Departments

Administration

ITS Administration equips and mobilizes ITS to achieve its mission. The team supports ITS staff and the university community through its functions in finance, procurement, human resource, facilities, workforce development, project management, and communication. Each of these teams help ITS operate smoothly.

  • Communications partners with ITS leaders and staff, and the VPIT-CIO Office to develop effective communications, marketing, branding/design, and public relations strategies.
  • Contract Management & Purchasing manages aspects of contract protection and high vendor/partner performance.
  • Facilities oversees the physical maintenance and renovations of the building where ITS staff work.
  • Finance oversees the ITS budget and compensation budgeting and forecasting.
  • Human Resources administers employment, compensation, staff, and union relations and provides consultative services to management and ITS staff.
  • Project Management Office manages project teams across ITS and U-M.

Advanced Research Computing (ARC)

ARC is a research-focused IT group that provides access to and support for advanced computing resources. It facilitates new and more powerful approaches to research challenges in physics, linguistics, engineering, medicine, and more. ARC is responsible for implementing the overall strategy of research computing infrastructure.

  • Research Mission: Advocates to other IT providers and is a research-focused IT group on scalable services. Provides communication across unit and lab-level sources.
  • Liaise Between Researchers and National Providers: Offering services such as networking monitoring and identity integration.
  • Data Science Platforms: Provide data science services including Hadoop/Spark cluster and data micro-services.
  • High Performance Computing: Consists of two primary platforms—Flux, for open science, and Armis, for PHI and other protected data.
  • Federal and External Awards: Provides consultation, letters, and direct staff support on faculty awards.
  • Sensitive Data Support: Provides many services that are approved by Michigan Medicine to support HIPAA/PHI classified data.

Enterprise Application Services (EAS)

Enterprise Application Services (EAS) is responsible for U-M’s enterprise applications across multiple campuses and Michigan Medicine. EAS focuses on three areas: embracing the cloud, excellence in delivering and running services, and enhancing culture and employee satisfaction. EAS capabilities include:

  • Development and Alumni Relationship Tool (DART) system manages data and analytics used in university fundraising.
  • Enterprise Document Imaging system provides centralized access to scanned documents, which are key elements to admissions, HR and financial management, and donor gifts.
  • Financials & Physical Resources System (FIN) services efficiently support the university’s business operations.
  • Human Capital Management (HCM) services are used to manage employee information at U-M.
  • Research Administration Systems (eResearch) supports U-M researchers and staff with proposal submissions and award management for external funding, research compliance for human subjects, biosafety, animals, and controlled substances, conflict of interest management, and research business office operations.
  • Software, Architecture, & Integration Delivery (SAID) supports web and mobile application development and delivers ITS applications to the university community on all platforms.
  • Student Administration (SA) provides a single source for student information, which directly supports teaching and learning at U-M.
  • Training and Documentation for projects and systems, which help students, faculty, and staff understand and prepare for changes in the IT field.

Information Assurance (IA)

Information Assurance (IA) oversees IT security at U-M and strives to proactively mitigate IT security risks in partnership with U-M’s three academic campuses and Michigan Medicine. IA takes a risk-based approach to securing the university’s sensitive information assets that enable teaching, learning, research, and healthcare. Key capabilities include:

  • Incident response and threat intelligence: Coordinates and manages serious IT security incidents and facilitates a Big Ten Academic Alliance collaborative threat intelligence sharing repository.
  • Risk assessment: Provides services for the Ann Arbor campus and standardized assessment tools for all U-M.
  • Vulnerability management: Conducts penetration tests, ethical hacks, sensitive data scans, and additional scans to prevent attacker exploitations.
  • Network security (in partnership with the Infrastructure network team)
  • U-M IT policy development and maintenance (by delegation of the VPIT-CIO)
  • Compliance support: Collaborates with numerous U-M stakeholders on U-M compliance with laws and regulations such as HIPAA and others (CUI, FISMA).
  • IT security operations: Unit-level security support for most units on the Ann Arbor and Dearborn campuses
  • Identity and Access Management (IAM): Connects U-M to services and resources, provides identity information to manage access, enable collaboration, and facilitate the management of digital identities, authentication, accounts, and passwords.
  • Privacy and data governance
  • Universitywide education: Ongoing awareness training for faculty, staff, and students.

