ITS 2025 Strategic Plan

• ITS will transition from a traditional IT model to a “fusion team” model for providing services, blending the expertise of business and technology owners to foster digital leadership across departments and disciplines. We will work with campus partners to create digital training tracks for the most critical technology platforms employed by the university. This increased collaboration will enhance the tech skills of St. Thomas staff and allow relevant digital competencies to be built into roles and job descriptions, as part of the ongoing evolution of our workplace.
• These efforts will allow St. Thomas to grow our reputation as a world-class higher education institution by retaining and attracting world class talent.

• With the growth of hybrid teaching, learning, and working, our community will need easy and secure virtual access to courses, materials, and tools. This will require both re-imagining our support models and improving existing systems to ensure that virtual or hybrid engagement is equitable and device agnostic. Physical spaces will be reconfigured to allow for virtual and face-to-face participation, offering opportunities for global engagement with St. Thomas.
• These flexible environments will also require on-demand support and training for the community, to accommodate variable teaching, learning and working schedules. Similarly, work benefits and incentives for faculty and staff will be tailored to meet individual and team needs to ensure robust support for the community and retention of our world class talent.

• ITS will work with campus partners to improve campus processes and implement automation strategies using Customer Experience (CX) feedback. In the next decade, our community will need easy-to-use, effective self-service solutions that eliminate unnecessary steps and authorizations. Our campus processes must evolve in tandem with the institution and emerging technologies. These improvements will allow students, faculty, and staff to focus on meaningful, high-impact work and will grow our reputation as a world-class higher education institution.

• ITS will work with campus partners to create a seamless digital platform for university systems, allowing our community to easily navigate digital interfaces to access software, systems, and data. Users expect systems that “understand” who they are so ITS will deliver an integrated platform that centers the customer, anticipates their needs, and streamlines their work. Delivering on this promise will enhance the digital skills of our campus, allowing for a “citizen developer” model and culture of innovation to thrive.

• ITS services and offerings will evolve in tandem with emerging technologies. Our community will need us to understand, recommend and implement tools that advance the university’s strategy. To anticipate these needs, we must continue advancing towards higher ratings on industry standard IT maturity models, allowing us to both adopt and create best practices in technology. We will be known as a user-friendly, customer-focused unit with service models and offerings that adapt to our community’s needs.

• ITS will work with campus partners to support the evolution of higher education at St. Thomas. We will understand, recommend, and implement technologies that support best practices in higher education, while continually assessing these practices for impact and outcomes. We will pilot the use of new technologies to determine applications and effectiveness for our community, and we will support the university’s research missions for students and faculty through engaged practice research.

Diversity, Equity, Accessibility & Inclusion (DEA&I) and Student & Community Experience

• We recognize that embedding DEA&I at the core of our work will fuel more effective and ethical technological innovation that serves the common good. We commit to centering the needs and experiences of our community, particularly the marginalized and oppressed, as we evolve our tools, systems, and IT best practices.
• We are committed to learning directly from our students and our communities about their challenges and using these learnings to make impactful improvements to campus processes and systems.