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Staff in ITS worked with the Office of General Counsel to plan, build, and test enhancements to the system supporting the annual conflict disclosure compliance for this academic year. These improvements address suggestions stemming from a recent audit and provide functionality found in commercial conflict of interest systems available in the market. For instance, the most important and useful feature was the ability for the form to adjust questions based on the previous question’s response. The new functionality and operational improvements help streamline the process for the community submitting the form, as well as for the form’s administrators.
Business stakeholders and IT staff across the London, Boston, and Oakland campuses collaborated on an upgrade that simplifies guest access to wireless services at all campus locations. Teams extended the access to allow guests up to 30 days of wireless service at a time. Previously, guests were required to create a new access code every day to connect to the campus network. This upgrade significantly eases the burden on guests, as well as their campus hosts, and allows for more effective collaboration and productivity.
Approximately 265 ITS staff members received incident management training over the course of three days and six live sessions in late February, fulfilling an audit requirement and providing staff with additional knowledge, tools, and resources for properly handling, prioritizing, and communicating IT incidents according to institutional processes. Using multiple baseline key performance metrics for comparison, the training is expected to help improve operational efficiencies, reduce the number and length of service disruptions, and increase overall customer satisfaction.
The Office of the Provost and ITS are partnering to develop and launch a new website and companion digital tools to support the new EXP makerspace and reflect the uniqueness and importance of the physical location set to open for fall 2023. The new website, which will be hosted on the university’s modern web hosting service, will be focused on attracting students to use the space while highlighting promotional elements aimed at industry partners. In addition to the website, the university’s enterprise service management tool, ServiceNow, along with related digital tools, will be leveraged to provide users of the makerspace convenient and self-service access to online training to become certified on makerspace tools and reserve those tools and spaces.
As part of an ongoing effort to modernize university website systems and services, the Bachelors-Completion website was recently successfully migrated from Northeastern’s aging on-premises server environment to the institution’s modern, cloud-based enterprise web hosting service. This move helps increase the reliability and security of a highly-visible, revenue-driving website that sees more than one million visitors a year, while also decreasing site loading time by 60%—ultimately creating a better user experience and higher-SEO value. The Bachelors-Completion website joins the more than 500 websites that have been migrated off the university’s legacy web servers, enabling a 54% reduction in on-premises web servers to-date, and helping the university reduce technical debt, risk, and cost.
In collaboration with business units throughout the university, including Public Safety, IT Services is establishing a more robust Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Program. A formalized BCDR Program helps ensure business operational resumption after an outage or disruption, mitigates risk of data loss, and protects the university against reputational damages. This essential program will support the university’s expanded campus footprint and global reach to ensure continuity of critical products, services, and applications when major natural or human-caused disruptive events occur.
Leveraging the Outsystems enterprise platform, IT teams developed and delivered an updated voting form for the Student Government Association’s annual vote. The project team collaborated with SGA representatives to capture business requests and updates, demo the changes, and release the final product so that it is available for fair voting for student government representatives. New functionality added this year include added logic for no confidence voting, so that if only one candidate is standing for election, a no confidence message is displayed at the start of the candidate slates. Logic was also added to disable other voting options when a candidate is written in.
IT teams supported the ongoing expansion of the global campus in Seattle with a complete data communications buildout at 225 Terry Ave., 2nd floor. This work provides state of the art wireless connectivity with increased Wi-Fi speed, four new Global Learning Spaces classrooms, and seven additional breakout spaces. As a result, the infrastructure now supports up to 20 additional students per class and hundreds more personal devices on the wireless network.
An initiative is underway to automate the request process and provisioning of high-performance computing (HPC) resources for classroom use, which benefits around 1,000 students each year who need to use HPC resources as a part of their coursework. The provisioning of user access, groups, and storage are all being automated. At the same time, the request form is being updated, with the help of a Canvas integration recently developed by ITS, to further improve and simplify the experience for professors, instructors, and teaching faculty requesting resources. Additionally, HPC usage is being standardized and compute environments are being tailored for courses.
