You have my vote

No, this is not about the upcoming presidential election.

A report, compiled by the OSU Faculty Council Long-Range Planning and Information Technology Committee, detailing the results of an investigation they launched last April into hiring, personnel and fiscal practices in the IT Division was released yesterday.

The campus newspaper has a decent recap of the findings here.

I won't go into much detail about the report. I'll let you read it yourself, should you wish. I will recap the following, that I have been saying for many months now:

Immediately after taking responsibility for the University's IT infrastructure, the IT Division began a forced march away from the stable and well-developed...environment towards a new...infrastructure.

It should be noted that no systematic analysis of the needs of the University was carried out prior to implementation, that testing of the new infrastructure was only carried out concurrently with deployment, [and] that very little in the way of contingency planning was introduced in to the deployment process. Moreover, there was no training of ITD personnel for the new environment... .
As a result... the University experienced recurrent disruptions in mission critical services such as: Email service, File access, Network access, Printer access, Technical support.

At the end of the report are recommendations from the LRPITC. Most have my vote as recommendations we should follow, but those in bold especially.

1. ITD should conduct a thorough review [of] the PQs (position questionnaires) of each of its employees and make efforts to ensure that the relative levels of responsibilities and compensation are consistent.
   
2. ITD should restore training programs for its employees.
   
3. Policies that permit the hiring of close professional or personal acquaintances by senior administration officials should be altered to foster a hiring system which is in accord with national and fair employment procedures.
   
4. Past and current use of all aspects of the Student Technology Fee should be thoroughly examined to establish whether or not such use has been in the past and is presently in compliance with the terms of the original agreement between the students and the Regents.
   
5. The Student Technology Fee oversight committee should be reactivated.
   
6. All budget units on campus should post their entire budgets...on a public web site... .
   
7. A complete internal audit for the last three years of the ITD budget...should be conducted, with the summary made fully public... .
   
8. Before initiating any major changes in the University IT infrastructure, a thorough needs analysis should be carried out; and before any deployment is carried out, plans must be made to ensure that mission critical applications such as email and network access are never put in jeopardy.
   
9. An IT Advisory committee...should be formed and formalized in such a way that the IT Division's clientele has direct input into the planning and operations of the IT Division.

I thought I had closed this chapter but it looks like it will remain open for a little while longer. The good news is that, if The Powers That Be take this report, subsequent reports, and all recommendations seriously, we should see the IT Division begin to rebuild itself into a once again trusted entity within the University with employees who enjoy coming to work. It will be an uphill battle on all fronts but I think we can do it.