Administration, Planning, & Finance (APF)

Yemeen Rahman, Director

The Administration, Planning & Finance (APF) team provides project management and business functions for the IT division. APF creates and maintains employment policies and procedures for the division, manages preferred vendor relations for technology purchases for the university, and ensures compliance with the university's software licensing contracts. APF staff also work closely with FE&P, departments, and contractors to support the technology aspects of facility construction, repair, or remodeling.

Projects include:

  • Career Progression Plan: Develop a comprehensive career progression plan for IT staff which maps out perspective career growth within and across departments in both technical and management roles. The career progression plan will document core competencies required for each IT position along with the training and certification requirements. The goals of this program are the following:
    • Increase IT employee retention
    • Develop customized (professional development) training plans
    • Ensure employee skill set meets the needs of the division/university
  • Collaboration with FE&P projects: Work with a single point of contact at FE&P to capture status of all ongoing projects with IT involvement or impact. Additionally, identify all maintenance activities which have a perspective IT impact and coordinate any outages,notifications and escalations between FE&P and IT.
  • Technology Marketplace: Build vendor relations and standards for hardware and software ordering for entire Rice campus. Additionally, the IT Procurement and Vendor Relations office is seeking attractive pricing discounts from vendors which will be available to the campus.
  • Asset Recovery Service: Pilot program underway of Dell's Asset Disposal/Recovery Service. This service offers vendor managed disposal of outdated IT equipment with data wipe guarantee.

NEWS RELEASE: Investing in the campus technology infrastructure

July, 2008 - Incentives from two different technology vendors have
provided new equipment for the Rice campus.

The Apple Demo Center (located in the Help Desk office in the Mudd Lab),
incentive is replacing 100+ iMacs in student computing labs and
classrooms across the campus.

IBM's matching grant program, managed through the Lenovo purchasing
program, is securing over $100,000 in laptops, monitors, peripherals and
servers. Approximately half of the matching grant will be used to
create and implement a Disaster Recovery site, providing DNS,
authentication, email, web, blog, and wiki services in the event a
disaster results in the loss of these applications.

Crisis mitigation, educational support, and technology training are the
three areas that also received funds from this vendor's incentive
program. The IBM matching grant is being used to secure computer
equipment for essential staff during an emergency event. Laptops
designated for instructional projects and peripheral equipment
replacement in classrooms will support and sustain Rice's educational
technology initiatives. LCD flat panel screens are being purchased to
replace CRT monitors in public spaces, thus reducing Rice's carbon
footprint. Additional laptops will be purchased for use in technology
training programs, where IT professionals teach group short courses and
individual, customized courses to Rice faculty, staff and students on
topics ranging from popular software applications to operating systems
and computer usage.

Previously, these vendors' purchasing incentives created a new Unix Lab
and enhanced the Control Center, a technology workroom used to
video-capture classroom lectures and presentations across the campus.