IT Smart

Change management process

ITS is responsible for a broad collection of systems, services, and capabilities that in many different ways, are important to our community.  Disruptions will periodically occur as we work to maintain and evolve our infrastructure.  ITS has a Change Advisory Board (CAB) that consists of our managers and is tasked with ensuring that substantive changes to IT systems and services follow a standardized process and proceed in a transparent, orderly fashion.  This minimizes the risk of outages or other negative impacts to the community.  A key step in this process involves communicating effectively and broadly with audiences internal and external to ITS.  This crucial step increases awareness among the community of upcoming changes and prompts timely feedback.  To achieve our communication goals, ITS is now publishing scheduled changes on the University events calendar under “change advisory board“.  This new change calendar gives CAB a mechanism to effectively reach a wider audience and gives constituents more opportunity to surface concerns or to illuminate impacts that may have been overlooked.  It also leverages the built-in features of the university events system, such as providing you with the capability to add the CAB calendar to Outlook and subscribe to RSS feeds.  ITS is committed to effective collaboration; we believe that our dedicated change calendar will make it easier for us to deliver information and for you to obtain it conveniently via a mechanism of your choice.

End of Semester Moratorium

ITS will have a moratorium on non-emergency network and system changes starting Monday, December 8, through Thursday, December 18.

We understand that this time of year is a critical period with students and faculty trying to meet end of semester obligations. ITS will defer changes to systems and services that might have a production impact in order to minimize potential outages during this high-anxiety period. Changes required to respond to emergent situations will be duly evaluated and pursued only if their need is significant.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have comments, questions, or concerns.