Vision and Strategic Plan - University Technology Services

Our Vision

University Technology Services is committed to deliver innovative, reliable, secure, trusted, and cost effective solutions. We provide expert counsel and opportunities for partnership to inspire education, encourage research, and enhance outreach in support of student, faculty, and staff success.

Our vision and aspirations include:

Network communications will not be an obstacle to teaching, learning, research, and community engagement.
Data and file storage will meet demand and will be suited to purpose.
The procurement, purchase, and implementation of information technology solutions will support the mission of the university, meet high standards of trustworthiness, and meet community expectations for timeliness.
University Technology Services team members will do their best to help others achieve their goals.

Our Mission

University Technology Services will achieve the Vision by:

Supporting Oakland University values, goals, strategic initiatives, policies, and procedures, and demonstrating a strong awareness of the community.
Creating and maintaining partnerships and seeking input from advisory groups through an inclusive Governance structure.
Planning and providing state-of-the-art, high-performance networks, systems, and applications that are constantly evolving to next-generation solutions and enable data access as a resource.
Providing a reliable "always on" environment by planning and carefully managing changes.
Providing expertise in the development, requirements evaluation, selection, adoption, and use of information technology resources, systems, architectures, and standards.
Building and maintaining technical architectures and environments that emphasize innovation, mobility, agility, technical currency, accessibility, best practices, scalability, and adequate capacity.
Maintaining a trustworthy environment by emphasizing security, recovery, availability, reliability, and risk management.
Seeking efficiency and sound financial stewardship through consolidation, right-sourcing, and life-cycle planning.
Maintaining a technically skilled, trustworthy, client-focused, communicative, enthusiastic, flexible, and diverse information technology organization and culture that provides professional fulfillment, professional development, and growth for its employees and opportunities for student employees.

July 2020

Strategic Directions

The Strategic Plan for Information Technology at Oakland University for the period July 1, 2019 – June 30, 2022:

Provide robust learning and advising technology solutions that foster student success.
Facilitate and advance the cyberinfrastructure needed to support research activities.
Support university initiatives for community engagement, especially the capital campaign.
Provide a high-performance, robust, and pervasive communications network.
Create, integrate, and implement enterprise solutions that support efficient and effective University operations and services.
Establish an acceptable level of security, risk management, identity management, and compliance that protects university information technology assets.
Manage the data center, IT facilities, cloud engagements, and operational environments with efficiency and effectiveness.
Support operational excellence through the governance, organization, and communications activities of University Technology Services.

Our full detailed Strategic Plan for Information Technology at Oakland University is available by emailing [email protected].

Change Drivers

Several factors are changing how we work and how we approach information technology. Our planning and work effort for information technology must consider change drivers:

Digital Disruption: Seeking and supporting opportunities to introduce significant efficiencies and innovation through technology advances, effectively responding to market and industry pressure for change.
Cloud computing: Choosing storage, computing, and applications in the cloud when it makes functional, financial, and security sense, following a "cloud appropriate" strategy. Cloud solutions that include subject matter expertise gain traction more quickly.
Compliance mandates: Government and regulatory agency compliance, particularly for tracking student success, data security, and data privacy initiatives, are significant drivers. Security in all technology areas is critical.
Analytics: To respond to increasing pressure to demonstrate results, in education and all endeavors, we need to understand our environments through data analysis. We need to use university data to inform our decisions and to forecast our future.
Mobility: Students, faculty, staff, devices, software, and data are all in motion, in different orbits, using services and providing connections that add value in a mobile moment.
Research cyberinfrastructure: Supporting the mission to increase the university’s research profile by implementing or enabling high performance, storage capacity, processing, and research networking capabilities.
Scalability: Scalability is an important driver affecting many areas of planning, including storage capacity for big data, research data, and video.
Relationships: Students, faculty, staff, alumni, and constituents expects technology solutions that support relationships and communications.
Software proliferation and disaggregation: Increasing software variety leading to an explosion of software purchases in a variety of flavors, including on-premise install, subscription-based service, and apps. License choices vary, including open source and subscription models. Solutions (ERP, LMS, etc.) that were once consolidated or restricted to a single platform are increasingly diversified.
Agile development: Software solution providers are moving to agile development methodologies, resulting in rapid software change. Rather than processing a single major software upgrade in a year, software upgrades are being released in small packages on a much more frequent schedule. More work is now needed to handle the rapid pace and not fall behind in software releases.
Device proliferation: A high volume of devices and sensors are presented in the Internet of Things, joining standard computers, cell phones, and any device that is handy in requiring a network connection.
Network architecture changes: IPv6 transitions will require pervasive technical change.
High density wireless networks: High-density enterprise, administrative, and business quality wireless networks are required as the first-choice network. Wired networks for client access are second-choice.
Software Defined Data Center: Software defined data center strategies are changing the landscape of traditional installed servers.
Legacy systems: Removing aging systems is becoming increasingly difficult; we find that we are adding and overlaying functions without clear exit pathways.
Greater skill diversity: The solution variety translates to skill variety. Older technical skills and new technical skills are needed to maintain a complex environment. Contract and vendor management with a strong understanding of the underlying technology is needed.