 My name is Shel Wagner. I'm from Berkeley, or at least I am for another 30 days or so. We are here in an IT community forum today to talk about the direction that the organization is going and to talk about the transition with Lyle Nevels, who will be taking over for me beginning May 1st. And to hear from John Wilton, the Vice Chancellor for Administration, about his vision on this transition and how he sees things moving forward. I wanted to start with just a couple of quick slides. This is not going to be a slide presentation. This is going to be a discussion. So you get to ask your questions. We do have some questions that were emailed in in advance. So I thank you for doing that. Let's just start with why are we doing this? Why are we making the changes in the organization or in general? You know, there's really three things that we have to change as part of the campus. We've got to change the governance. We have to change the funding models and we have to change some of the org. And trying to change any one of those is, you know, like trying to move a piano by yourself. You know, you can pick up one corner, maybe move it a half an inch, and then you've got to go to the other corner and move it a half an inch. It's a very slow process. But if you've got a bunch of people and you move it at the same time, you can make a lot more progress. Well, at Berkeley, it isn't just people we need to move. It's processes, it's structures. And a lot of that is very embedded in the campus. Some of our policies are 20, 30 years old. Some of our business processes are very old. I was, I'm in discussions with a dean right now around the need for that dean to submit something in 33 bound double-sided paper copies to meet a campus process requirement. And he asked me, you know, is there a better way to do this? It's 2012, assuming that there probably is. But our current process and policy documentation says, no, this is how we should do it. So evolving those things means if you change an organization or you just change a piece, you run up against those barriers. So we really started with OE and IT design saying, we're going to have to think about the governance. How do IT decisions get made? And who makes them? Who has the decision rights? All right. And then the funding model is a big problem there. We all know that, you know, we have these recharges and we have to charge one group and other things are centrally funded. And then we end up putting everybody on centrally funded money because the benefits are there. But if you put them on a recharge, then you got to pay the benefits. There's lots of incentives and disincentives which have just become embedded in the system that don't make sense anymore. Particularly when most of the funding models were designed around the assumption that the state funded the lion's share of the campus, right? That lion's share is now a mouse share and shrinking very quickly. And then the org design, how are we organized? Well, much of the campus organization around IT is basically organic. Design, meaning a local department or a local organization needs an IT person. They hire an IT person. Well, they keep growing. Well, we need another IT person. Let's hire another IT person. And they tend to do that. Think about that. If you're only hiring one IT person, you tend to hire somebody that can do it all, right? And then what we need, one more IT person who maybe is a little better in this. So you hire another IT person who can sort of do it all. So we end up with lots and lots of people who can sort of do it all in a world where nobody can do everything. It's just too hard. So we start looking at that and saying, what does the org design mean? And then we get into, you know, changes like shared services and OE projects. And we need to adjust for each of these. So our goal really is not all that complicated in making changes to the organization. We're really trying to say, all right, in most cases, we need cross-campus partnerships to do things. We need to find ways to have not just a project visible, but who's accountable for it and how do people participate in it? You know, one of the problems that we have right now is everybody is so stretched when an interesting project comes up. You can't really go to your manager and say, hey, I'd like to go work on that project. A, you didn't know it existed. And B, you don't have anybody to backfill you because you're the only person spinning all those plates because you were the person that was hired to do everything. So we don't necessarily have the optimal match of skills and projects and visibility. We don't have a strategic planning process that incorporates the needs of all the diverse units. So what ends up happening is each unit has to implement its own thing on its own timeline, even if every unit on campus needs that thing. Now, if they knew it was coming and we were clear, like we've announced Google is coming, then departments don't necessarily have to go and try to sign up Google themselves. They could probably just follow along and they would put it into their timeline. Now, maybe some need it right now today, but if they knew it was coming this summer, would that be okay? So we haven't done necessarily an adequate job of publicizing what the big things are that we're going to do. OE has really helped that because we put a lot of those big stakes in the ground in big projects. We probably have, you know, what's the old saw? Yes, we have standards. We have many of them. I mean, every department sets up its own standard. And, you know, each IT group says, well, here's how we do it. Many of those things are not actually different. They don't need to be different. They're just different because people set them up and they set them up the way they know how to do it and then the next department sets it up the way they know how to do it. You know who really feels it? Students. Students really feel it because they cross every organization on this campus and they'll go into an office and they'll say, hey, can I get some help on advising? And can you do this? And the faculty advisor or the staff advisor says, sure. You know, so I see you're in these two classes. Well, no, actually, I'm also taking this other class in the department. Oh, well, I don't see that here. Oh, well, yeah, no, I've been, I'm double majoring. Well, are you declared? Well, I can't declare yet because the other department says I have to do these other things. I mean, it goes on and on. And the students left having to, you know, you ever go through that feeling where you call into somebody and you say, yeah, can you help me? And you're on the eighth person and you've had to re-explain the whole story each time. That's how our students feel. So we need to make this a lot more seamless than it is today. And some of it's organization, but