Strategic UIT group aims for smooth start of school

By Emily Rushton

The start of fall semester has arrived and UIT is doing everything it can to make sure it’s a success.

“One of the things that [Steve Corbató] said is a priority to him is making sure that the start of school goes as smoothly as possible for our faculty and students,” said Rene Eborn, Chief of Staff for University Information Technology (UIT). “It’s really important to him.”

So important, in fact, that an official group was formed for the sole purpose of making the transition to start of school a seamless one.

The group is comprised of 10 people, both UIT directors and associate directors, who have been meeting together to discuss strategies for dealing with the inevitable challenges that always arise with the start of school. 

“We know that the first three days of school are the largest volume; that’s when we see the most need,” said Eborn. “Those first few days of school put a huge tax on our infrastructure.”

Some of the proactive measures that have been taken include ensuring nonessential processes won’t be running during the first few days of school, providing a help desk presence on campus, and putting a moratorium in place so that no changes go into the system during that time.

“One of our goals is operational reliability,” said Eborn. “We want to make sure we respond quickly to things.”

The group has also been coordinating with the University’s cloud service providers, like Pearson and Instructure, to make certain that those companies don’t perform any major upgrades in their systems during the start of school.

“We’re not promising it’s going to be perfect,” said Eborn. “We’re just going to do our best to make it as smooth and successful as possible.”