STRATEGIC PLAN FOR INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MARY WASHINGTON
comments to chip@umw.edu
STRATEGIC GOALS FOR INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES
- Enhance Learning Processes -- use technology to enhance current processes of teaching, learning and discovery
- Provide full-featured, easy-to-use and supportable tools to assist in teaching and learning
- Increase utilization of technology in teaching and learning
- Promote innovation in application of technology to teaching and learning
- Acquire or develop tools that can be used both in enhancing traditional modes as well as in supporting adult and lifelong learning environments
- Create environments that support student and faculty research
- Ensure Technology Fluency -- ensure that faculty, staff and students are fluent in (understand how to use and understand how to communicate about effective use of) the technologies that are relevant to them
- In all programs and disciplines, ensure in the initial phase that students have the competency to use the technologies required for effective integration of knowledge
- Ensure that faculty and staff can make efficient and effective use of technology in performing their mission-related functions
- Teach users of all types how to exist safely in an on-line world where new threats emerge daily
- Provide Tools for Building Community -- use technology to provide new tools in building a sense of community (both academic and general) at the University
- Provide flexible and comfortable tools that help users organize communication and interaction
- Enable the formation (and dissolution) of ad hoc groups to help persons of common interests or concerns easily create virtual communities for collaboration
- Provide Information Access -- use technology to provide better and easier access to the University information needed for better deliberation and decision making
- Deliver easy-to-access information that end users can manipulate and use for reporting in operations and planning
- Provide systems and services that build confidence in the central data environment as an accessible, flexible, and secure source for institutional data, eliminating the need for "shadow" databases in individual units
- Enhance the institutional data environment to support more sophisticated student advising
- Provide systems and the training necessary to use them that allow for projection, modeling, and pattern identification in institutional data
- Deploy User-Focused Services -- use technology to provide better services focused on the needs of end users and to provide more efficient processes that allow service providers to concentrate on the aspects of their work that produce more valuable services
- Identify service models in higher education that provide value and efficiency, and implement them at the University using business process reengineering and e-commerce/e-business solutions
- Include in the design of new facilities and renovations a vision of how technology developments will change the nature of processes and interactions to ensure that we are building spaces in accord with how people will actually use them
- Enable Technology Evolution -- constantly update and make more flexible the technology infrastructure and the services related to it so that the University can rapidly and efficiently benefit from technological advances while at the same time sustaining needed services
- Conduct research on, establish standards for, and deploy common infrastructure components supporting teaching, learning and scholarship
- Expand the range of institutional IT equipment managed on carefully monitored replacement cycles
- Conduct research on and promote potentially useful technology solutions with broad-ranging utility for all varieties of institutional activity
- Simplify the ways that users access institutional IT resources
- Apply sufficient resources to ensure that the daily services on which most users depend are so reliable and useable that those users can think of them as ever-present utilities
- Support Reputation of Institution as a Leading University -- use technology to support improvements that will make Mary Washington more competitive for outstanding faculty, students, staff, facilities and funding with respect to its university-level peers
- Understand the candidate audiences the University is trying to reach and their expectations of a technology environment (prospective students, faculty candidates, staff hiring pools, etc.)
- Constantly scan the higher education environment for -- and inform the University community about -- uses of technology that are likely to become trends and that are likely to become decision factors for candidate audiences
- Reflect in the technical environment -- and in its governance and policies -- the dynamic balance, characteristic of a university, of seemingly opposed themes such as information access and data security, independence and community, reliability and innovation, openness and privacy, freedom and responsibility
NOTES:
- "Research" on technology will include evaluation of stability, supportability, and security.
- Evaluation of any UMW IT strategic initiative will focus in large part on how well the initiative contributes to achievement of one or more of these strategic goals.
STRATEGIC OBJECTIVES FOR INFORMATION Resources Division included in University 2007 Strategic Plan
(source: Office of Planning and Institutional Research)
OBJECTIVE VI.1 (2007-08)
a) STRATEGIC AREA VI: Information Environment
b) GOAL: Create a top-quality, accessible, yet secure information environment for all University functions and provide the tools, technology, and support that enable all members of the University community to use that environment efficiently and effectively.
c) OBJECTIVE VI.1: Create a digital learning environment for the future that accommodates evolving definitions of learning and stimulates self-awareness of learning in the learners, while retaining unique UMW-specific character.
d) Rationale for this Objective: This objective will demonstrate to prospective students, faculty and staff that the University understands the rapid evolution of technology and the necessity of making effective use of it as a catalyst for learning with future-generation persons in each role. Success will improve the University’s competitive position in attracting the highest-quality students, faculty and staff.
e) Principal strategy(ies) used to accomplish this Objective:
- Select a physical location for UMW’s Learning Resources Convergence Center (new building)
- Develop a virtual, flexible, standards based “middle” layer for the technology-catalyzed learning environment that accommodates authentication for -- and aggregation, creative combination and easy replacement of -- learning resources.
