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University Committee on Information Systems & Technology (UCIST)

Reports

 

Previous Directions Statements     

Membership of Committee

Terms of Reference

Management Framework for Computing on Campus

UCIST serves as a co-ordinating body for computing on campus, and has representation from each of the Faculties (the Associate Dean, Computing) and the major academic-support areas (the Associate Provost Academic, University Librarian, and Director of Business Operations). Most of these constituencies have some professional computing-support staff, although this tends to be truer of the Faculties than the academic-support areas. In addition to the standing committees listed below, UCIST also charters ad hoc committees and projects.

Committees Advisory to UCIST

Other Campus Computing Committees

Guiding Principles Identified by UCIST

Learning and Teaching

  • Recognize and reward the effective use of IT in teaching and learning.
  • Encourage preparation of educational materials in digital format to facilitate flexible delivery for private study, tutorials, laboratories, distance education and classroom presentation.
  • Strengthen our strategic role in the area of innovative education in Canada, including Distance Education.
  • Provide adequate student computing lab resources to support teaching and learning activities.

Research

  • Local academic departments/units should provide essential levels of support of hardware, software and network connectivity to general-use faculty members.
  • Local academic departments/units should provide assistance with networking and limited hardware support to specialised and heavy-use faculty members.
  • The University should provide financial assistance with the operation and maintenance (infrastructure) of mainly research-oriented computers, from overhead funds generated by government and industrial funding for projects that contain an HPC component.
  • Researchers who have highly-specialized compute-intensive requirements should seek external funding for their basic hardware/software needs, wherever possible. However, as the nature of compute-intensive facilities are such that it will be unlikely that a single academic unit is able to maintain them unaided, the University itself, or through inter-faculty co-operation, should provide a measure of support for the successful operation and maintenance of such facilities.

Infrastructure

  • Ensure that administrative IS standards, approaches, and infrastructure are consistent with the University IT standards, approaches and infrastructure, and vice versa.
  • Commit to principles of distributed access, IS integration, and the exploitation of generic solutions and protocols as opposed to customized approaches or development for specific areas.
  • Ensure that IS projects are supported with appropriate commitment by both the user groups and IT/IS service providers, that priorities are well established through consultation, and that project feasibility, structure, methodology, and evaluation are appropriate.
  • Coordinate resources at all levels to ensure that faculty, staff and students have appropriate access to workstations that will facilitate their required academic and academic-support activities in the Electronic Workplace.
  • Consult regularly with end-users, and in particular students, to ensure their basic desktop requirements are identified and incorporated in subsequent planning decisions.
  • Encourage a review of alternative work arrangements such as "telecommuting", in recognition of the changing nature of the workforce (per Recommendation 26 of Building on Accomplishment ).
  • Encourage departments and groups to adjust job responsibilities to establish local staff expertise and thus provide a basic level of local support for the major activities of their unit.
  • Negotiate with vendors to allow the University community to obtain hardware and software at reasonable costs.
  • Refine the list of standard hardware, operating systems, applications software and networks to be supported by the University. We must reduce the complexity of support caused by diversity.
  • Pursue technical opportunities and licensing frameworks to enhance off-campus access to the electronic workplace, subject to secure identification and authorization of the user. 

Maintained by Meltem Kurtman
Last Updated: 2010-10-06