Change only works when everyone is in it together and that is what was empathized by speakers, Paul Hixson from the Office of the CIO and Greg Gulick of CITES, from the ITPF presentation, Developing a Campus IT Strategic Plan. An IT Strategic Plan has been called for by the Office of the Provost this year. Currently, the plan is in the creation and drafting process. The final draft will be refined during spring semester until Provost Adesida’s deadline for it in May 2013. As part of the creation and drafting process, a wiki site has been created to encourage community investment. Here is the link: https://wiki.cites.uiuc.edu/wiki/display/CampusITStratPlan/Home.The main goal of these means, according to Hiszon and Guilick, is to continue on the land grant tradition; Bring the university to the people to create an inclusive, non hierarchical environment.
A successful IT strategic plan according to Hixson and Gulick is supposed to do many things to better Illinois’s reputation as an education institution and a technologically forward-thinking one, too. This involves creating an academic reputation largely credited to technology. Technology will be focused on connecting both current and past campus populations and enhancing the university learning experience. More specifically, the plan’s current goals involve increasing mobile technology services, encouraging digital literacy, engaging the IT campus community, sharing more services across campus, and engaging external resource partners such as UC2B and Blackboard Collaborate. The end result after this drafting process should be rather detailed and affect everyone on UIUC’s campus.
GSLIS, as a college with an involved and varied IT staff, has either already been working on some of these goals that the IT strategy plan currently wishes to execute or they are in the process of establishing them. With the exception of engaging external resource partners to the extent the university would like to do so, these priorities are GSLIS priorities. It would be very interesting to see what other IT teams at other colleges and offices are doing already. Since it would be assumed that the campus would become more officially streamlined in technology support and services, it would make sense to have a clear understanding of what is already there in different parts of campus and attempting to see the similarities and differences. GSLIS has a lot to offer, but it is always good to ask if it is enough.
