Page 24 - Campus Technology, November/December 2017

SPECIAL SECTION
2017 CT IMPACT AWARDS IN DEPTH david raths Getting Beyond the Vicious Cycle of Outdated IT
An information technology overhaul at Johnson County Community College has resulted
in true culture shift, coupled with better-fortified infrastructure and deeper partnerships with vendors.
Category: IT Infrastructure & Systems Institution: Johnson County Community College
Project: Migrating to a Sustainable Technology Infrastructure
Project leads: Matthew Holmes, director, network and data center operations, and
Del Lovitt, director, enterprise system support
Tech lineup: Amazon, Ellucian, Microsoft
BEFORE 2009, the IT leadership team at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, KS, was stuck in a vicious cycle of falling behind on technology infra- structure replacements, squeaking by with patches and maintenance on older systems. Without a dedicated funding stream, IT floundered — and faculty, staff and students had
low expectations of what technology could bring to the campus. Something as simple as video streaming in the class- room was difficult because of poor net- work infrastructure.
Flash forward to 2017: An ongoing and sustainable infrastructure rebuild, includ- ing working with cloud and hosted ven- dors, is reshaping the culture within the IT group and the perception of IT on cam- pus. How has the department made this transition and had such a great impact?
Sandra Warner, deputy CIO and direc-
tor of administrative computing services,
credits JCCC’s executive leadership and
the board of trustees for creating a dedicated funding stream for technology infrastructure.
“We were in a pattern of going through a request for
proposal process every time we needed a piece of tech- nology, and it was hampering our ability to build an infra- structure that was interoperable,” she said. “Basically
Johnson County Community College’s project team
(left to right): Sandra Warner, Del Lovitt and Matthew Holmes
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | November/December 2017