 Right, it's time to begin. Thank you all for joining us. You've reached one of the project briefing sessions for the CNI Spring 2020 virtual meeting. I'm Cliff Lynch, the director of CNI. I'll be very briefly introducing this. We have a speaker today from the University of Miami who will be talking with us about technology planning for operational continuity during COVID-19. This is one of a small number of additional project briefings which we added after we took the conference virtual in an effort to allow some of our member institutions to share early issues, reactions, and strategies for dealing with the current crisis. It's kind of remarkable to me in a way that we actually have been able to use the affordances of the virtual conference to be able to do this. But I am sure you're gonna find it very valuable. After our speaker concludes, we will take questions. Diane Goldenberg Hart from DNI will moderate the Q&A. There is a Q&A button down at the bottom of your screen which will open up a text box. You can use that at any point during the presentation to put in questions as they occur to you and we'll get to all the questions at the end but don't hesitate as you think of questions going along to just make note of them through the Q&A tool. And with that, let me turn it over to Denushka Samarakun. Excuse me, there's an extra syllable in that last name that I trip over every time. For our presentation. Thank you so much for joining us and for doing this over to you. Thank you, Cliff. Thank you for the introduction. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Denushka Samarakun and I'm the Head of Library Technology for the University of Miami Libraries. And today I'm going to discuss technology planning for operational continuity during this COVID-19 crisis. I would highlight some planning and action items we took during this process and getting everyone ready for alternate work arrangements. So on March 11th, the university issued a statement asking all non-essential employees to work from home starting Friday, the March 13th. So this gave us only two days or more or less one and a half days of preparation time in getting everyone ready for the work from home scenario. To ensure a smooth transition to a work from home environment, we had to evaluate the current setup and get everyone ready for telecommuting. So during this briefing, I will discuss how we accomplish this, the planning process and some lessons learned. As the first step in the process, we analyzed the current computing equipment landscape at the library. Everyone has different job responsibilities and the tools and the equipment needed for their work, it's different. No two jobs are the same. We identified that only 40% of the staff currently have work provided laptops and 60% of the employees use a desktop as their primary machine. Some employees use a desktop as their work happens in the office. They really don't have a need for a laptop. So they choose to work on their desktop. And in other instances, it's based on the need. They require a more high performance machine that are suitable for specialized activities, such as graphic design, video production, programming. A laptop cannot really replace a desktop in these instances. So it's more of a need based on their work activities. In order to obtain an accurate picture of everyone's home computing environment, we worked with the Research and Assessment Librarian here at the University of Miami Libraries to develop the home computing environment and remote access evaluation survey. We distributed the survey to the staff on Wednesday itself. I'm including few screenshots of the survey to highlight the primary questions that we asked. The first question was if you have access to a personal computer at home and are you willing to use it for your work? Based on these answers, we determined which individuals needed work provided equipment and who's comfortable using their own current equipment. Sometimes even if you have a personal computer, some other member of your household might be using it. Miami-Dade Public School System announced building closures starting on March 16th and move all classroom instruction online. So if you have kids at home, then you might have to dedicate your personal computer for their school work. So even if you have a personal computer, it might not be an option for everyone to use that for work. The next question was focused on collaboration and communication during telecommuting to make sure they have the headsets, webcams for communicating with each other as well as providing patron consultations and do they have a good home internet connection? Are they on a limited data plan? We did not want to make assumptions about individuals' home internet connections or their home equipment or infrastructure setup. As these things can vary depending on their geographical location and their needs, some individuals need specialized hardware and software to do their jobs. So we used the survey to capture all of this information in order to work with them directly on a one-on-one basis. Once we gathered the responses, we identified three broad categories of individuals. The first group, it's ready for telecommuting. They have a work-provided laptop or they are willing to use their personal computer to do the work. And they have good home internet connectivity. The second group had no home internet connections. We did not have a good solution for this issue. So in this instance, we left it up for each supervisor to make work arrangements that can be done offline for those individuals. Later, the university started a program to offer phone stipends for all the staff members who are telecommuting. So they can offset some of the costs and they can tether to the phone for connectivity. Now I'm going to talk about the third group. The third group needed hardware assistance. Some of the hardware