Office of the Vice President Information Technology and Chief Information Officer
  • Athabasca University
  • Office of the Vice President Information Technology and Chief Information Officer
  • RISE
  • Goals and Objectives
  • Goal 8: Continuous Improvement
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  • RISE
    • RISE: Athabasca University's Digital Transformation
    • About RISE
    • Goals and Objectives
      • Goals and Objectives
      • Goal 1: Digital Strategy
      • Goal 2: Digital Experience
      • Goal 3: Data Collection
      • Goal 4: IDEA Model
      • Goal 5: Governance
      • Goal 6: Partnerships
      • Goal 7: Digital Learning Products
      • Goal 8: Continuous Improvement
      • Goal 9: Access to Digital Learning

Goal 8: Continuous Improvement

Focus our IT talent and processes to continually identify and implement emergent solutions with a continuous improvement mindset based on Lean best practices for higher education in product development and ownership.

Objectives

8.1

Place student experience needs first, engaging them as end-users in the design and testing of all new services prior to their implementation.

8.2

Improve IT service management capabilities by training staff in industry best practices in service management (ITIL) to achieve Level 3 on the ITIL capability maturity model and train existing infrastructure staff to become a high-performing cloud infrastructure management team.

8.3

Implement best practices in proactive training and technology communications to drive increased utilization of the university’s existing technology stack and adoption of new, enterprise-wide technologies.

8.4

Implement university-wide digital learning on cyber-security threats and mitigation tactics to alleviate risks.

8.5

Optimize the inclusiveness and communication of IT product development and enhancement plans and priorities through the governance process to ensure IT plans are understood by the university community as a key member of integrated planning and continuous improvement.

8.6

Improve project planning and delivery by establishing and maintaining an Integrated Delivery Plan that aggregates the priorities, risks, dependencies, and resource requirements of:

  • All approved IT capital projects
  • Priority business initiatives identified as part of integrated organizational planning that require IT resources
  • Ongoing operational requirements
  • The new IT Strategic Plan 2018-22

8.7

Conduct annual reviews of AU’s adopted IT Lean portfolio strategy and governance frameworks to ensure their effectiveness.

8.8

Develop staff knowledge and skills to ensure effective management of currently implemented technologies, and align training and learning plans to facilitate the development of new skills and knowledge required to address emergent needs.

8.9

Establish and maintain a Continuous Service Improvement Register to capture service improvement opportunities identified from customer feedback, student satisfaction with IT, project lessons learned, service incident root cause analyses, audits, and other feedback sources to inform continuous improvement planning.

8.10

Improve the performance of core services by monitoring services against service level agreements and proactively intervening as required to mitigate service disruptions.

8.11

Once new strategies and processes are well-established via the governance process, implement semi-annual internal IT audit cycles to ensure quality of software design, code, and supporting cloud infrastructure are consistent in product areas such as:

  • Cloud infrastructure management
  • Learning management system and sup-porting digital learning technologies
  • Online forms
  • Interface design
  • Identity management
  • Data governance
  • IT communications via email, blog, newsletter, social media and website
  • Agile portfolio management
  • Software development
  • Software security

8.12

Determine a DevOps philosophy and framework utilizing configuration as code, containerized deployment, continuous integration, and other operational tools that are needed in order to make development sustainable and flexible.

Updated September 25, 2020 by Digital & Web Operations, University Relations (web_services@athabascau.ca)

https://www.athabascau.ca/vice-president-information-technology/ c5dfc79d0a2a32ea0a1fd18eeb3d76fb