1
Office of the Chief Information Officer (CIO)
University of Guelph
Integrated Plan 2012/13 - 2016/17
February 8, 2012Submitted by: Catherine Steeves, CIO & Chief Librarian (Acting)
Introduction:
The initial integrated plan from the Office of the CIO established the metaphorical objective of creating the “iCampus.” The goal was to enable an information rich environment that enhanced and supported the research, teaching, learning, and administrative roles of the University. During the period of this integrated plan the Office lead significant advances in IT security and IT governance, organizational renewal efforts in the Library and CCS, extensive software-as-a-service (SaaS) implementations, enhanced linkages between the Library and CCS, and a renewed focus on enterprise solutions for a variety of requirements. The success of Managed Desktops and Web Solutions (two key services through CCS) illustrate the manner in which CCS can transform IT support and the value received from IT
innovation. The transformation of the Library through creating a new team-based organization, the continued impact of learning services, and the extension of digital resources and new capacities like the Science Commons, demonstrate its centrality to the academic mission.
This second Integrated Plan of the Office of the CIO continues to be shaped and guided by three key themes included in the first CIO plan:
1. One Community, Many Neighbourhoods – promoting shared objectives and common services through campus wide infrastructure, policies and standards while enabling the flexibility for local innovation and unique needs
2. Proactive Leadership: engaging in proactive partnerships with academic and administrative users to enhance capacity and expand capabilities
3. Client-Centred Success: measuring success by responding to the objectives of faculty, students, staff, alumni, and the friends of the University
The Integrated Plan of the Office of the CIO is in itself an integrated plan, incorporating the individual plans of the Library, Computing and Communications Services (CCS), and the Portfolio Management & Systems Assurance Office (PMO). Each unit’s plan is a separate document that will expand on many of the goals and initiatives in the Office of the CIO plan and should be considered as appendices to this plan.
Visions:
CIO: The Office of the CIO will act as a key agent of change in the University by shifting its focus to information, not just information technology, and advanced tools, services, and resources to enable business and academic transformation and the creation of knowledge.
2 CCS: To be technology and knowledge solution leaders, partnering with University communities,
enabling excellence in teaching, learning and research.
Library: To be central to the University community as a valued facilitator, partner, and catalyst for learning, research, and knowledge creation on campus.
Summary of the Five Major Strategic Priorities:
PeopleWe will enhance our ability to engage and enable our community by cultivating a culture of learner and client centeredness in our organizations. We will capitalize on the strengths of our people, our teams, and our organization through a strong commitment to professional development and by fostering leadership capacity throughout our organization.
Information
We will create an information technology strategy that emphasizes “information” and highlights how technology enhances access to information, defined broadly to include information resources, digital media, and research and business data.
Infrastructure
We will maintain a robust, adaptable and scalable infrastructure to meet the University’s current, emerging, and future technology and information resources needs.
Partnerships
We will foster, strengthen and grow collaborative partnerships over the next five years to deliver creative and effective programs, services and systems.
Space
We will transform the Library space to meet current and future student, faculty, and researcher needs.
The Office of the CIO Integrated Plan will communicate the high level efforts to deliver on these strategic areas over the next 5 years.
Process of Engagement and Consultation:
The Office of the CIO and PMO Plans were compiled through consultation with staff across the three units and the CIO Executive. The White Paper, which was developed with the CIO Executive and championed by Mike Ridley, has been discussed broadly across CCS and the Library and helped to inform the integrated planning effort in these units. The White Paper was also distributed to VPAC and the Board of Governors for discussion, where there was a high level of engagement and constructive debate.
The CCS Strategic Planning Committee, made up of a cross section of the organization’s staff members, facilitated the strategic planning process for CCS by gathering input from across the unit. The
3 needs, and to identify opportunities for future collaborative partnerships. By also examining industry trends, and considering the University’s needs and priorities as discovered through consultation and planning documents, CCS has identified a number of themes for the next five years, many of which complement or reflect the CIO’s White Paper themes.
