CU-Boulder Draft Themes for the IT Strategic Plan
V2, '02/3/3, pel

I. Introduction: the Strategic Planning Process

• Why do a strategic plan?
  • To meet market competition
  • To provide clear support of the University's core mission
  • To achieve efficiencies
  • At what cost and trade-offs?
    • To what extent is there a campus consensus for continued IT investments?
• What process?
  • Grade current efforts, goal: an A- or B+ on these issues
  • Assess if using IT to best effects
  • Identify gaps to meeting above strategic planning criteria
• Strategic goals
  • Strategic goals provide an overall intended direction
  • Faculty, departments, staff, workgroups etc., all take initiatives which head in various directions, not necessarily fully aligned with the strategic goals
  • Boulder should reinforce or reward those which lead in the overall strategic direction
  • What is that strategic direction for IT?

Evaluate existing programs and investments; provide a report card?

• CU-Boulder has made significant investments in IT infrastructure over the last four years;
• Critical to evaluate and report on existing IT support programs
  • Survey data already in hand
  • Follow-up in each major area to provide a "ROI" report
  • Are the core goals being met, e.g., students using the residential network? Student ownership increased? Faculty using the $1,200 support?
    • Any teaching and learning goals that can be evaluated? Teacher or student impact or satisfaction?
  • Hard to benchmark against other schools, but possible on basic infrastructure measures: a matrix of five peer schools with a statement of comparison on the four or five major goals of the last plan
  • Any obvious gaps from the prior plan?
    • I didn't observe any though comparison with peers might reveal

II. Vision

Establish overall vision for next planning period

• Highlight: as with '98 plan, the academic enterprise drives adoption of IT
  • Not vice versa!
• Simply stay in place relative to peers? Or, selectively advance?
  • Chancellor clearly wishes to selectively advance
    • ATLAS program
    • IT and Library programs an area for growth
    • TAM and multimedia an area of existing excellence should be sustained
  • System President clearly wishes to selectively advance
    • CU Systems in top five public research institutions
    • Ability to share resources across campuses
• All also clearly want to take advantage of any efficiencies offered by continuing advances in administration
• And staying in place requires tracking the rapidly improving IT function, price performance curve and continuously rising user expectations

III. Themes, tentatively cast as goals

Goal: school, college and departmental IT planning

• What can we accomplish by building on the existing infrastructure?
  • Each school, college and department has significant issues specific to the discipline and particular needs
    • The college or school may need stronger IT to meet curriculum requirements
      • E.g., Engineering, Architecture and Planning, Music, etc.
    • The college or school can generally benefit by layering its specific needs on top of campus-wide infrastructure
      • Consultation from ITS, Coordination with ITS staff can be a big help
    • These are likely to be critical college or school trade-offs
      • College and schools specific needs will generally be funded locally
    • These issues also apply at the Arts and Sciences department level
  • Central infrastructure and services can provide the colleges and schools with tools to minimize their costs while meeting their specific needs
    • Standards and consulting on space design for IT needs
    • Standards and consulting on cluster layouts, costs, etc.
    • Develop options for ITS to support college, school or department IT facilities such as those pioneered by the "Planning Across the Curriculum for Technology" program
      • Anchored by Service Level Agreements
  • IT staff should engage in routine conversations with academic and administrative units to understand their needs and explain existing capabilities so they can collectively envision possibilities
    • E.g., student services & other admin units, schools and departments
    • Should be proactive, not only reactive
  • Requires good communication from ITS on IT possibilities and plans
  • And qualified "ITS consultants" to participate
• => Seek annual IT plans from each school, college and department, jointly developed with ITS involvement
  • Significant challenges to motivate and incent such a goal
  • But the payoff in communication and coordination of a success program could be huge!
• If local plans are developed, communication about the planning process and publication of the resulting plans are crucial elements!

Goal: Support college and school use of Campus and CU System data and IT systems

• All colleges and schools want sophisticated data analysis and tracking of their students, faculty and alumni
  • Data may be available at the System level or at the CU-Boulder level
    • A benefit to develop an integrated view of such data & data dictionary?
  • Is there more that can be done to support a common baseline of such activity?
• Support college and school specific mining of administrative data
  • Develop campus-wide data definitions ("data dictionary") of core data and standards for access and use to support college and school specific needs
  • Need to include CU System data and standards
  • Data management and use would be integral to college and school IT plans

Goal: Continue to improve faculty and student IT support

• The current support structure clearly has strengths but many also questions if it is the "final answer" or if further improvements can be made
  
  • Comments included:
    
