VI.
IT Organization, Governance & Practices
Key Initiatives
Evolving a Forward-Thinking IT Shop
Building Blocks
Information Systems understands the importance of partnering with our campus community. With enhanced support being a primary focus, we implemented AskDeac, our online help portal, providing an easy-to-use, user-friendly platform for faculty, students, and staff to get IT help. We also increased and improved our online support and internal processes to better respond to the changing and unique remote needs of our campus community.
Emphasizing new ways of support will be a major component when evolving our forward thinking IT shop. As the University grows, a tiered and multi-faceted structure will need to be developed to support auxiliary areas in the most efficient ways by scaling central services and consulting on unique business needs. We will create a support infrastructure to respond, guide, and recommend outsourcing opportunities for particular specifications, as needed.
Connecting and integrating ourselves with our campus community in thoughtful, productive ways will provide an environment to reach our teaching and learning goals. Academic Technology is partnering with the Center for Advancement of Teaching, Digital Initiatives & Scholarly Communication, and Online Education to create a collaborative to provide comprehensive support to faculty, called the Faculty Commons. This suite of support from a variety of different offices around campus will touch on curriculum design, project mapping, data management plans, research support, and more. Additionally, identifying more opportunities to partner and strategize with the Instructional Technology Group to scale College faculty support, will allow for more resources when expanding campus support.
With opportunities for hybrid work becoming more flexible, we will delve further into expanding telecommunication methods. Benefits of moving pieces of the current phone system into the cloud and providing campus users the ability to text with a WFU phone number through the soft client are just a few of the opportunities that will be explored.
Much of the work of the future involves budgeting for new and growing needs and priorities. Articulating the benefits of how our cloud-first strategy sets us up for success in the future is critical in securing funding. In addition to planning for new investments, the budgeting for growth and adoption of current solutions is equally important. Individuals investing their time in learning and adopting new solutions need to know their time is valued and that chosen solutions will remain available and supported. We must be diligent in preparing our organization to grow with the ever-changing environment. Whether it is providing training for IT professionals to acquire new skills or hiring personnel to support new initiatives, IS will need to have the headcount and abilities readily available to innovate, partner, consult, and support campus for the future.
Collaborating with Campus Constituents
Building Blocks
The IT Advisory Committee structure was reimagined to work in tangent to evaluate IT initiatives with University priorities. Implementing monthly pre reads for the advisory groups has promoted engagement by replacing in-meeting updates to focus on meaningful discussion.
The IT Advisory Committee structure will be reviewed and re-aligned to better fit with evolving strategic directions. Re-evaluating the structure of the committee will allow us to optimize engagement and promote robust discussion. A thorough review of committee membership will identify the opportunity to create new positions, redefine existing positions, and include additional areas of campus. The review will also help identify membership overlap and make adjustments to assure the best use of committee members’ time.