some of it's that funding and some of it's governance. And some of it is just, we're not very quick on the draw. We don't move very fast as a campus. And from an IT perspective, I will tell you, slowing IT down so we get it right doesn't make it right. We have to move faster because the half-life of the things we're doing is shortening every day. If we spend three years to get a project perfect, that project was only going to live for five years anyway. Well, if you get it mostly right and you do it in 18 months, then at least you can iterate along the way and improve it. Now, some things, obviously, major capital investments, those kinds of things, you have to plan longer. But we have fewer and fewer of those because capital and IT, we're shifting from a capital model to an operating model where we're just using money as we go, not big money once every 10 years. So things are changing a lot on that front. So here's the organizational model. It's basically a conceptual model that says, we're going to take the academic clusters out for a minute because you've got all these academic units out there that are doing all kinds of interesting things. So they aren't part of this phase at all. But basically, all of the functions that are directly supporting students are going to be part of a student cluster. So the environment there is applications that are delivered to students, the planning around students. Remember, we want to project what we're going to be doing, what's the roadmap, how are we doing the analysis on the needs. All of the demand activities for students are all going to be in this one group and student experience. The teaching and learning model, academic engagement, we're going to put all the resources there. So classrooms, labs, the things that are all about that experience are all going to be in one grouping. Research, this is an area which we have historically underfunded. Classically, we have enough money to do it a thousand times but we don't have enough money to do it once well. Every faculty member writes their grants. Every faculty member then purchases resources. Imagine if we were trying to build a road but instead we just told everybody to walk off through the forest on their own, we'll meet you on the other side. Every faculty member has got to bushwack their way across to get to a place where they can then start doing their research. That's not very efficient. We need better platforms, better foundations to start on. So having a focus on research will really help. And then administration, this is what OE is all about, right? Doing administration more efficiently. So those groupings then get added the shared services model which is going to have an IT component, right? IT shared services. Each of those five are going to dual report to their functional lead and to the CIO. So the students are going to dual report to Harry Legrand and the student groupings behind will then they'll have their own focus team. What are they doing? How are they coordinating around student? Same thing in the academic engagement, that's going to report to the vice provost for teaching and learning, Kathy Koshland and also dual report in IT. Under research, this will be with Graham Fleming, the vice chancellor of research's office. And obviously research is done everywhere but having some coordinated vision of what the big term investments are. What are our big platforms need to be? How are we going to handle big data? How are we going to handle the future of high performance computing? Do we do it here? Do we consume it from somewhere else? Having strategies and resources aligned with that will really help our community. And then under administration, this is going to report, a dual report into the vice chancellor for administration so that we have some alignment and coordination there. And then Tara Calmain and her team are building the shared services model right now which will have more than IT in it and will have the end user support piece for IT. So all those are going to dual report and then we have the foundational services that are just single reporting and basically all of these folks' customers are this side of the line. So all of the major systems investments that we have and the use of third party systems, so if we're going to use Amazon or we're using our own services, our own cloud, our own infrastructure, this team is going to be responsible for providing those services to these groups. Same thing on the data side, all of the data management, the data warehousing, all of the administrative data, that will all be managed at DBAs in one team. This is a new investment force around architecture and middleware. We've tried to do this in the past but we haven't put the resources into it. But when we're designing solutions, the only way these groups are going to reduce duplication is if they can use some common platforms, right? That doesn't mean we need to have one standard, right? But two or three would be nice instead of 50. So that's what this group is going to be focusing on. And then Telcom encompasses the traditional telephony, all of our wireless infrastructure, the networks, and security operations. So the intent of these groupings is to focus on the ability of these leveraged places. This is where you get most of your leverage, right? Everybody running their own server, not so much. Running, you know, 1,000 servers, a lot more. Up to a demand planning where students say, here's our focus, this is what we're going to do and they are going to have requirements around coordinating on those needs. So you get a lot more efficiency. So that's the way the dual reporting is going to work. I think the intent of the model, and I'll just leave that slide up there. The intent of the model isn't to have this rigid organization, but it's to show clearly that we already have interdependencies. We might as well acknowledge them. There's no monolithic IT organization because Berkeley isn't monolithic. Nor can we really support one IT person in every department anymore. That model just isn't sustainable. Now if that one IT person was focused on what they were doing, if they were doing one of these functions and they could get some of the other functions from somebody else, then we can afford to train the talent, retain the talent and deliver the services. So that's the basic model. I'm going to turn it over to John to talk through kind of his thoughts on the directions and the way things are going. And then we'll have Lyle Neville give us his vision and view into this and an introduction into his background. And then the rest of the time is for questions. So let me turn it over to John. Good. Great. Well, look, thanks very much for inviting me along. I think the major point of this meeting, from my point of view, is to try and communicate with the IT community. And why