requirements were very simple as they just needed a webcam or a headset. In some instances, they needed a laptop in order to continue their work. Once we got the list, we had one day to prepare and deploy the laptops to those who needed them. These pieces of equipment came from a variety of sources. Some were machines that we were using for events while some laptops were from the loan inflate. In order for them to be standardized for deployment, we wiped the OS and imaged them with the library staff operating system image. In addition, the university issued new guidelines allowing employees to take their desktop home with them. In some cases, individuals actually preferred taking the desktop home with them over a laptop. Team worked with everyone individually to make sure that they are taken care of and provide instructions and assistance. When everyone's working from home, the workplace dynamics and interactions changes. If they need assistance with any technological needs, they have to rely on remote support. It's a lot different than walking into someone's office and seeking help. As the library technology team, we take support requests over the ticketing system, email and phone. Under the workflow, under the work from home scenario, we encourage everyone to use the ticketing system. But at the same time wanted to be available over email and Microsoft Teams chat to answer any questions. In addition to these options, we implemented an internal library tech help desk. The University of Miami libraries is using library help as its reference services chat tool. So what we did was we created a new service desk on the same platform and placed a link on the library intranet. The service desk is staffed by team members from the library technology team. This provides another avenue to seek immediate help. Now let's focus our attention in another direction. University of Miami employees and staff, students, everyone had access to Microsoft Teams for a long time. But its adaptation rates were low. Few teams were using it for their project activities, but not many have tried it. And few days before the telecommuting orders were issued, UM purchased a site-wide Zoom license. Overnight, the adaptation of these two platforms grew exponentially. Staff needed a reliable, easy method for communicating with each other. Within the library technology unit, we have been using MS Teams for some time now, but have not really used it up to its full potential. One of the main questions that were posed to us was the difference between the two platforms. At a fundamental level, both platforms operate in a similar capacity. While MS Teams have some additional functionality, they pretty much do the same thing. While the two products can be used interchangeably, we promoted the use of Microsoft Teams for quick chat among colleagues or team members. It's good for a quick, impromptu meeting. For a quick question, you don't necessarily have to send an email and instead send a chat. Once you create groups or teams within Teams, it provides a more seamless communication channel where you can have a shared notebook, share and collaboratively edit documents, things such as that. And we mainly proposed using Zoom for pre-planned meetings, especially for larger groups. If you are conducting a webinar or a training or if you are inviting participants external to your organization, Zoom is a good option. Then again, these are not necessarily hard and fast rules. They are just suggested guidelines. And in most cases, you can use any tool that you prefer in any of these scenarios. With the help from the Web and Application Development Team at the University of Miami Libraries, we developed an intranet guide that is specially for telecommuting instruction. In that, we placed some information and resources on how to connect to the platforms that employees need. For example, how do you connect to the ILS from home? We use Alma as our ILS and as you know, it's a web-based product. But some users might not have used it outside of the work environment. They probably have the link bookmark in the browser at the office computer and don't know how to get to it from home. This is just one example. Having all these links in one location helped employees easily locate the information they seek. So all of these are good ways to provide information to the staff, but we noticed that with the changes to the work environment the works dynamics have changed. We also saw that the students were very proactive with offering help for individuals. The UM Library Technology Department started a series of tech talks for library employees. The goal of these talks is to demonstrate an application, tool, or a technology that you can make use of. Participants can follow along with the instructor while they demonstrate the tool. This gives them a chance to ask questions rather than opening up a support ticket for minor inconveniences. But then again, we are happy to receive tickets for any issue, but oftentimes if it's minor, individuals might not report to them. So this gives us a good opportunity to talk with those and capture those scenarios. And after the tech talk, we distribute a survey to collect feedback on the session, as well as other topics that individuals might be interested in and would like to see in the future tech talks. Based on this information, so far we have conducted trainings on Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Outlook 365. I'm happy to report that we've gotten a very good participation rate from the library. In each of these, about 30 to 40% of the library employees attend the training. I believe that's a good participation rate. And we are planning on continuing with the series based on the request that we received. During the first week, we were able to solve most of the issues that people were having, and they've been able to get back to the routine and