DoIT Vision
As an organization, DoIT aspires to serve and reflect UMBC’s distinctive mission of inclusive excellence by providing great, reliable information technology. As staff partners, we aim to help solve problems or create new opportunities through collaboration that affirms and empowers our campus colleagues. As professionals, we share with and learn from our peers in higher education’s research, instruction, and business communities. Finally, as mentors, not just supervisors, we seek to give our student employees real-world experiences that both advance their professional goals and positively impact UMBC.
DoIT Mission
DoIT provides robust, secure IT environments that enable solutions for advancing the UMBC community. We do this through a team of exceptional student staff and nationally recognized technology professionals who are dedicated to serving the UMBC and larger higher education communities. We advance UMBC’s mission and strategy by partnering with the colleges and divisions to support excellence in teaching, research and services. Through our efforts, technology solutions will continue to contribute to UMBC’s national reputation as one of the most innovative universities.
Supporting Objectives
- Advancing the student experience and success through innovative solutions.
- Assisting the faculty to utilize technology to provide an innovative learning environment.
- Supporting business units to operate more efficiently and effectively.
- Working closely with university research centers and faculty to provide the technologies and systems to advance their work.
- By integrating student employees into our teams, we both enhance their technical and professional development while providing efficient and effective services to the campus.
- Enabling ethical, effective use of information to inform institutional decision-making.
- Ensuring a secure environment that protects the university community from ongoing cybersecurity threats, and ensures individual privacy.
Guiding Principles for UMBC’s Digital Strategy Fy2022-2024
- Our digital strategy is grounded in UMBC’s vision, mission, and values.
- Our digital strategy supports and extends the reach of UMBC’s 2016 strategic planning goals and broadly builds on our campus efforts and successes in using technology during the pandemic for remote learning and remote work.
- Our digital strategy focuses on continuing to deliver a robust set of core enterprise services. Whether in the cloud or on-premise, the core services that enable our community to manage, create, teach, learn, and work effectively are essential infrastructure and are designed to be as reliable and resilient as possible in alignment with the work done in the foundations working group of the strategic plan.
- Our digital strategy uses our enterprise risk framework to identify and mitigate the cybersecurity risks in our objectives.
Strategic Objectives
- Use digital platforms to deliver exceptional service and support: Building on our implementation of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, continue to strengthen our core services and digital platforms to provide the tools needed by campus units to consistently serve, support and communicate with our students, faculty, staff, alumni, and visitors.
- Advance our use of data to continuously innovate and improve: Building on our implementation of HelioCampus and Amazon Web Services (AWS), make it easy to use data to drive insight for improving and advancing institutional, college, and divisional goals and services.
- Advance and support digital innovation in curriculum and pedagogy across all modalities: Building on our work with PIVOT and the Quality Matters Impact (QMI) training. Partner with the Colleges, DPS, and FDC to build communities of practice that utilize digital curriculum and leverage advances in classroom technologies to identify pedagogy practices that advances teaching and learning.
- Use digital information platforms, especially myUMBC and Sites, to advance and support the student experience: The web is the place that students, employees, and patrons go to find information. Personalize the student experience by integrating myUMBC with Salesforce, HelioCampus, and AEFIS. Partner with UAA, the Colleges, Student Life, DPS (USG) and the Shriver Center to document and connect students academically and socially through their coursework, co-curricular activities, service learning, and experiential learning.
- Advance and support digital innovation in research and creative achievement: Building on our work with HPC facility, AI Cluster, PI**2, and MIIC centers. Partner with our Colleges and Centers to broaden access and support to new and innovative technologies for research and creative achievement.
- Expand digital skills training for all: Building on our work on the Greater Washington Partnership Digital Generalist badge and instructional design efforts with DPS, expand our collaboration and partnerships across the campus to ensure every employee has access to high quality training resources to appropriately use digital technologies securely to analyze, create, teach, learn, and work.
Results
Upon completion, we will be successful if we have achieved the following:
Deliver exceptional service and support
- Exceptional service and support requires enterprise services to be intuitive, reliable, and available to the community without significant interruptions, ensuring community members have access to the connectivity and tools needed to be successful in their work, research, or learning.
- Communications and collaboration are digitally enabled with common platforms that readily support our staff across organizational and physical boundaries.
- Online services are personalized and UMBC students, employees, and faculty associate our campus as a place that consistently provides outstanding service across all departments.
- Provide options using AI and/or chatbots to deliver robust self-support capabilities that augment or extend in-person support in areas of high demand. Develop short online training videos for all but the most difficult or complex services or support requiring DoIT’s intervention. Community members can easily chat or talk with a support contact, even after regular hours, for basic support questions.
- Data is regularly provided back to supervisors to provide feedback on the effectiveness of our support.