According to demographic data collected in recognition of March as Women’s History Month, women employees in ITS account for over 32% of the division’s full-time workforce. This percentage is up from 25% in 2018 and is above the IT industry average of 26%, as reported by Gartner, the respected business and technology research firm. This trend in ITS aligns with Northeastern’s commitment to building a diverse and inclusive university community, and is part of ITS’ ongoing efforts to amplify voices and initiatives that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion as best practice.
In a joint effort between IT Services and Human Resources, the Employee Hub was formally introduced to Northeastern employees on Monday, March 27 as the new digital home base for faculty and staff. An expansion of the Student Hub that launched in 2020, the Employee Hub provides quicker, easier access to many of the productivity tools and other resources that employees need to navigate day-to-day university and work life most effectively. Daily site visits to the Employee Hub, which replaces and builds upon the myNortheastern employee portal that will retire as of June 1, 2023, were up three times in the days immediately following the announcement.
The completion of all pre-requisite upgrades in Banner marked a significant milestone in the project to migrate Student Financial Services off of the current financial aid system, Powerfaids. This milestone puts the university one step closer to the expected transition to Banner Financial Aid starting with the incoming class of students this fall 2023. This work will result in a more stable and integrated platform for this critical university function, which awards approximately $1B in financial aid each year.
The university’s Discovery Cluster high-performance research storage systems, located at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC), have been expanded in capacity, and updated to increase system performance. These updates enable the more than 6,000 research faculty and students throughout the global university network who use MGHPCC to work with larger data sets while reducing the amount of time they need to run simulations. MGHPCC is an intercollegiate high-performance computing facility located in Holyoke, Massachusetts, supported as a joint venture of Boston University, Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, and the University of Massachusetts system.
As part of ongoing work to support further integration of the Oakland campus with the global campus system, Northeastern IT teams in Oakland and Boston collaborated to migrate the legacy Mills housing data from a third-party vendor to Northeastern’s system. This transition provides Northeastern’s enterprise systems and housing teams with full control of this service, further enabling the university to move quickly as it coordinates enrollment growth.
The Mills email transition was completed when the final step of moving the @mills.edu mail domain to @northeastern.edu was done on January 31. Since the merger was finalized last summer, data from no fewer than 833 @mills.edu individual and shared Gmail accounts were migrated to Northeastern M365 accounts, while continuing to route all mail sent to those addresses to their new @northeastern.edu mailboxes. As a result, legacy Mills College employees and students are now fully integrated with Northeastern’s unified communication and collaboration platforms, allowing for more seamless messaging, meeting, and file-sharing with members of the university community around the global campus network.
ITS is moving forward with a Microsoft partner to help the university provide security responses across all global campuses on a 24/7/365 basis. Cyberattacks continue to increase around the world, making it more important than ever for Northeastern to ensure that its services, data, and people are protected around the clock. As Northeastern continues to expand globally, utilizing an outsourced security operations center will help the institution scale its security program. As a result, the university can continue to repel attackers and help keep the community safe from cyber threats.
The latest update to the Student Hub moves up the date by which admitted student data is brought into in the Hub. As a result, admitted students will now have earlier and expanded access to useful information and resources, beginning as soon as this data becomes available in related systems of record. Previously, admitted students did not receive the full Student Hub experience until the week before they started classes. Admitted students’ basic data, like their college and major, will now be displayed on the Me profile and searchable on the Discover page to foster connections, and the students will also be able to view their course registrations, billing statements, and more, directly through the Hub and well in advance of the start of classes. While improving the experience for admitted students, it is also expected this update will reduce the amount of support calls made to the university ahead of each new academic semester.
As follow-up to a 2019 assessment, the university has engaged Gartner, a leading global technology research and consulting firm, to refresh and expand the institution’s digital application assessment and roadmap. The effort will help Northeastern better manage risk while enabling improved prioritization and investment across the global university. Technical staff and business partners and leadership throughout the university will be included in the assessment process through surveys, interviews, and workshops.
Academic Technologies has been working with the Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning with Research to discuss and explore the recent technological advancements in generative AI, such as ChatGPT, and their impacts on education. Focus has been not just on the potential threats of this technology, but also the opportunities for providing a robot-proof education. Teams from Academic Technologies, CATLR, and other areas around the university co-wrote a whitepaper and presented in an educator exchange, “The Landscape of AI and ChatGPT: What is it and how can we work with it?” on Feb. 13. AT and CATLR will continue to support broad discussions about this new technology and create resources that help faculty to re-think assignment design to support more authentic learning and preparation for their future careers.
