The Information Technology Division (ITD) is one of five major divisions at the University of Memphis. Its more than 90 employees in ten departments include programmers and systems analysts, consultants, system and network administrators, operators, and support personnel.

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VP/CIO Office

The Office of the Vice President for Information Technology provides information technology leadership for the campus and the coordination of a campus-wide IT planning process to complement the institution's strategic plan. The office serves as the financial and budgetary monitoring point for the entire unit and acts as liaison for external administrative functions such as personnel as well as providing direction for day-to-day activities. The office also coordinates the ombudsperson function for the division, offering a problem-solving service for both users of ITD services and for staff within the division. Information Technology coordinates the uses of technology on campus with a focus on innovation to enhance the learning process of our students and to provide more effective administrative functions.

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Advanced Learning Center

The Advanced Learning Center (ALC) researches learning practices as well as provides support to the campus community related to enhancing learning through the effective implementation of technology in the classroom. The center receives support from both Academic Affairs and the Information Technology Division.

Current services include support and consultations of campus applications including Desktop Video Collaboration, eCourseware (D2L), Podcast Central, TurnItIn and UMdrive. Additional help is provided through online answers and tutorials archived in AskTOM.

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Client Support Services

Client Support Services (CSS) is responsible for providing the Information Systems Helpdesk and Support Center to the university. The Helpdesk is available twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week when the university is open. The Helpdesk answers questions and finds solutions concerning Information Technology services via telephone, Internet, and in person.

Additionally, CSS actively monitors and proactively maintains the university's 274 smart classrooms, TigerLAN labs, and public printing stations. CSS trains students, who provide almost twice the man hours of its full-time staff and a quarter of the four-thousand hours the ITD division invests weekly to deliver technology. CSS also provides solutions to an additional 10,000 students, faculty and staff needing help with RODP, ROCC and WebCT.

CSS is committed to the highest level of client support. Everything that it does, from answering the phone to documenting the solution to a request, is focused on providing courteous and effective customer service. CSS endeavors to act as a client advocate to influence IS priorities by actively participating in technology planning and implementation.

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Enterprise Application Services

Enterprise Application Services (ITEAS) provide services and technical support that are essential to the delivery of effective, efficient, and reliable core business application systems to The University of Memphis community. We support the university business applications for Advancement, Finance, Human Resources, Student Administration, Student Financial Aid and the campus imaging system, Matrix. Responsibilities include creating and maintaining internal and external interfaces and support of third party application software including UC4 / AppWorx, Evisions and Resource 25.

ITEAS is responsible for management and support of a number of different enterprise web servers and applications. The main U of M web site, search engine, and myMemphis portal are hosted on servers managed by the group.

ITEAS staff works with client offices across campus to investigate and implement, and in some cases develop, enterprise applications to meet university business needs. Some of the client office applications developed and hosted include the Faculty CV system, Online SETE reports, Faculty Effort Certification, and web sites used for creation of University policies as well as the Business & Finance and faculty handbooks. Members of the staff coordinate the U of M Web Developer Group (WebDev), and are available as resources to assist distributed web server administrators across campus.

The ITEAS group is also involved in enterprise database support.  The group

• develops data policies and standards to ensure data quality;
• designs, implements, and maintains databases and database applications for institutional analysis;
• troubleshoots administrative systems and database problems; and
• consults and advises academic and administrative divisions for data and database needs.

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Enterprise Infrastructure Services

The Enterprise Infrastructure Services team provides various enterprise middle-ware services and applications to the campus. Middle-ware services create and maintain user accounts. These services also include functions such as identity management, authorization, and authentication across many different system platforms and applications.

The team currently administers and synchronizes over 100,000 user accounts between multiple systems including Banner, TigerLAN, the central campus e-mail system, and the central LDAP directory servers.

Software, such as the iAM website, has been developed by the team to provide users with self-service options to maintain their campus accounts.

The team also participates in the Internet2 Middle-ware Initiative, a national group made up of higher education representatives working toward the deployment of core middle-ware services at Internet2 universities.

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Network Operations Center

Under the Network Services Department, the Network Operations Center is responsible for daily / nightly production of updates to and reports from university databases and servers, including daily backups and business processing for the university. The department is evolving into a 7-day 24-hour, tier 2 level, centralized network operations center for monitoring and tracking problem resolution for critical university systems and services.

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Network Services / Telecommunications

The Network Services Department installs and supports a robust network on the main campus as well as outlying campuses. This network includes over 12,000 data nodes, 6,500 phones, 2,400 cable TV connections, and 270 web cameras. Network Services Department functions as a gigapop site for regional connections to Internet2 and as the connector for the State of Tennessee SEGP program for Internet2. Additionally, the Network Services Department handles all adds, moves and changes for university voice, data and video communications.

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Server Administration Team

The Server Administration Team is responsible for selecting, installing, and maintaining the university's centralized servers. These servers, which number in the hundreds and include the university's High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters, host a wide variety of centralized applications by way of half a dozen different operating systems. The team also manages a number of the university's large, centralized applications such as e-mail, the university's web-based file storage system (UMdrive), and course management systems--both for the university and for the state-wide Regent's Online Degree Program. Additionally, the team supports a large storage area network (SAN) that is well over fifty terabytes and growing, backed up using a robotic tape library.

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