to do that at this point in time? I think the overarching reason is simply to try and address the issue of anxiety. And I mean anxiety related to all of the multiple changes that are currently underway and try to reassure people with respect to the situation going forward. Because I think from the bottom line of what I'm about to say is that Berkeley would be an enormously attractive and vibrant place to be in the IT space. And I think that's going to be one of the underpinnings of the search that we would do for the new CIO. And I'll speak a bit about that too. But I think the main thing of this gathering is really to communicate and address issues related to anxiety. And we're probably best to do that by you actually asking questions. And I don't think there's any question that you should be afraid of asking. Because unless you ask it, you're going to persist in moving in a vacuum of information that will be populated by rumors, most of which will probably be wrong. So I really do encourage you to ask questions even if you think they may not be appropriate. So I just want to make three points. One relates to continuity. We have a hell of a lot going on just looking at this and some of the things that Shell mentioned and Lyle's going to touch on. We have a lot of moving pieces all at once across the campus and particularly in operational excellence. And we have Andrew Zerry here to answer questions on all of the projects on operational excellence. There's a lot of terror at the back. Also, if specific questions come up about shared services. But there's just a lot going on and nearly all of them touch IT. And the good part of that, in my view, if I was in IT, is that we're investing a lot of money and resources in IT. And Berkeley has massive legacy problems across the IT space. And we just need to move into the modern era and upgrade the IT that we provide across the board. And operational excellence has given us a bit of a platform to do things that we should have been doing over the past five to ten years. So I think it's an exciting time to be involved in it. It is stressful because we're changing a lot of things at once. But at least we're modernizing it. The point there is that we're not going to slow down with Shell's departure. You know, Lyle's fully up to speed. He'll speak to that. Andrew's there, he can speak to that. And we just anticipate that we're going to continue to move ahead as fast as we would if Shell had been staying with us. So, you know, the point to emphasize there is that continuity, we're going to keep on moving. And I don't anticipate that anything will slow down in that area. And obviously, you know, IT goes way beyond OE. You know, you have big projects ongoing in the academic space and in research space. And all of that will continue. So, you know, we've actually, I think, dealt with the change as well as we can. And obviously, you know, we have some decisions to make going forward. But we will make those in a timely way in order to make sure that we can deliver on the IT agenda. So that's the first thing. The second thing is, Shell asked me just now to speak a little bit about what's the vision going forward at the campus level. And primarily because that impacts IT beyond the next 12 months. And I think if you had to boil it down to its simplicity, is that Berkeley faces financial challenges that we've now documented and sort of illustrated through different financial scenarios. And that has concentrated people's minds on how do we solve that potential problem. One of the conclusions from that work is pretty simple, is that the financial challenges we face, you can't resolve through cuts. You can't make Berkeley financially sustainable as well as maintain access and excellence by cutting the budget. We have to be efficient. We have to implement operational excellence. We have to reach the goal of 75 million in savings. But that by itself doesn't resolve the problem. And the only way you can resolve the problem is by growing Berkeley. As I've often said in the past, Berkeley has grown in every year of the last 10 years. Berkeley has not gone into decline. Total revenue and total spend is simply because the other sources of revenue that we use, which are tuition, philanthropy and research contracts and grants, have all grown at a faster rate than state appropriations has declined. So Berkeley has been growing and we will continue to grow it. My challenge is simply to identify those sources of activity that will generate revenue to enable Berkeley to continue to grow. And so that is what I'm focused on. And you know, if you had to put a sort of slogan around it, it would be invest to grow. And if we invest to grow, it doesn't even have to put even more money into IT. Because if you think of the three biggest areas that we think we'll have to invest in, they would be research and it would be digital education and probably our ability to reach our donor base. So all of those require big investments in data systems and technology. So again I'm sort of emphasizing the fact that the IT world will be an area of growth and investment by the campus both as we modernize but also to achieve our revenue objectives. And then the last point is on the search. I am the co-chair of the search committee with George Breslau, the provost. And we are moving as aggressively forward on it as possible. We are going to select the search firm I think this week. And then the process will be an open and transparent one. We expect to get many very well qualified external applicants and we will welcome internal applicants to the process. It's open and we will select the best person from that process that we can. As I outlined I think both the Berkeley brand plus what I have just outlined in terms of ongoing work and our commitment to IT and it being at the center of growing Berkeley. I think we are going to get a strong pool of applicants and I think a lot of people would be excited about filling shells shoes and cleaning up all the mess that is left behind. You know expect a lot of applicants. So that is the three points I am going to make and I am going to hand over to Lyle. Down here. Hello everybody and hello to everybody online and for the folks that are online streaming please go ahead and submit questions as they come up as we get into my part and get done with this we are going to spend the majority of the time actually answering questions so if you have them please send them in. Little bit about me. I have been with Berkeley for about three and a half years at Haas as a CIO. Responsibilities there include all of the traditional IT roles and responsibilities that you can think about as well as media services. In addition to that over the course of the past couple of years I have taken on responsibility for strategic space and facilities management at the