Office of Learning and Information Technology

 

 

University of  Wisconsin-La Crosse

ITS  2013-2014 Work Plan

Goal 1: Support for Faculty and Learners

Bring additional capabilities and modes to the learning experience of students by enhancing the digital learning tools available to students and faculty. Integrate desktop conferencing technology into the Course Management System, allowing for virtual office hours, easier access to guest speakers at distant locations around the world, and ad hoc videoconferencing services. Introduce mobile device and tablet support to core academic services.

Goal 2: Learning and Teaching Spaces

Improve student learning experiences with more flexible classroom designs that accommodate a variety of learning and teaching styles in addition to expanding student interaction without borders. Similar services for conference room designs, residence hall study spaces, informal drop-in collaboration rooms, other library spaces, and specialized training labs.

 

Goal 3: Unified Service Center

Integrate the various University technology service points to facilitate a stable, robust, efficient, and customer-focused support environment, including convenient Web-based assistance and performance metrics for all information technology services and systems. This provides a single point of contact for technology-related support that can be leveraged to optimize the support experience, improving response time and communication.

Goal 4: Mobile Applications

Develop a mobile architecture that provides access to University information and communities, thereby enhancing the student experience, strengthening the campus community, facilitating faculty communication, improving alumni engagement, and increasing employee efficiencies. Support development of mobile applications that allow users of smartphones (such as the iPhone, and Android) and users of tablet devices (such as the iPad ) to access enterprise applications.

 

Goal 5: Virtual Desktops

Establish an institutional model and a centrally provisioned virtual desktop environment to improve data security reduce energy consumption, maximize the efficiency of desktop support efforts, and reduce overall costs.

Goal 6: Business Intelligence

Continue to develop effective, intuitive, accurate, and easy-to-use business intelligence solutions that allow quicker adoption, self-service, and pervasive use of business intelligence for reporting, analysis, monitoring, and informed decision making at all levels of the institution. Enable all enterprise systems to standardize reporting on the enterprise

Goal 7: Lifecycle Funding for University-wide Systems and the Technology Infrastructure

Develop a financial model that anticipates the cost of enterprise system upgrades, new functionality demands, and technology infrastructure enhancements, that provides appropriate multi-year budget planning throughout the technology lifecycle.

Goal 8: Improve Information Security posture on campus

Enhance network assessment processes with invasive testing, automated assessment of local environments, forensic services, and associated reporting as agreed to by schools and departments, Develop additional policies and standards, continue training and education, and recommend improvements for increased university network and data protection, develop applications to aid in identifying and reacting to critical conditions (e.g., cyber-attacks, malicious traffic, policy violations, etc.), deploy Network Access Control technology to ensure computers are operating securely in compliance with the university policies before network connectivity and interoperability is allowed and develop policies and process improvements to ensure that sensitive research data is processed and stored under appropriate access controls in compliance with program and regulatory requirements. This includes policies on information storage and accompanying measures to better control physical and logical access to university data centers and the network infrastructure

 

 GOAL 9: A single, ubiquitous, telecommunications enterprise to provide voice, video, and data.

Increase the university network capacity to support the growing demand for multimedia applications, video distribution, video-conferencing, and administrative operations, Maintain the service capacity of the network, increase its reliability, and plan for the growth of voice, data, and video and develop and implement a digital video distribution system over the campus

network.

 

Goal 10:  Build and retain a strong University ITS team.

Mentor new ITS staff, cross-train ITS staff, implement a professional development plan for ITS  staff and recruit, and retrain qualified staff.