The Library struck a Strategic Planning Committee (SPC) comprised of staff, professionals, librarians and managers to solicit input and to guide the development of the unit’s plans. The SPC consulted the whole Library staff through a Library Forum and conducted two surveys, one for students (500 responses) and one for faculty (100 responses). The SPC also comprised the writing team for the final Library integrated plan.
Strategic Priorities for 2012/13 – 2016/17
People:
We will put people at the centre of everything we do, ensuring that the success of our students, faculty, and researchers remains our primary focus. We will do this by continuing to cultivate a culture of learner and client centeredness in our organizations, where we enable our campus community to be active participants in the use, creation, and evolution of information and information technology. In order to enhance our ability to engage and enable our community effectively, we will capitalize on the strengths of our people, our teams, and our organization through a strong commitment to professional development and by fostering leadership capacity throughout our organization.
We will deliver on this strategic priority by continuing to grow our understanding of our constituents by expanding our communication channels, both inputs and outputs, through surveys, focus groups, consultations, participation in and engagement with committees. We will use direct observation and user experience design to inform our virtual and in person service development and learning
environments.
We will advance the self-sufficiency of our community through the ongoing development and delivery of self-service opportunities and online automated support and instruction efforts, allowing our
constituents to take control over their IT and information service needs.
We will create a Virtual Learning Commons to provide access to online learning services and objects at the time of need as an enhancement to our in-person programs and services designed to advance the life-long learning skills of our students.
We will continue the maturation of our organizations through ongoing internal endeavours including the development of CCS as a strengths-based organization, strengthening of the Library’s service team organizational model, and by implementing a culture of assessment across the portfolio of the CIO. Our success will be visible through our highly engaged, productive and influential internal teams, and our ability to enable engagement, productivity and self-sufficiency for our students, staff and faculty.
4 Information:
Knowledge creation, mobilization and transfer are at the heart of the mandate of the CIO and its units. Technology releases the power of information and, at the very point where information reaches the student or researcher through enquiry and discovery, new knowledge is created. By creating an information technology strategy that emphasizes “information” and highlights how technology enhances access to information, defined broadly to include information resources, digital media, and research and business data, we are able to enable the creation of new knowledge.
The information context for higher education, and indeed for all of society, is changing rapidly. Technology has radically altered the ways that information is produced, distributed, accessed, and shared, and it is far more varied and dis-aggregated than ever before. The implications of this radical change for enabling access to information are clear, and will require us to continuously develop
institutional responses to information policies and to facilitate processes for coordinating the purchase, management, security and use of information assets. Issues of financial sustainability, ensuring
alignment of information sources to the University’s needs, development of intellectual property and copyright frameworks, and careful monitoring and responding to evolving modes of scholarly
communication – all of these pertain and represent very real challenges to the CIO.
We will lead the campus information evolution by engaging our partners in the collaborative
development of appropriate learning and business analytics to improve learning outcomes and increase institutional effectiveness. The CIO is positioned well to see how data from enterprise systems can be harnessed – through integration, aggregation and analysis. We will also enable the integration and sharing of University of Guelph information through the development and implementation of efficient record and document management processes and tools.
Key examples of how we will deliver on this strategic priority include enhancing and advancing the collection, storage, preservation, and dissemination of information and data resources within the Library and enhancing our support for embedding information resources and services in learning and research environments. A redesign of the Library’s online presence from that of a gateway to an enhanced information discovery portal will further this objective. We will broaden the implementation of an enterprise Content Management System that will enhance campus administrative workflows by providing strong document management processes and capabilities, and we will develop a new information literacy service model and embark upon an exploration into media literacy.
Our success will be visible through the integrated information and data sharing and distribution processes at all levels of the organization.
Infrastructure:
Within the Office of the CIO infrastructure has dual meanings: the physical Information Technology infrastructure and the information resources infrastructure as delivered through the Library.
Attention to, and investment in, the ongoing renewal of the University’s core Information Technology infrastructure and services will ensure we maintain a robust and scalable environment to meet the University’s current, emerging, and future technology needs. We will adopt, build and integrate technologies to provide infrastructure and toolsets that empower University communities to achieve their goals. We will also participate in national efforts lead by CUCCIO and CARL to create a Canadian
5 Digital Infrastructure to provide a national infrastructure and platform for unimpeded access to
appropriate research tools, services, expertise and resources.
