Action Item 2.01
All members of the LSU community should have ready access to the IT software they need to succeed.
Software is the realization of information technology hardware, and is the brain upon which the brawn of computing operates; software provides access to the power of the computer. The University should provide the broadest possible offering of software tools to the community, leveraging campus-wide site licenses, freeware and open source tools, and special institutional pricing. ITS made significant strides in 2005 with the Microsoft Campus License Agreement, and TigerWare, but these should simply be the first of many forward-looking steps the University takes to ensure the community has access to software. Where site licensing or campus-wide licensing is neither possible nor affordable, other sophisticated and creative ways of serving software must be explored. All members of the community should be able to easily identify where the software and tools they need may be accessed—whether that be via free download, application serving, at-cost acquisition, or availability in a fixed location in a campus lab. ITS should make a primary facet of its Web presence a veritable warehouse of information about software—and specialized hardware tools—availability.
Action Item 2.02
All members of the LSU community should have ready access to the specialized IT tools and resources they need to succeed.
In addition to software, a variety of other specialized tools should be made available for use by students, faculty, and staff. Every interesting and useful IT tool is not affordable to all individuals or departments; hence, having pools of these specialized resources for community access and/or check-out makes sense economically, while providing the richest IT peripheral environment to the University. ITS should work to identify needs and funding sources for these tools (such as cameras, video equipment, large-format printers and plotters, high density scanners, visualization equipment, and the like) and work to establish and maintain convenient locations and availability of these resources to the community at large.
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Action Item 2.03
Information stations (e.g., kiosks) with a minimum of electronic mail and Internet access should be placed strategically across campus, to improve the access to communication utilities and information on the Internet.
Students, staff, and faculty should be able to check e-mail or access PAWS while away from their desks or during the time between classes. A ready supply of information stations or kiosks in high pedestrian traffic areas will empower the campus community and provide efficiencies. These stations provide alternatives to the computer labs which are at full capacity during peak times in the semester and are better used to supply access beyond basic information to the rich set of software tools that advance pedagogy. While the continued adoption of mobile computing technologies may render the need for these devices obsolete over time, such an assumption should not simply be accepted as fact, until it is proven so through detailed study of use patterns. This role also provides an excellent post-life-cycle use of desktop computers, as described in action item 1.11.
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Action Item 2.04
Information technology “commons” areas should be developed in strategic, centralized, high-traffic areas, such as the Middleton Library and/or the Union, to promote twenty-first century era collaboration on campus. These “commons” should be showplaces of IT infrastructure and resources, which will promote not only student collaboration, but faculty collaboration as well.
An IT Commons area is an interactive physical space that encourages and enables collaborative uses of technologies. The area has sufficient hotspots, ports, and electrical outlets to host several laptops and can be the site for podcasts, Web trainings, lectures, and the like. IT Commons areas are becoming increasingly prevalent at top research institutions nationwide. LSU must follow this trend in order to attract and retain top students and faculty
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Action Item 2.05
Availability of technology should not be limited to the campus. Faculty, students, and staff should have access to information and resources while traveling or at home just as they would on campus.
The work of the University is not always completed during business hours and within the confines of the campus. Routinely, employees and students work on projects from home or while traveling. While PAWS provides a good portal into a number of campus resources, it is not complete. Individuals want remote access to their course information, calendars, group lists, and research. Mechanisms to easily work securely from abroad should be explored and put in place where possible. Such advances will enable the work of the University to be successfully completed without time and space limitations.
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Action Item 2.06
New faculty and staff should have telephone services, e-mail, Internet access, and a suitable desktop computer in place upon hire.
Currently, there is not an automatic or one-stop process for providing basic services to a new employee. ITS should consolidate its processes so that departments need only complete one form in order to expedite telephony, mainframe access, network connections, a logon ID and account password, e-mail, and a new computer’s placement in an office. An institutional, rather than departmental, computer program will facilitate this process as well.
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Action Item 2.07
The University should support the use of multiple and diverse computing platforms (hardware systems and operating systems), and ensure that access to as broad an array as possible of University information systems is available to diverse technology environments. Users should not be limited in their capabilities and abilities to access LSU resources by the platform they are using. Innovation and the development of new technologies should be supported.
As a national flagship-status University, LSU should support and benefit from advances in technologies. ITS should collaborate with researchers and provide venues for beta-testing of technologies that may directly benefit LSU’s IT environment.
The University recognizes that a variety of platforms (MS Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac, and so forth) must be supported, so that users can make use of their specific capabilities and environments to meet their needs in serving the University. While the majority of desktops may run on Windows, there is a need for IT support for machines that run other operating systems. LSU information technology infrastructure and data resources must be accessible to a broader spectrum of the technologies used by its constituents.
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Action Item 2.08
The University should ensure emerging technologies, such as hand-held PDA devices, and Internet-enabled cellular phones, interface well with common LSU applications.
With the increased use of hand-held devices, applications must be adaptive to emerging technologies. LSU community members want to be able to access their calendars, course management systems, and PAWS information from their mobile devices. ITS must assess the state of the interface market, and base its decisions for application development tool sets, in part, on the availability of mobility-enhancing capabilities.
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Action Item 2.09
Members of the LSU community should possess a minimum of basic IT skills. The University should employ multiple means of skills training—including making freely available basic skills training classes and computer-based training programs—to ensure that adequate training regimes are available to every member of the LSU community.
It is expected that a National Flagship University be comprised of students, faculty, and staff that have a set of basic IT skills at minimum. Every professor, student, administrator, and staff member should be able to turn on a computer, access e-mail, navigate the Web, use PAWS, and use basic desktop productivity tools. Efforts should be made to train the University community, and a general education requirement for computer literacy should be explored.
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Action Item 2.10
Members of the LSU community should have access to the electronic resources (films, journals, research articles, texts, etc) they need to be productive students and faculty.
Resources must be allocated to create and maintain a library that is rich in materials relevant to the community of scholars within the University. The existence of information scarcity is detrimental to the University’s Flagship Agenda. Scholars should have immediate and easy access to the latest developments in their fields, as well as the standard works seminal to their research. Innovative means of developing electronic information resources, like the digital library and an institutional repository, should be explored.
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