business school as well. Additionally I have spent about a year or so, a little bit more than a year or so working on lots of campus initiatives very specifically around the OE implementation or I am sorry the design team as the manager of that group working with Andrew, working with Shell working with many of you on how the design and the future of IT is going to look like as we kind of go forward. And so I think one thing to point out there from a continuity standpoint is I am very familiar with the organization, with Berkeley with IT in general across the campus through that work and having worked with lots of folks from different units across the school. Additionally I have also spent some time working with Cal Athletics on some major initiatives in their IT organization as well as with university extension. So lots of kind of breath and depth from an experience standpoint around the campus. So I think I have a pretty good idea of how things are working really good understanding what is happening from the OE perspective and I think part of my time at the moment is spending learning more about some of the very key and critical projects that are actually happening within ISNT and that work is actually getting underway this afternoon with the IT leadership group. Prior to coming to Berkeley, same capacity CIO role at a company called First Franklin, a financial services company same type of role there a little bit different than what we do here at UC Berkeley, but IT is IT as they say. Prior to First Franklin I spent a few years at a startup company an online learning company in San Francisco and then prior to that I spent some time at Autodesk as well as Apple Computer for about 13 years. So about 20, 25 plus years of operations and IT experience in a number of different industries and I'm really excited to be able to step in and as John said, kind of move this thing forward and so I think one of the key things to think about this there's this introduction here on the first slide that talks about the interim CIO I don't look at it that way the way I look at it is I've been asked to kind of move the organization forward continue to work on the projects that have been set forth continue to move the organization in a direction based on the vision that Shell and John and others have already put in place but we're going to move that organization forward and so I think that's the task that I have been given and I think with the leadership team that Shell has kind of outlined here we are well positioned to do so and I think that's kind of the focus I think one of the things that we'll see over the course of the next couple of months is there's so much change happening on the campus communication is extremely important we need to step up the amount of communication as we kind of go through the next few months so that there is indeed clarity that we understand kind of the vision and where we're headed and I think the IT management group is to help us kind of move that forward so just wanted to kind of put that out there and I look forward to the opportunity and I'm going to open it up to the questions John can you respond to the rumor that my decision to leave was precipitated by you firing me because cow mail crashed at Thanksgiving well how was it expecting that one I wasn't either but I did get it in email well since they sent it in email it couldn't be that bad because email is up and running but I'll answer that and the answer is I have been torn tremendously about leaving Cal it is an amazing place and you are all very much part of my enjoyment in coming to Cal I think it's been an enormous opportunity for me and I care about this place deeply but the opportunity to continue to support Cal on a national stage and to work with internet to to move forward what we're calling the net plus portfolio all the services to be offered to all the campuses and allow Cal to offer those services to other campuses is just something that I couldn't turn down it was an opportunity to work with other universities and our peers in a way that I think will really help lower the cost of education which we just have to do we have to find a way to keep the cost from continuing to escalate at the pace they were in the past and each one of us doing our own thing at our own campus can make a difference but if we can escalate that up to the R1s working together I think we can have a pretty big impact on all of higher ed so it was something that I was compelled to do and it certainly wasn't an easy decision I feel really torn about it because as John laid out the portfolio is quite exciting right now the changes that are happening right now at Cal are so needed and so helpful to know what the future is going to look like we're really on a very nice course and I think John's leadership is critical to that and he and I have really enjoyed working together over the last year and it's really unfortunate that the timing is what it is but I have a lot of confidence in Lyle and I know that John and George and the Chancellor made a very good selection in appointing him to take over Questions? Is this working? Can you hear me? Yeah, okay. So there were some questions that got sent in prior to today and maybe I'll ask some of those here. I think this is probably for Lyle what is the timeline for deciding which services and people are moving? Yeah, that's a good question. I think just to be clear we're working through the IT leadership group. We got formed back on I think March 1st and the team's been working through the portfolio to understand what should fall within each of these buckets here and so we're taking a very methodical approach to that to really understand what are the complexities of those various services that are provided by each of the organizations and so from a timeline standpoint I can't say it's going to be three weeks from now or four weeks from now we are moving forward with it and what I've asked the team to do is to really kind of think about things at a higher level, making sure from an organizational standpoint that we have clarity around each one of these buckets what the responsibilities are and what the key charters are for that and then with that we'll determine where the portfolio products and services reside. Probably 85% of those are just common sense. It fits here, it fits here, it fits there. For those other areas that 10-15% where there are cross boundaries if you will we need to have some dialogue around that to make sure that we're making the smartest decision and so that work is underway. Great, thanks. So another question that came in was is there a vision to have a common approach to application portfolio management slash application information collection across the three organizations like student, academic engagement and administration? Absolutely, I think that's