AUT University(MIS100 2010)

By Jess Meyer | Thursday, May 27 2010

2009 ranking: 11

Senior IS executive: Liz Gosling, Director IT Services
Reports to: General manager, services and operations
Size of IS shop: 73

PCs: 6465
Mobile PCs: 1010
Terminals: 441
Hand-held devices: 677
Total screens: 8593

Industry: Educational services
PC environment: Cyclone Computers, Apple, Lenovo, Windows XP, Linux
Server environment: Cyclone Computers; IBM; Novell; Windows 2003, 2008; Apple
DBMS: Oracle, MySQL, SQL
Address: 55 Wellesley Street East, Auckland
Website: www.aut.ac.nz
Key IS projects this year: Research information systems,
distributed teaching using videoconferencing; desktop virtualisation; identity management and federation; campus wireless; website development; strategic business intelligence.

AUT’s ICT services division has a mix of projects planned for 2010. Growth for AUT, and an increase in total screen numbers from last year, has been driven by more online components of teaching delivery, increased research activity and increases in the equipment made available to students. ICT project and operational budgets remain much the same as last year, with several key projects in the works. Website development is planned for the university’s main website, with the goal of introducing a new staff intranet site, according to Liz Gosling, director IT services. Investments in unified communications will be made this year, as the university looks to leverage from its VoIP implementation.

In March, AUT officially opened its new campus in Manukau, to further extend the course offerings provided to students at its inner city and North Shore campuses. “The opening of the Manukau campus has had heavy involvement from the ICT team, who’ve upgraded the wired network, installed wireless around the campus, and fitted out teaching and learning spaces with equipment,” explains Gosling. “We have installed equipment to allow distributed synchronous learning across multiple campuses, so that students in Manukau can take part in lectures given at the North Shore and vice versa.”

CRM and wireless projects initiated in 2009 have been completed successfully, allowing the ICT team to focus attention on new areas, such as disaster recovery, e-business technology and cloud computing.