Initiatives

Initiative 1

Prioritize our users’ security by combining security best practices while continuing to listen and partner to ensure that faculty, staff, and students feel enabled and empowered to accomplish their goal:

• Create an environment where security is part of our culture and a part of everything we do
• Replacing risk management to promote our ability to identify, evaluate, and mitigate security risks that may have a detrimental effect on our ability to achieve our goals and objectives
• Build security requirements and a timely, efficient security review into the procurement cycle

Short-term Efforts and Priorities in 2018-19:

• OpsSecure Phase 1
• Common, encrypted wireless infrastructure (Eduroam)
• Endpoint security as a standard practice
• Standardized security tool sets
• Shared dashboards
• References to security policy in ITS job description

Initiative 2

Establish a clear and consistent catalog to describe, promote, and support ITS services to leverage technical expertise on all campuses in order to provide enhanced support for users across the NU system:

• Provide reliable platforms where content is readily available whenever and wherever through a consistent user experience
• Ensure that users entering our environment have a clear understanding of the core tools/systems available to them, and that access to these is secure, clear, and easy to understand
• Leverage communities of practice to respond to campus-specific needs, and create appropriate communications and resources when needed so users get the help and support they need to meet their goals

Short-term Efforts and Priorities in 2018-19:

• Identify teams to consolidate, evaluate, and promote new and existing services that work best across the NU system.
• Clearly identify the service and owner
• Develop a service catalog
• Prioritize/rationalize services that tie back to the strategic goals
• Identify opportunities to discontinue, simplify, or automate services
• Leverage opportunities to standardize services
• Create a service management office with a governance structure

Initiative 3

Build in data-driven and measurable decisions, and build an IT culture that is proactive through partnership and communication:

• Update the strategic plan quarterly and obtain feedback from ITS and across the campus community, noting accomplishments and project completions
• Celebrate a culture of “quick wins” to become more agile and get to bigger solutions more quick
• Create, build, and change processes to enhance the ability to be a partner in transformation for our stakeholders and their units
• Document requirements through business analysis, and focus on the outcome over solution first

Short-term Efforts and Priorities in 2018-19:

• Create and deliver a strategic internal communication action plan that shares the vision, the priorities, and the successes in a continuous way throughout ITS
• Establish regular standup briefings
• Launch ITS website and roadmap
• Launch ITS strategic plan and communication
• Identify division-wide metrics to track progress toward strategic plan
• Identify other communication channels
• Clarify roles of leadership team
• Adopt “communication forward” perspectives and practices into daily work within leadership teams

Initiative 4

Celebrate and promote the people and purpose of NU ITS, how they are tied to the mission of NU, and how they address the unique needs of each campus:

Create opportunities to facilitate and develop networking and relationship building to empower staff to be involved in input and decision-making:

Short-term Efforts and Priorities in 2018-19:

• Integrate hiring principles, staff expectations, and communication principles into hiring process and job descriptions
• Recognize outstanding employee efforts through the Technology Excellence Award, the Rick Fredericks Awards for Collaboration, Kudos awards, and other monthly recognition's
• Launch an internal blog and/or party-line for success stories and photos
• Support, promote, and encourage participation in activities such as CREW and ITLD based on MOR Leadership principles
• Increase staff participation in conferences such as the Higher Education Users Conference (HEUC), Women in IT Symposium, and the Innovation in Pedagogy and Technology Symposium

Initiative 5

Build a holistic, single comprehensive ITS budget to support and resource critical needs, projects, and priorities:

• Build a review process to manage multiple projects in different physical locations through a common change management system with a global view
• Identify priority projects, allocation/re-allocation of resources, and ongoing communication strategy of the top efforts for the organization

Short-term Efforts and Priorities in 2018-19:

• Develop a budget process that identifies and brings clarity/visualization to the base budget versus discretionary funding
• Identify remaining budget response team targets, and realize identified savings

Initiative 6

Define and clarify our feedback, governance, and advisory channels with faculty and administration across the NU system in order to bring clarity and maximize the value of faculty input to the ITS environment and to increase faculty-campus understanding of new initiatives and changes coming from ITS:

