Several weeks ago, I met with President Hartzell to discuss our emerging strategy going forward. We have talked many times about his goals for technology at the University and this was a first opportunity to reflect that discussion back to him to make sure we are moving in the right direction. We had a great discussion, where he listened, provided feedback, and told me to keep pushing in this direction. It was an honest discussion about how we need to position ourselves for long-term success. I thought it would be helpful to share a little bit about some of the early changes we are making

I have mentioned before that we are taking on the daunting task of rebranding our new organization. Now that we have brought the existing ITS team together with AIS and eBITS we have the opportunity to focus our energy at solving the largest, most complex challenges at the University as it relates to technology. Our focus is centered around envisioning, creating, and implementing enterprise level technology solutions, hence the selection of, The University of Texas Enterprise Technology as our new organizational name. There are a number of steps that need to be taken to finalize this change before we launch a branding campaign around the start of the new fall semester.

I am a firm believer in the idea that every organization must express their values proudly and transparently. When the senior leadership team sat down for this discussion, we knew that we wanted to create a series of values that represent the scope and scale of the work we perform while giving us some guardrails we can use to guide our work. To me, what is so important about being overt with our value statements is that it gives us a collection of lenses to look through to help guide our decision making. We can ask ourselves if we are living up to these values whenever we are making decisions, sitting in meetings, doing strategy work, or executing on our day-to-day activities. Values guide our actions, and the SLT believes that these 10 values will help guide us to make better decisions and express who we are.

I then took him through in detail the three primary components of our emerging roadmap. The first being a plan to rebrand our new organization and a focus on getting our own operations in order to rise to the challenge of driving the enterprise conversation forward. The second piece is where the bulk of our strategic roadmap will focus. I have worked with the Change Starts Here (CSH) strategy office to think about how we will work together to address our IT modernization efforts around CSH 3.9, Modernizing IT. By aligning with CSH, we will be able to leverage those existing governance models to help us move our programs forward.

Finally, I believe that we as a campus community need to draw a line in the sand as it relates to common good services, service delivery practices, and the alignment of our community to the delivery of these services. This will not be easy, but by working closely with the ITLC, other governance groups, and our internal teams I am confident that we will be able to make major strides in the area of common good and enterprise service delivery.

At our next staff meeting I will deep dive into the three areas of our strategic roadmap, and we can have some real dialogue about what it all means. I will also be putting together a post here that will attempt to do the same. Until then, find me on Teams or reach out to get a meeting scheduled if you have questions or just want to talk.