History

Consultation and findings

Consultations for the plan began in early fall 2016, with the plan being released in the summer of 2017. A 3-year horizon was selected for alignment purposes and as a reasonable planning threshold. During that period, 40 individual meetings were held with various stakeholders, as well as an internal survey and several workshops. Many in the campus community played a direct role in the development of the plan, or had the opportunity to review early drafts and provide feedback. Questions posed to IST staff and community covered topics related to strengths and weaknesses, external influences, our customers, various services or functions and how to measure success.

Feedback revealed a great deal of consistency between IST staff and the community when it came to our strengths and weaknesses. IST’s brand is reflected in its enterprise-wide perspective, strong foundational services, availability to clients and concern and support for campus in specific areas such as security. Examples of specific strengths included improved alerts and notifications, networks, depth of expertise in areas such as project management and security, classroom problem support and successful large system implementations. Specific concerns were noted in areas such as speed and agility, not leveraging tools already acquired, visibility with licensing decisions, and cost of some services. Opportunities identified included the development of a cloud strategy, additional focus on security and privacy of data, more formal vendor and contract management, leveraging metrics, continuous improvement processes and planning for the loss of expertise through retirement and other changes.

Influencing factors and main themes

Factors that might influence direction included the rapid evolution of cloud offerings and resulting changes, the new university budget model and increasing obligations related to compliance or other legislation. Overall, input coalesced around needs in 5 main themes, including:

Challenges with governance, broadly defined, were also frequently cited. Some of the related aspects included the organic growth of applications, strategic alignment, the effectiveness of committees and where IST or local IT groups and staff might best contribute. Participants also highlighted a number of potential conflicts to navigate, including the need for standards but desire for innovation and new tools, being agile and responsive but managing risk and large services or systems, and specific local timelines versus the desire for a more managed enterprise portfolio approach for everyone.    

The work

Work was organized into several key areas for action that organized the projects or other work needed to achieve our goals and overall strategy. Each area was guided by one or more sponsors, with leads for individual initiatives. A number of successful projects were completed, including:

Strategic plans provide important guidance and focus on specific areas for attention. A key aspect, however, is their ability to adapt and accommodate changing and unexpected needs during their duration; this is particularly important in efforts spanning many years. In the case of governance, preliminary work was done in looking at the structure and role of various committees and IST’s role on them, a compilation of policies and related guidelines or procedures and an early look at an IT risk framework. This work was incorporated into the IT Review and its initial discovery and fact-finding. Other items, such as a new prioritization process for initiatives, was paused due to new processes related to the campus budget model and funding changes from the provincial government in 2019.

Changing times

With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic in the final year of the plan, work in our various action areas and indeed IST operations overall shifted to that necessary to support the campus through this difficult period. While not specifically included as projects within the plan itself, IST was able to respond and move forward on a number of initiatives to support students, faculty, staff and campus partners as we jointly navigated the pandemic. All of these reflected some of the key aspirations found in the plan such as working better together and in maintaining the best possible user experience to support learning activities in a very challenging time.

While a complete list would be extensive, we would be remiss in not mentioning some of the many efforts undertaken by all of the groups in IST in support of pandemic-related activities, including:

Moving forward

In 2019, the campus embarked on a review of our overall IT capability. The final report from its Steering Committee is now with the Provost and CIO for review and consideration of next steps. The information collected from that exercise, in addition to the lessons learned and advances made as a result of this plan, specific initiatives arising from the University’s 2020-2025 Strategic Plan, lessons from the pandemic and other campus needs will provide important guidance and feedback for our next planning cycle.

The IST Exec team would like to thank all of those who contributed to the development of the plan, those who led or contributed to the various projects and ultimately worked to help IST provide better service to the campus.