I plan to develop a communication solution to address a need in the Teaching and Learning Technologies, (TLT), group which is a part of the central Information Technology department, (ITaP), at Purdue University.  According to the ITaP website, “Formed in 2001, ITaP initially brought together several related areas of computing and telecommunications as a result of Purdue's vision for seamlessly integrating information technology with learning, discovery, engagement, and business enterprise of the University. In the years since, ITaP has formed partnerships with distributed IT groups within the University, led development of the IT strategic plan to support University decisions, and launched numerous new projects for research, academic, and administrative computing such as the SecurePurdue initiative.”  TLT was one of the areas brought together when ITaP formed.  It is now a group of over 100 people who perform a variety of tasks relating to the academic goals of the university.

            Within TLT is a group of systems administrators.  This group consists of eight employees.  The TLT systems administrators maintain all the TLT servers, or large, high performance computers dedicated to certain tasks like hosting web sites or databases.  The TLT server group is responsible for close to 200 servers which are located in two buildings on opposite sides of campus.  All the administrators are located in a third office building about a ten minute walk from the two server rooms.

            The communications gap that exists within the TLT server group relates to changes made to the servers.  It is important for all the people in the server group to be aware of a server being renamed, moved, or altered in any significant way.  Currently there is a diagram displaying the location of the servers as well as some other important attributes like the system name and IP address.  Administrators need a quick, well defined way to keep this document updated with changes they make.  This will prevent miscommunications and mistakes made when people assume the diagram is accurate.