An enduring core mandate for the Library is the delivery of information resources and data. The ability to achieve this will depend on our collection sustainability strategies, both now and into the future, and will be adapted to the changing needs of the campus. The ability to respond to major shifts in scholarly publishing business practices and the increasingly complex ways that scholarly knowledge is created and shared will be critical to our success. Key strategies which the Library will use to ensure sustainability and predictability for our information resources budget will include: collaborative collection
development at the local, provincial and national level;continuing to use consortial purchasing models to increase content and decrease costs; and requesting modest inflationary increases to match the increased costs of scholarly content as time passes and the University’s academic and research programs evolve.
Key examples of how we will deliver on this strategic priority include upgrades to our enterprise applications systems (Colleague SIS, HR, eBusiness Suite), the introduction of new enterprise systems including an enterprise Content Management system as well as key expansions, enhancements and upgrades to various aspects of our IT infrastructure, including enhancements to support mobility and enable the development and use of mobile services and applications in teaching, learning and research. We will also enable improved and on-going responsiveness to potential disruptions and security
breaches, utilizing a centralized IT Asset/People repository.
Our success will be present through the invisible and ubiquitous IT infrastructure and the seamless provision of information resources upon which the academy will rely.
Partnerships:
As a continuation of our already successful partnerships in the teaching, learning, research and
administration areas across the campus and beyond our university, we will foster, strengthen and grow sustainable partnerships over the next five years. The Office of the CIO and its units embrace the philosophy of shared ownership in our partners’ challenges, opportunities and successes. We will use this belief to increase our successful delivery of creative and effective solutions, programs, services, and information resources and systems.
Key examples of how we will deliver on this strategic priority include engagements in curriculum
development and fostering the Learning Commons by deepening relations with COLES, the Colleges and faculty across the campus. We will also continue to work with faculty and the Office of Research to develop research support services and scholarly communication platforms which will actively support campus research projects and maximize the dissemination of the University’s research outputs and data management capacity.
We will continue to implement new IT service models, both internal and external to the institution, by fostering the Integrated IT Services Support Model with campus units through the delivery of IT services and management. Our desktop management services, our Business Analyst practice, and our strengths in IT management are all potential opportunities for building new and stronger partnerships. We will also enhance and expand our partnerships with vendors including Software as a Service and other cloud service models, and we will acquire and administer a standardized departmental tool for
6 partnership engagements. The Library will continue to rely on its many consortial partnerships (TUG, OCUL, CARL, and CRKN) to ensure sustainable, secure access to scholarly information resources and models of best practice for academic libraries.
Space:
Physical space has a significant impact on campus life and student success and in recognition of its importance and value, the Office of the CIO will support the Library over the next five years as it embarks upon a space transformation strategy which will create many more student learning spaces. The Library will continue to build on its successful and significant ability to leverage its space through strategic partnerships, such as the recent Science Commons project with CPES. We will work to ensure that Library space continues to respond and transform to meet ever-changing student and faculty needs, and to ensure continuing academic support for Guelph students through its research collections and its study and learning spaces.
Key examples of how we will deliver on this strategic priority include the creation of a Library Master Space Plan that will deliver a coherent and effective response to future student needs, including a programming and instructional space review and a collections management strategy, that will recover and repurpose collections space in order to create student learning space, while also creating space for future collections growth. The Library will also plan and implement an Integrated User Services Desk for the first floor of the Library to meet changing user service expectations, and to simplify access for students to all of our academic support services.
Our success will be visible within the Library, where students will be engaged and supported through enhanced and effective spaces that provide the learning opportunities required for their success, and which provide access to a rich array of information resources and services.
Major initiatives for 2012/2013
The following initiatives highlight the various activities that will take place in the Library, CCS and the Portfolio Management Office through the next year in order to move forward our strategic goals: The Office of the CIO will focus on developing an information strategy that leverages information
systems, data, resources and technology. The information strategy will identify academic, research and administrative information management and information technology needs, and incorporate information governance, policy, security and accessibility.
