University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Executive Summary

In March, 2005, the Information Technology Strategic Transformation Committee (ITSTC), constituted with broad membership from the University academic and administrative areas, was charged to better understand the current IT environment on campus and to design governance, service, and funding models for IT at UB.  Important objectives included finding ways to improve services, reduce costs, and better align IT investments to support academic excellence in research and instruction. The ITSTC collected data about IT at UB, gathered faculty, student and staff input about IT services and IT needs, interviewed IT executives at other institutions, and studied the leading practices of successful IT organizations.

IT will play a principal role in supporting the UB2020 agenda for change, by enabling the campus to become more competitive for large grants, creating an environment where interdisciplinary and inter-institutional collaborations can flourish, providing infrastructure for increasingly data-intensive disciplines and research, and enabling faculty to challenge students with new and innovative learning experiences.  The ITSTC understands that IT is not simply a resource to be “managed.”  Appropriately invested in and directed, IT is a strategic asset to be leveraged for broad and comprehensive change and strategic institutional advancement.

It is possible to achieve an appropriate balance among the many competing forces that influence IT services.  This balance is critical to our success in creating a seamless community of IT professionals regardless of reporting relationships, organizational associations, and funding schema.  Balancing innovation with stability, standardization with uniqueness and experimentation, and accessibility with security/privacy will help to ensure high levels of value for IT customers and maximum return on campus IT investments.

The ITSTC’s vision for IT is that it should be an integral part of UB’s effort to enable the creation, dissemination, and application of knowledge through exceptional technology. To actualize this vision, the committee has developed a strategic plan that includes four strategies, encompassing ten initiatives:

1. Establish an institutional process for effective IT decision making and funding
   1. Implement the proposed governance process recommended by the ITSTC
2. Build a Robust and Adaptable Technology Foundation
   2. Replace legacy administrative systems and consolidate enterprise application development
   3. Consolidate servers and services
   4. Improve workstation services
3. Enhance IT Support for Innovation in Instruction and Research: Core Business
   5. Coordinate and expand research computing support, including infrastructure and support staff
   6. Enhance innovation in instructional computing support
4. Optimize IT Management
   7. Create a hybrid model for providing seamless user support
   8. Manage the IT service portfolio and implement an assessment process
   9. Implement an enterprise-wide security strategy
   10. Build a Human Resources portfolio for IT staff

Fully executed, these strategies will generate efficiencies in utility services, allowing for greater investment in core research and academic IT infrastructure and support.  The strategic plan also creates an effective system for governance and decision making that builds support across the various constituencies and develops a collaborative model for service.  The UB IT community will become a more nimble and flexible organization that can quickly adapt to changing needs.

UB has an opportunity to think differently about the delivery of IT services.  The ITSTC identified the following items from the data collection as presenting significant opportunities for change:

• UB maintains 75 phone systems at a cost of $3.8M per year
• UB spends $11M per year (162.5 FTE ) to support administrative applications
• UB maintains 24 separate email systems
• UB maintains 773 servers
• UB offers minimal IT support for helping faculty write the technical sections of grants
• UB offers inadequate support for instruction and research
• UB pays insufficient attention to data backup and cyber security

Addressing several of these opportunities may enable UB to realize financial savings and achieve critical capacity gains that can be redirected to the support of the core academic mission.

The ITSTC has specified a multi-year plan for change to ensure that improvements to IT services and systems are in fact strategic and less subject to reactive decision-making.  Most decisions regarding IT policy, services, or systems have the potential for a cascading impact on other policies, services, and costs, and a propensity to affect different constituencies in different ways. Therefore the ITSTC wanted to ensure that the immediate changes recommended were rationalized within a larger plan rather than approached in an ad hoc manner.  There will be an inevitable need to adjust and improve the strategic plan beyond the second year.  For that reason the committee’s most detailed recommendations are for the first year of the plan; these first year projects are summarized in Table 1.  These recommendations are designed to build trust within the IT community, create capacity while reducing cost, enhance security, and improve delivery of services.

Projects after the first year will need to be examined in light of the first twelve months of work, new developments in technologies and needs, and refined priorities of the campus leadership. Thus at the beginning of year two, an examination of the return on investment and the value of the year one initiatives must be conducted. As capacity is freed, these resources should be redeployed to support research and instruction. That is, the business case for new investments must be made again at that time.

The ITSTC’s recommended approach to implementation calls for the use of cross-functional teams from across campus to participate in the initiatives.  This approach is advocated as much for its attempt to bring the correct perspectives together from across campus, creating a balanced approach, as for its attempt to engage a capacity sufficient to accomplish the specified objectives in a 12-month period.

For each of the first year initiatives, the ITSTC expects to rationalize spending requests within fully documented business cases that specify the expected return on investment.  In many cases, the bulk of the work required to produce these business cases and justifications has been completed as a part of the ITSTC’s initial planning phase.

Initiative	How we will do it
Implement the proposed governance process	Implement the governance structure Develop and recommend a set of minimal IT  standards Institute a revised IT funding model Align IT priorities with the institution’s mission, goals, and agenda for change Develop a program to better identify the needed strategic technology efforts Adopt/endorse the IT Bill of Rights
Replace legacy administrative systems and consolidate support	Replace HR/financial administrative systems Consolidate organization of enterprise administrative application development
Consolidate servers and services	Consolidate phone systems Implement an enterprise print management system Consolidate e-mail Consolidate server rooms Consolidate servers Enhance institutional network file space
Upgrade workstation services	Standardize workstation hardware, software, and images Implement a common refresh cycle Expand software site licensing activity
Coordinate and expand IT research computing support	Invest and participate in key areas of network technology (e.g., GENI and National Lambda Rail) Implement large data repositories infrastructure
Enhance instructional computing support	Standardize basic classroom technology, add IT classrooms, implement a refresh cycle for classroom equipment Create a forum to enhance the sharing of innovation in teaching
Create a hybrid model for user support	Re-engineer the current Help Desk
Manage the IT Service Portfolio	Build a service and customer satisfaction assessment process
Implement an enterprise-wide security strategy	Appoint an institutional Information Security Officer and establish a campus Security Office Develop an IT security program Improve data security and data backup Implement a security infrastructure
Invest in the development of IT staff	Create an IT professional training program and promotional plan Create consistent IT position description, compensation system, and career path

TABLE 1  Key First Year Initiatives

To begin implementing the recommendations, the ITSTC recommends that the University:

1. Secure endorsement from the Executive Committee for the proposed initiatives;
2. Charge the CIO with implementing the recommendations approved by the Executive Committee
3. Identify costs, resource requirements, return on investment for the various initiatives
4. Present the business case (value proposition) for projects requiring start-up funding
5. Communicate the recommendations to the campus at large
6. Identify and charge the various teams, individuals and committees to implement the approved projects
7. Set priorities and manage the implementation
8. Provide periodic progress reports to senior leadership and the University community

The report that follows this summary represents the work of numerous individuals who are deeply committed to the success of this project and to meeting UB’s IT challenges.  The information submitted by each of the ITSTC’s principal sub-committees is presented to the UB 2020 Executive Committee in its unedited form and is the original work of each sub-committee.

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