Introduction

Charge

The OneIT initiative, launched by President Sheila Stearns and CIO Matt Riley in April 2017, seeks to design integrated IT services that align with UM's strategic vision and meet the following challenges directly from the charge:

  • Maintain and ideally enhance services to faculty, staff, and students
  • Achieve efficiencies and cost savings in the deployment of software, hardware, and personnel
  • Improve cross-training and professional development for IT personnel across campus
  • Ensure that the FTE delivering IT services can flex efficiently and appropriately according to student enrollment, faculty and staff served, research requirements, campus infrastructure size and characteristics, and inevitable expansion of support for online courses, programs, and
    administrative services.

In short, the goal of OneIT is to design and deliver better IT services more efficiently.

Timeline

The OneIT process was conducted from May-October, 2017.

OneIT process timeline

Our process

The OneIT team used design thinking methodology to arrive at recommendations. The critical and time-intensive first phase of design thinking is to empathize. To ensure that we clearly understood the needs of IT staff, IT users, and other key stakeholders, we engaged in the following activities:

  • Meetings with administrative and governance leadership teams
  • Focus groups with IT teams and functional offices
  • Two open campus forums
  • Extensive online engagement and community ideation using a tool called IdeaScale
  • Faculty and student surveys administered through Educause Technology Research in the Academic Community (ETRAC)
  • Information gathering about data centers and server rooms
  • Started inventories of IT services and software

 

Design Thinking 

Design thinking model: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test 

Guiding principles >