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Case Study: Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET)
At a Glance
An IT Director knows he has to rebuild an IT environment and leverages All Covered’s experience to make the right decisions first time.
The Context
An educational organization specializing in technical course accreditation has to manage very large volumes of electronic documents and data. Although the organization has internal IT people, they want support and advice from engineers and consultants with specialized expertise and knowledge.
The Client
Located in Baltimore, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) was originally founded in 1932 as the Engineers' Council for Professional Development. It was created to help promote engineering as a profession and to accredit training courses on behalf of professional engineering societies, such as the IEEE and ASME. Renamed ABET in 1980, the organization is among the most respected accreditation organizations in the U.S. ABET has provided leadership and quality assurance in higher education for over 75 years and is a federation of 29 professional and technical societies representing these fields. The organization now accredits some 2,700 programs at more than 550 colleges and universities nationwide, covering applied science, computing, engineering, and technology.
The Problem
Although ABET’s full-time staff is just 30 people, more than 1,500 professors and university faculty from around the world volunteer to accredit courses and need to interact with ABET’s systems in order to update information regarding their evaluations. Early in 2008, Frank Sarlo was appointed as the Director of IT and quickly discovered that the computer systems were not performing as needed. Frank commented that “downtime and slow response times were so common that people had become used to it. I knew things needed to get better quickly.”
He set out to re-structure the organization’s systems and networks in order to better service the needs of the users. Frank is a seasoned IT professional, but he knew that he wanted to have some supplemental expertise available to him and his team members, to validate their strategies and help with particular projects.
Enter All Covered
Frank had previously been supported by All Covered at another company, and quickly decided to engage All Covered’s experts again. As he mapped out a new structure for the IT systems he regularly discussed the different options with the All Covered engineers, who contributed their advice based on the large number of different networks they support.
The Results
ABET has now significantly evolved its IT environment with a focus on Frank Sarlo’s three cornerstones of stability, security and speed. With All Covered’s help, the number of servers has been reduced from 15 to 11, the Active Directory structure has been simplified, Terminal Servers have been deployed and numerous network enhancements have been made. All the servers and network devices are being monitored and proactively maintained by All Covered to improve stability.
Frank is pleased with the results, saying that “we trust All Covered and I appreciate their engineers’ depth of experience. Everything here is now much more stable. If we get into trouble, I know All Covered will be there to help. They are our safety net. When we’re looking at something for the first time, the All Covered people have often seen it many times before. It’s then my choice as to whether we do the work ourselves or have All Covered do it.”
“We trust All Covered and I appreciate their engineers’ depth of experience..” |