one of the reasons for having this organization is so that across all of them we've got consistency and conformity in the way that we manage those things. Another area that we're looking at is partnering with the OE program office as well as the TPO to make sure that we've got a right solution in place to do that and I think one of the products that we're looking at is something called Eclipse. I personally don't know a whole lot about that but I know that it's an OE program office so we're going to look to see if that can be leveraged across all of the organizations. Okay, one more question we have here is there seems to be an ever widening choice available i.e. Confluence for non-structured data Cal Share for structured data B-Space, hub, Eclipse Google Docs, et cetera especially once sorry I don't quite understand that question but the core of the question is are 1,000 points of light better than a few beacons and are there efficiencies to be gained by using common project documentation tools? I think the answer there is certainly there is does that mean it needs to be one? Not necessarily. One solution doesn't necessarily provide the need for everyone in every organization in every situation. I think the key here is to be able to provide guidance to the organization, to the campus in general about what the right tools might be for the right things and so I think one of the things that we as an IT leadership group have to do is be able to come up with that guidance and then put that out to the rest of the campus. I might add on to that as well five years ago if you'd said well what choices do we have the cost of a choice was very high you had to invest a lot to offer a choice and so you had very few choices because it was very expensive to offer them it's much now compared to entry for choice is virtually zero. The problem is the risks associated with those choices have gone way up so yes any one of us can click on the web and go to use an application and put donor data in the cloud but we may not realize the risks that we're taking on so when we think about choice in services or products I don't believe we'll ever go back to a world that said this is what's offered by the campus they'll use this for lots of services that we'll always have one payroll system hopefully a new payroll system but we're not going to have a world where we'll only have one option in many things in the future the costs are coming down so much but then Lyle's job and John's is really to help provide some guided choice because unlimited choice is really expensive and really dangerous there are in fact lots of sites out there that are just out to capture our data they don't have security protocols they don't have risk management in place so there's lots of things that I think are coming in the future where we're going to be more than owners or stewards of our own resources but have to really evaluate external resources that are part of the world of choice and then help guide people as to which ones they can use the question mentioned three or four different products I think IT has a new responsibility which is to provide a map of that ecosystem so that faculty, staff, people know well here are my choices that are generally supported that have been vetted that are secure and that's part of what we're going to do as well in the national stage is to get common contracts in place so that we know that they'll support higher ed in the way we need higher ed supported another to add on to that the speed in which technology is changing as we all know is incredible so what we have today and our options that are available to us today a year from now will be completely different and so we need to take that into consideration as well don't have questions if you have answers we could use answers so many of the short term initiatives like the OE initiatives and other investments that are on the horizon or underway are particularly with regards to student are very closely dependent upon the student information system which is upwards of 35 to 40 years old and the strategy for replacing that is a much longer term strategy so how do those two reconcile so on the student services I guess we're all on the student services there's a large collection of IT related projects and services for students that fall within the OE remit and Andrew might want to speak to them a little bit more from what I know we've just moved ahead to actually recruit somebody that will be full time for the first time professionally equipped to focus on updating student services and try to welcome and there you are wonderful nice to meet you and she's recruiting people to help her do it so it's good to meet you so that is a huge step forward because there's a lot of willingness to do it there's been a lot of preliminary work but in order to move it forward aggressively and in a logical rational way we realized that we needed someone who has expertise in it and who could devote all of the working day on that key issue so I'm really hoping that we get traction on it the only other thing I mentioned before handing over to Andrew is that not all of the student services that we need to update and improve fall within OE's there's a whole slew of investments we need to make that will fall outside of OE so we also need to think about how we're going to pay for and fund those activities so people shouldn't think of everything we're trying to do in that area as just being what will be articulated with the OE remit it's broader than that you know that's that's what we're doing Andrew would you like to add anything? The podium Micah has to be held by Liz no there it is so I'm Andrew Sarri I'm the faculty head of the OE program and it's nice to meet you Laura I heard a lot about you actually so welcome aboard regarding the student services technology related proposals we had five large proposals that came into the OE program office about a year ago these five proposals had a lot of interconnections and interdependencies and they spawned a really serious effort at looking at the roadmap for student services technology over the near-term and medium-term future I think that was all very useful work and I think the direction that we've decided to take which is to hire a professional team put in place a professional team that can do the detailed design work and develop prioritized implementable plan for all of this work I think is a really good solid approach it's the same approach by the way that we have taken with shared services and I look at my colleague Tara in the back of the room there so I think that this will lead to a plan that we can execute against as John mentioned it's not going to be completely funded from operational excellence most likely there will be shared funding from other parts of the campus as well and we have some years of really