Information Technology Strategic Plan*

May 23, 2007

Introduction

Technology is embedded in all aspects of our institution. It facilitates our communications, supports faculty scholarship, enables learning and facilitates our administrative processes and decision–making. The ubiquitous nature of technology in our lives often makes us take it for granted. We have grown accustomed to assuming it will be available to us when and where we need it. Each year we discover new needs and new ways to use technology to transform how we work, learn and build communities.

The extensive need for technology and its great potential to deliver benefit requires us to make careful decisions about when, where and how to embrace it. Like other institutions, our ideas for how to use technology outpace our financial and human capacity to implement them. We must weigh the relative merits of competing demands for new technology and the need to support the technology we have already implemented. We must also have frameworks that enable us to set priorities for how to invest our discretionary time and resources in technology across our institution.

A strategic technology plan provides long–term direction that informs how technology will be used at CSUN. It communicates our priorities and intentions for where we will invest to make the most of what technology has to offer. Most importantly, it challenges us to link whatever we as an institution do with technology to our highest institutional priorities. Research has shown that institutions who create methods to align their technology priorities with their institutional priorities achieve greater value from their technology investments. This plan creates just such an alignment.

Our environment is complex and our technology planning must be cognizant of the many organizations that make up our technology environment. The Division of Information Technology has primary responsibility for technology at CSUN, but it is not the only organization that provides IT resources. Our strategic plan must be informed by the directions set by the Chancellor’s Office and responsive to the needs and capabilities of the technology providers within our colleges and administrative divisions. This is not a plan for any one technology organization. Rather, we have developed this plan to assert the technology goals and strategies of our institution as a whole. While it informs the priorities of the Division of Information Technology, it also sets direction for how we will work across IT organizations to meet broader institutional goals.

Planning Framework

Our predominant goal in planning for technology is to ensure that technology priorities are aligned with institutional priorities. Throughout our planning process, we challenged ourselves to link our technology goals and initiatives to CSUN’s institutional priorities and plans. We began with a discussion of the Presidential Priorities and planning categories for the University.

The planning process was inclusive of a diverse set of participants from the University. The initial ideas were surfaced by the IT Division leaders in a two day retreat. These initial ideas were refined and augmented by the input from the University’s technology governance groups, the IT Division staff and other stakeholders on our campus. The input and feedback from all of these groups has enriched the plan and helped ensure we are focused on the right priorities.

The detailed actions involved in the planning process included:

• An environmental scan to identify and understand the major changes that are taking place in higher education in the U.S. and California that will impact CSUN.
• A technology scan to evaluate how developments in technology in the next three to five years will limit or expand our strategic options.
• A series of brainstorming sessions to surface ideas for how technology could be leveraged to further our institutional goals.
• Consultation with the Cabinet, IT governance groups and IT staff to refine the plan.

Choosing a time horizon for technology planning is always a challenge. Planning horizons that are too long are rendered irrelevant by technological change. Too short a horizon often creates tactical project lists rather than strategic goals and aspirations that move the institution forward. We settled on a three year horizon for this plan because it seems a reasonable balance of short and long–term interests. The following section describes the goals and strategies for technology and how they link to our broader institutional goals and priorities.

IT Goals and Strategies

Goal 1: Encourage the development and adoption of the use of technology to enhance and support a learning centered environment.

Links To

Presidential Priority: Increase graduation rates and reduce time to graduation.

Planning Categories: Academic Excellence and Student Engagement

Rationale

The role of information technology in learning is one of the most interesting frontiers in higher education. Faculty have incorporated technology into the curriculum through simulations, technology mediated collaborations and access to digital content from a wide array of sources. We anticipate that our faculty will continue to innovate by incorporating technology into the learning environment in more ways. We want to be ready to support them by encouraging their innovation, providing the technology and support services they require to explore additional technologies and finding ways to support broader adoption of learning technologies.

We also anticipate that on–line learning will be an increasingly important part of CSUN’s strategy. Hybrid courses offer a promising alternative that may enable the University to increase the utilization of our classrooms and break the link between learning and place. On–line courses may enable us to offer access to our courses to more students. We need to make sure that our infrastructure and services are ready for these developments.

Three Year Strategies

• Support faculty exploration and innovation with instructional technology and encourage their broader use.
• Maintain smart classroom technology that is in–line with faculty and student expectations.
• Support faculty efforts to use technology to effectively engage students with varied learning styles.
• Provide the infrastructure, applications and services required to support an expanded set of on–line course offerings.

Goal 2: Provide enhanced analysis, modeling and decision–making capabilities to support institutional strategies to improve graduation rates and decrease the time to graduation.

Links To

Presidential Priority: Increase graduation rates and reduce time to graduation.

Planning Categories: Academic Excellence and Student Engagement

Rationale

Increasing graduation rates and reducing the time to graduation are two of the most important institutional priorities for CSUN. The work underway with CSUN’s My Academic Plan system is an important initial step to use technology to impact graduation rates. Understanding the issues that impact retention and persistence requires sophisticated data collection and analysis. Technology can play a key role in helping us to devise and implement strategies to meet our goals. Other institutions have used analytical technologies to build predictive models to help students to choose their courses or to help academic advisors to proactively identify students that may be at risk.

