Technology Center
Strategic Plan AY 2019
Executive Summary
The Information and Learning Technologies department is a local service team providing support for the College of Education community. Our group has a solid service reputation and is recognized as a key agent in supporting the College’s mission. In light of our organization’s evolution, we decided to start development of a strategic plan to help us to be mindful and deliberate in the ways we continue supporting and empowering our community in the use of technology for education, research and administrative tasks. This report summarizes the results of this analysis
The department identified three areas of service: Website Management, Web Development, Help Desk and Support. Website Management provides support for our college’s footprint, composed by 24 different websites, including our main college’s site. This unit also provides consulting and support for other individual projects, and initiatives. The Web Development area is responsible for at 20 data driven web applications, many of them critical for daily college activities. The Helpdesk and Support team is in charge of providing direct customer, classroom and instructional technology support, resolving more than 4 thousand tickets every year. This group also helps with technology purchases, consulting and user training. We provide Canvas support, and our Instructional Design person provided support for more than 30 Canvas courses last year.
Planning Process
The team has been working both internally and with stakeholders within our college to refine our mission and identify strengths and opportunity areas. Among these strengths, our knowledge and understanding of both technical and social/organizational level issues, and strong relationship with faculty were consistently highlighted. We also recognized challenging areas, mostly associated with the fact that at least two of our teams are just one-person-deep, which limits the scope of projects we can work on concurrently, the long-term maintenance of existing projects, and the preparedness for emergency or unforeseen personnel events. We recognize that current trends – in service standardization, branding, and technology management as a way to decrease costs – open new opportunities for our team. In a similar way, increasing teleconferencing adoption are seen as positive changes for our department. Our team will need to improve and develop policies and procedures to help us and our customers to navigate an increasingly dynamic environment.
Projects
We have developed five target areas for next year’s projects: Accessibility, Information Security, Administrative, Educational and Research Information and Technology. We identified strategies, and associated projects for each one of these areas. The emphasis in Accessibility will be to increase awareness, resources, and technologies to facilitate a cultural shift towards building universally accessible content. Information Security plans will be centered in developing a plan, policies and procedures to enhance our college critical system’s security. We will keep developing integrated solutions for diverse administrative needs, increase cross training and redundancy within our team. During FY19 we will update and improve diverse technologies available to develop educational materials/media and start developing a two stages plan to refresh classroom technology. We are also planning to improve the communication and support for educational research groups, and to enhance collaboration with research IT groups within UW.
Progress Reports
If you are interested in learning more about our progress in web and application development, please review the following reports:
