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8 Making the Most of Your ILS Colorado Springs’ Office of Information Technology’s (OIT) machine room alongside other campus systems. Part of our project ultimately involved migrating to an off-site server hosted by our vendor, Innovative Interfaces. Moving to a hosted solution would simplify ILS software and operating sys- tem upgrades in the future and allow us to decommission our physical server in the OIT machine room. We set up a meeting with the director of networks and infrastructure and the associate director of computing services to discuss the migration, the firewall changes involved, and our larger project to opti- mize the security of our ILS. They were happy to assist with the migration and the security optimizations because campus security is a key priority for them. They saw our move to a hosted environment and our optimization proj- ect as benefits to OIT because it would eliminate an on-campus server and reduce the likelihood of campus systems and personal data being compro- mised in a security breach. CREATING AN IMPROVEMENT PLAN As you are planning your ILS optimization project and talking with all rel- evant stakeholders about how it might impact them, it’s important to begin codifying these plans into a formal improvement plan. Your improvement plan will serve as an official proposal detailing the scope and goals of your project that you can share with your stakeholders. This document should describe the aims of the project, what benefits it will provide to the library and its users, any estimated costs involved, what work will be required by other departments of the library, the project’s timeline, and how you will assess its success. The authors wrote the following plan for the Kraemer Family Library’s ILS optimization project and shared it with the library’s administration, staff, and the UCCS OIT department. Preparing this document helped us think through the details of our project before we started it in earnest. We used it to identify some of the initial projects we would work on, including identifying a timeline for migrating to a hosted service, evaluating the features included with a new bundled subscription our vendor was offering to aid in decision making, and mapping our ILS system inputs and outputs, among other proj- ects. We also used it to capture questions we were still wrestling with, for instance, where our documentation would live and how we would work with departments to document and improve their workflows. The timeline we included, too, was only six months in length, to cover the initial stages of the project, with a plan to revisit it after six months. We share our improvement plan with you to provide a model you can use to develop your own plan. A blank version can be found in Appendix B, Worksheet 1.