continue with their work. But from the second week or so, we started getting new requests. Employees have been telecommuting for about a week, and at that point, they figured out things that were not so obvious at first. Sometimes they might start work on a new project that they have not worked on so far, and realize that they need access to files at work desktop, or need access to a specific software. These specific issues were dealt with on a case-by-case basis. We worked with the Central IT at the University of Miami in getting the VPN IP range added to some systems in order for people to have access to them from home. Sometimes my team members would go into the building and set up a remote desktop for individual machines so that they can access files or local software that they need. Some of these requests are not even access-related. For example, some individuals, when you work from a laptop for a week, you discover ergonomic issues, and they need their usual setup. They need their dual monitors with the external keyboard and the mouse. When we get these requests, we pull the request together and have one team member go into the building on a particular day of the week and process those requests. We would obtain the dual monitors, keyboard, mouse, the docking station from the employee's office, package them. Then we asked the employee to drive up to the loading dock and call us. When they call the team member from the library technology unit, they would go out to the loading dock, place them on the dock and go in. Once they go in, the employee can come up to the dock, retrieve the item and take it with them. So we implemented this no-contact drop-off method to ensure everyone's safety while making sure that we can still fulfill the needs of the staff. And once they go home with the equipment, my team would do a video call with them and walk them through the steps in setting everything up. The level of instruction each individual needs differs. For some individuals, they don't need any help at all. They know how to set everything up. For some individuals, we will provide a limited set of instructions and we can get them up and running pretty quickly. And for some employees, we have to provide more detailed instructions. The picture you see on the slide is one where we labeled all the ports and cables so there would be less confusion when setting things up. In all of the above topics, we talked about the current situation and what we did in order to facilitate telecommunication. But now that the genie is out of the bottle, there's no putting it back in. When this is over, majority of the employees will be comfortable with these new technologies and tools that they've grown accustomed during this period. And they would be an integrated part in their daily workflow, which means we will need to provide the hardware and software support for these tools and applications. We were already planning for teleconferencing meeting rooms or Zoom rooms before COVID-19. We already have one room fitted with the technology needed for the virtual meetings. We are planning on creating a full technology plan that integrates productivity tools into the daily operations and fulfill the staff needs. With that being said, I would like to thank everyone for attending this talk and I'm happy to answer any questions you have. Thank you. Thank you, Danushka. That was a really fascinating talk and impressive how your staff turned on a dime and just mobilized to provide the equipment and the resources for your staff. It's really fascinating to hear about. Thank you for sharing all that with us. And we've already got quite a number of questions in the queue. So I'll get right to those. Certainly from Robert Hilliker, who has a few questions. His first question is, how big is your team and number of FTEs and how big is the library staff overall? Sure. Library staff overall, I think it's about 150 employees somewhere around that. My team is, I have two sections, one taking care of the enterprise applications, ILS, that side. That's one faculty member. Then on the other side, for the infrastructure support, we have four individuals that maintains all the equipment and the library technology infrastructure. Okay. Thank you for that. And thanks, Robert. And Robert's next question is, do you have a dedicated point of contact in central IT? For some projects, once we start the project, we do have a dedicated point of contact, but some of the general issues, we rely on the ticketing system, they use service now, so we submit the RFS or request for service and seek help. One of the things that central IT implemented, which really helped us was when this telecommuting, orders were issued, and when everyone started telecommuting, the CEO started ITLC. I'm part of that group, it's Information Technology Leadership Council. They started a series of Zoom meetings, so every day at 430, all the IT elites throughout the university would meet for a half an hour and discuss things. So that helped expedite things, expedite the issues, and we were able to get solutions much faster than just going through the ticketing system. So I think that's one of the approaches that was really successful. You really get to talk to the CEO and all the other elites in the central IT, as well as other departments, and bounce ideas off of each other. Sure, sure. Having that regular access point and knowing that you'd be able to communicate with them on a regular basis, I'm sure that helped a lot. Absolutely. And Robert also is asking, do you have bomb guard or some similar tool for remote support? We don't. That's one of the things we are, we were actually investigating before that, but right now we don't. So that's one of the challenges. The time it takes to diagnose one request and provide support increased dramatically during the telecommuting period, because rather than walking up to an