April 2014

Dear staff, I hope that you are all enjoying the start of spring and the return of warmer weather. As we near the end of the 2013-2014 academic year, it is a good time to check in with your individual and team FY14 goals. Please work with your teams and managers to ensure that you are progressing on these goals and continuing to align efforts with the Division of IT’s annual goals (printed on page 2 for reference) and the university’s mission, vision and values. Please reference my message to the division from Monday, April 7, about 2014 mid-year checkpoints as you check in with your managers and direct reports in the coming weeks, and use the naming convention Last Name_First Name_GWid_GA when saving your updated Goal Agreements. Please send all updated Goal Agreements to Jon Lantz at jmlantz@gwu.edu no later than Wednesday, April 30.

As always, thank you for all of the hard work that you do every day and your commitment to excellence in the division and at the university as a whole. Thank you. Dave Steinour, CIO

Communications and Marketing Update The communications and marketing team is continuing work on the new Division of IT web presence, which will include one primary website for informational content and the GWiz knowledge base for help- and support-related content. The main IT website is divided into several sections, including accounts, e-mail and calendar, network and connectivity, security, web and collaboration, software and business apps, communications, backup and storage, research computing and training. If you have any questions or suggestions regarding content for the new website, please contact Rachel Blevins at rachel_k@gwu.edu or 4-2138.

UWS Updates We are working hard on a number of fronts. We launched the 2014 Summer Housing app in mid-March to much success and also supported more than 18,000 applicants in learning their application decision. Drupal has more than 175 sites running in production and many more on which content is being developed for a later launch. We are also working on a number of SharePoint elements, including the intranet, Team Sites and more.

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Don’t Forget… Division of IT FY14 Goals 1) Improve the service experience of

the university faculty, students and staff through measurable service initiatives

a. Continue to implement planned improvements from the FY13 plan

b. Survey faculty, staff and students to assess success of improvements

c. Plan FY15 improvements 2) Position the Division of IT into a

technology leadership role by leveraging internal and external partnerships

a. Support the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) in establishing an integrated system of record for proposal management

b. Implement the Capital Area Advanced Research and Education Network (CAAREN)

c. Transition to shared IT project prioritization

3) Manage the business intelligence (BI) and data sharing needs of the university

a. Continue executing deliverables from the BI roadmap as agreed to by university stakeholders

4) Find opportunities to leverage platforms for efficiency, life-safety and cost savings

a. IT Service Management (ITSM) suite implementation

b. Complete closed-circuit security cameras design and RFP per project milestones

5) Implement solutions to provide information through mobile means to improve ease and flexibility of access to information and build a collaborative environment

a. Define and provide a scalable intranet and collaboration suite for a portal infrastructure using MS SharePoint

b. Implement new version of GW Mobile application with student information access

BIS Update Jelena Roljevic, Margaret Roldan and Ron Layne were selected to present at this year’s Higher Education Data Warehouse (HEDW) conference, which will be held April 27-30 at the University of Pennsylvania. HEDW is a network of higher education colleagues dedicated to promoting the sharing of knowledge and best practices regarding knowledge management at colleges and universities, including building data warehouses, developing institutional reporting strategies and providing decision support. The forum meets once a year and sponsors a series of listservs to promote communication among technical developers and administrators of data access and reporting systems, data custodians, institutional researchers and consumers of data representing a variety of internal university audiences. HEDW has more than 2,000 active members, representing professionals from more than 700 institutions in 38 countries and 48 states. Jelena Roljevic and Margaret Roldan will give the following joint presentation: Agile Business Intelligence: Increasing Adoption and Delivering Value, 10 Days at a Time In 2013, the GW BI team had two firsts: pulling data from its financial ERP into the warehouse for the first time, and using an Agile Scrum methodology. The objective was to build an interactive dashboard for principal investigators designed to help them manage research grants more efficiently. This presentation will focus on how Agile helped the BI team deliver a solution that increased user adoption through constant engagement and timely feedback from end users. Lessons learned will be shared as well as the future of Agile at GW. Ron Layne will give the following presentation: Data Governance Technology – A Game Changer This presentation will focus on how technology is a game changer in helping to mature the data governance process. Topics discussed will include acquiring the technology, developing requirements, preparing and evaluating RFIs and RFPs, conducting a proof of concept, the installation and pilot phase, going live, the features and benefits, the metadata repository, the business glossary, the report catalog, approval workflows, policies, standards and processes, data lineage, data issue tracking, metrics and lessons learned. Please contact us at insight@gwu.edu if you would like to receive copies of the presentations after the conference.

