Dear Botany department,

Due to unsustainable workload, Sean Shang's desktop support hours will now be 1-5 PM from Monday to Thursday.  If you need help with your computer, you can talk to him during these hours.

See below for more information.

There is a new Botany IT advisory committee (Tom Yerex, Faculty of Science IT; Alistair Blachford, Zoology Computing Unit; Santokh Singh; Loren Rieseberg; Ljerka Kunst; Keith Adams).  We met on Friday July 23 and our goal was to address the issue that our IT manager Sean Shang has an unsustainable work load. He spends about 80% of his time doing desktop support, solving immediate problems for Botany users. He is also responsible for the main office computers, teaching lab computers, several departmental servers and the local area network resources/security. The constant interruptions by distraught people make it very difficult for him to do these latter jobs.

The advisory committee recommends:

1. Botany IT unit should have the priorities of 1) administration (main office; departmental business; finance office) 2) teaching 3) research. This priority scheme has been used successfully by the Zoology Computing Unit (ZCU) for some time.

2. Sean will have "Office Hours" for desktop support. The hours will be: 1:00PM to 5:00PM, Monday to Thursday. During this time, you can go to his office in room 1322B or phone his cell phone. Better yet, put in a work request to his ticketing system by sending an email to helpdesk@science.ubc.ca with Sean Shang in the subject line, as we share this ticketing system with Faculty of Science IT. You may contact him outside of office hours in a dire emergency. Sean will define if your problem is an emergency. If he says it is not an emergency, then please be patient and wait for his office hours.

3. Botany policy will be that Sean does not support home computers and he will support smart phone-UBC email issues only if time permits.

4. As Zoology has three IT professionals supporting 112 Zoologists, Botany should have one more IT professional to support our 50 Botanists (these counts do not include graduate students or collections).

There are clearly large budget hurdles to hiring another IT professional that will have to be cleared but, in the meanwhile, we invite people's opinion on our future IT needs. You may send your opinion to Jessica Sui in the Botany office and she will compile these for the advisory committee.

5. Virtualization of the Botany main office computers and server to central UBC IT is recommended, despite central IT's ridiculous data storage charges, in order to relieve pressure on Sean. No more than a one year contract is recommended to provide flexibility in the future, also to allow time to evaluate services provided by UBC IT.

Thanks for respecting Sean's time and diverse responsibilities.
Lacey

Dr. A. Lacey Samuels
Professor and Head
Department of Botany
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC, Canada, V6T 1Z4

phone: (604) 822-3554
fax: (604) 822-6089