Recap: July 2016 - Nov 2017

UCPath Implementation

As the MFA project moved into production my role diminished and I was assigned to the UCPath project to serve as the Technical Lead for the IdM workstream.  UCPath is a UC-systemwide Payroll and Human Resources system intended to replace the 30+ year old mainframe PPS (Payroll Personnel System). UCPath is an acronym that stands for UC Payroll, Academic Personnel, Timekeeping, and Human Resources. UCLA ran an instance of PPS for UCLA, UCOP, ASUCLA, and UC Merced, and UCOP ran an instance of PPS for other campuses. The project was announced in October 2009 under UC President Yudof, with PeopleSoft selected in 2011. The Office of the President (UCOP) was the first to go live in December 2015. The next wave - termed the "pilot" - was targeted for August 2017 and was to include the campuses UCLA, UC Riverside, and UC Merced, and the organization ASUCLA.

Because UCOP utilized several of UCLA's Identity related systems, even though UCLA was not on UCPath there were integrations set up between UCPath and the UCLA systems so that as new employees were hired at UCOP they would be assigned their UCLA ID (UID) from the UCLA UID system and that ID communicated to the UCOP IdM system and UCPath. These integrations went live in December of 2015 but did not get much use because of the low volume of employees at UCOP. Also there were concerns that some decisions had been made to meet the UCOP go-live deadline that might require rethinking in order to scale to support UCLA.

While much work had been done to meet UCOP requirements, there remained much to do in order to fully support UCLA. Because of the number of separate test phases - system test, integration test, DR test, QA test - the time allowed for development and developing thorough test cases became increasingly compressed and the time for correction of defects discovered in testing cycles was reduced. Eventually the decision was made to delay the pilot go-live date to December 2017. By July 2017 testing was proceeding well but there remained significant concerns with the quality of the data and other aspects of the project. In early October UCLA announced that it was dropping out of the pilot group and would defer until 2018. ASUCLA, UC Merced, and UC Riverside decided to proceed on schedule, and because ASUCLA and UC Merced were heavily dependent on UCLA Identity services all of the IdM integration work still needed to be completed and implemented on schedule, so the decision for UCLA to defer actually added tasks to our workstream rather than reducing them. By that time, because the IAMUCLA team needed to take ownership for production support and I officially started in the role of IT Architecture supervisor on November 1 my role as IdM workstream lead was turned over to the IAMUCLA lead. I continued working as an SME with the project through the holidays but by the time ASUCLA, UC Merced, and UC Riverside officially went live on January 2, 2018 I was no longer heavily involved.

There was a wave of departures, retirements, and reassignments that started in January 2018 and continued through the summer, including our CIO and several of the IT directors. One can only speculate that the 11th hour decision to defer UCPath for UCLA was a contributing factor in some cases.

UCLA went live on UCPath on September 23, 2018 along with UC Santa Barbara. It is not widely understood that, due in part to the efforts of my team from July 2016 to November 2017, that by that time many of the IdM processes and integrations had been running in production for nearly a year.

And Is That All?

Though the UCPath project did take up the bulk of my time I did have the opportunity to participate in a few other major activities.

Student System Replacement RFP

In 2016 an effort was underway to consider replacing the Student System and I began participating in March 2016. In April I began chairing the RFP Access & Roles Definitions sub-group which developed that section of the formal RFP. The sub-group effort concluded in November though the materials we generated were then used as input for similar sections in the Financial System Replacement RFP which was spinning up around that time.

Financial System Replacement RFP

In late 2016 the Financial System Replacement effort began with the development of an RFP. The sections of the Student System Replacement RFP that my sub-group had developed were leveraged for the Financial System Replacement RFP. My role was primarily to review and edit those sections of the final RFP accordingly.

Enterprise IT Architecture Team

An Enterprise IT Architecture team had been created within IT Services by the Associate Vice Chancellor in 2012. An optimistic and visionary roadmap was developed at that time and training was done, but over the years the director had resigned and the group first lost focus and gradually influence. In 2016 Albert Wu, a senior director in IT Services, took ownership of the team and sought to assess and rebuild. Since I was his IdM Architect he added me into the team. Leadership of the team was rotated quarterly and I served a stint as chair, but my primary focus was to observe and evaluate and consider areas of potential improvement for both the team and IT Services. This lasted through the fall of 2017. At that time I applied for the permanent position as supervisor of the team and officially began in that role on November 1st. I was still engaged with UCPath which required implementation of the IdM interfaces for UCOP, ASUCLA, and UC Merced and I continued to remain involved in that through the holidays.

The EITARCH team during 2017 was focused primarily on establishing the groundwork for future architecture work, with a special focus on Business Architecture and governance processes.

There were many opportunities during this year to establish relationships with individuals from a variety of UCLA departments, many of whom were business process owners. From that perspective it was a rewarding year.