As we look ahead to the expanding ways technology will enhance and provide critical value to the strategic mission of the University of Vermont (UVM), we must ensure there is a solid foundation to build upon. A solid foundation for how ETS provides services, partners through governance, manages resources, and engages in policy and decision-making is important to support innovation and new opportunity. A commitment to foundations is a chance to commit to addressing gaps and ensuring best practices are met.  

1. Align as a one-ETS team. A focus on enhancing internal-to-ETS forms of community and collaboration including but not limited to: 

2. Expand frequency of all ETS engagements through town halls, newsletters, and more 

3. Ensure meeting structures, best practices, team norms are in place for enhanced community engagement and clarity of work efforts 

4. Ensure community building is organized across all ETS and thoughtful to both in-person and remote experiences for our distributed employees  

5. Implement Inclusive Excellence objectives where appropriate  

6. Invest in a ticketing and/or IT Service Management solution that ensures a strategic approach to designing, delivering, managing, and improving IT services to focus on customer satisfaction and aligning IT with business goals. Development of both an internal and external service catalog to align service level expectations and service level alignment with university priorities and needs. Ensure clear escalation workflows and continue to enhance the current comprehensive knowledge base. 

7. Review IT-relevant policies and procedures to ensure they are updated and current. 

8. Development of a comprehensive ETS communication plan to ensure emergencies, planned, and other forms of communications are in place and understood across the UVM community.  

9. Initiate a comprehensive approach to budget and resource management where all leadership is engaged in current resources and prioritization of those resources in alignment with the ETS and university strategic plans. Identify further opportunities to align our budgeting efforts to leverage our purchasing power.  

10. Organize an inventory initiative to ensure full understanding of all user-level hardware and core central technology infrastructure across the university and development of a budgeting and resource plan to address deferred maintenance where possible and ensure a proactive approach to lifecycle management.  

11. Support a review of the university’s IT purchasing and procurement processes with recommendations for process changes that best leverage our purchasing power, address security risks, ensure integration with other systems, and improve time to service. 

12. Establish a more intentional partnership with the UVM Bookstore to ensure technology purchasing services align with university needs.  

13. Invest in project management as a best practice, implement structures, timelines, and better processes for resource allocation. This will consider the need for both an investment in professional development and resources as appropriate.  

14. Work within ETS and with key partners to improve intake processes for service requests, projects, and new work. 

15. Implement a monthly scorecard that provides metrics, reporting and data on service themes across ETS and identifies opportunities for improved services or training and development activity.  

16. Continue to invest in our student employees and expand opportunities where appropriate.  

17. Provide more targeted and intentional professional development for our staff to support talent development and succession planning. 

18. Invest in customer service training and pillars of ITIL training to enhance our partnership across the university.  

19. Ensure a commitment to practicing thoughtful change management and increasing shared accountability to our successes.

ETS is unique in that we work with and support almost every unit across the university to support serving our mission. It is critical that our work not only focus on technology, but on the data and information management, business processes and people that elevate our outcomes. Our second pillar of work is focused intentionally on improving structures and relationships.

1. Commit to ETS employee cross-team training and collaboration between ETS teams. 

2. In partnership with the colleges, re-engage in the experiences of the first phase of shared services – ensuring resources and services are met, improvements are made, and service level agreements are developed and agreed upon supporting to support shared accountability.  

3. Engage in thoughtful conversation with our academic colleges/administrative partners to set the stage for future collaboration opportunities where appropriate. 

4. Develop a comprehensive IT governance model for the university that ensures strong community partnership and effective structures for prioritized and agile decision-making. 

5. Intentionally engage with both the Student Government Association and other student groups.  

6. Intentionally seek to engage with the colleges academic governance structures to align more intentionally with the student and faculty experience.  

7. Partner with staff governance groups such as staff council.  

8. Prioritize a regular cadence for the CIO and other executive leaders to ensure projects and priorities are aligned.  

9. Establish a quarterly communication/newsletter to better communicate with the broader UVM community. 

10. Partner with other units on training and educational opportunities, supporting a culture of continuous learning and innovative conversations.  

11. Consider the development of an IT liaison program or similar structures to provide advisement on technology and information management and business process solutions.  

While we invest in our first pillar of foundations, we must concurrently lead conversations around strategic and digital transformation. With the rapid pace of technology change, ETS will seek to be a bridge between solutions and ideas. ETS will work to position itself as a key leader on several timely projects that will establish a strong enterprise strategy for the university and help accelerate and advance its ability to modernize.  

1. In partnership with other key executive sponsors, including OIRA, establish year one deliverables around data governance, connecting outcomes and objectives to a strong data governance framework. Efforts include establishing a data governance committee, documenting a data dictionary, reviewing policies and standards, and assessing an infrastructure strategy to support strategic levels of reporting.  

2. Engage all major units in a system mapping exercise to document critical systems that support the business of the university and understand gaps in support, data flows, and more. The mapping exercise will serve as a foundation for understanding a currently disparate and disconnected enterprise strategy and set the foundation for a long-term enterprise plan.  

3. Engage in Enterprise Resource Planning readiness, particularly for HR, Finance and Student Systems. Support efforts around information management and business process solutions and support the modernization of technology solutions that support a more digitally oriented student body, both in-person, online, and abroad. 

4. Partner on training and development efforts in data virtualization tools that empower intersectional strategic reporting and business intelligence – consider a proof of concept. 

5. Resource and support critical upgrades in core enterprise systems including our current SSB8 to SSB9 migration. 

6. Engage in partnerships to support ongoing assessment, training, and educational opportunities for our Brightspace learning management system to improve our faculty and student experiences.  

7. Co-lead a university-wide AI taskforce plan with specific deliverables and objectives grounded in a comprehensive readiness plan. Consider development of a student AI working group.

With UVM’s impressive transition to an R1 university, it is critical we invest in and secure a technology infrastructure that elevates and supports our aligned work. ETS seeks to support and secure a comprehensive research enterprise and considers expanded partnerships to grow and sustain.  

1. Development of an IT security plan that addresses immediate needs, manages risk and response, presents solutions for ongoing audit response and compliance. 

2. Collaborate on solutions to sustain current research computing infrastructure and develop a plan to engage in partnered conversations for scalability and collaborative innovation.  

3. Engage in research data security strategy planning.  

4. Ongoing investment and commitment to the building of secure enclaves and computing environments to protect sensitive and critical data and processes. Deployment of new high performance computing infrastructure to support researchers, including a new large-scale GPU cluster for artificial intelligence and other highly parallel computation. 

5. Address deferred maintenance in our wired/wireless infrastructure, revisit our long-term telephony services strategy, establish a structure for ongoing and enhanced investment to support our enterprise.  

6. Build relationships with other technology leaders around our state (and beyond).