Our approach to assurance is coupled to the ongoing oversight of programs and projects that is a normal and ongoing part of IT management. As such, our primary assurance is the annual development of strategic objectives accompanied by quarterly reports and/or meetings on those objectives between IT Senior Management and heads of Service Areas. The IT Strategic Plan details these objectives, strategies, and metrics by service area.
Independent assessments, including peer reviews, provide additional assurance along with our ongoing key metrics such as network availability and customer satisfaction.
1.0 Top Risks, Challenges and Opportunities
1.1 Personnel Recruitment and Retention
Multiple groups across IT have struggled to recruit qualified applicants to open positions, including senior posts. One senior position has now been posted three times. Budget pressures and the Bay Area market continue to hamper our ability to craft packages that compete.
1.2 Multiple major projects in progress to chart the future of business at the Lab
Virtually every area in operations has a major retrofit of their supporting business applications in progress. This is promising for the future of LBNL’s support organizations, but so many parallel projects will continue to tax our resources.
2.0 LBNL Performance
2.1 Business Plan Performance
Our strategic plan provides quarterly reporting on business plan progress - the entire quarterly report is available at http://it.lbl.gov - click on strategic plan. Below are select highlights from our Director level objectives
Business Systems
- EHS: The first major project of the EHS Strategic Modernization project - CHESS Phase 1a for Industrial Hygiene went live in December 2011. Phase 1b User Acceptance Testing for Occupational Medicine completed April 6 and go-live was April 23. This retires several legacy EHS applications.
- FSM: The FSM project is on track to receive bids by late June and evaluate them over the course of the summer with a decision by Lab Management not later than October 2012.
Scientific Computing
- Launch and adoption of the condo model, which helps to reduce costs to researchers to maximize their use of scientific computing.
Efficiency, Effectiveness and Safety
- Improved and streamlined multiple processes associated with help desk, telephony, and desktop support as part of Service Now implementation. Continued to move services from recharge to overhead without increases in overhead spending through efficiencies and self-service (AV, Video Conferencing, Storage, Collab Apps).
Customer Satisfaction & Communications
- Addressed key areas from 2011 Customer Service survey. Our outreach and Phase 2 Library Parity Projects addressed library concerns. Top feature request ("dropbox like functionality") is now available to Lab via Google Drive.
- Launched successful LabTech event to expand stakeholder knowledge and input. Through active role in user groups we continue to generate new ways to get user feedback.
2.2 Audit: DOE Inspector General Audits
The Department of Energy’s Inspector General included Berkeley Lab in the following audits which are already in process:
- Cyber Security Incident Management
- IT General & Application Controls
- FISMA
- IT Vulnerability Assessment (internal and external)
At this time, we are not aware of any findings related to general IT controls.
3.0 PEMP Goals, Objectives, Notable Outcomes
None defined for IT.
4.0 Noteworthy Accomplishments
- The completion of the library parity project is one of the most important things the Laboratory has accomplished to serve researchers and is an excellent example of the value UC brings to the stewardship of Berkeley Lab. No other National Laboratory has access to the scale of library resources and expertise that is provided to the Laboratory by UC and UCB.
- IT’s datacenter greening efforts, a cooperative project between EETD and IT, were recognized this year with two major awards (Director’s Achievement and UC Sautter awards). The project is both cutting edge in its adoption of technologies and by a rare long term operations/research collaboration where our production computing facility is used by researchers to further their understanding of efficiency in data centers.
- IT continued its efforts to help researchers understand and make effective use of the wide range of technologies and resources available to them at the Laboratory. The successful LabTech event drew hundreds of scientific staff from the Laboratory to learn about new technologies, approaches, and services.