Infrastructure

ITS Infrastructure provides foundational communications, computing, and systems to U-M. The Infrastructure team supports:

  • Networks connecting the university to the rest of the world.
  • Telephones used for critical university business and development.
  • Data Centers housing mission critical compute, database, storage, enterprise applications, and data.
  • Television & Streaming presenting entertainment and live content.
  • Audiovisual & Videoconferencing enabling collaboration.
  • Cellular & Radio supporting campus coverage enhancements.
  • Storage Services housing mission critical data.
  • Compute Services providing virtualized servers, integrated cloud offerings and virtual desktops.
  • Collaboration Services supporting communication and work on campus and across the globe.
  • Web Hosting Services supporting unit and individual websites, applications, and data.
  • Service Order engineering, designing, and implementing the services above across campus units.
  • Information Systems providing ordering and billing systems.
  • Identity and Access Management Support helping protect campus applications, data, and websites.
  • Application Developer Support building the infrastructure behind our campus enterprise systems.
  • Application & Integration Support providing monitoring and notifications for services and systems.

Information Quest (IQ)

Information Quest (IQ) supports and promotes the growth and development of reporting, dashboards, trending and forecasting analytics through partnerships and consultation within the U-M community. IQ delivers data integration, modeling and architecture solutions to support institutional and unit-specific data used throughout the entire organization. IQ provides Business Intelligence tools and services that drive actionable decisions for executives, faculty, and staff. Key capabilities include:

  • Data Management & Security: Create and support centrally managed sets, provide multiple database platforms for securely storing data sets long-term onsite and and in cloud.
  • Data Integration/Data Delivery: Bring data together by supporting an enterprise API manager, Informatica, and Sql Server Integration Services.
  • Data Architecture: Data models, data mappings, and comprehensive data architecture design to provide the best solutions for each specific type of data.
  • Database Services: Supports enterprise applications and managed databases for units and faculty.
  • Business Intelligence (BI) Tools: Manage Tableau, BusinessObjects, and M-Reports reporting platforms. Design and promote new reporting and analytical capabilities.
  • BI and Data Analytics Training & Consulting: Educate and support a wide range of campus administrators in best practices for for reporting, analysis, and data visualization.
  • Data Concierge Service: Streamline and ease requests for access to institutional data.
  • Executive Dashboard Creation: Provide data visualization reporting to U-M Regents, Provost, President, and campus units.

Strategy & Planning

ITS Strategy and Planning (S&P) is responsible for providing two related capabilities to ITS. One, helping ITS and U-M to anticipate future technology needs and changes and formulate strategic objectives to accommodate those changes. Two, working with ITS service owners to translate strategic objectives into goals and measures and to help them attain the goals.
 
The S&P group provides UM-wide support to the Office of the CIO. The team is responsible for the creation and maintenance of U-M’s IT strategy, U-M’s IT governance, enterprise architecture, and supporting Michigan IT program activities.

Support Services

Support Services provides the entry point into ITS and its services, including direct support for the everyday technology needs of the U-M community. Support Services delivers value by providing and supporting at-scale technology and services that are used by the community.

  • The Support Services team consists of the Service Center, End User Services, and Campus Tech. Together these teams deliver 10 campus-facing lines of business and support all ITS services through chat, email, phone, and walk-up service.
  • Support Services serves faculty, staff, and students of the Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Flint campuses, as well as Michigan Medicine, and thousands of other community members who are supported as they interact with university systems.
  • Many Support Services staff work in the units they serve. They regularly attend unit staff events and meetings, and interact with faculty members daily.
  • The Assistive Tech Team supports students with disabilities, helping them use assistive technology with personal devices as well as providing other environmental accommodations that might be needed.

Teaching & Learning

The ITS Teaching & Learning team develops, integrates, and supports enterprise-scale academic technology services for the university. They collaborate with academic and administrative units and offer three major services to the university:

  • Learning Management: Manages Canvas as the core learning management system and provides support, training, and outreach to faculty and students.
  • Learning Analytics and Data Services (LAADS): Provides infrastructure and service to support learning analytics applications and learning science research.
  • Academic Advising: Provides academic advisors across campus with the Student Explorer application to support advisors’ engagement with students.

ITS Teaching & Learning (T&L) has a long history of innovation and leadership within their field, including leading the adoption of private and public cloud infrastructure. They were the first ITS group to run a production service in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and to implement a learning analytics service on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). T&L instrumented multiple learning applications from campus partners and developed a prototype Learning Record Store (LRS) for capturing and storing Caliper learning events. T&L is actively developing skills in data science and visualization to support our collaborations with campus innovators.