hard work ahead of us to address I think what has been fairly systematic under investment over the years but I would say that the administration of the campus is absolutely committed to improving the situation with respect to student systems right from the ground up so hold tight it's coming and I think you'll like what you see while I have the microphone I wanted to just say something about the choice of Lyle to serve as interim CIO as was mentioned I worked closely with Lyle on the OEIT design initiative when I was the faculty co-sponsor of that initiative when it started out along with Shell who was the administration co-sponsor Lyle was the manager who kept us to task and kept everything moving forward and we all shared very deeply the kind of academic approach that we took to problems developing case studies and so forth and the high degree of consultation and transparency that we built into the process so I have great confidence in Lyle going forward I think he was an inspired choice to be asked to lead in this extraordinary time as interim CIO and so Lyle I wish you great luck I might add one point on the student system issue I tend to forget but is important to note students' environments have been distributed on this campus the responsibility for student care and feeding has lived with every department and every unit on the campus and that has resulted in the lack of a common voice around what we needed to do for students so while we have made investments they've been very diluted across lots of areas so the hiring of Laura the fact that we now have a student organization for IT that encompasses all of the student pieces Angela Blackstone is going to be heading that group up she brings in the student affairs IT organization which she's been working on we're moving in our applications people so that the portfolio will get rationalized but one of the things that Angela is responsible for is we refer to as demand planning what is it that student needs to do and what's the roadmap need to look like moving in all those dilute voices into a way to get really focused investment that has happened in HR and we put a lot of money into it it's happened in finance we put a lot of money into it one of the reasons that's happened in those areas is there has been a common voice a leader on the campus somebody responsible for doing that because we've had 20 or 30 or 50 student leaders in various ways it's just made it much harder so I think there's a structural change that's taken place in addition to a funding change that's going to help us get past that now that doesn't mean that we can replace telebears overnight and in fact as I mentioned in another discussion you know it's probably our most cost effective solution we've ever deployed if you amortize the cost of it over it's 30 year or 40 year life cycle but it is also virtually impossible to replace in flight right it's so core to so many things it's very difficult to pull that out so lots of the solutions are being built around the anticipation of the core being replaced and then we'll have to connect in the new core and that's going to be a tricky job hi Don McLeod I'm in that systems bucket UC Berkeley has had an awful lot of participation UC wide and nationally with regard to certain external initiatives largely because of Shell being here how do you anticipate that relationship with these entities changing with him moving on yeah I think that those are very key and very critical and Shell and I have had a lot of discussion about though about those those will continue there are certainly things that the UC wide around UC wide initiatives that we need to be part of and we need to be leading so that work is going to continue we're doing a lot of work with UCSF and we're also expanding the work that we're doing with UCSF so I suspect that that is going to continue as we move forward what Shell has put in place over the last couple of years has gained great momentum in the last 12 months is something that we don't want to put aside it's extremely important one of the things that's been awkward for me as I work with other groups in what I hear used to be IST is just that the only new org chart that's been published is the very top level one and then we don't know you know does IST still exist or these various people we work with we don't know where what happened to them who they report to or anything even currently much less what the plans are for them and that's been really awkward working with some of those groups that as far as I have no idea where they landed and it's just always an awkward interaction now I don't know if there's any way for us to know at least today do you still hear yeah understood and I think one just to be clear as usual is the message today continuing to move forward we know or I know as part of the coming into this role as part of the IT leadership group is that we've got to get that clarity out there ASAP and those discussions are underway the same token I want to make sure that we do that in a very informed and methodical way and so those discussions I'm actually starting to have with the team beginning this afternoon right my the first day on the job is supposed to be May 1st right the reality is it started the day after the announcement was made and so those discussions are happening now and I suspect over the course of the next few weeks we'll get a greater clarity around that so that you don't have to be concerned about that and that there is clarity about where things report in the organization and that there is an org chart further down than just what you see up here I understand the angst around that we need to get that resolved I know that funding has always been an issue and a lot of talk is going on right now at the executive level can you share with us some of the thoughts that are being tossed around on funding IT at this campus one I think the funding really really macro big picture of Berkeley the story around funding Berkeley has to change I touched on it in my remarks Berkeley's grown revenue every year for the last 10 years total revenue it's my job to try to make sure that we continue to do that and I feel pretty confident that we can so it's much more difficult living in an environment where the cake is getting smaller and we're trying to protect our own little portion of the cake if the cake is getting bigger it's much easier to invest and do the things that you need to do so the first priority is to make sure we grow the overall cake and then as I was saying we have to align all of the resources with the strategic priorities that we have going forward with respect to IT just given the nature of what we do and the business we're in almost anything that we do involves investment in IT if you think of the three big revenue sources that I see is growing obviously there's our