IT Plan coming into view
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
The first chapter of the campus IT Strategic Plan has taken shape.
A Roadmap to Service Excellence - The UW-Madison Information Technology (IT) Strategic Plan—presents a shared campus vision to achieve and sustain excellence in IT service for higher education. Although this is an IT Strategic Plan, its focus is not on technology, but rather on how technology-based services can support our campus mission and college and department priorities.
The campus IT plan is divided into three areas, with campus services supporting the interaction of each one.The Process
In developing this plan, we examined our campus culture, the role IT service should play, how we can more effectively communicate and collaborate, our processes for making decisions, our approach to funding our efforts and infrastructure, the skills and competencies we all need, and our strategy for measuring IT service value. With the help of the Office of Quality Improvement and contributors from across campus, we convened more than thirty-five sessions with hundreds of faculty, staff and students. During each session, we collected input, worked through facilitated exercises, and discussed strategies and options. Faculty, staff and students participated in all phases of the process. All materials collected in the process can be found at: http://www.cio.wisc.edu/plan/.
The process slowed a bit this winter while we aligned its objectives with the forthcoming campus strategic plan. It was worth the wait. The IT initiatives blend and extend well with campus priorities.
The Current State of IT Service
UW-Madison has always approached IT service through a combination of centralized and distributed support strategies. IT services have traditionally operated relatively independent of one another at the campus, college, school, department, and major unit level. Even when functional dependencies exist among the services, the financial resources, infrastructure, support structures and services remain relatively disconnected. This strategy helps instructors and researchers meet some needs that a central solution could not address but also results in some inefficient duplicative activities.
This traditional practice of independence and disconnectedness is being challenged by the interdisciplinary nature of higher education today, ever-increasing financial pressures, and the increasing value of working more collaboratively. IT service must adapt to these fundamental changes.
Over the past five years, we have made progress and much is working in our favor. We have recognized the need for change and have articulated a willingness to take on these extraordinary challenges. Communication among instructors, researchers, and technical staff members is better now than at any point in our recent history. We are aggressively pursuing new administrative and academic service delivery strategies, and we are making remarkable progress using technology for teaching, research, outreach and service. Our shared governance structure is engaged, and our campus leaders are open to new IT service ideas and strategies.
Overarching Themes
A few overarching themes emerged from our engagement with the campus.
- Support communications, collaboration and innovation across campus.
- Promote and support IT service leadership.
- Embrace the Wisconsin Idea/Wisconsin Experience.
- Conduct effective assessments.
- Develop and implement sustainable funding models.
- Embrace agility and innovation.
- Develop and implement a common IT architecture and consistent infrastructure.
- Create a more effective organizational infrastructure.
- Support green computing initiatives.
Through the “Wisconsin Idea”, we have come to understand the UW-Madison mission as it relates to our state and our people, not just our campus. Through the “Wisconsin Experience,” we articulate specific strategies to help us create and apply learning inside and outside the classroom to help our faculty, staff and students make the world a better place. The shared vision of this strategic plan is to put those ideals into practice in all UW-Madison IT service offerings. Together, we will achieve and sustain IT service excellence for teaching, learning, research, outreach and public service, and campus services.
Next: Teaching, Learning, Research, Public Service and Outreach initiatives.