Introduction

UW-Madison has always embraced the ideal that faculty, staff and students actively participate in institutional governance and policy development.  We accomplish this through organizations unique to faculty, staff and student groups and increasingly through organizations that combine representation from each group.  Our culture, which has evolved over more than 150 years, continues to embrace shared governance, distributed decision-making and local support.  Respect for and understanding of the value of local autonomy and academic freedom remains an essential component as we frame our strategies.

This Plan—A Roadmap to Service Excellence - The UW-Madison Information Technology (IT) Strategic Plan—presents a shared campus vision for achieving and sustaining 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 can support our campus mission to:

  • Enhance teaching and learning experiences
  • Achieve greater success competing for research funds
  • Realize ever-increasing research excellence
  • Prepare of our students to be successful leaders and contributors in the international information economy
  • Contribute greater value to campus services
  • More effectively engage with people throughout Wisconsin and across the globe

Relationship to the Campus Strategic Plan
Every effort has been made to align this plan with the UW-Madison Strategic Plan (“For Wisconsin and the World: Focusing a Great University on its Core Mission, Public Purpose and Global Reach”). The guiding principles, goals, strategies and initiatives expressed in the IT Service Strategic Plan can be directly tied to those articulated in the campus strategic plan.

The Process
In developing the IT Service Strategic 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.   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/.

Vision
The UW-Madison information technology service community will achieve and sustain service excellence for teaching, learning, research, outreach, public service and campus services.

Guiding Principles

  • We will undertake IT service as a campus-wide challenge.
  • We will work to develop and sustain strategic alignment and partnered decision-making.
  • We will work to effectively communicate horizontally and vertically across campus.
  • We will leverage enterprise infrastructure and avoid unnecessary replication of infrastructure and services.
  • We will maximize transparency across the campus.
  • We will select the most appropriate IT service delivery strategy for each need (enterprise, federated and local).
  • We will continue development of effective governance and advisory strategies.
  • We will develop sustainable funding strategies for all IT services.
  • We will embrace an appropriate mix of vendor-supplied and open source applications and services.
  • We will foster technical and leadership growth for IT service staff members.
  • We will work toward green computing strategies.