Happy New Year!

Tomorrow, July 1, means the start of a new fiscal year for UWF, so Happy New Year everyone! This new fiscal year brings some pain and trials as we react to substantial budget reductions that impact the personal and professional lives of our staff and challenge our ability to perform our mission. Our fiscal year serves not just as our financial cycle but also as the framework of the cycle for our planning and reporting at the university. Thus, we will soon be producing our annual report of accomplishments, and we're also thinking about our planned accomplishments for the coming (fiscal) year. I'd like to share a few thoughts on the latter.

As always, one of our chief goals is to make sure that IT strategy is linked to university strategy -- that is, that we're striving to use IT to support the strategic goals of the university. Chief among those university goals at present is maintaining and increasing student enrollment. This includes a wide range of sub-strategies - including delivering a quality product in terms of instruction, delivering academic programs that meet regional needs, improving student engagement and success, conducting more effective recruiting and marketing, and improving student retention. In terms of retention in particular, it seems that a wide range of efforts across the university are paying off, as our re-enrollment of sophomores this fall is much improved over previous years. Things upon which ITS is currently working which relate directly to the enrollment goal include improvements to the academic early warning system; version 2 of the web presence; improving flexible instructional delivery through tools like Elluminate, Scopia and Tandberg videoconferencing, and our online eLearning environment; and improving the availability of information on enrollment and registration trends.

While some of these strategic objectives wax and wane, there are three goals that we are always pursuing: using IT to help improve the quality of the university's products (learning, instruction, scholarship, and graduates); using IT to help improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the university's business operations; and continually striving to improve the way we "do IT" at UWF. In terms of quality academic programs, this summer we are putting in place a university-wide environment to support student response systems or "clickers" under the leadership of Michael White. The planned move to Google Apps for Education will provide new tools for students and instructors as well as being a more efficient method of delivering email and calendaring services. We continue to pursue business process improvements through RouteIt and document imaging and via improvements to various business systems. We are even considering moving our student systems from NWRDC to a new platform here at UWF, showing that we haven't let circumstances affect our willingness to dare great things for the good of the university.

We are also taking a renewed focus on how we "do IT" at UWF as we strive to be a world-class IT organization. We are unrolling a major security awareness campaign and have many other security enhancements planned for the coming year. We are re-examining our IT management framework and philosophy, and are developing plans to improve our information management and enterprise architecture functions. We are striving to improve "IT engagement," the manner in which we engage our clients and foster good working relationships; we plan to update our IT service catalog and flesh out service quality metrics. All of this will take time, but it indicates that we are not complacent but are rather striving for continuous improvement in how we perform in ITS.

Times are tough and the challenges are many. Often we have to adapt our plans to a changing reality, so I'm sure that where we'll end up at the conclusion of 2009-10 is not exactly where we envision now. I'm thankful every day for the team of world-class professionals in ITS that face these issues head-on. I have high hopes for the year ahead.