HP PPM Reports – Project Totals by Lifecycle Phase and Health Status The Project Management Office (PMO) has made HP PPM project reports available for all projects in PPM in the PMO Updates section of the Division of IT intranet site at https://intranet.gwu.edu/dit/SitePages/GWDisplayForm.aspx?itemID=23&listName=GW%20Base%20Promotion. The report shows the totals of all projects in PPM by lifecycle phase (charter, planning, execution, deploy or closeout) and by health status (green, yellow or red) for both PMO- and functionally managed projects. As of March 17, the report is available every other Monday. For more information, please contact David Bell at dsbell@gwu.edu. Projects Meeting Updates The PMO is planning updates to the projects meeting agenda. These updates will be based on the interviews conducted with attendees of each projects meeting. Stay tuned for the announcement of the updates.

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Don’t Forget… Submit a Positive Vibe! Publicly THANK, CONGRATULATE or RECOGNIZE a GW colleague on either a job well done or a special occasion! http://hr.gwu.edu/current-positive-vibes Monthly Project Updates The PMO continues to put together monthly project updates that can be found in the following location: G:\ISS_SHARED\Projects\OngoingProjects\PMO Monthly Project Updates. Please check back every month for the latest project updates that interest you. Project Portfolio Dashboards Dashboards are now available for all IT managers through the PPM tool. To view the dashboards, log in to the PPM tool and look for the ‘Dashboards’ section along the left side. The new dashboards are under ‘Div of IT Management Dashboards.’ The dashboards compare proposals and projects from last fiscal year to this fiscal year based on project size, type and sponsoring department. Technical Writing The Office of Communications and Marketing has been assisting with the creation of several policies, procedures and technical documents for the Division of IT. This work has included documenting office knowledge, writing new procedures and editing and re-formatting existing documents. For more information or to assess your team’s technical writing needs, please contact Rachel Blevins at 4-2138 or rachel_k@gwu.edu. Press Inquiries and Awards Please send all press inquiries to Rachel Blevins at rachel_k@gwu.edu or 4-2138. Any requests from the press, including The Hatchet, should be filtered through the Office of Communications and Marketing. Rachel will work with External Relations and the correct office within the Division of IT to draft a written response to any question from the media. Remember that the Division of IT HR office is here for you. For comments, questions or concerns, please contact the team: • Jon Lantz, Jr. HR Client Partner,

jmlantz@gwu.edu, 3-0142

Enhancements to the Risk Management Program As IT professionals, we are making decisions to manage risks every day. With all of the different risks that we encounter on a given day, it’s important to have a standard way to consider risks and a single view into the risks that we’re facing together as one division. To help make this possible, we’ve been working on a number of enhancements to the risk management program. Here’s a quick overview of what we’ve been working on and how to can access these new resources:

• Risk Management Standard: An effective risk management program starts with a set of expectations and definitions that everyone can understand and leverage. Drawing from industry recognized best practices such as COBIT, ITIL and NIST frameworks, we developed a risk management standard that describes how the Division of IT will utilize the risk register and manage risk going forward. To make sure that the standard and overall risk management program is continuously evaluated and improved as necessary, a risk management standard steering committee has been assembled. The group will meet periodically as needed to review the risk management program and the standard. The steering committee is made up of Chris Megill, Greg Wilson, Larry Legge and Sweth Chandramouli.

