro to ensure that students have the computing devices that they need to be successful, no matter what their financial situation.