A Letter from the Vice Chancellor for Information Technology & CIO
Welcome to the 2016-2017 ITS Annual Report. Each year, the ITS Annual Report allows our organization the opportunity to reflect on our service to Carolina over the past year, and share with the University community the work that's been done to enrich the experiences of the faculty, staff and students at UNC-Chapel Hill. When I reflect on the stories, videos and photos that you will see in this Annual Report, one word so often comes to mind: collaboration.
One of our most visible projects over the past year has been Carolina Service, the UNC-Chapel Hill initiative to create more efficient and effective ways of delivering services and sharing resources. The IT work stream of Carolina Service continues years of work, most recently the IT Excellence initiative, focused on developing solutions to better serve the University’s technology needs. Collaboration with partners across campus – from other administrative units to the IT Executive Council to our own ITS employees – was essential to our progress. We look forward to continuing this work in the coming year and serve as a resource for other units on campus as they embark on their Carolina Service-related projects.
Collaboration was also essential for the launch of Adobe Creative Cloud on campus in September 2016. Teams from ITS worked closely with Adobe to develop an efficient way to provision accounts, and educate students on all that Adobe CC has to offer. Carolina’s partnership with Adobe empowers the campus community to create and manage content with powerful, 21st century communication tools across platforms and in a secure way. More than 14,000 students and faculty members have activated licenses and use cases for Adobe CC span schools, disciplines and interest areas.
Collaboration also happens behind the scenes, as we've experienced on a number of projects over the past year. The Sakai 11 upgrade in December required teams from across ITS to work together to plan for and execute a smooth rollout within a very small window of opportunity. Our work with of Athletics and their data analytics project with SAS has helped them utilize big data to better understand ticket purchase behavior. The seamless transition of iBilbio to Research Computing from Paul Jones and the School of Information & Library science has allowed millions of users to visit resources every day without interruption. And, the rollout of numerous enhancements to ConnectCarolina would simply not be possible without the coordination and collaboration among multiple teams both internal and external to ITS.
These are just a few examples of our successful collaborations over the past year and I hope that you will read the many more stories that appear in this Annual Report. Collaboration is fundamental to our success as an IT organization and it is only through working with our customers and engaging with partners that we continue to grow and improve the services that we offer to the community.
Regards,
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Photo Credits
Home page lead photo: Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill | New student Convocation and Fall Fest held at Carmichael Arena and Hooker Fields on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Sunday August 20, 2017.
All photos used throughout the report not otherwise credited: Kelly Johnson / UNC ITS