• Risk Register: Previously, the division used a tool called Agiliance to manage our risk register and facilitate our bi-weekly risk register meetings. The Agiliance tool was very capable but not easy to access or use. As a result, we’ve developed a slimmed down risk register and launched it on Google Drive. This new risk register is easy to access and update and can provide an on-demand view into the risks that have been reported by Division of IT personnel.

• Risk Register Submission Form: To make risk register submissions easy and efficient, we have developed a risk register submission form. Filling out this form will allow the compliance and risk team to easily migrate your reported risk to the risk register. It’s easy to walk through and only takes a few minutes to complete. We think this works better than e-mail and requires less re-work for the compliance and risk team later on. The form is available at https://docs.google.com/a/email.gwu.edu/forms/d/1n-VMnNuOJcyzrMbOtBU2Y5uNsN3guTvIGnAVLUeOHzw/viewform.

These enhancements have been shared with the Risk Register Working Group this month to seek the members’ feedback and suggestions. The enhancements are just the beginning of a hands-on and collaborative risk management program. As we begin to build up a good data set, it will give us the opportunity to produce more effective reports and a risk management dashboard for senior staff. We will also continue to analyze our toolset and evaluate whether third-party tools can be used to further enhance the value and effectiveness of the program. Please contact Noor Aarohi or Brian Markham if you have any comments or suggestions. Security Quick Byte Did you know?

• Your GWemail account offers the capability to “undo” a sent e-mail you can undo a sent message by going to Settings, then selecting Labs, scrolling down to Undo Send, selecting Enable and saving your changes (screenshot below).

• Hidden worksheets, columns and rows in spreadsheets can cause inadvertent

data disclosures. When dealing with confidential, regulated or sensitive data, always double-check to rule out any possibilities of accidental data disclosure.

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New Staff Arshad Ahmed SharePoint Developer, Office of University Web Services Arshad joined the Division of IT on April 7,coming to GW from Pyramid Systems, where he served as a software engineer working on .Net and SharePoint. In his new role, he will be working on Nadya Rose’s team as a SharePoint developer. He is located on the Virginia Science and Technology Campus and can be reached at arshad_ahmed@gwu.edu. Michael Glyer Director, Information Security Services, Office of Information Security and Compliance Services Michael joined the Division of IT on March 3, coming to GW from the Central Intelligence Agency, where he has served as liaison to In-Q-Tell (a strategic investor for the intelligence community) and held first-line supervisory positions. In his new role, he will lead efforts to defend the network against attack and protect the critical information of the university. Michael is located on the Foggy Bottom Campus and can be reached at 4-9178 or mglyer@gwu.edu. Anh-Thien Nguyen ITSM Administrator, Office of Service and Contract Management Anh-Thien joined the Division of IT on March 3, coming to GW from NetCentrics Corporation and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he contracted as a Remedy team lead, demonstrated wide-ranging project management skills and interacted with client management. In his new role, Anh-Thien will be responsible for the configuration, maintenance and upgrading of the BMC Action Request System (ARS), Atrium Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and BMC Remedy ITSM suite of products. Anh-Thien is located on the Virginia Science and Technology Campus and can be reached at 3-0268 or thiennguyen@gwu.edu. Roger Saplan Business Intelligence Analyst, Office of Business Intelligence Services Roger joined the Division of IT on March 17. Continued on page 5…

Continued from page 3… • Using encryption helps invoke Safe Harbor provisions. Safe Harbor is provision

within a statute or a regulation that reduces or eliminates a party’s liability by way of offering relief from costly notifications and reputational risks by exempting a security incident from being classified as a data breach. So, it would make sense to encrypt confidential, regulated and sensitive data, right? Do you know if your laptop is encrypted and that the Division of IT offers e-mail encryption services? Please contact the IT Support Center or e-mail us at infosec@gwu.edu to learn more about these services.

