Megan McEvoy
Chair, UCLA Academic Senate
Dear Chair McEvoy and Members of the Legislative Assembly,
Thank you for transmitting the Resolution on Information Technology Accountability, Transparency, and Shared Governance. We appreciate the Senate’s commitment to UCLA’s academic mission and welcome the opportunity to clarify the purpose, status, and structure of the One IT initiative, as well as the extensive collaborative processes and consultation that have shaped it.
First, we want to affirm that faculty perspectives are essential to the success of any campuswide initiative that touches research, teaching, and service. Over the past several years, our teams have engaged in sustained discussion with Senate committees, department chairs, and faculty across campus regarding UCLA’s long-standing technology challenges. We have also submitted specific proposals for formal consultation to the Academic Senate and its committees. These engagements, together with external reviews and operational analyses, have made clear that UCLA’s significant technology debt and fragmented infrastructure pose risks to research data and compliance, instructional continuity, data security, and our ability to effectively serve a large and diverse academic community.
The One IT initiative is designed to address these structural weaknesses, not through centralization, but through consolidation of select core IT functions while aligning and supporting specialized IT functions. The goal is not to impose a one-size-fits-all model across units. We are currently in the rationalization phase, which is explicitly the period during which faculty, staff, and students collectively participate in the determination process for which IT functions and services should be consolidated to more effectively benefit the entire campus and which must remain bespoke, directly supporting academic units with truly unique needs. The decision about if we will proceed with One IT has already been made, but decisions around how we consolidate and what the end state should be has not been predetermined. This year is devoted to listening, analysis, and design.
In addition, we want to underscore that the Chief Information Officer holds a dual reporting line to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, and the Administrative Vice Chancellor, a structure that ensures direct alignment between campus technology planning and UCLA’s academic mission. Through this reporting relationship, the CIO is acutely aware of the importance of discipline-specific solutions for academic computing and is committed to safeguarding the flexibility necessary to support diverse research and instructional needs across units in the future One IT model.
This fall and winter, Digital Technology Solutions (DTS) is establishing a broad set of working groups that will include Senate faculty, unit-level IT leaders, researchers, instructors, staff, and students. These groups will evaluate academic requirements, operational risks, and infrastructure needs; review options for modernization; and recommend models that protect and enable unit-specific scholarly work while improving campuswide reliability and resilience. We strongly encourage participation from the full range of academic disciplines to ensure that outcomes reflect UCLA’s intellectual diversity and mission.
We also want to clarify that, while the Senate plays a vital advisory role established in Regents’ Bylaws, the authority to make administrative operational decisions, including IT staffing structures, rests with the Administration. Even so, our longstanding practice has been to involve the Senate early and meaningfully, and we remain committed to that principle. To reinforce this, we propose continuing and expanding structured consultation channels, including the use of the new DTS working groups, joint briefings with CDITP, and regular shared-governance touchpoints during this phase of work.
To enable the collaborative work required in the rationalization phase, we made interim adjustments to reporting lines so that unit-level and central IT teams could plan and problem-solve together in a coordinated and accountable way. These adjustments were necessary to ensure that all units were fully able to participate in campuswide design efforts and to facilitate the cross-unit cooperation essential for infrastructure modernization.
Finally, we will work with Senate leadership to review the information requested in your letter and to determine what additional materials and context can be shared to support a common understanding of UCLA’s modernization and risk-mitigation efforts.
We look forward to continued collaboration with the Senate as we work together to build a modern, resilient, and academically responsive technology environment for UCLA.
Sincerely,
Julio Frenk
Chancellor
Darnell Hunt
Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost
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cc: Kathleen Bawn, Immediate Past Chair, Academic Senate
April de Stefano, Executive Director, Academic Senate
Tim Groeling, Vice Chair/Chair-Elect, Academic Senate
Emily Rose, Assistant Provost and Chief of Staff to the EVCP
Julie Sina, Chief of Staff to the Chancellor