Date Tue, 3 Jul 2001 074733 -0400

From "Marilyn T. Smith" <smithmt@MIT.EDU>
Subject computing support
Cc ganderso@mit.edu, workgroup@mit.edu

On behalf of the Computing Support Working Group, composed of members
from the DLC's, AACII, and IS, we are writing to ask for your
participation in an effort to identify ways to improve administrative
computing support among Departments, Labs, and Centers with the goal of
making recommendations to the senior administration. As you recall,
improved local computing support in the DLC's has been a
long-standing'hot button'. This group began planning work in May to
structure an approach so that we could determine the extent and nature
of support requirements among the DLC's. As a cross-organizational
group, we are working together to engage the DLC's to understand
requirements and to prepare a proposal for the senior administration
this fall. A description of the goals and scope of the work is appended
at the bottom of this message.

Our approach is to work extensively with a few departments such as yours
in order to understand requirements and then to test if those
requirements are extensible across the Institute. To help us in that
effort, we would be grateful for an initial meeting with you and any of
your staff engaged in computing support (either your local I/T expert,
or if you have someone who unofficially troubleshoots computing
problems) We would like to talk with you as an initial interview for
approximately 90 minutes. We hope to begin scheduling this interview
activity beginning Wednesday, July 11.

Please let us know if how this works for you. If agreeable, we then
begin the scheduling process. Please respond to both of us.
Many thanks in advance for your participation and contributions,

Marilyn Smith

Assistant Director, McGovern Institute
Chair, AACII
Greg Anderson
Director, I/T Support

Information Systems

-----------------------------

Computing Support Working Group

The Goal: create a proposal supported by the AACII to be presented to
Bob Brown and John Curry regarding DLC computing support. The Provost
and Executive Vice-President have stated that they would carefully
consider a proposal for computing support that looked across a variety
of units and groups.

Scope of the work: It is clear that DLC's need improved local computing
support. This work will focus on the definition of the need - quantity,
standards, skills, nature of the work, source of the problems, etc. in
order to build recommendations that will improve local I/T support.