MSU IT is prioritizing enhancements for foundational IT services and infrastructure. The goal is to improve access and reliability, and enable greater avenues for innovation in teaching, research, and scholarly activity.

Initiatives with the Office of the Executive Vice President for Administration

On behalf of the Office of the Executive Vice President for Administration (OEVPA), MSU IT established a new Requirements Management Training Program to improve the university’s ability to effectively define and articulate business goals and needs. Requirements Management training focuses on the process of gathering, analyzing, documenting, and prioritizing the desired outcomes for a project or initiative at its outset and throughout its implementation. By the end of spring semester 2024, nearly 200 individuals from various colleges and units will have completed this training, supporting effective communication between all campus stakeholders and, therefore, successful collaboration and outcomes when planning institutional initiatives or projects and developing RFPs.

MSU IT also collaborated with OEVPA to move the MSU IT Project Management Office (PMO) in support of establishing a central Enterprise PMO in OEVPA. The move provides a prioritization mechanism at the enterprise level for university-wide initiatives to better align project efforts with MSU’s strategic goals, while considering efficient stewardship and sustainability of university resources.

Network Modernization

Often taken for granted, the network has become the functional foundation that supports everything on campus. Try to imagine a modern-day campus without a network, and you’ll quickly find that you cannot.

A multi-year investment is underway to invest in network infrastructure and improvements that enhance user experience by expanding common good services to achieve stewardship and sustainability goals. Network infrastructure upgrades and enhancements will continue across campus buildings and new construction to modernize wired and wireless networks and improve campus fiber network connectivity and reliability. This work supports new and critical campus infrastructure needs, and addresses simplification of the network and enhanced service resilience. Users will see increased bandwidth with less downtime and greater capacity control.

Recent accomplishments include:

• Central campus fiber optic improvements in partnership with the Farm Lane Bridge construction project.
• Upgrades of fiber, wired, and audio-visual solutions in the Duffy Daugherty Football Complex.
• Addition of fiber connectivity and network equipment installation at the MSU Horse Teaching and Research Center.

Upcoming work includes:

• Full suite of network deployment at the Multicultural Center, including high-density outdoor wireless.
• Network upgrades at the Main Library and Campbell Hall.
• Partnership and planning for multiple new construction projects that include high bandwidth installations for research and improved connectivity for over 30 university classrooms with a hundred-plus seats.

Click here for an overview and timeline of the Network Modernization Initiative. MSU IT is working to improve and enhance IT services and infrastructure. The goal is to improve access and reliability and enable greater avenues for innovation in teaching, research, and scholarly activity.

MOON-Light

Launched in 2022, the MOON-Light initiative partnership with MSU IT, Merit Network, and the Quello Center is an outreach program, made possible with a federal grant, to expand network access to under-resourced communities around Michigan.

MOON-Light leverages middle-mile infrastructure to allow internet service providers to make available affordable, high-speed broadband internet to unserved and underserved Michigan communities. The project will directly increase access to high-speed internet to 17,000 Michiganders, supporting MSU’s strategic plan to promote equity and access. MSU IT looks forward to the conclusion of this project that has spurred progress for Michigan and showcased how public/private partnerships can overcome obstacles that can hinder a sole entity’s ability to decrease the digital divide.

MSU IT is making strides to improve access to technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and augmented and virtual reality to enhance learning, research, community engagement and MSU’s reach. Additional improvements have been made in capturing valuable student feedback, retiring obsolete SIS applications, and updating data retention and storage limits with industry norms.

Generative AI

To address the evolving needs of generative AI at the university, MSU IT has been engaging with campus partners to provide collaborative leadership in a cross-functional working group facilitated by MSU Ethics. Institutional guidance, data security assessments, and individual consultations were provided during 2023 regarding the use of generative AI in education, research, and operations.

Guidance will continue and be provided as needed as AI technology continues to advance. Additionally, MSU IT is helping to develop and implement digital transformation strategies to support a sustainable enterprise generative AI service for the university. Engagement with campus partners to define requirements and considerations for this service is underway.

Future of Veterinary AI Research

Two areas within veterinary medicine are collaborating with MSU IT to explore the use of AI to advance the work in their field.

The College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM) department of Large Animal Clinical Sciences plans to develop an edge-AI device to identify dairy cattle. The current method of associating identity through RFID technology is expensive, complex, and administratively burdensome for producers. An edge-AI system allows computations to be done close to where the data is collected and not in the cloud or offsite data center. It is estimated that using AI computer vision in this type of identity system would be 1/10th of the investment cost of RFID. It also provides increased privacy and availability since internet access is not required to process data. All of which is encouraging for future wide-spread adoption of the technology across the state of Michigan and the country.

The CVM Veterinary Medical Center (VMC) sees great value in training disciplinary specialists on common uses of generative AI. An area which has seen much innovation in private industry are disciplines of diagnostic imaging and comparative medicine. To support the expansion and adoption of AI, the VMC is looking to develop specialist training workflows, which allow for supervised classification of medical findings in radiograph studies. The workflow would introduce specialists to AI in a way that is complementary to their education, would be moderated by the faculty advisor, and allow for an introduction to predictive analytics in veterinary radiology.

Explorance Blue

Providing academic staff with the proper tools is essential, as is the ability to capture student feedback about their experience in the classroom. MSU IT partnered with the Office of the Provost to invest in Explorance Blue, a new software to replace the Student Instructional Rating System, or SIRS, to collect feedback on courses and instruction.