Short-term Efforts and Priorities in 2018-19:

• Develop a budget process that identifies and brings clarity/visualization to the base budget versus discretionary funding Create consistency and alignment in committees on each campus; fill in gaps as needed
• Identify remaining the budget response team targets, and realize identified savings
• Describe and promote governance/advisory groups on the ITS website
• Create and distribute a user survey across our multi-campus environment

Initiative 7

Focus on student affordability by driving down the cost of hardware and by developing solutions to reduce student-spend on common costs such as textbooks:

• Identify solutions to reduce student-spend on common costs such as textbooks, printing, and hardware while providing no-cost, reliable Wi-Fi
• Provide low or no-cost troubleshooting in-person at Help Desks and virtually for students for devices and tools

Short-term Efforts and Priorities in 2018-19:

• Bomgar
• Wepa
• Open Educational Resources initiatives in partnership with campus libraries and offices of online learning

Initiative 8

Pilot the same overarching systems on each campus and, if successfully reviewed by faculty, staff, and students, align the purchase and contract to benefit the entire NU system, achieve scale, and realize efficiencies:

• Create a continuously-improved user experience for students, faculty, and staff at the system-level with consistent tools and services available whenever possible
• Bring users into similar streamlined systems, allowing a better understanding of usage data in order to fill gaps and make future, well-informed enhancements

Short-term Efforts and Priorities in 2018-19:

• VidGrid implementation
• ITSM project
• EMS
• Identify division-wide metrics to track progress toward strategic plan

Initiative 9

Demonstrate a commitment to proactively creating a highly accessible environment through buying and building solutions that benefit all users’ needs, learning styles, and preferences:

• Have all NU-provided IT and services accessible or readily accommodated so individuals with disabilities can use them in a highly effective manner
• Monitor and maintain websites, training, and learning materials to comply with WCAG and ADA guidelines
• Build accessibility requirements and a timely, efficient accessibility review into the procurement cycle
• Solidify an NU system-wide effort identifying a cross-functional team to regularly focus on ensuring IT accessibility in partnership with existing ADA/504 compliance offices

Initiative 10

Lead our community in technology solutions for our core systems and services to help students, faculty, and staff study, work, teach and do research on and off-campus:

• Optimize classrooms, security, contracts, support, and other solutions across a three-campus environment
• Equip a cloud-first strategy
• Define a digital campus strategy and mobile experience
• Help campuses adopt transformative technology to bring maximum value with limited resource
• Balance the needs of our distinct campus communities to select most efficient, user-friendly tool
• Elicit ongoing campus feedback in order to make well-informed decisions that meet stakeholder demands and add maximum value
• Equip classrooms on all campuses with easy-to-use, appropriate technology in order to create an exceptional teaching and learning environment for faculty and students

Initiative 11

Work together with state-wide partners to find technical solutions that can connect systems and users to discover what’s next or possible, benefiting a wide range of stakeholders:

• Prototype what’s possible based on the outcomes wanted
• Refine and collect requirements to form innovation and solutions teams when necessary and provide examples of potential solutions
• Engage with the state to increase knowledge and partner when possible, particularly with Network Nebraska

Initiative 12

Empower researchers both on-campus and across the state, inside and outside the University of Nebraska, to fulfill our mission:

• Use technology as a catalyst and AI/Machine Learning for our statewide partners through outreach
• Provide tools to allow for continuous surveys and data analysis, allowing technology to be an enabler to find data and use data safely
• Create and leverage big data for analysis and interpretation from our campus partners in the areas of facilities, academic affairs, enrollment management, etc.
• Engage state and university partners in technology initiatives

Initiative 13

Contribute to the enhancement and creation of products and services by participating in appropriate IT communities, consortiums, and organizations that are driving IT progress in higher education:

• Get users together to learn from each other through communities of practice
• Continue to engage with current organizations such as I2, Educause, and Unizin to influence and shape the future of technology in higher education
• Research products and services for possible adoption to benefit the Nebraska K-20 community