core business and we just finished one new building the LKS building we're finishing the one opposite it on Oxford Street we're going to probably commit to doing another building further down behind that we've just got the stadium we've got the high performance centre so Berkeley is growing and we will continue to grow the core business and don't forget we've just got the green light to partner with Lawrence Berkeley labs on the new Richmond Field Station that's a long term plan but that's another expansion of Berkeley but the point being that all of these things require IT if you think of the things I'm focusing on which are raising development financing putting more money into our ability to win contracts and grants and being much more imaginative about capturing the economic rents around intellectual property or patents we need to do a lot more there and then digital education that's a massive opportunity for Berkeley and we're just putting in place a structure that will enable us to do that in a coordinated and rational way all of those things will require extra resources to be diverted to towards the IT component of those activities and that's why I'm trying to change the narrative away from only focusing on efficiency gains you have to achieve and harvest efficiency gains otherwise you have no credibility when you're asking for extra resources if we're asking our donors or our students or whomever to give us extra resources we have to prove that we're spending the resources we currently have efficiently so OE is crucial but as I said that can't be the whole answer to the problem and therefore that's the growth part of it and by definition it means that we have to invest in IT across the board I think just if you look at what's been supported under the productivity suite or other areas we spent $30,000 more on productivity suite than we were previously spending so we spent more money we didn't save money on that by cutting the spend we spent a little bit more but in exchange for doing that we eliminated all the administrative costs we distributed the highest package of software so everybody got everything it's just a simplified way of doing business John's big driver there was to take out the $140 per reimbursement that we were spending every time somebody would go buy a copy at Costco because they could get it cheaper than they could buy it online and then they'd come back in with their paperwork and it just doesn't make sense so I know from his vision part of it is redirecting the resources to the service and away from the bureaucracy and that can fund quite a few things we want that bureaucracy layer to exist, it needs to but it should be like an ice rink a little faster, you can move across it quicker even if you fall down occasionally because you did something wrong you can still fix it we just need to move quicker MATLAB and Mathematica and we did it without a long-term funding model in place because it needed to be done we saved the faculty huge hours in administration on MATLAB it brought a tear to Andrew's eye when we announced it really my own lab, I don't have to come in and administer my MATLAB license those things are simple but they add up they really do add up so when we talk about the funding model this is why those three things I showed you they all have to work together we all have to be willing to make some shifts and I know that the community here is very good at running on next to nothing right? but sometimes a little bit of investment goes a very very long way whereas our running on nothing if you keep trying to cut you get down below sustainable there and stuff starts breaking so a little bit of investment but not back the way we were doing it investment in a new way to do it I think it's going to matter and I think we have a lot of those plans laid out I think you've all contributed to that could you maybe speak to the current thinking and vision about how Berkeley will be leveraging partnerships with the other UCs in the system I think the obvious one is administrative systems and we've heard some about that but I wonder like what is the higher level end goal related to what those partnerships are is there one and what does that currently look like when I'm looking at it I mean we've done this experiment in procurement where we now have actually a joint it's fully integrated we don't have a UCSF team and a Berkeley team we have an AE team who manage procurement on both campuses and vision there is actually that we probably expand it in this part of California to the other nearest campuses as time permits as they're ready so we see that like a nub that we could grow based on its own capacities to expand and I think that's actually proving to be an extremely good example of cross campus cooperation because it was driven not by our top down plan but it was driven by both campuses realizing that there was massive efficiency gains and it just made a lot of sense and then we had the capacities to do it so my guess is a lot of it will be driven in that manner there are some top down initiatives like payroll that Shell mentioned and some core HR functions that will be well are centralized and they'll continue to be centralized and they're largely transactional activities that can be automated and centralized and I do think that apart from those obvious cases that are already centralized but we can do them a lot more efficiently I think most of it will be actually driven from campuses recognizing that partnerships make sense and then us activating them I don't know if that's... I think that makes sense and I would say the good thing about I understand Shell's new appointment is a high probability that he will stay close to campus and this point about UC wide initiatives or initiatives within the United States Shell is going to remain a key player in that space and if we're lucky enough to have him position the internet to office close to campus actually it will help us leverage up and keep plugged into it and we'll actually be getting Shell for free so we'll have a CIO with 30% of Shell I haven't told him that bit yet so I think actually it will be better place than we are now to do a lot of that So to follow up on Shell's comment earlier about some of the arguably crazy business processes and policies that we have in place that are outdated where does business process reengineering fit into this picture I actually think it fits in every single circle that's on the board so it's not about doing the same thing the same way that we've always been doing it it's all about finding the most efficient and effective way to do things moving forward and so that happens in every single one of these circles and so as an IT leadership group we're looking at how can we make things more effective and some of these things kind of cross those boundaries but it