Strategic Goals
Goal 1: Engage to Inform
William & Mary Information Technology (W&M IT) strives to provide high quality services while creating opportunities to expand community involvement, share knowledge and develop effective and dynamic partnerships.
1a. Advance Customer Service & Advocacy
- Enhance and broaden current efforts to reach out to university constituencies to gauge needs and advocate for meaningful technology adoption for the university as a whole and unique functional areas.
- Pursue stronger connections with faculty to gain better understanding of instructional needs.
- Increase outreach to under-supported academic groups to facilitate information-sharing within the research community.
1b. Explore and enhance collaboration opportunities
- Work with university partners to identify technologies that will improve teaching for all modalities, research programs for all disciplines and process improvement for all business functions.
- Refine and expand governance models to promote inclusive involvement relevant to IT policy development and project planning.
- Provide time and technologies to promote relationship building through personal and group interactivities.
1c. Lead and expand efforts in education, awareness and user self-service
- Improve capabilities and provide available technologies that simplify the customer experience.
- Provide and promote data quality guidelines, data literacy education and tool expertise by developing an array of educational resources.
- Develop documentation, programs, courses and in-service activities to promote academic technologies, research opportunities and enterprise application use.
Goal 2: Expand to Educate
W&M IT will define its role in supporting teaching, learning and research and enhance the support resources of research computing to promote scholarship, facilitate innovation and foster an academic technology community.
2a. Provide technologies and support to the university research community
- Expand the use of High-Performance Computing (HPC) to under-represented research groups.
- Develop technologies for expanded data storage opportunities.
- Create a support structure for workstation research processing.
- Build the technical knowledge for modern deployment of server infrastructure, operating systems and management tools on the research computing team.
2b. Provide support for enhancing new and existing academic technology initiatives
- Develop a team to support the teaching & learning technology needs of faculty and students.
- Explore collaboration opportunities with Studio for Teaching and Learning Innovation (STLI), Swem Library, professional schools and other academic units to expand and enhance academic technology goals.
- Work to provide support, meaningful experiences and innovative technologies for an expanded on-line and on-site teaching & learning environment serving both traditional and life-long learners.
2c. Develop a stronger focus on Audio Visual (AV) technologies
- Create a team to support the design and installation of AV technologies on campus.
- Develop strategies to support emerging and changing technology needs for classrooms and meeting spaces.
- Determine a strategy for a consistent campus wide digital signage experience.
Goal 3: Secure to Protect
W&M IT will advance and improve security practices in response to industry standards and increased global cyber risks.
3a. Strengthen protection of university information assets
- Create a consistent and secure file and data storage environment.
- Inform and educate stewards of application and data assets so they know their responsibility to administer and secure information resources.
- Ensure access to sensitive and protected data is continually audited and refined to ensure principle of least privilege.
3b. Provide technologies to promote sound security practices
- Implement a modern identity management system to ensure secure and reliable provisioning and deprovisioning of services.
- Increase the use of existing and reliable technologies to provide enhanced antivirus and other information protections.
- Build change management practices and policies as we expand use of self-service user development environments.
- Deploy modern authentication services to reduce dependency on less secure legacy services.
3c. Refine security risk management practices and programs
- Adopt changes to mandatory training and communication efforts to address increasing risks around ransomware, phishing attacks, and other threats.
- Plan annual simulated social engineering attack exercises to increase end user awareness of risks.
- Devise a disaster recovery (DR) strategy using modern technologies and addressing the most critical business processes.
Goal 4: Design to Adopt
W&M IT will expand and transform the application, data, systems, and networking infrastructure to meet user needs, enable modern technology adoption, and deploy rapid response in a changing landscape.
4a. Provide robust and modern technology
- Architect and maintain a modern ecosystem that enables users to quickly innovate, focusing on university productivity, business process efficiencies, a sustainable and redundant network, academic creativity, and research productivity.
- Make technical design decisions that aim for reusable building blocks to drive automation.
- Develop strategies for supporting broad end-user adoption of new and existing technology.
4b. Architect a sustainable data environment and promote a data driven culture
- Build a data framework and repository to facilitate reporting and analytics.
- Work with data stewards to establish and communicate data definitions and guidelines.
- Improve definition of data governance responsibilities.
4c. Expand and develop cloud-based services
- Continue to expand the use of Software as a Service (SaaS) and hosted application services.
- Explore and expand Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) options to support university operations.
- Create administrative models and target goals for increasing the availability of cloud-based research computational services.
Goal 5: Organize to Evolve
W&M IT will develop organizational and cultural approaches to enhance the skills and improve the experience of IT staff and stakeholders.
5a. Advance IT staff potential to promote personal and professional growth
- Improve professional development and career growth to encourage innovation and ensure continued success.
- Foster a work environment where diversity, equity, and inclusion awareness and practices can be expanded and explored.
- Develop strategies with our Human Resources partners to improve classification and compensation processes and move toward salary equity across the department and within the university.
5b. Foster continuous improvement and organizational effectiveness
- Responsibly maintain systems and applications allowing the university to meet future challenges by maximizing resources through efficient funding practices.
- Develop and improve best practices for governance, service management, portfolio management, IT budgeting, billing practices, and contract development that are inclusive, transparent, and flexible.
- Develop roadmaps and replacement cycles for software enhancements, servers, network equipment, and AV technologies.
5c. Help the community thrive in W&M technology environment
- Ensure environmental sustainability, accessibility, affordability, and university DEI efforts are considered in technology acquisition, operations, and IT support practices.
- Assess and advise on the rate of manageable technological growth.
- Employ effective communication techniques to successfully promote IT initiatives and inform of technological change.
5d. Administer responsible stewardship of university resources
- Maintain systems and applications responsibly while allowing for experimentation and exploration.
- Prepare for future challenges by maximizing university resources through efficient funding workflows.
- Work closely with departments on grant proposals and other funding models to meet academic and administrative needs.
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