FAS Information Technology

Mission Statement

FAS Information Technology provides comprehensive information technology services, resources, and support to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, including faculty, staff and student populations. FAS Information Technology partners with academic and administrative departments to meet research, instructional, and administrative needs by providing leadership and consultation on matters relating to information technology.

Groups within FAS IT

Administrative Computing

Working in concert with FAS and University administrative offices to create an integrated enterprise of administrative and business systems, the Administrative Computing Group builds applications, manages web and application servers, and provides customer support for their applications focused primarily on making administrative processes in FAS work. Some applications are student facing like electronic registration and study cards; others are geared toward staff such as Asperin and EReq. Finally, some are geared towards the community such as My.Harvard or the Electronic Directory. They handle webmaster support for www.fas.harvard.edu, and help design and implement key websites including www.fas.harvard.edu and www.college.harvard.edu.

CTS

Client and Technical Services (CTS) provides support to the community of FAS end-users, which includes faculty, staff and students. CTS is staffed by employees and students. The employees include desktop technicians, help desk technical staff, and specialized IT professionals. The part-time student User Assistants (UAs) provide technical and user support in the basement of the Science Center, as well as residential houses and satellite locations around campus.

Human Resources and Administration

The Administration Group helps FAS Information Technology staff to organize their work experience as well as offers support services for employees. The team handles the financial matters of both internal and external customers, processes all FAS IT billing, payroll, recruitment, human resources, travel, office administration, and any fiscal related needs.

ICG

The Instructional Computing Group (ICG) offers year-round training and consulting for FAS faculty and teaching staff that use technology in their teaching. ICG supports the use and development of online teaching materials using "Course iSites," a powerful, easy-to-learn set of tools for administering courses and teaching with the Web. "Course iSites" provides a platform that allows faculty to create course websites that have a meaningful impact on teaching and learning.

ICG also welcome input, suggestions for collaboration, and general inquiries from colleagues at other institutions. www.icg.fas.harvard.edu/

IT Systems

The IT Systems Group supports systems and systems utilities and services for central host machines throughout the FAS. The IT Systems Group is in charge of three separate, but related sub-groups which cover different areas. The Systems Group has three sub-groups: Macintosh and Windows system support, known as the "Micro Group" which manages the key-server and software servers, server hosting, and server based applications; Unix systems which handles the e-mail and the central file storage system and the database group which manages centralized databases.

Network Operations

The Network Operations Center provides services and support for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences network infrastructure. This includes wired and wireless access in most FAS buildings, network monitoring, and jack activation and repair.

Outreach and Communications

The mission of this group is to conduct outreach to users to better understand their technology needs and thus help FAS IT to provide better service to all our customers.

Research Computing

The research computing group focuses on enabling research by providing advanced computing services across FAS. Our staff maintains expertise in constantly changing computing technologies, but can also "speak the language" of the researchers, to use computing most effectively in a given research area. Our goal is to provide researchers access to professional IT staff and computational support, so that researchers may in turn focus on their areas of expertise rather than computing systems.

The research computing group comprises four groups, focusing on different research areas: High Performance Technical Computing, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Humanities. Our services range from sequence analysis, microarray and programming assistance to multi-terabyte storage arrays and high-performance clusters. In addition, we offer training classes.