- Get funding for explorations and make the case for funding that can sustain these explorations as core activities, not one-time events
f) Outcome indicator(s) for this Objective: Success will be demonstrated by better competitive results in recruiting students, faculty and staff, who cite the digital learning environment as a significant reason for their decision to come to UMW.
g) Administrator responsible for this Objective: Vice President for Information Resources and Chief Information Officer
OBJECTIVE VI.2 (2007-08)
a) STRATEGIC AREA VI: Information Environment
b) GOAL: Create a top-quality, accessible, yet secure information environment for all University functions and provide the tools, technology, and support that enable all members of the University community to use that environment efficiently and effectively.
c) OBJECTIVE VI.2: Build and sustain the University Libraries as leading liberal-arts learning libraries*, redefining their roles at the core of the UMW academic culture in terms appropriate to a rapidly changing, technology-catalyzed collection of learning resources used not just for students’ period of enrollment, but for a lifetime.
* Not solely, of course, as the libraries also have a significant role in support of the graduate and professional curricula.
d) Rationale for this Objective: The ever-increasing availability of digital and digitized information means that the uniqueness of collections provided at institutions of our size, always limited, will diminish further. Library character will increasingly be expressed, in part, by emerging qualities of expert guidance through the world’s digital holdings. Libraries will become known as where you go (virtually or physically) not to “find it,” but to “make sense of it.” In our context, the library identity also will be established not only as an expert-navigation point, but as an origin point for new materials, where scholarship products from our community are provided to the world. Libraries that recognize these possibilities have an extraordinary opportunity to establish essential new connections to the core of teaching and learning, and they have the opportunity to think in terms of relationships with patrons that exceed institutional boundaries and enrollment time-limitations.
e) Principal strategy(ies) used to accomplish this Objective:
- Develop library structures to support the libraries’ role as a digital repository of UMW-specific contributions to learning/information resources – a place alive with an array of projects to collect, digitize, categorize/catalogue, and make accessible worldwide scholarly products of our community.
- Develop the physical location of UMW Learning Resources Convergence Center (new building) as the headquarters of this activity (among other functions)
- Develop the concept of discovery teams – students, faculty, librarians, and technologists – as core elements of UMW’s digital learning environment.
f) Outcome indicator(s) for this Objective: Success will be measured by perception in the University and higher education communities of the libraries’ greater connection to the core academic identity of the institution and its central role in innovative development for the future of UMW’s learning environment.
g) Administrator responsible for this Objective: Vice President for Information Resources and Chief Information Officer
OBJECTIVE VI.3 (2007-08)
a) STRATEGIC AREA VI: Information Environment
b) GOAL: Create a top-quality, accessible, yet secure information environment for all University functions and provide the tools, technology, and support that enable all members of the University community to use that environment efficiently and effectively.
c) OBJECTIVE VI.3: Manage data as a valuable University asset whose creative use in University decision-making helps the University distinguish itself from its competitors.
d) Rationale for this Objective: Successful implementation of an ERP system – although a major accomplishment in itself – is but the first step in developing a flexible, extensible data environment that support decision-making and forms the basis for a highly-personalized service climate for University constituencies. Pursuit of this objective, although relatively less expensive than the ERP itself, is the key to creating much greater value from the ERP investment. It will streamline transactions, force (by the nature of the design questions involved) deep examination of the purpose of processes (and alteration of processes to serve institutionally-valid purposes), and greatly improve the awareness by all constituencies of operational and management data, empowering all of them to make better use of both types. Again, done correctly, accomplishment of this objective gives the institution a significant competitive advantage, especially over larger more complex institutions whose data-use challenges are bigger.
e) Principal strategy(ies) used to accomplish this Objective:
- Implement an operational data store and a new reporting/data analysis environment.
- Plan and implement such process-improvement aids as on-line work flow, scheduling systems, customized internal billing systems and other functions.
- Improve the “fluency” with which all constituencies use University data of all types.
f) Outcome indicator(s) for this Objective: Success on this objective will be simple, at least in concept, to assess: when all constituencies are able to easily access and manipulate the University data that they need in their roles, including as individual members of the University community. It is probably best measured by surveys.
g) Administrator responsible for this Objective: Executive Director for University Data Management
OBJECTIVE VI.4 (2007-08)
a) STRATEGIC AREA VI: Information Environment
b) GOAL: Create a top-quality, accessible, yet secure information environment for all University functions and provide the tools, technology, and support that enable all members of the University community to use that environment efficiently and effectively.
c) OBJECTIVE VI.4: Become one of the nation’s leading institutions in the creative rethinking of the definitions of security, privacy and intellectual property in the context of UMW’s digital learning environment of the future.
d) Rationale for this Objective: Faculty and students today are discovering that security, privacy, and intellectual property as traditionally defined, place extreme constraints on learning in a highly fluid, networked, learning environment. Redefining those concepts (not abandoning them) in terms that promote learning and that reinforce the University’s character and identity can place us in the vanguard of higher education in ways that research universities will not easily accommodate.
e) Principal strategy(ies) used to accomplish this Objective:
- Develop models of use of Creative Commons protections for the intellectual property of students, faculty and staff, and means of educating those populations on such use.
- Develop identity management tools that allow students to participate in worldwide digital learning contexts without being required to sacrifice security and privacy.
- Develop a comprehensive program of awareness to ensure that all populations take steps to protect their private information and that of other members of the UMW community.
f) Outcome indicator(s) for this Objective: Our success on this objective will be shown by our emergence as a national model for how to grapple with the above issues (publications featuring best practices, use of our practitioners as presenters on these subjects, etc.).
g) Administrator responsible for this Objective: Vice President for Information Resources and Chief Information Officer