As the IT Strategy Working Group continues its work, I thought I'd share some insights from IT strategic planning efforts at other universities. This one comes from a friend who served as CIO at a large, multi-campus university. I won't share details; those would be too specific to their particular circumstances. But it's interesting to look at an overview of their IT strategic plan, to see how we might define our own IT strategy here.
Two things stand out from this IT strategic plan:
- IT is vital to the University's successful achievement of its mission;
- IT infrastructure and services are delivered in a distributed, but increasingly coordinated, manner.
While this IT strategic plan will guide the efforts of their University for the next 5 years, their central IT and division IT action plans provide an opportunity for them to annually revisit their success in meeting goals, and to adjust their actions as needed to improve. IT is constantly changing; to provide value, we must continually adapt to these changes to meet the needs of our constituents.
Like Morris, their IT planning process builds on the collaborative nature of their University, providing additional opportunities to share plans, success stories and lessons learned. This strategy document is reviewed annually, to look ahead, and to modify the plan to adjust to changing needs.
Let's look at the themes of this IT strategic plan:
Guiding principles
- Technology decisions should include broad input from those most impacted.
- "Integration" and "ease of use" should be expected features of all new systems or technologies.
- Infrastructure planning needs to be carefully designed and executed so as to retain and improve as appropriate the following attributes.
- The University should examine opportunities for business process improvements in conjunction with the adoption of software before reengineering administrative IT systems.
- Open standards and interoperability are important and highly valued characteristics.
- Applications will be adopted when available and built or integrated when necessary.
- Security and privacy of electronic information will be highly valued and all systems and infrastructure will meet required levels of security and privacy.
Goals
- Secure our electronic information and IT systems.
- Increase the utilization and effectiveness of IT.
- Provide IT services that meet the campus needs in a coordinated and efficient manner.
- Support the evolving research needs of the campus.
- Enhance University's web environment to improve communication and provide easy access to public and personalized information and services regardless of time and place.
- Ensure student technology laboratories and resources support instructional and research objectives and meet the changing needs of all University undergraduate and graduate students.
- Design, build, maintain, and continually enhance the University's technology infrastructure to enable world-class teaching, learning, research, and scholarship. Plan for and provide sufficient bandwidth, cabling, electronics, and service quality for network connectivity in all classrooms, laboratories, workspaces and University living environments.
- Offer 24 x 7 availability of data and telecommunications networks and provide a secure environment for access to information and collaboration among members of the University community.
- Enforce a secure network and computing environment for all members of the University community.
- Provide robust interconnection among University locations and external networks, including Internet2 and other significant partner institutions.
- Establish systematic practices for recapitalizing equipment in central facilities, classrooms, labs, and offices.
- Fully integrate information technology's role in the capital planning and funding processes.
(Each goal was supported by 4 or 5 actionable strategies.)
Indicators of success
- Indicators Related to Specific Actions or Initiatives
- IT Strategic Plan Progress
