From the Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer

Contained herein is the Office of Information Technology’s annual report for the year 2019. We hope you find it interesting and useful.

As with our prior Year In Review IT report, our goal is to:

• Share relevant factual data,
• Provide insight into who in OIT is “turning the wrenches”, and
• Recognize our accomplishments are the result of collaborations and partnerships.

In the IT business, change is constant. In 2019, Auburn’s entire community pitched-in to improve the campus technology environment. Some examples include:

• Our office published Auburn's first Information Technology Strategic Plan.
• Our network team implemented a second data route for campus so we have redundancy in the case of an outage.
• Our digital workspace team upgraded hundreds of servers from Windows 7 to Windows 10 to maintain support.
• The Project Management Office collaborated with the Office of Professional and Continuing Education to bring the AU Young Professionals group to campus and host the first two meetings in 2019.
• Multiple teams worked together to implement DUO (two-factor authentication) for all students.
• Several teams worked together to change all faculty and staff email accounts from an on-premise solution to a cloud-based one.
• Working with campus partners, the university made a selection for the vendor for a campus-wide CRM.

These achievements are possible because we have a great group of IT professionals on this campus; no one unit could accomplish these things alone. There are slightly more than 250 IT pros on campus, split between OIT and distributed teams. Additionally, in any given year, OIT employs more than 50 students working in classrooms, at the service desk, and as software development co-ops.

A special Thank You to the Student Government Association. The SGA is a great partner for OIT. From spreading the word on Cybersecurity to helping with search committees, I am continually impressed with their expertise and maturity.

As CIO, I appreciate each and every one of these teams and individuals for their professionalism and dedication to the Auburn mission. A key focus for our University is to work toward Auburn Excellence, and, as you read our 2019 Year in Review, we hope you see just how true this is of our campus IT community. Please take a few moments to review areas that interest you! We value any feedback that would help us improve Vol. #3 in 2020. Just submit your comments through Ask the CIO.

- Jim O'Connor