The PMO will acquire a Security Awareness Training program to be presented via the D2L Learning Management System with the initial licensing of this program targeting faculty and staff.
The CIO’s Office will implement an on-line Repository of IT Assets to capture key attributes including ownership and support, facilitate institutional risk management, security profiling, and
emergency/incident response.
The PMO will work with Financial Services and numerous departments across campus to leverage the external security review initiated in 2011, implementing remediation and compliance
7 certification for the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard.
The PMO will license and administer the Business Continuity Planning tool ‘Ready’ from the Kuali Foundation to provide a standardized tool to document key business processes and set out emergency recovery requirements.
The Library will begin collections maintenance activities to facilitate the re-purposing of space and create a Library Master Space Plan, including a Collections Management Plan, and implement the Integrated User Services Desk.
The Library will begin the development of a “Virtual Learning Commons” by piloting online writing consultation, SLG sessions, and developing learning objects and mobile service delivery models in order to increase point-of-need access for students.
The Library will enhance discoverability and collaboration within the research community by creating a research data repository, by developing a comprehensive web-accessible catalogue of research activity at the University of Guelph, and by assisting researchers with their data
management challenges including preservation and publication of research data.
CCS will continue to advance self-sufficiency tools for the campus community by creating an Online Service Catalogue that will provide a comprehensive information source for all CCS services, and by implementing a speech-enabled Auto Attendant that will directly route internal and external callers when they speak the name of a department or person.
CCS will refresh and expand its information backup and recovery service in order to provide archival storage and it will pursue partnerships with other higher education institutions to deliver this as a shared solution.
In partnership with Student Housing, CCS will pilot Wi-Fi coverage in Johnston Hall's residence rooms to assess the delivery of an enhanced wireless service for all student residencesand
the resulting recommendation will include an implementation timeline for the remaining residences.
CCS will centralize support for ImageNow, the document management solution implemented byFinancial Services and the Office of Registrarial Services to enable the adoption of the solution by other units who share a common need.
Resource Allocation
The Office of the CIO, the Library and CCS continue to assess resource needs and make internal allocations to focus on key priorities and reduce allocations to areas that are less crucial. However, increased funding is necessary to enhance services and resources, sustain core infrastructure, and respond to new challenges
8 Requests for 2012/13:
IT Infrastructure (CCS): $580K base, $205K OTO
CCS and the Office of the CIO manage the IT Infrastructure budget to make the most effective use of available funds. Our current forecast for 2011/12 indicates that we will carry forward sufficient funds to mitigate the majority of the inflationary component of these costs. The proposed IT Infrastructure budget for 2012/13 is $5,060,928. Additional funds are requested to implement a new Enterprise Content Management System ($240K base), to acquire an Academic Activity Reporting and Management System (eCV) ($65K base, $205 OTO) and to centralize the financial support for the University’s Learning Management System (D2L) ($255K).
Critical enterprise application upgrades (eBusiness Suite for Financial Services) begun last year, will continue in 2012/13 utilizing existing base funds. In addition, the campus storage and backup
infrastructure will be renewed as will the physical interfaces to the public switched telephone network. Finally, CCS will complete an initiative to upgrade the core of the campus network to 10G, thus providing increased capacity for on campus bandwidth and set the stage for future expansions.
As part of the Integrated Planning process, CCS has created an IT Infrastructure Framework Document that has been submitted to the Provost and to the Assistant Vice President (finance and integrated planning). This document focuses on a multi-year approach to the management of this infrastructure and will be updated on an annual basis. At this point in time, it is estimated that annual increases to address inflationary pressures will be approximately 2.5% per year. New technologies, solutions or campus needs may have a more substantive impact on the IT infrastructure budget, however, the Office of the CIO and CCS will work within the IP framework to proactively identify and resolve those issues as they arise.
