Arts and Science: Shared Service Model

Dear gfautin, thank you for your question. My apologies for the delayed reply, as I was out of the office from the last town hall to yesterday. Your question is a very good one. TIG recommended that IT core services be ‘common good’ and not for fee. As the task force looks at all of the options, the funding model going forward is a key component of the new strategy. Small departments are just as important as the big ones, and I do not think the current plan involves disadvantaging the small departments or having anyone worry about having to ‘buy in’. Thank you for your input!

Grace,
I believe there are a couple of thoughts that could help address the needs of small or under served areas of campus access technical services. As Elaine wrote, the main goal is to no longer charge areas for core services and to provide consistent, high quality services equally across all of main campus. Areas that do not currently have existing technical staff to act as an ITO will likely partner and coordinate with areas that do have an ITO and coordinate efforts with that technical group. An example of this in action currently is the Honors College which Arts and Sciences is also providing technical support for and will likely represent with an ITO as well. These will need to be discussion that we continue to have with Dean’s, Directors, and Unit Administrators in order to best understand how to serve and represent their needs.

As we continue to collaborate with each other and move towards more efficient services it should begin to afford some of the existing technical units the ability to work more closely with under represented and smaller units, and hopefully getting everyone up to the same level of consistent service.

What a great start to our discussion forum!  Grace, thank you so much for being the pioneer to start the dialogue with this important topic. Elaine and Walter have done a nice job articulating the approach, and I will try to expand.

We used college, school and VP level administrative unit as the foundation for our ITO model, with the full acknowledgement that this will evolve as we learn more about IT service delivery across campus. Walter is spot on that there are some units, even at this high level, who do not have ANY designated technology professionals, and additional grouping is required.  As we do this it will be very important that we ensure that the ITO is able to develop a strong relationship with these additional units so the ITO can properly understand the area and represent their technology needs.

It is also worth noting that there are other areas on campus that are at a level underneath college, school and VP unit that may have such a significant level of IT staffing and technology needs to warrant having some ITO’s at a lower level, such as department or center.  We will seek to identify these possibilities as we continue to have discussions around campus.

In collaboration with the ITO’s, we will look to identify effective service delivery practices that are in place throughout campus, leverage the best of the best by working with the people delivering the services, and incorporate the combined knowledge into developing a more efficient way to benefit all with efficient and value adding improvements.