Three Year Strategies

• Design and deploy analytical capabilities that help to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of strategies to improve graduation rates.
• Deploy additional capabilities to enable students and faculty to model and monitor academic progress.
• Create predictive models of future demand for classes and classrooms.

Goal 3: Leverage existing and potentially new technology to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of business processes.

Links To

Presidential Priority: Become a more user friendly campus.

Be a more effective organization known for collaboration

Planning Categories: User friendly business practices

Campus and community collaboration

Rationale

There are opportunities to better utilize the capabilities of our current technology to support even more efficient business processes. We can also use technology to further our institutional goal to be a campus that is “user friendly”. Technology offers the opportunity for us to deliver more self–service capabilities and information to our students and faculty. As our students become increasingly mobile and increasingly “on–line” 24 hours a day, they will expect to able to transact business with us anytime, anywhere. Technology and business process change will be critical to meeting these expectations.

Technology is only a part of business process improvement. Analyzing and changing business processes is a skill unto itself. We believe that the IT Division should take steps to build greater skills in process design and incorporate process redesign activities into our implementation methodologies. This will enable IT to offer greater capabilities to support the University’s efforts to enhance business processes.

Three Year Strategies

• Partner with University departments to identify priorities for improving business processes.
• Develop a strategy for making business processes and information available on mobile devices.
• Create additional project management and process improvement capabilities within IT that can be brought to bear on any University effort to use technology to improve service.
• Be leaders and influencers of the System–wide technology strategy on behalf of the University.

Goal 4: Sustain a secure, reliable and stable technology infrastructure.

Links To

Presidential Priority: Become a more user friendly campus

Planning Category: User friendly business practices

Academic Excellence

Rationale

Our first responsibility is to provide a technology infrastructure that people can be confident in. Our infrastructure needs to be stable and secure. Our major applications need to be as reliable as possible. Technology has become such an embedded part of our daily lives that we want it to be something we can take for granted. Meeting this expectation is not an easy task. It requires careful choices about what technology to adopt and when to adopt it. It requires us to become more proficient at managing technology and technology projects.

Offering reliable technology is not enough, it must also be as secure as possible. Security risks continue to grow more numerous and more complex. To be secure requires changes in technology and changes in individual behavior. We need to implement strategies to raise awareness about information security and mobilize the entire University community to help safeguard our vital information.

Three Year Strategies

• Maintain the currency and performance of the IT infrastructure.
• Develop more extensive capabilities to manage and execute complex projects.
• Develop an information security strategy that balances the need to minimize risk with the desire to maintain an open environment that facilitates the exchange of information.
• Raise awareness of information security risks to individuals and the institution.
• Implement a technology funding model that sustains our ability to renew and replace vital technology.
• Maintain up to date, tested disaster recovery plans that support the institution’s business continuity plans.

Goal 5: Deliver quality IT support services that are valued by the University community.

Links To

Presidential Priority: Become a user friendly campus

Be an effective organization known for collaboration

Planning Category: User friendly business practices

Campus and community collaboration

Rationale

To use technology effectively, CSUN will require high quality technology support services. We must provide training to help users understand their technology. As technology becomes more embedded in our classrooms, offices and business processes, we must be prepared to provide responsive, knowledgeable support. This requires us to improve the ways we provide service.

Supporting technology is not just the responsibility of the central IT division. There are technology staff throughout the institution who play a role in managing technology and supporting users. We need to create a closer collaboration among all staff involved in technology management and support. We have to develop more effective forums for sharing best practices, sharing knowledge and helping all of our IT support staff to keep their skills as current as possible.

Potential Strategies

• Develop service level agreements, service standards and metrics for IT services.
• Collaborate with departmental IT support staff across the University to deliver integrated IT services.
• Improve internal and external IT support processes.
• Implement a professional development program that builds and sustains the skills of IT support staff.
• Develop methods to minimize the disruption from the adoption of new technology.
• Implement a process for making technology adoption decisions that consider a broad set of factors including user needs, security, supportability and reliability.
• Improve the effectiveness of IT communications.

Implementing the Plan

A plan is only an intention. Realizing our strategy will require us to embed the plan in our decision–making and reflect its goals in the priorities we set. To implement the plan we must use it to establish priorities for the IT division, inform the technology goals and initiatives of the colleges and other administrative divisions, and to guide how we allocate discretionary resources at an institutional level.

Initially, we will use the plan to prioritize the projects of the IT division. IT has reviewed its FY07–08 project plan to ensure their alignment with longer–term goals and strategies. Projects that do not align with the plan will be discussed with stakeholders. As new project requests come to IT, the plan will be used to facilitate communications with other divisions to establish relative priorities within and across the portfolio of requests IT manages.

The plan will also play a role in guiding annual IT planning across the institution. The CIO will regularly engage each University division in an annual planning discussion to identify projects and initiatives that can further our institutional IT goals and strategies. Working with the IT governance groups and the President’s Cabinet, these new technology needs will be prioritized and aligned with the overall IT goals and strategies.

Planning is a continuous process. This plan represents our best understanding of technology opportunities and goals. However; it will be refreshed annually to reflect changing needs and changing technology. These forward looking discussions will be used to adapt and re prioritize our strategies as necessary.