Use data to continuously innovate and improve
- Data is an institutional asset and systematically collected and curated to support analysis across our strategic objectives using a common set of tools supporting visualization that allows individuals, departments, colleges, or divisions to use data in support of operations or in new and innovative ways.
- Through partnerships with Information Systems, Computer Science, and the Data Science Masters, develop the training and human expertise needed to fully utilize and apply analytics and machine learning to improve student outcomes and success.
- Democratize data and analytics by appropriately integrating insights into our core IT systems and personalize recommendations based on an individual’s role.
Create and support digital innovation in the curriculum and pedagogy across all modalities
- Working with the FDC and departments, develop systems for tracking student learning outcomes, especially those achieved through direct measures.
- Working with the faculty in the colleges . . .
- identify courses to pilot the University of Michigan eCoach system that provides automated outreach and assistance to students based on faculty heuristics.
- Working with departments, help them visualize their curriculum using the APLU sankey diagrams. With that, help departments develop digital strategies that support faculty innovation in curriculum and pedagogy in high impact courses or specified programs.build communities of practice in selected digital strategies and pedagogies, such as learning analytics, that support student learning outcomes and address student success.
- We will have sufficient, effective and efficient instructional technologies to support a broad variety of pedagogical innovations and modes of instruction.
- Help faculty assess the opportunities that new course modalities in their curriculum.
Personalize and enhance the student experience
- Expand the salesforce marketing cloud to manage all communications and interactions associated with the student lifecycle — from recruitment through graduation and alumni.
- Continue to build tools into myUMBC to provide recommendations that personalize the student experience based on data.
- Working with the colleges, expand the efforts to deploy the Comprehensive Learner Record (CLR) so that by fall 2024 we can document all students’ personal academic learning outcomes and co-curricular experiences.
Expand access to digital innovation in research and creative achievement
- Partner with the Colleges to develop a shared business model designed to complement and collaborate with researchers needing advanced digital infrastructure to support high performance computing for research, data-intensive research, visualization, or specialized tools for AI and data science.
- Working with the Vice President of Research and Deans, identify core digital research infrastructure that DoIT can work with the Colleges to support new or updated major research infrastructure (MRI) proposals.
- Working with the Vice President of Research and Deans, develop approaches that allow faculty to successfully and securely meet requirements associated with controlled unclassified information (CUI).
Enhance digital skills and training
- Expand our partnership with DPS to utilize our instructional designers and work with subject matter experts to produce self-paced training modules in utilizing new digital services or accessing data and building reports.
- Work with HR Organization Development on incentives for staff to complete more comprehensive training programs, such as the six modules that are part of the Greater Washington Partnership’s Digital Generalist curriculum or to complete other self-paced training that can span many hours but significantly updates the digital skills of staff.
- Further link distributed IT and research staff with DoIT, providing training and development pathways, reskilling opportunities, and a supportive environment to enable them to innovate within their areas while staying aligned with the strategic direction of central IT.
- Expand the badging program to support optional and required training for employees and give employees the ability to earn badges and build their professional skills.
What Does This Mean for:
Student’s Digital Experience is Personalized
- Our myUMBC portal remains the digital entrance to connect, serve, and support students.
- Students will consistently receive appropriate communications based on their personal circumstances.
- Support services will be consistently designed and new tools will greatly enhance self-support. When needed, there will be online chat or an after-hours call center to take questions.
- Students will have access to a comprehensive learner record based on their academic and co-curricular experiences that demonstrate their acquired knowledge, skills and abilities at UMBC.
Faculty are Supported in Their Research, Teaching, and Service
- Faculty will have access to a broader range of research resources and support through collaboration between the Colleges and DoIT when working on research that requires additional data security or needs specialized digital resources.
- Faculty interested in pedagogical innovation will have access to a broader range of resources from their College and DoIT when working to document student learning outcomes and/or improve student outcomes.
- Faculty will have improved self-service support options they can utilize for their own needs or refer students, too, when students need support.
Administrators Have Access to Data and Tools to Improve Services and Achieve Their Goals
- Administrators will have better access to data and tools for visualizing data and producing dashboards to track their goals and KPIs.
- Administrators will have new tools and data to support tracking students’ experiential learning, student learning outcomes, and department and college accreditation and program review.
- Administrators will have access to a commonly used and understood set of enterprise tools to allow for efficient collaboration and data sharing between units.
- New services can be implemented that leverage self-support tools and enable consistency.
Digital Foundations We Build Our Strategy On
- Ensuring ubiquitous connectivity throughout the campus so that community members have access to the tools to be successful without worrying about if they can access what they need to.
- Ensuring that community members have a single login identity to seamlessly and securely access all of their digital resources.
- All digital systems leverage our enterprise security architecture and security is assessed using our enterprise risk management approach
- Infrastructure decisions are guided through an enterprise architecture approach with emphasis on resilience, scalability, security, and cost.