Thursday, December 5, 2019 - 14:50

Assessment of Creighton Information Technology

Creighton recently partnered with a consultancy, Thought Ensemble, to Assessment assess the University's information technology and services.  The aim of the engagement was to ensure alignment between IT and the overall University strategy. The assessment reviewed major processes with focus on IT projects and prioritization.  Members of the Creighton community including faculty and staff were interviewed to understand Creighton's organizational and technology goals.  Their feedback was used to develop recommendations on how to overcome challenges and improve IT services. From the interviews and analysis, the following strategic direction was created:

"In alignment with the mission of the University, Creighton IT will provide a highly tailored, end-to-end user experience for students, faculty, staff, alumni, and partners to differentiate Creighton, provide a valued experience, and enhance the operational success of the University."

More details related to initiation of the assessment,  the findings, and recommended actions are listed below.

Why Did We Perform an Assessment of Creighton IT?

  • The higher education market is shifting and the need for technology solutions and nimbleness has become paramount to attracting and retaining students, faculty, and staff, and Creighton needed an outside point of view as to whether we were best positioned to support our future technology needs related to the strategic direction of the University.
  • The availability of critical services that support the day-to-day technology needs of our students, faculty, and staff is a key component for delivering a great experience to our students and we wanted to ensure that we have the best in class tools and technology to deliver that experience.
  • University leaders have also expressed concerns around our IT workload being too high and the project prioritization process needing to be improved.
  • Creighton leadership wanted an experienced, outside, non-biased perspective to validate what’s been working well in IT and identify any blind spots that we may not have seen.

What Were the Results of the Assessment?
The assessment looked at four key elements of our IT department and provided necessary insight into how they were functioning:

  1. Our IT Strategy:
    • We have defined processes for the development and refinement of the overall Creighton University strategy and the IT Digital Strategy.
    • The strategic importance of serving our students is clear in both of our strategies, but we need to work on more clearly defining how we will do that.
    • Our IT Digital Strategy needs to be refined to a smaller set of priorities and initiatives in order to focus our efforts.
  2. Our Technology:
    • We have taken a “best of breed” approach to deploying pre-packaged solutions, which has been driven primarily by our business needs.
    • Thus, our technical health is generally strong as vendors are responsible for addressing our technical debt and making upgrades.
    • However, there is a need for custom solutions, as well as more mature application and data integration, to address some critical gaps in functionality.
  3. How We Deliver Our IT Services:
    • Despite our defined project intake process, how we prioritize projects needs more refinement.
    • Our communication and collaboration with business stakeholders needs more attention in order to develop a shared understanding and build trust.
    • Many of our processes across IT need to be formalized, developed, or more uniformly implemented in order to reduce potential technology issues.
  4. How Our IT Division is Organized:
    • Overall, our efficiency and individual relationships have improved as the result of our implementation of a centralized support structure with semi-autonomous units.
    • Our Library Services are separate services and should be treated as such.
    • Our organizational focus needs to be on talent management, development, and retention.

What Recommendations Were Made Based on the Assessment?
As a result of the assessment, it was recommended that Creighton IT focus on enabling end-to-end user experiences via a new core technology architecture and cloud-based services while also solidifying associated technology processes and getting more aligned organizationally. The summary of recommendations is as follows:

  1. A New IT Mandate: Creighton IT should provide a highly tailored, end-to-end user experience for students, faculty, staff, alumni, and partners in order to differentiate Creighton from other universities, provide a valued user experience, and enhance the operational success of the University as a whole.
  2. A New Core Technology Platform: Creighton should deploy a new architecture to support the University’s mission to support students, learning, and opportunities; Creighton IT should build custom solutions on the new architecture as necessary to achieve these goals.
  3. A Cloud First Approach: Creighton should migrate existing IT systems to the cloud to reduce operational complexity and effort; IT should then focus on ensuring systems and applications meet functional needs, including security and reliability.
  4. Improved IT Processes: To support the mandate and new environment, Creighton should focus on solidifying appropriate processes, including building of applications, integrating systems, managing IT’s portfolio, and overseeing vendors and partners.
  5. An Aligned Organization: Creighton IT should align its people and skills to the new environment with a focus towards innovative business functionality over commodity IT skills.

What Has Happened Since then?
Since the completion of the assessment, Creighton has taken several steps on the path to tackling these recommendations, including:

  • Starting to develop the business case for a new core technology platform, including business objectives, use cases, peer university research, and financials.
  • Starting conversations with potential vendors about how they could support us, and beginning to develop a workplan for how we will migrate systems to the cloud.
  • Starting research around talent management efforts.
  • Developing go-forward plans for process improvement as well as an initial list of prioritized projects.
  • Communicating changes and providing materials to various stakeholders in order to get everyone aligned around the path forward.

What Should We Expect Next?
In the short-term, it will be business as usual, but behind the scenes, Creighton IT will be working to further dive into the details and requirements of implementing the recommendations above in order to confirm that making these investments will be the best course of action for Creighton students, faculty, and staff. Once we have the right information and a proven business case, we will move forward on the recommendations (assuming they are still the best course of action) by creating timelines, project plans, and implementation plans.  We will continue to communicate with everyone at Creighton as we progress in order to keep you all apprised of what is going on, when it will be happening, and how.

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