Office of Information Technology History

It is believed that the first semblance of a computer department was probably in the mid to late 1960s utilizing an IBM 1620 data processing system. With operations housed in several small rooms and a hallway in Building #1 on the City Park Campus, the department consisted of the switchboard, keypunch, sorters and card readers. It offered services of accounting, payroll, registration and reporting to the college.

Thereafter, the Center moved to Building #11, then to a facility in Michoud in the New Orleans east area of the City until its move to Building #37.  Primarily the services offered remained the same until 1991.

By 1992, the college had purchased and implemented the SCT Plus system.  This enterprise system allowed for a full-service offering in student information, financial resource and human resource systems.  During this period the department began offering some network and desktop support services. 

As the department grew and technology became more relevant to the operation of the college and state-of-the-art equipment, infrastructure and facility were established, service offerings also grew: email, network connectivity, student information, financial, human resource, application programming, computer operations, account security and the like.

In February 2005, OIT moved to a newly renovated facility in Building #10 on the City Park Campus. August 2005, the college was devastated by hurricane Katrina.  However, with lots of effort and determination, full services and more were restored to the current facility by May 2006.  After hurricane Katrina, several recovery funding sources became available which facilitated the following technology improvements: installation of a PBX system (with a backup telephone system at hot site), installation of wireless network infrastructure (in case of flooding, we will have alternate capability), imaging project (all academic history is now imaged), network upgrade (allows for wider range of throughput and redundancy), UPS upgrade (longer period of uninterrupted power supply to Data Center), generators (backup power source to main buildings housing IT equipment), development of a comprehensive college-wide IT Security Policy and development of a comprehensive college-wide IT Strategic Plan.

In 2011, by action of the Louisiana Community and Technical College System (LCTCS), Banner was implemented as one database instance across the (18) LCTCS colleges and is currently hosted and maintained by Ellucian. Consequently, in February 2013, the Computer Operations unit was dissolved and an internal restructuring occurred within the Office of Information Technology. In August of that same year, the SIS Plus mainframe was deactivated.

Today, the Office of Information technology (OIT) offers a variety of services to the entire college which include an information center, high-speed network, IT service management and business automation, email, information management, telecommunications, security and client support services.