Current IT environment
We engaged with hundreds of stakeholders over a four-month period to define current state and clarify challenges related to our charge. Our guiding principles represent much of what IT users and IT professionals said they want and need. Foremost, users want to be empowered by technology, and they need an IT organization willing and able to be partners in providing solutions and serving the University as a whole. IT professionals express the need for clear priorities on workload issues and support for professional development.
The following are significant circumstances and challenges revealed through our engagement:
The IT organization(s)
There are multiple IT organizations and IT professionals spread across campus. The central IT organization comprises roughly half of the IT employees at UM and reports to Chief Information Officer (CIO) Matt Riley. Distributed IT units and professionals who do not report to the CIO comprise the rest of the IT community. For example, Enrollment & Student Affairs and Administration & Finance have dedicated IT teams, as do several colleges. Most other academic and administrative units have just a few IT support employees, some have no clearly defined support.
Stakeholders contend that UM lacks a shared IT vision, clearly articulated priorities, and a collaborative environment needed to achieve strategic alignment.
Campus administrators, functional offices, and IT professionals all made compelling cases for the value of having distributed IT support embedded within sectors and units. These distributed IT units better understand the unique needs of their users, and can be more agile and responsive than IT support offered through a more centralized approach. Administrators with distributed IT support value having control over their own IT priorities and initiatives, rather than relying on a central IT organization with a broader scope of priorities, projects, and operations.
Closely aligned central and distributed IT units could provide the best organizational model for delivering quality IT services efficiently, but there is work to be done. There is a general lack of trust, openness, and sharing of knowledge and resources across UM's IT organizational boundaries. Stakeholders further contend that UM lacks a shared IT vision, clearly articulated priorities, and a collaborative environment needed to achieve strategic alignment. As a result, disparate IT units, in many cases, duplicate efforts or work at cross-purposes.
IT funding
Clear and consistent funding represents a significant challenge for UM's IT operations. The recent decision to transition away from individual telephone and port charges to fund IT operations was a step in the right direction. Campus units were choosing to remove telephones from offices and forego access to UM's wired network, opting instead to rely on much less robust wireless access. The port-charge model was replaced by a funding mechanism in which sectors pay for IT services in lump sum payments. That provides stability to IT funding, and ensures that all IT employees have access to tools necessary to do their jobs and serve students.
Unfortunately, there have also been steps backwards in how UM finances IT. Most notably, the IT utilities budget, which funds multi-year contracts for UM's core IT infrastructure and enterprise applications, was removed from a protected status and subjected to budget reductions applied across the organization. That has the effect of diminishing opportunities to invest other IT funding sources, such as student technology fees, into new academic and administrative solutions.
Leadership and governance
We met with all campus vice presidents and their leadership teams as part of our engagement phase. They all acknowledged that some level of dysfunction in the organization and delivery of IT services exists, and they did not appear to be in alignment on how to address these shortcomings. As a result, there are multiple examples of campus sectors duplicating efforts or working at cross-purposes in delivery of IT services.
Collaborations, partnerships, and consolidations across organizational boundaries can only happen when sector leaders are willing and able to work together to make them happen.
IT Senate is the formal (but not only) IT governance committee at UM. IT Senate was constituted in 2012 as the result of a strategic planning process that identified a lack of effective IT governance as a weakness. The OneIT engagement process revealed that IT governance still fails to meet needs and expectations of many stakeholders.
The initial charge of IT Senate—developing and maintaining a strategic plan for all campus IT—was determined to be too broad and ambitious for the committee. That was replaced by the current charge: "to provide a forum for initiation, evaluation, and prioritization of IT strategic initiatives, and to recommend IT strategic directions to the President’s Cabinet that are aligned with University goals and aspirations."
IT Senate has had minimal success in delivering on its charge. One of the most ambitious initiatives IT Senate attempted was to develop an enterprise applications procurement process to ensure accountability for large-scale software purchases, but that process faced resistance at the cabinet level and was never put into practice.
There are also several informal and ad hoc committees and communities that provide voice to IT decision-making, such as the Banner Mod Squad, Tech Partners, and a currently dormant data governance group. IT Senate has added representatives from those groups as voting members, but a lack of alignment and accountability remains an issue.
IT employee training and development
UM struggles to invest time and resources into employee development necessary for maintaining quality services and competitive skill sets. Many IT professionals asserted that they receive inadequate training and professional development opportunities throughout the duration of their tenure in IT at UM. Training that does take place is often solely focused on technical skills development and does not focus on developing skill sets reflective of what is needed in the IT profession today. Such skills may include project management, business and data analytics, process and interface design, and vendor relationship management. Furthermore, the speed of technological change challenges IT employees to maintain competency but without sufficient professional training to do so. The result is an IT workforce that is insufficiently prepared to deliver high-quality services, which affects users as well as the morale of IT professionals on campus.
Quality of IT services
Central and distributed IT organizations provide a wide range of services critical to the academic, research, and administrative missions of campus. Some of those services are exemplary but most are just adequate. When viewed from the users' perspective, however, there is lack of clarity about what services are even available and where to go to find them.
In short, academic and administrative leaders suggested they want IT to be proactive partners in developing solutions rather than providing a dizzying array of services from which to choose; services that do not always address unique unit needs. To address this, technology experts should be involved early in any project that has an IT component.
From the perspective of day-to-day technical support, individual users desire simplicity of solutions and clarity on where to go for help.
Hardware and software procurement and management
UM spends millions annually on personal computers, servers, productivity software, and enterprise applications. These purchases are made across multiple units with little coordination or strategic alignment, resulting in product duplication and missed opportunities for negotiating cost savings.
People who purchase technology need better information and support in decision-making, either to help them match their needs with existing solutions or to make wiser choices that can benefit the broader campus. An example where campus IT has already started to address this challenge is through the collaborative software asset management (SAM) initiative (see Heading in the right direction, page 8) which has reduced expenditures and improved satisfaction among departments campus-wide. Stakeholders want to see that model extended into other areas, such as the faculty computer roll-out and data center consolidation.