individual directly working on the machine, we had to sort of guide them through the process. And I just to expand a little bit on that question, is there, are there security or privacy concerns, which have kept you from wanting to implement some kind of remote support, or is it just you just haven't gotten around to it yet? Or what are the issues? At this point, it's basically we haven't gotten around to it. Yeah. Yeah. A lot happening. You want to do. For sure. Okay. Thank you. And thanks, Robert. Those were really great questions. And I see we have another question in the queue, but I just want to remind everyone, please submit your questions via the Q&A tool or the chat box. And we'll be happy to answer those live. Our next question comes from Anna Kraft. And Anna asks, was there already a culture of telecommuting at your institution before this situation? I know, they have a few individuals who telecommuted before this started. There's one individual, one faculty member that's telecommuting 100%. But other than that, I know there are a few departments in which individuals telecommuted one day per week. But I wouldn't say there's a very big culture of telecommuting before this happened. So it took some time for everyone to get used to the new environment. Sometime like maybe a week. Yeah. Sometimes like maybe a week. That's true. Right. Whether you like it or not, you are in the situation. You just have to make the best out of it. Right. That's right. All of those were really great questions. Thank you. To Robert and Anna for those. And thank you, Dineshka for, for those answers. Personally, I'm curious to hear from those of you who have also implemented similar strategies in your institution. So please feel free to share those with us. And I see actually that Cliff has a question. Cliff is asking if you could say a little more about how you handled connectivity for people who didn't have and maybe couldn't even get good internet connectivity at home. And how many simply couldn't get, couldn't get connectivity at home. So based on the initial survey, I think we identified only two, two individuals that don't have home internet. So for those scenarios, we did not have a good solution. The only solution we could come up with is maybe providing hotspots, but at that time we didn't have enough time to implement that. So we sort of left that decision up to the supervisor. So some of the things that during these meetings that came up was, can they take enough work home with that does not need real time connectivity. And they take some documents and work on things that they need. Oh, can you find, can we find alternate work arrangements or more or less alternate work for them to do if they are day to day operations require direct connectivity. Then later, this question was posed to the ITLC during one of our meetings and they said they were looking into a mobile device or a reimbursement or a stipend situation. And within few days, university issued a statement offering all the staff members a stipend so that they could, this is again, if they have a mobile phone with mobile data, they can start using that and tether off the phone and university you would get to stipend through the university. Interesting. Okay. Thank you for that answer. And Cliff, thanks for that question. And Robert, Hilliker has another question. Just to follow up on Cliff, he, he just wanted me to say, he wanted me to thank you and it's very helpful and it's interesting that there are so few network connectivity availability problem cases among the staff, which is, which is actually quite remarkable. Yeah, I'm talking more or less, whether you have connectivity or not, but on a day-to-day basis, I mean, some individuals said, okay, they have the connection, but based on where they are located, sometimes if they are in a more rural setting, the connection connect, they do have connection. They can get through the work, but at Zoom meetings, you might just have to turn off your video. Right. So your line might be slow, but I think most individuals, they have a good enough connectivity to at least get their work done. Right. That's wonderful. And, and surprising. So Robert is asking, do you have Citrix or some other mechanism to provide access to key client-based applications without using remote desktop? Yes. We have Citrix and some of these resource-heavy packages. I think we have like SAS and some other applications like that are loaded in Citrix. So, but this is mainly geared towards patrons. We are not heavily using Citrix for any staff applications. For patrons, we do have Citrix and they can use that for mainly this stack packages and other resource-heavy applications. That's interesting because I, I was so interested to hear that you've leveraged several library resources for this initiative. I mean, you used the chat tool and then you, of course your assessment librarian was deployed to survey the staff. So I just found that very interesting that you were able to use some of those resources that are normally turned toward other kinds of work for this purpose. Yeah. It's a collaborative effort. So everyone helped us through this transitional period. Yeah. It's great. I want to read a comment to you from Lisa Hinchliffe who says, she doesn't have a question, but she wants to thank you for a great presentation. And she comments, this is a great case study and she hopes you'll write it up as well as presenting it here today. So I think Lisa speaks for a lot of us who say this was really fascinating. I think a lot of folks could learn from the process that you have shared with us today. So thank you so much, Danushka for coming and sharing this with us at CNI. As I think I mentioned earlier, I may not have mentioned it to our attendees, but we do have the capacity in our webinar to turn your microphone on if you would like to make a comment or ask a question live.