Via Jenny Levine – ALA Strategic Technology Directions 2014-2017 & Technology Roadmap

“The ALA Information Technology & Telecommunication Services (ITTS) unit presented the ALA Strategic Technology Directions 2014-2017 to the ALA Executive Board in April 2014.  It provides a good foundation to understand how technology is implemented to meet the goals of the organization and explains the role of ITTS within ALA. The diagrams in the report attempt to show the complexity of the implemented technologies and how they are integrated with each other.  For example, our conference registration companies retrieve iMIS (our Association Management System) data so that members won’t have to reenter their membership information again when registering for conferences.  The ALA Technology Services diagram on page 2 shows all of the integrations between systems. With only 8.5 employees, ITTS supports software and hardware for our 11 divisions, 20 round tables, 55,000 members, and 25 offices with approximately 240 staff. On page 3 of the report, there is an infographic containing 2013 ITTS statistics.  For example, we received 3,833 help desk requests in 2013.  This is a conservative number because we aren’t able to log every call or hallway conversation.  Help desk requests are usually individual problems, and as such they don’t represent large scale projects.  We also maintain 300 databases, 100 virtual servers, and 40 physical servers, in addition to the services we manage that are provided/maintained by 27 different consultants. We had 25.5 million pageviews on our website, and 22% of our members use ALA Connect.”