Information Resources (Library): $232K base
Over the course of the last Integrated Planning cycle and multi-year plan the Library has gone to great lengths to re-organize itself to best serve the needs of students and faculty while balancing the fiscal realities of our limited funding. This process allowed us to evolve and invest in high priority areas which will be solidified over the next couple of years. While there are some ongoing pressures in regards to staffing, the Library is attempting to address them as we continue to evolve and will be in a better position in late 2012 to determine if there are needs that are beyond our resources. In regards to maintaining our Information Resources, the Library is proposing a 5 year sustainability model and requesting a 2% base annual increase contribution. The request for 2012/13 is $132K base and will partially address annual inflation that currently runs from 4% to 5%. The Library will use the variability in the IR budget (currency fluctuations, consortia purchases, prepayments) to mitigate the inflationary gap. To address critical collection management and space issues, the Library is requesting $200K base, split over two years; thus $100K base in 2012/13 and again in 2013/14. These funds will provide the Library resources to begin and sustain efforts towards freeing up collection space to be repurposed as user space. The funding will provide us the capacity to undertake de-selection and collections management projects as well as the deconstruction and removal of existing shelving. These efforts will pave the way for a multi-year project to install compact shelving throughout the Library.
9 Finally, while no budget is being requested by the Library for the current year, the University should budget for the potential liability arising out of the ongoing developments in regards to the Access Copyright Post-Secondary Tariff. Current indications are that the Copyright Board will support a substantive mandatory increase in the tariff from the historical rate of $3.38/FTE to around $25 to $30/FTE retroactive to January 1, 2011. The annual cost of a tariff of this magnitude is $700K. This issue will not resolve itself quickly and therefore it is recommended that the University set up an Access Copyright Tariff Fund to cover the liability when it comes due. If not resolved until 2014, the accumulated liability could be around $2.7M.
Space (Library): No request for 2012/13 – capital funds will be requested over the life of the plan In addition to embarking upon a Library Master Space Plan, the Library is undertaking a significant project to rationalize and reorganize our collections and install compact shelving. This project is expected to yield an additional 17,000 square feet of user space and an additional 6,000 square feet of new collection space by compacting the collection. Preliminary estimates for the installation of compact shelving are $5.25M spread over four years and will begin in 2013/14. The cost to refurbish the space is estimated at $400 – $800K over four years. It is expected that the seating capacity of the Library will be increased by 30% once the project is fully concluded. Combined with the 20% increase in capacity achieved during the last Integrated Planning cycle, the Library will have increased seating capacity by 50% over a 10 year span (2006 to 2016). It should be noted that the costs sited here are early estimates and ongoing planning efforts during 2012/13 will provide more precise information that will be utilized in the first update of this new five year integrated plan.
Risk Management (PMO & Systems Assurance): $30K base
A junior level analyst/intern is required to support day-to-day minor security incident management and to participate in the continued development and population of the IT Repository. This resource will allow the IT Security Officer and the Risk Analyst to focus on detailed risk assessments in the context of business continuity and disaster recovery planning as well as enhancing the University’s preparedness in regards to major IT security incident prevention and response.
Capacity Planning and Innovation (Office of the CIO): $100K OTO
There is a need to provide resources within the Office of the CIO to create capacity to support new innovation, professional services, and project management. A request of $100K OTO funds is being made for 2012/13 to provide this capacity. It is not wise to defer this one-time-only fund request until next year because the new CIO and Chief Librarian will need the ability to act in the short term and currently the operating budget is very restricted. The time to recruit a Deputy CIO also exasperates the need for the CIO to engage professional services to support immediate initiatives. The new CIO and Chief Librarian will take the time necessary to review needs and determine the most appropriate longer-term funding direction(s) to take. It is anticipated that additional staffing will be requested in 2013/14 as well as base funding to support pilot projects and other investigations.
10
Conclusion:
The Integrated Plan of the Office of the CIO, the Library, and CCS has been informed by the White Paper coming out of our Spring 2011 CIO Executive Planning Retreat. The ideas in the White Paper will guide the Office of the CIO and the institution over the life of this plan and will inform the development of an Information Strategy. We will continue the dialogue started by the paper and work with our partners to develop strategies in response to the many issues raised. We will also continue to collaborate with our partners on institutional initiatives and reach out to our students, faculty, and researchers to advance information technology and information resource solutions and to provide responsive and adaptable services and programs.
