Looking forward

As the OneIT process concludes, UM awaits the outcome of an academic and administrative program prioritization process, fallout from staff employee buyout offers, and the arrival of a new president. Those events could significantly alter the landscape for IT. We encourage those who have a role in executing these OneIT recommendations to stay focused on long-term goals and to make decisions consistent with the design thinking process and the shared values in the University's strategic vision.

The IT culture we envision has a bias toward action. Ideally, IT just works, with services that are simple, seamless, intuitive, reliable, and fast. IT should drive innovation and be collaborative, creative, and solution-oriented. While it may take several years to fully realize aspects of this vision, we will only get there if we begin taking iterative steps in the right direction now.

We recommend continuation of design thinking principles in the execution of IT strategies. The OneIT team took the process only through the ideate phase. The next steps are to prototype and test ideas as a way of continually moving forward. A design thinking culture also continually circles back to empathy, defining, and ideating, which we believe is critical to building a trusting and innovative IT operation.