is all about reengineering across all of them it has to be otherwise you don't get the efficiencies you don't get the scalability that we need in the future with Tara about shared services she's trying to design all of her services not from the policies outward but from the consumer of those services inward what does it look like to be an end user out there and try to do some things and how can we get a common portal to go through 27 steps how does it auto-populate so that we don't have to fill in all the information multiple times can they just call one place can they use one website a lot of our things we're just very fragmented in so when we think about policies and doing away with them we kind of have to start with what's the end game in mine and not assume that the policy is our guidance because many of the policies need to be revisited and we're not terribly good at that we assume that policies are there and they must be there I would argue that many of our policies are there as risk prevention because of an error that occurred at some time in the past you know and we the training wheels have to come off at some point yeah okay we may have made a mistake but I think we can live we've learned from that what do we need to do now to do it differently I mean I know for example I have a policy that says I have to sign off on everything over it was $50,000 we raised it to $100,000 and IT spend so Laia will inherit that to do that online is part of bear by instead of getting this paper form that is sent to my office in triplicate that I have to review and sign I literally have to sign this form well why that's not the goal yet that's what the policy says so we've got to change the policy instead of adhering to it blindly because it was there in the past one of the goals that I have when I was at Haas is really eliminating friction in the system how do I make it easier for everybody to be individual to do their job and so for us to be able to do that we need to be out in front of our customers and really understanding what it is that they do every single day and what those challenges are and so we need to think about how we eliminate that friction by redesigning the way that we do our work some of that requires the business to change some things as well so it's not just all on the IT side and so working together with the community to reduce that friction is really where you're getting at around business process redesign and I think that's part of the focus and I think that's one of the things that I need to bring to the table as well as we kind of move things forward yeah it's about to go anyone else? Last chance I guess I'm wondering what the plans are for publicizing some of these processes specifically the evaluation of the application portfolio or portfolios how that process is going to happen how people have interest and some of the products are going to be informed on what the evaluation process is basically that's it Great question I think that's one of the questions that I have for the team this afternoon is we think about this process of how the portfolio is going to shake out between these various groups what is that decision criteria how are we making those decisions and then how are we going to inform the other stakeholders within these organizations so that they have transparency into that process and then also publicizing it to everybody across the community that hasn't yet been figured out and outlined but it is something that I've asked the team and it's something that we're starting to have discussion about so that that transparency exists and we get that in front of everybody Really good question Thank you, you talked about the transparency so with the IT teams or leadership teams working in the futures how we would understand the I'm so sorry the roadmap or decision made in the transparency kind of share with the communities so we can give our feedback Sure I can't speak to and she can maybe do this I can't speak to how this was done in the past what I can tell you my expectations going forward is open communication lots of feedback and more of it so we need to find the vehicles for which we do that one of the conversations we were actually just having is just a regular maybe it's every six weeks or every couple of months a video blog that comes from the IT leadership team and myself about our plans what we have in front of us some of the decisions that we are making so that we get more and more information out to the community it's these types of forums and doing more of these I think that we need to come up with a process by which we get your input and we take that into consideration as we kind of move things forward and that will help to inform us as we make changes going forward as well one of the questions that I also had that was kind of sent in is the new CIO going to shake things up even more coming into the role and the answer is there we have a vision and Shell has put forth a very strong very good vision with John's help and help from many of you across the community so I don't foresee that changing in a big way but there will be change and part of that is going out and reaching out to the community understanding what the needs are of the community and being able to share that on a regular basis and so I think we need to put some vehicles in place to be able to do so and I can't tell you today how that's done but I can tell you within the next few weeks we'll have a process for how we're going to handle that I would like to thank everybody who came face to face today and for all of those who are online and who are available to Lyle is officially in the role as of May 1st thankfully he also is doing work today for both jobs and it's my understanding that the IT leadership group in their planning will also plan on some communication activities and events after Lyle formally takes over in May so I think you can expect more of that and I'll have an opportunity to meet with you at some other events over the next six weeks or so so I'll still be around campus my thanks to John Wilton for the sponsorship of all of these activities and my sincere thanks to Lyle for stepping into this role and to all of you and your support for him you guys are all working very hard there's a lot of change going on the good news is I think IT's better positioned today for the changes to come than we ever have been I think each of you personally are better positioned because of the changes you've already been through being in IT means being supportive of change and your community and for them because for many departments on campus they just haven't been through change before and so your expertise in that way is going to be a guiding skill for the community in the weeks and months to come so thank you all very much and I look forward to seeing you in the coming weeks