Message from the Director

Cliff Frost

Network Funding Plan

The campus has reached a major milestone in the lengthy process to put the campus network on a stable financial footing. You can read about the plan at, Network funding plan. CNS is now working to operationalize these decisions.

CNS Organization

Prompted by some staffing changes in early 2000, CNS embarked this spring on an organizational development process that has led to a new organizational structure for the department, as well as several other outcomes.

Input

We began by asking campus faculty and staff, including CNS, for input on three questions:

• what are the three things CNS now does best?
• what are the most important three things CNS should improve?
• what are the three most important new services CNS should offer?

The results of this solicitation were organized and published in March for internal CNS use. The input is now available for you to read at, Input from CNS Customers and Staff. We also invited several campus customers to join us in later discussions and learned a lot from them.

Facilitated Process

Beginning in May, we formed a new CNS leadership team, consisting of everyone with supervisory responsibility plus one additional staff member from each of the then seven CNS units. The leadership team reviewed and discussed the input we had already gotten, and several initiatives began without further discussion, such as the redesign of the CNS web site. One of the areas of most comment was the length of time it took to get a new network connection, and we believed that we had already made great progress on that issue, (see Network Connection Installation Process).

Other parts of this strategic planning process were to:

• identify a vision and business goals
• identify our strengths to support the vision
• identify obstacles to achieving the vision

The areas of obstacles that we identified included our current organizational structure, which the leadership team felt contributed to some of the weaknesses our customers had identified, such as coordination and flexibility internal to CNS. While we are continuing to work on each of the areas we saw as obstacles, we have already defined the intended organizational structure and moved into a transitional period.

The New CNS Organizational Structure

The overall structure, showing the functions in each unit, is online at Functional Org Chart. The People Org Chart shows the individuals reporting in each unit.
The following are what we see as the major changes:

A unit devoted to direct customer service which we expect to bring the customer perspective more directly into all of our planning and processes. Associate Director Marv Eckard and Manager Margaret Baker are developing this important new unit, and would like to hear ideas from our customers. When there is a new Customer Services Manager Marv and Margaret will return to their existing jobs (which they are still doing in the meantime). Moving Network Development and Wireless in with the rest of the installation, operation, and repair services. A new Project Management unit in DIOR, which will work on major design and construction projects. These functions had been spread across CNS, which had made it unnecessarily hard for our customers to work with us. We have defined a position to lead this group and that position should be listed shortly. Our internal computer applications and workstation support have been merged under Urszula Frydman. In the transitional period, Urszula is serving as a Manager and reporting directly to me; once Marv has completed his transitional work on the new Customer Services unit, Urszula will report to him. The new org chart shows Financial Services (Manager Vicki Fall) and Planning, Analysis, and Outreach (Manager Margaret Baker) as direct support for the director. Although both groups do have considerable contact with customers, their work is primarily in support of the department, not in direct support of customers.

We hope that this new structure will enable us to provide better services and customer support and will make our organization less mystifying as well. Please let me know if you have comments or questions, cliff@uclink.berkeley.edu.