Throughout the winter break, necessary work was performed on the university’s technology to continue supporting the Northeastern community and to scale to support the expanding global network. Below are highlights of some of what was accomplished during the recess:
Earlier this month, the application servers for the university’s Banner ERP infrastructure were migrated to Linux. This migration improves the university’s security stance for these servers and keeps Northeastern in compliance with vendor software requirements. The move to the open, modern operating system also means that portions of the Banner infrastructure can be migrated to the cloud. Major releases to the Banner systems were also completed this month to keep the university compliant with updated tax regulations, including 1099 and 1098T reporting. To limit the impact of system outages during the releases, staff in ITS worked closely with business partners throughout the institution (including the Office of the Registrar, Finance, and Student Accounts) to plan the releases and navigate year-end processes, tax reporting deadlines, and start-of-term activities.
Instructors, administrators, and others can now find a dashboard of over 300 Boston and Oakland registrar-managed classrooms, including resources and information about the technology in each one. The classroom dashboard is publicly hosted on the Tech Service Portal on the ServiceNow platform, but when an instructor who is assigned to any of the classrooms is logged in, a personalized list of their classrooms and any current maintenance work or A/V issues is featured front and center for convenient access. The new classroom dashboard leverages data feeds from the Registrar, Facilities, and ITS to help better prepare faculty members to teach in their classroom and leverage the technology available to them.
Oakland-based ITS team members, in conjunction with partners including Facilities Management, took quick action to protect systems and data in the Oakland data center and throughout campus, following historic storms in the Bay Area that led to two-inches of standing water in the data center. Following the initial flooding and remediation, the teams took additional steps to mitigate against future water intrusion from the ongoing storms, including further elevating sensitive equipment and cables, backing up critical systems and data to another location, and reviewing and updating continuity plans for the data center and associated technical systems. Proactive reviews of network closets and other campus technology were also performed to identify any storm damage or potential for damage.
To kick-off spring semester classes and activities, the global university community leveraged the knowledge and assistance of IT Service Desk professionals by calling, chatting, emailing, and walking-up for support. In the first five days of the spring semester, the service desk fielded more than 3,000 interactions from university community members. More than 20% of interactions came in via chat, which is an increasingly preferred method for support. In addition to call, chat, email, and walk-up options, text messaging is also being explored as a future added method of support.
Enrollment Management and ITS collaborated to transition automated call distribution system vendors from Five9 to 3CLogic. Enrollment Management’s ACD system is used to connect with students, family members, and other audiences across 16 high-traffic support phone numbers including for Admissions, CPS, OGS, SFS, and the main university call center. The transition was accomplished on schedule under a tight 3.5-month timeframe, and it provides these areas greater integration with ServiceNow and a significant annual cost savings. ITS was the first university area to move to 3CLogic in 2020. For ITS, the integrations with ServiceNow and other university systems cut customer call wait times in half while enabling service desk agents to immediately identify callers and pre-fill information about a caller (including their call history) so that agents can more rapidly assist callers and provide a personalized experience.
Information Security and Kostas Research Institute, LLC partnered recently on a mock assessment as part of final preparation for seeking CMMC level 2 certification. This trial run gave the ITS and KRI teams the opportunity to experience the auditing process and assess what steps need to be taken prior to the actual government audit anticipated by late summer. The CMMC audit is required by the federal government to ensure that Northeastern meets the strict cybersecurity compliance regulations needed to work with controlled unclassified information, and so that the institution can continue its Department of Defense contracts and other government-funded research.
erviceNow’s Hardware Asset Management module launched the evening of Jan. 25, 2023, to facilitate greater operational efficiencies for the institution through automation. The HAM software can standardize asset data and tracking of IT assets, including university-managed laptops, loaner equipment through the Service Desk, and network infrastructure equipment. Using HAM, ITS can now view available inventory in various stockrooms, will receive “re-order” notifications when minimum inventory thresholds have been met, and can track asset age to inform automatic-replacement cycles. The launch of HAM will lead to a reduction of costs and risks associated with hardware inventory management while increasing customer satisfaction throughout the hardware lifecycle.
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