• The Division of IT now offers Password Management Pro for all Division of IT staff. Use this password vault to securely store as many credentials as you want. The service can be accessed at https://volt.it.gwu.edu/, and you can log in using your NetID and password. If you’re interested in a password vault for personal use, consider using the KeePass Password Safe. In addition to a desktop application, KeePass also offers a portable version.

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning Updates Please note that a crisis telephone bridge has been established for technical operations during a crisis. This conference bridge will supplement the existing bridge for the command center. The dial-in information and chairperson code will be shared with management staff. As part of the duty officer role rollout, more information will be shared on responsibilities and roles of staff in major incident response and evaluation as well as roles and responsibilities during a declared crisis. Our first process improvement for the business continuity and disaster recovery program relates to defining and implementing the role of duty officer (DO). This role is essentially the primary escalation point for the IT Support Center (ITSC) and other staff who believe an incident could be a major incident or crisis. The DO role will be serviced by deputy CIO direct reports on a rotating basis (every two weeks). The DO will be on call 24 hours a day to assist the ITSC in major incident triage assessment and classification, work closely with on-call staff from impacted service areas and be responsible for declaring an emergency or crisis. Once a crisis or major incident has been declared, the DO will coordinate response through a command center (most often conducted through a telephone bridge) comprised of senior Division of IT leadership. For specific activities and responsibilities, please see the matrix below.

Roles Primary Responsibility

Details

Duty Officer

• Leads major incident assessment

• Leads Command Center Team

• Directs major incident activities

• Initiates and leads Command Center (conference bridge)

• 24/7 even during

normal working days (escalation point for ITSC)

• Receives incident report and activates plans, if necessary Reviews initial incident activates Command Center

• Declares disaster, if necessary • Notifies Division of IT senior leadership of

declared crisis • Communicates with senior university

leadership regarding level 1 incidents {unless managed by the Office of the CIO)

• Sets priorities • Directs activities, plans and

communications • Approves communications to employees

and to other target groups, as recommended in the communication plan

• Assigns responsibilities and tasks to Division of IT teams

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New Staff Continued… He came to the division from GW’s Procurement Department, where he first served as senior P-card specialist and was promoted to reporting specialist. Additionally, he has been instrumental in supporting the Innovation Task Force with its reporting requests for procurement activity. In his new role, he will be supporting the division’s business intelligence efforts. He is located on the Virginia Science and Technology Campus and can be reached at 6-4268 or rsalpan@gwu.edu. Tahlia Thomas Manager, IT Support Center, Office of Service Delivery and Communications Tahlia joined the Division of IT on March 31, coming to GW from Northwest Community College in Terrace, British Columbia, Canada, where she served as the director of technology services. In her new role, she will supervise a staff of ITSC analysts, providing performance management, establishing training and development plans for individuals and workforce management, establishing work schedules and allocating staff resources as necessary to meet the support center’s changing needs. She is located on the Virginia Science and Technology Campus, with hours from 3 p.m. to midnight, Monday through Friday, and can be reached at 3-3526 or tethomas@gwu.edu. Alexander York Windows Systems Administrator, Office of Systems Engineering Services Alexander joined the Division of IT on April 7, coming to GW from the University of Florida, where he supported enterprise infrastructure and operations. In his new role, he will also support enterprise infrastructure and operations, with a focus on Microsoft applications. Alexander is located on the Virginia Science and Technology Campus and can be reached at ayork@gwu.edu. Congratulations!

