SMU’s Integrated Information Technology Services (IITS) has done it again!

Not only has IITS garnered the CIO 100 Honouree award for the second year in a row, this year, both their project submissions for excellence in strategic enterprise IT deployment received the nod from the judges, making IITS the proud recipient of two CIO Honouree awards.

CIO Asia magazine’s annual CIO 100 index is a prestigious annual listing of the top 100 enterprises and organisations in Asia that have deployed information and communications technology to derive the highest strategic value and to yield the greatest return for their key operations and businesses.

Mr Lau Kai Cheong, SMU’s Chief Information Officer and Vice President for Integrated Information Technology Services, received the awards at the CXO - CIO Conference on 7 May 2015.

Said Mr Lau Kai Cheong, “The CIO 100 Honouree awards validate the skills, effort and dedication of the IITS teams. Both our winning entries - Advanced Learning Analytics and SIEM-X – are the result of our constant efforts in identifying and meeting the evolving needs of the university by coming up with innovative and effective solutions. As SMU forges ahead towards Vision 2025 of becoming a great and iconic global-city university in Asia, IITS will continue work closely with the SMU Community to provide them with the necessary IT tools and solutions to realise this vision.”

The CIO 100 honourees were chosen by the CIO editorial team based on the strategic impact, customer impact, financial impact, social impact, and operational impact of their projects.

Advanced Learning Analytics (ALA) 

[Caption: Members of the ALA team which won the CIO 100 Honouree Award are (from left) Ms Zhu Yan, Ms May Lit, CIO & Vice President Mr Lau Kai Cheong, and Mr Fan Tang Meng.]

SMU is the first tertiary institution in Singapore to implement this learning analytic tool to help detect learning risks early enough so that relevant interventions can be designed to improve student learning and success outcomes.

ALA enables SMU instructors to better measure a student’s individual competencies, engagement levels, understand the student’s social learning patterns and detect learning difficulties.

With ALA, students receive personalised attention, relevant feedback and guidance to achieve better learning outcomes. At the institutional level, ALA provides evidenced-based aggregated student information for data analysis, which will help the schools in making better decisions and improvements to course curriculum and program design.

Led by May Lit Mei Wan, Associate Director (Learning Systems and Technologies), ALA was rolled out in July 2014 and was opened to all schools and centres for trial. To date, the tool has been set up for use in several courses in five schools and one centre. It will be further fine-tuned and implemented across the board over the next two years.

[Caption: A screen grab from ALA. The slices in the chart indicate how a student is performing in an assessment or a group of assessments. It also compares the student's score with the marks range of his class.]

SIEM-X : Improving IT Operations Through Security Tools

SIEM-X is an acronym coined by IITS to represent Security Incident Event Management (SIEM) eXtension (-X).

SIEM is a security monitoring tool utilised by IITS to boost IT security defences at SMU.  Challenged by CIO Mr Lau Kai Cheong to extend the use of SIEM to other IITS divisions, Calvin Chan, Deputy Director (Enterprise Infrastructure) and his development team worked closely with the other IITS user teams to explore and probe the capabilities of the tool.

The result is SIEM-X, a user-friendly and customised operational dashboard which provides integrated data drawn from the various IT systems that are connected to SIEM. In doing so, the development team successfully extended the use of a highly technical back-end monitoring tool used by trained security personnel, to a front-end monitoring tool used by helpdesk agents and other IITS user support staff. 

SIEM-X offers user IT teams the ability to monitor their own critical systems and to improve and enhance their daily operations.

For the IT security team, SIEM-X provides an additional pair of eyes (by way of the user teams) to keep the critical systems secure, as well as provide data and insights on the occurrence of an incident, thereby enabling teams to resolve incidents and problems faster.

The development of SIEM-X has helped transform SMU’s security profile from a reactive stance where the responsibility of detecting and responding to incidents and problems lie with a small team of information security personnel, to a proactive one where more IT teams are now helping to keep an eye on the critical systems.

[Caption: SIEM-X provides a single, integrated view of information on an operational dashboard to enhance security insights, productivity and efficiency for application and system administrators. These were previously not available or were performed manually.]

[Featured photo: IITS’s SIEM-X development and user teams, led by IITS Deputy Director Calvin Chan (front row, holding the CIO 100 Honouree award), ensure that incidents are monitored both by the front-end users and back-end systems support. Next to him is CIO & Vice President, IITS, Mr Lau Kai Cheong.]