Terry Gray
17 Sep 2007
Information Technology is widely understood to be rapidly changing, and the past is not always a good predictor of future needs or solutions. Occasionally there are breakthroughs and singularities, and even tech fads and bubbles. More often, major advances are the sum of incremental improvements developed over years and only recognized later. Sometimes "small seeds" of new technologies take root and gradually grow until one realizes in retrospect that they have transformed the world and totally displaced the conventional wisdom. Examples from the past include the ARPANET/Internet and the personal computer. Today we see equally important changes building upon those earlier innovations, such as web-based applications and multi-function handheld devices with pervasive wireless connectivity.
In order to maximize both the effectiveness of its knowledge-workers and institutional synergy, the UW needs to focus attention on what new technologies can enhance the mission of the institution, and what new cultural and marketplace realities will drive the IT landscape for the next decade.
The UW IT Strategy Initiative (ITSI) is an attempt to do just that. This initiative is being coordinated by the Office of the Vice President for Computing & Communications, at the direction of the Chair of the University Technology Advisory Committee (UTAC), and the Vice President for C&C. However, it recognizes that IT planning for the UW is going on constantly in multiple venues and at multiple levels. Principal co-conspirators in this activity include the Office of Information Management, the Technology Advisory Committees, and the campus Computing Directors group.
Ideally an IT strategy, or strategic plan, will encompass both HOW the IT service-providing organizations should operate, (especially, how they should engage customers to ensure business needs are being met), and WHAT product/service and architectural directions make sense for the enterprise at any point in time. Both are essential ingredients.
The UW IT Strategy Initiative provides a framework for discussing the UW's overall IT needs from the perspective of three principal business drivers: research, teaching, and health care. The framework created as part of this initiative is intended to shed light on both the processes and stake-holders involved in defining a university-wide IT strategy as a continuous improvement activity, rather than a once-or-twice-per-decade isolated event. The overall IT Strategy Initiative is expected to spawn both one-off and recurring conversations about HOW future IT needs get defined, yield some specific recommendations about WHAT Information Technology products and services the UW will need in order to be successful in the coming years, and also identify mechanisms whereby those recommendations, reflecting a wide diversity of campus needs, can be created and addressed on an ongoing basis.
The UW does not currently have a coherent process for continually assessing how to adapt IT services to the mission and goals of this University as both the technology options and problem space evolve. The ITSI is intended to address this need, and has the following objectives.
FIRST: to define a framework that shows the relationship of various UW IT areas and planning activities from an organizational and business driver perspective. This framework establishes a taxonomy and vocabulary of IT services and policy activities which will facilitate interaction between groups, reduce confusion, and foster more effective and efficient results. The Office of Information Management (OIM), Computing & Communications (C&C), UW Medicine IT Services, and the campus Computing Directors are all engaged in IT planning efforts, and the ITSI framework should be useful in coordinating these various activities.
SECOND: to coordinate and encourage a series of engagements (some with specific timelines and deliverables, others as continuing conversations) that will help strengthen the abililty of IT to support the UW's business, drive synergy and productivity gains, and foster innovation and collaboration. Engagements may include Task Forces focused on a particular problem, advisory groups for existing services, or Special Interest Groups (SIGs) to facilitate ongoing discussions on a variety of topics.
THIRD: through these engagements, to achieve the following specific goals:
begins with a framework on how ideas for improving technology at the University of Washington can be shared and communicated in a way that allows the University to hear and take action against those technology needs.
Principal outcomes for this initiative are the existence of multiple ongoing strategy conversations (SIGs, Task Forces, etc) and one or more sets of recommendations for the UTAC, in addition to the normal proposal processes leading to approval by the I-MAC, A-TAC, and state Information Services Board.
Early initative deliverables include:
Success indicators would be that, by Summer of 2008, UW has:
The scope of this initiative is UW-wide; specifically intended to help coordinate, and sometimes initiate, multiple IT planning activities across the university.
In Scope:
Out of Scope:
Four phases are envisioned, with the following target completion dates:
For additional detail, see the Project Plan phases page.
The first diagram, "IT Strategy Framework" provides a top-level taxonomy for ITSI activites. The top part divides the universe of technology solutions into five application areas, plus supporting infrastructure:
The first two application areas reflect the primary business drivers of UW (academic research & teaching, plus healthcare), followed by "universal" personal productivity and collaboration tools, and then core services for media access and administrative business functions. In addition to general business support functions such as payroll, billing, the core administrative applications can be discipline-specific, e.g. the student system or Course Management Systems, in contrast to discipline-specific applications in the first two categories (research and teaching), which might be developed or customized by and for individual faculty or staff. Media Access includes core services to distribute and provide access to digital media, including radio/TV broadcasting and streaming/archiving content services.
Infrastructure includes information technologies which support multiple applications or services. This category includes networking & fundamental communications capabilities, middleware (e.g. access control and identity management services), datacenter facilities, storage, database, and server facilities, etc.
Below the technology solutions taxonomy are a set of topics or issues that shape the IT environment. Some of them represent general business drivers and policy constraints, such as compliance, security, business continuity, and finance; others impact the quality of IT deployment at UW, such as coordination/communication, community building, and user services. While all of these could be addressed within the scope of a particular application area, there is synergy in treating them wholistically, across the entire spectrum of IT tools and applications.
The purpose of this diagram is to show how different categories of IT relate to one another, and how parallel planning efforts, based on organizational structure or constituencies, also relate to one another. For example, UW Medicine IT Services focus on planning for healthcare clinical systems; the Office of Information Management concentrates on the "Administrative Systems & Information Management" area; C&C planning emphasizes infrastructure, media access & distribution,and personal productivity/group collaboration tools.
A variation on this diagram, customized for a UW Regents meeting, may be found on page 2 of the following document:
http://www.washington.edu/regents/meetings/meetings07/sept/items/fin/f-11.pdf
These two diagrams highlight the stakeholders and constituencies which influence the UW IT Strategy. The centerpiece of both diagrams are the crucial deliverables of:
The first diagram is a conventional view of stakeholders and influence paths. The second diagram emphasizes the concept of community leadership, with primary university organizational units around the top, and the major supporting IT organizations around the bottom, all interacting and engaging to shape the strategy set.
Key point: the campus engagements (e.g. SIGs, Task Forces, Study Groups, Advisory Groups) are the cornerstone of the strategy for shaping The Strategy.
Thus, the two centerpieces of the Strategy Initiative are the Engagements, which are expected to be a long-lasting and positive legacy, and actual "Strategies" --which might be "living documents" or collection of recommendations, rather than a static tome distinguished only by its ability to collect dust on a bookshelf.
Outside factors must also be included, such as virtual organizations and external forces such as compliance (legislatively mandated), marketplace, etc.
THIS IS A VERY PRELIMINARY STRAWMAN on how the IT Strategy Framework might map into C&C (and other) service lines and service line families. More discussion needed!!
Types of engagements:
Here is a list of possible (as well as some ongoing or completed) engagements that might relate, organized according to the ITSI Framework taxonomy:
https://wiki.cac.washington.edu/display/ITSI/Possible+ITSI+Engagement+Topics
A more detailed spreadsheet is here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pV0RLsxoR_cgWJN3oRFU1Pw
The lists above have been superseded by the new Computing Directors SIG
initiative. For details see:
http://sigsig.washington.edu/
See the Related Activities page.