• Rodmy Bozo was promoted to Windows systems engineer in the Office of Systems Engineering Services

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Roles Primary Responsibility

Details

Command Center Staff

•Supports DO •Facilitates Actions within IT teams •Represents (bidirectional) Division of IT teams and Command Center

• Allocates resources to the crisis management effort

• Reviews Damage Assessment Report and makes recommendations

• Represents DIT teams within Command Center

• Coordinates messaging and assignments to Division of IT staff / teams

• Delivers updates to Command Center

ITSC

•Initial Incident response / triage •Escalates to DO •Initiates Command Center (conference bridge) •Facilitates communications between response teams and customers

• Receives incident reports and performs initial triage

• Contacts and coordinates on-call coordinator evaluation

• Escalates to DO for added evaluation / escalations

• Supports activation of command center resources (phone bridges, Elluminate, etc.)

• Assists in notifications to command center staff, IT staff and GW

Information sessions will be held in April to provide interested staff with more information. Session details are below.

• Tuesday, April 15, 2-2:45 p.m., Enterprise Hall 382 (VSTC) and 2100 M 205L (Foggy Bottom)

• Thursday, April 17, 10-10:45 a.m., Enterprise Hall 382 (VSTC) • Tuesday, April 22, 10-10:45 a.m., Rome Hall B208 (Foggy Bottom) • Thursday, April 24, 2-2:45 p.m., Enterprise Hall 382 (VSTC) • Date TBD: dedicated Elluminate session

If you would like a dedicated presentation and discussion session for your team, please contact Bill Koffenberger at 4-3347 or billkoff@gwu.edu. This is one focused business continuity and disaster recover planning effort to fill gaps and prepare. To contribute ideas and suggestions to the division’s planning in this area, please contact Bill Koffenberger.

Online Tuition Remission A new online tuition remission benefit application process has been developed for eligible employees and their spouses/domestic partners and/or dependents. This application will be accessible through the Employee Menu in the GWeb Information System beginning Monday, April 14. If you or a dependent will be taking courses this summer, you will need to complete the online application no later than Sunday, June 15, to take advantage of the tuition remission benefit program. Beginning in summer 2014, an application will be needed for each semester for each applicant (employees and dependents). The certification process for the employee graduate tuition benefit tax exemption has not changed. If you wish to submit a certification to be considered for the tax exemption, please refer to the graduation certification forms at http://benefits.gwu.edu/ and review the certification information at http://benefits.gwu.edu/tuition-remission. Continued on page 6…

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Continued from page 5… Tools and resources to help guide you through the transition to this new online application process are as follows:

• Tutorial: https://benefits.gwu.edu/sites/benefits.gwu.edu/files/downloads/TR%20Online%20Application%20StepByStep%20Instructions_FINAL_032114_0.pdf

• Instructions: https://benefits.gwu.edu/sites/benefits.gwu.edu/files/downloads/TR%20One%20Pager%20Doc..pdf

• FAQs: https://benefits.gwu.edu/sites/benefits.gwu.edu/files/downloads/FAQs%20Tui%20Application%202015%20Process%20w-URLs%2033114%20FINAL3_0.pdf

• Tuition Remission Benefit Policy: https://benefits.gwu.edu/sites/benefits.gwu.edu/files/image/Tuition%20Remission%20Policy_FINAL_R022614.pdf

This application will bring a great deal of efficiency to the current process and will remove a lot of manual overhead for Student Accounts and Benefits Administration. This was the first Banner team (EIS) project that followed Agile Methodology. After we received the user requirements, we logically split up the various tasks into five iterations. Each iteration was a deliverable to the users and they tested the application piece by piece. This helped the users look at the newly developed pages much earlier and suggest text and field changes that could not be envisioned during the design phase. The most challenging part of the project was to have the exemption codes correctly mapped out for various scenarios for employees, faculty, research staff and retirees and their dependents.

