Located in Madison, WI, Central Information Technology Services (CITS) is the foundational support unit for enterprise systems and services for the University of Wisconsin Colleges and the University of Wisconsin-Extension. We are responsible for institutional security and provide strategic oversight, planning and direction to support the needs of our customers.
Our Service Center offers a single point of contact, providing friendly and effective technical support to students and employees.
CITS recognizes the important role technology plays in higher education and outreach. By maintaining strong customer relationships, CITS is able to deliver value added services and support to UW Colleges and UW-Extension.
Our CIO
Werner comes to Central IT with a mix of Private and Public sector IT leadership experience, and practical IT experience in nearly all facets of IT Business Management and Operations. He earned his Bachelor of Business Administration degree from Cardinal Stritch University, Milwaukee, WI and a Professional Certificate in Advanced Management and Leadership from the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Throughout his career, Werner has managed teams ranging in size from three to 200 staff members and budgets of $4MM to $130MM.
Regardless of the size of his organization’s staff or budget, Werner has found that the practice of
- Understanding that IT provides a service and that customers/users must be earned every day;
- Understanding your customers/users expectations and needs so you can meet them;
- Communicating often both internally and externally;
- Building a trusting relationship with stakeholders;
- Doing the "right" thing even if it is more difficult or challenging;
- Being honest, having patience, listening, listening some more, and not making assumptions;
are bedrocks of great customer service, and they are practices he strives to follow every day and instill in others.
Our Teams
Technical Operations
The Technical Operations Team supports the Central IT infrastructure and provides infrastructure consulting services for the UW College Campuses and UW-Extension Divisions. Responsibilities of the team include; management and support of the Central IT Data Center; architectural design, installation, configuration, and maintenance of server and network hardware; management of backup, restoration, and recovery services for the servers, network firewalls and circuits, intrusion detection devices/software, applications, databases, data warehouses, and network infrastructure; establishing and managing information security policies and practices; development and management of policies for efficient use of the infrastructure components; and administration of services that provide high availability systems, single authentication to the networking infrastructure, use of network storage, disaster recovery functionality, enhanced SPAM filtering, e-mail, calendaring, collaboration services, and a platform to support web services.
Support Services
CITS Service Desk assistance is available for the UW Colleges and the UW-Extension through the IT Central's IT Service Desk. The CITS Service Desk is the first point of contact for all service and project requests and serves as a liaison between our customers and technical support staff. The Service Desk ensures that all calls are handled promptly, courteously and are resolved or routed to the team that can resolve the issue. The IT Service Desk is also a source for temporary loans of laptops, projectors and a mobile training lab. Contact the CITS Service Desk at 608.263.5034 or by filling out a web request form.
The area of Instructional Technology and Training offers support for instructors and staff in the use of emerging technologies. This includes training, best practices and support for a variety of technologies. Other activities supported by this unit include the development of hybrid and accelerated hybrid courses, Desire2Learn (D2L), wikis, blogs and other learning technologies.
Application Development
The Web & Application Development Team supports and maintains the institution's main web site and top-level web sites. They coordinate the planning and design of new web sites and web applications to support the UW Colleges campuses, the UW-Extension divisions and Central Administration. The team is also available to consult on usability, web accessibility and search engine optimization (SEO).
The PRISM Technical Support Team is responsible for all aspects of the UW Colleges PeopleSoft Campus Solutions student information system. Additionally, they work closely with the Web & Application Development Team to deliver business and enrollment information to UW Colleges Administrators through web-based reports.