“This enhanced tool will help our faculty and staff better identify where opportunities exist in our instruction to improve the overall teaching and learning experience for everyone,” said Marilyn Amey, assistant provost for Faculty and Academic Staff Development. “More robust data and the opportunity to include college-specific feedback will help guide educators, ultimately allowing academic staff to provide the most appropriate environments to achieve their own, their college’s, and their students’ learning objectives.”

SIS Auxiliary Project and Retired MSU Mainframe

The Student Information System (SIS) project focused on the remediation and retirement of auxiliary applications in the SIS landscape, cutting the number of auxiliary systems in use by over half. Upon completion, 298 of the 545 SIS auxiliary systems in the MSU IT legacy environment were retired or scheduled for retirement, and another 247 were remediated. An additional 30 applications in the Registrar’s Office were also retired as part of this effort.

Initially launched in 1981, the MSU Mainframe was retired after successful implementation of the new Student Information System (SIS), Campus Solutions. These resulting efficiencies of the removal will save the university $1 million annually in hardware and maintenance expenses.

“Our last student information system was over 20 years old, based on an old mainframe with over 400 auxiliary systems that was very expensive to maintain. It didn’t have the functionality we need to ensure proper record keeping and advance our efforts around student success,” said Thomas Jeitschko, Interim Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs. “One of the best experiences around this was to see the teams in action. This was a very collaborative process between IT, the academic side, and our support units.”

Data Retention Improvements

To address concerns over reaching data storage limits, MSU IT Information Security partnered with the MSU Office of General Council (OGC) to improve MSU data retention policies that ensure compliance with legal requirements as well as proper stewardship of resources. Policy changes were made that now call for date ranges when setting litigation holds on email accounts and for annual reviews of resolved cases to release holds. This has already dramatically reduced storage limits by hundreds of gigabytes, which reduces maintenance burdens and costs.

Building on this effort to improve data retention policies, MSU IT is looking forward to reviewing other opportunities in the university’s broader ecosystem, including Microsoft, to increase efficiency and improve stewardship of resources.

MSU IT is committed to assigning resources to innovative ideas and sustainable technology that support and serve future generations of Spartans.

Regulated Research Enclave

MSU IT partnered with the Office of Research & Innovation to secure $6 million in funding to establish a Regulated Research Enclave. The purpose of the enclave is to establish the necessary institutional policies, workflows, and controls to meet current and future regulatory compliance requirements for U.S. Department of Defense research grants and contracts. These efforts help MSU IT support the university’s goals of increasing student, staff, and faculty success and expand research funding to over $1 billion annually by 2030. It ensures the sustainability of MSU’s research enterprise and allows it to lead innovation for global impact.

“It is clear to me that researchers need greater collaboration and clearer direction from technology professionals,” said Arthur Shank, Psychology IT Lead. “If we can communicate with the MSU research community at the beginning of the research lifecycle, I believe it will expand the research goals of the university.”

TeamDynamix

In the spring of 2023, MSU IT replaced their service, project, and portfolio management system with new software from TeamDynamix (TDX). The move streamlined user experience for service requests, reduced technical debt, and resulted in a total savings of $268K, of which $85K was realized for our partner units Student Life and Engagement and the Office of Health Sciences. TDX also offers zero product licensing costs, creating opportunities to scale to additional interested MSU units.

While the cost savings are significant, the full impact of this stewardship and sustainability effort includes the consolidation and retirement of old IT services, such as CA Service Desk, CA Project and Portfolio Management, and Information Security Automation Solution. Using one tool for each function helps create a better and more cohesive user experience. TDX has enhanced the way IT services are managed, while fostering collaboration and efficiency across the organization.

Click to view the advantages of Federated IT

Federated IT

MSU IT strives to deliver exceptional user experience through Federated IT partnerships that provide dedicated IT support to MSU colleges and units. They expand MSU IT’s commitment to working collaboratively with colleges and units with an innovative approach to identify the balance between unit expertise and enterprise capabilities to best support the mission, vision, and values of the partner college/unit, IT, and the university.

Through the Federated IT model, the dedicated unit-level IT services provided are specific to the partner while leveraging enterprise-wide, common good services. Since collaboration naturally results in more effective and efficient utilization of enterprise services, this partnership model manages institutional risk, provides financial clarity, and is the step towards even greater sustainability and stewardship for MSU.

“One thing we get from the partnership is an intellectual exchange where we can come together and solve issues or problems,” explains Senior Vice President of Student Life and Engagement Vennie Gore. “It is critically important for those who do the work, who are MSU technology staff, to work together and be a part of this community.”

The current partners with Federated IT models include Student Life and Engagement, the College of Veterinary Medicine, the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, the College of Natural Sciences, Infrastructure Planning and Facilities, the Office of Health Sciences, University Advancement, and the Broad College of Business. MSU IT is a proud leader in the higher education community in terms of this innovative approach and looks forward to building more campus partnerships over the next year.

Identity and Access Management

The Identify and Access Management (IAM) Modernization Program will ensure every Spartan has seamless access to the right technology at the right moments throughout their MSU experience. The journey to align technology services with the needs and goals of campus stakeholders is represented in our three-year roadmap. This plan represents the technology investments that will increase our cybersecurity resilience and strengthen and improve digital access and identity for nearly 720,000 unique MSU users.

Watch below to learn how improved digital identity and access allows MSU IT to best meet the needs of our campus communities.