    • DATCs are good but don't go far enough
      
    • Support could be improved by having staff "down the hall" - closer to the question, providing a more discipline specific and responsive answers
    • Faculty also would like to see priority for classroom support
• Central infrastructure is critical to providing a baseline of support across the schools
  • Campus-wide infrastructure services
    • Network, email,
    • Baseline faculty equipment grants
    • Baseline support
• Seek "finer grained" support
  • Provide support locally
• Create and support an organizational structure for ITS optimized around end-users
  • Communicate, communicate, communicate
  • Survey faculty and students to develop continuous improvements
  • Create a support ombudsman?
• Create a faculty advisory committee for ITS drawing faculty from across the colleges and schools
  • Provide feedback to ITS
  • Serve as a sounding board and consultant to new plans
  • Provide another vehicle for communicating with the faculty
• Consider options or programs to reach out to faculty particularly to groups who
  • may wish to use technology in their teaching but not be comfortable getting started on their own, or
  • may be unaware of options for using technology in teaching
• Departmental, college and school IT plans would be a major opportunity to "fine tune" support to the particular needs of the units.

Goal: Support increasing use of multimedia by students and faculty

• The TAM program illustrates
  • 1) how multimedia use becomes integral to certain curricula, and
  • 2) how multimedia use increases IT infrastructure demands
• The TAM program is a (highly successful) example of leadership at CU-Boulder
• Faculty (and students) believe that the balance of the campus will gradually adopt many of the same techniques and facilities that TAM is now exploring
  • With significant infrastructure implications over time
• Undertake a study of existing multimedia classroom use to seek a solution to current request for expanded facilities
  • Is this a facilities problem, a scheduling problem or something else?
  • Determine if any units are seeking solutions outside of standard channels
  • If so, why?
  • Develop (publish) MM classroom standards
  • Develop standards for use (scheduling) of MM classrooms
  • Determine if priority support is needed for instructors while teaching in MM classrooms

Goal: Increase ITS/Libraries coordination and cooperation

• IT and Libraries services will increasingly overlap
  • An increasing set of digital materials managed and organized by the Library but accessed via IT infrastructure within the Library, on-campus and beyond the campus
  • An increasing set of computer based tools (search engines, analytic tools and more) which work on digital collections
• Faculty and students do not necessarily understand, nor should they have to understand, the organizational distinctions between IT and Library
  • Can CU-Boulder provide "one stop shopping" for digital library questions?
  • => IT and Library services will increasingly need to be coordinated and provided together
• Emerging digital library services require significant new IT infrastructure
  • Particularly sophisticated directories to manage patron authentication and authorization for access to licensed materials
    • And, ultimately, rights management
  • Also, the infrastructure and management software for acquiring, storing, accessing, managing, publishing and preserving digital library materials
• Work closely with the Library during a renovation or IT refit of the Library building
  • Develop more joint ITS and Library spaces organized around faculty and staff needs
  • Co-locate appropriate ITS and Library services within the Library
  • Create an exemplary integration of IT and Library
• Develop ways among ITS, the Library and the colleges and schools to track and advise on curriculum specific software needs and options.

Goal: Update business continuity plans

• The events of 9/11 have changed perceptions of what is acceptable disaster recovery practice
• ITS has a disaster recovery review underway
• Business continuity planning is more than an IT exercise, however, it requires full engagement of the business and academic units which expect to continue operation after a major disruption
  • What human support is needed to maintain functioning of core systems
  • What is the communications strategy, who will implement it and what are back-ups if primary actors are unavailable

Goal: Track continuing concerns, issues and possibilities for maintaining IT security and privacy

• Changing federal, state and local laws must be tracked and implemented
  • Implications of the USA PATRIOT Act?
• Should the changing environment or laws result in any changes to Campus or System policy?
  • E.g., some campuses have instituted policies of destruction of logs and other "circulation data" to preserve patron privacy

Goal: Maintain highly cost-effective "state-of-the-practice" IT infrastructure with excellent flexibility

• Campus constituents have a series of ideas for the future which may make new IT demands
  • A few examples among a huge range of possibilities include:
    • Increasingly deep and sophisticated electronic collaboration across multi-investigator research programs typically across multiple campuses
    • Wireless PDAs for information collection and dissemination
    • Working with the national labs on high-performance computing
    • Partnering with Storage-Tec or others for hierarchical storage management (off-line, near-line, online back-up and recovery options)
• CU-Boulder needs to provide a flexible, scalable, reliable infrastructure which can meet those demands we can now envision and those that we may not yet be able to envision
  • Standard "Internet layering" is one element of a solution
    • With replaceable units which can be sized according to changing demands
  • Lifecycle funding will allow for natural growth based on continuous renewal allowed by improving price performance for electronics and bandwidth
  • (My suggested) guiding principles published by Educause in 2000 if reference is desired
• And, end-user expectations continue to rise continuously raising demands for
  • Capacity, reliability, responsiveness
  • Network capacity and function
  • Server capacity and function
  • And more