Congratulations! Continued… • Andre DiMino was promoted to

senior network security engineer in the Office of Information Security and Compliance Services

• Isra Elmahdi was promoted to endpoint support analyst in the Office of Service Delivery and Communications

• Regina Mays was promoted to assistant finance director

• Brian Mislavsky received the vExpert award

• Alex Nimmannit received the vExpert award

• James Otto was promoted to endpoint developer in the Office of Service Delivery and Communications

• Vijay Padmanabhan was promoted to director of information technology architecture services in the Office of Planning and Strategic Initiatives

• Jerome Temple was promoted to Windows systems administrator in the Office of Systems Engineering Services

Online Morale Survey The morale survey, which was distributed to Division of IT staff in 2012, is still open on the Division of IT website. All Division of IT staff are invited to complete the anonymous form at https://it.gwu.edu/staff-feedback-and-suggestions with their feedback and suggestions for the division. We will continue to review these suggestions and implement them where possible. Employee Referral Program The Employee Referral Program is a way for all Division of IT staff to contribute to the continued success of the organization. If you know someone who would be a good addition to the Division of IT team and they meet the qualifications for an eligible open position, it may be worth $1,000 if you refer them for employment and they are hired. If your candidate is hired you will be awarded $1,000, minus applicable taxes, after six months of continued successful employment of the referred individual. Please visit http://it.gwu.edu/employee-referral-program for more information and to see the current eligible postings.

Virtualization In 2008, Enterprise Systems set a goal to reach an 80/20 virtualization ratio by 2012. Several efforts have been made since then to lifecycle all end-of-life servers and complete new deployments where possible with virtual machines. These numbers will vary as virtualization, decommissioning and new applications increase. As of April 7: Managed services: (last month’s totals)

• 433 out of 493 Windows servers are virtual: 90% (427 out of 484, 89%) • 49 out of 79 Novell servers are virtual: 62% (no change)

o The Novell infrastructure environment is planned for decommissioning by January 2015, due to the extensive efforts to amplify the migration of the authentication and file sharing services to the Enterprise Active Directory platform

• Overall, the managed services are about 85% virtual (no change) Continued on page 7…

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Division of IT Fun Facts Monthly Voice Systems Statistics Voice Systems Users Foggy Bottom: 14,781 Virginia: 1,796 Total inbound calls: 334,284 Total outbound calls: 347,854 Total calls: 682,138 Voicemail Users Foggy Bottom: 5,781 Virginia: 806 Modular Messaging Foggy Bottom Total incoming calls: 151,909 Total messages processed: 32,327 Percent of incoming calls resulting in messages: 21.28% Virginia Total incoming calls: 19,252 Total messages processed: 3,970 Percent of incoming calls resulting in messages: 20.62%

Continued from page 6… Unix services: (last month’s totals)

• There are 29 stand-alone Solaris servers (32) • There are two M8000 with 17 zones (no change) • There are 248 Unix (Solaris and Linux) virtual machines (239) • There are seven appliances (IronPorts, Axway) (no change)

VMware virtualization metrics: Data Domain Storage Array In spring 2010, the Division of IT purchased two data domain storage arrays to replace the university backup storage. The decision to move the enterprise backup solution to data domain storage arrays was made in order to use smarter storage instead of continuously increasing our storage. The data domain storage arrays are leading the industry with their data de-duplication technology. This allows for more data to be stored on less storage. As of April 2014, we have stored about 1.5 PB of data on 93 GB of storage.

• Total amount of data stored on disk: 1,658,340 GB • Space used by data on disk: 105,672 GB • Compression: 94%

Windows Servers Patching Update The Division of IT manages more than 400 Microsoft Windows servers. Every month, Microsoft releases several patches that are applied to every single server. From January 2010 to April 2014, 2,487 patches were released and applied to the Division of IT-managed Windows servers.

In March 2014, 32 patches were applied to all servers: 20 security/other updates and 12 critical updates.

The State of the Division of IT

newsletter has been distributed by the Division of IT’s marketing and

communications team. If you have been left off a list, have information that you

want included in the next edition or have comments, questions or

suggestions, please contact Rachel Blevins at 4-2138 or rachel_k@gwu.edu.