CIO Corner: Fall Welcome
from CIO Andrea Ballinger
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Welcome back and happy fall, Beavs!
There is never a shortage of excitement at Oregon State University in the fall: the energy that students and faculty bring to our campuses and virtual classes, Beaver athletic events, OSU Homecoming, and the promise of new strategic initiatives that advance the university’s mission and values. University Information and Technology (UIT) has been working diligently throughout the summer to meet the evolving needs and expectations of our students, faculty, researchers and employees. Imagining new and innovative ways to bring together the best brick and mortar experiences OSU has delivered for over 150 years and a digital experience that distinguishes us as leaders today, with real-time seamless online communication and engagement across various platforms, delivered in ways that feel relevant, contemporary, equitable and personalized. In the spirit of OSU IT’s culture of continuous improvement, UIT underwent a thoughtful and intentional exercise to re-align our organization and better position UIT to meet IT strategic goals. This re-alignment is designed to ignite our efforts to implement measurable transformation across the university through urgency and imagination by expanding on the office of the Chief Information Officer with a direct focus on both the Research IT function and Administrative Modernization Program (AMP), while also continuing to strengthen UIT and elevate the experience of the OSU community.
OSU IT welcomes the OSU community this fall with enhancements in the teaching and learning experience. In coordination with the Admissions Office, Office of the Registrar and Dean of Students Office, UIT migrated all student email accounts from Gmail to Microsoft 365 email. A unified email system for students, staff, and faculty improves communications and streamlines the use and support of OSU email. Students and employees will benefit from access to the entire Microsoft Productivity Toolset (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, OneDrive, etc.) and improved security with enhanced protection from phishing attacks and fraudulent emails. In collaboration with Academic Affairs & Student Affairs, UIT introduced Beaver Hub to the OSU community in June. Beaver Hub is a transformative step in how we engage with students, providing a one-stop portal for tools and resources that support the student experience in alignment with the university’s vision of a unified, cohesive, managed, and equitable experience for current and future students. Additionally, UIT Academic Technologies is partnering with Academic Affairs and Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), to co-lead the Resilient Teaching Faculty Learning Community. The Faculty Learning Community is open to all fixed-term and tenured/tenure-track faculty who routinely teach credit-based courses on the Corvallis and OSU-Cascades campuses and is focused on developing the concept of resilient teaching and the pedagogical use of academic technologies. Finally, in response to the ADA31 Task Force recommendations, a university-wide task force charged with setting the vision and strategy for digital accessibility at OSU will ensure ADA compliance requirements and provide an accessible and equitable information technology experience to the OSU community.
Building on our achievements over the last four years, we are preparing to ignite digital and organizational transformation at OSU, paving the way for a modern, streamlined university experience with the Administrative Modernization Program (AMP). This ambitious initiative builds on OSU’s Strategic Plan 4.0 and will help create the foundation for the university’s next strategic plan by integrating and simplifying technology systems, data practices and policies, and replacing the university’s 34-year-old core administrative systems for human resources and finance. OSU hosted open forums and focus groups during the summer to engage the university community, collect feedback, identify success factors, and hear aspirational goals for administrative processes and systems at OSU. We are pleased to announce that these community engagements have culminated in the decision to move forward with Workday, as OSU’s new enterprise resource planning system and active planning is underway to formally launch the AMP Program. Watch for routine updates on the AMP website to learn more about opportunities to engage the program team and keep apprised of progress.
OSU will dramatically expand the size and capability of our research enterprise by 2030, with researchers increasing their collaborations to solve large transdisciplinary challenges that have a high societal impact. To achieve this goal and support our researchers’ success, it is critical for OSU to have a state-of-the-art enterprise-wide model and strategy for the university’s compute-intensive (high performance computing) and data-intensive support services and infrastructure. This is especially urgent given the radical innovations occurring in research computing (including in AI and Machine Learning), emerging compliance requirements, and our current aging on-campus research clusters. The Research Computing 2030 Task Force , charged by Provost Feser and VP Tumer will look ahead to what OSU’s research computing capacity and capability needs should be in 2030, including but not limited to HPC and data storage. It will examine our aspirational 2030 peer universities with a significant scale of HPC resources, like the resource we anticipate in the CIC. As the Task Force identifies viable operating models, a separate group of unit leaders supporting information technology in research will be conducting an inventory of the IT Research Ecosystem. This will assist the Task Force in creating a roadmap from the current Research IT ecosystem to an optimized version to effectively and efficiently support the needs identified by the Task Force.
OSU IT has big goals for this year, and I have every confidence that we will not only succeed in our strategic and operational work but answer our imperative by empowering the OSU community to live vibrant, digitally empowered lives. I encourage you to visit our OSU IT Year in Review for additional information about these and other exciting OSU IT initiatives.
Go BEAVS!