Yesterday we hosted my first hybrid all staff meeting in our new UTA Commons space on the Austin campus. At first, to be completely honest, it was a bit overwhelming seeing so many people together in a room that until yesterday I had not seen more than 10-15 people in at a time. I feel like I am not 100% over the isolation practices of the pandemic times — lots of people in a constrained space make me a little uncomfortable. It is weird because I am in crowded places all the time — airports, concerts, and the like. But, for some reason, it all felt a little surreal doing it in the context of our workspace with over 100 people. By about halfway into the meeting that feeling was replaced with excitement and I can’t wait to do more of it!

Once the technology started to (mostly) cooperate, I was able to share some thoughts on the organization, the University, and how I want us to shape our role in being the drivers of progress and digital change. I reviewed the slides I shared in my previous post, but this time I was able to pause and talk about the “why” behind the decisions we have made. I was also able to spend a bit of time highlighting a couple of the organizational values we have developed and why I believe they are critically important — I highlighted the importance of Engagement, Service, and Security and how those three values need to be top of mind and at the center of our decision making going forward.

We reviewed the three primary pillars of our emerging strategy and discussed how we see ourselves getting there. The first thing we talked about was the Organizational Roadmap that will provide the guideposts to organizing ourselves appropriately and communicating change to campus.

We then did a bit of a dive into the IT Modernization workstream that I am aligning with the President’s Change Starts Here strategic plan. The power in this alignment allows us to utilize existing governance structures to address our largest enterprise technology challenges, hear directly from campus leaders, and turn these challenges into opportunities. The slide I shared aligns to five critical areas of focus for us to organize around. You can see it below, and to be honest, the five areas are even more important at this moment than the initiatives contained within each. This framework should help us work with campus partners to make significant progress in the most critical areas of need.

Finally, we discussed how we wanted to improve both the services we currently offer and identify those offered across campus that should be provided at the enterprise level. Essentially, my perspective is allowing the identified services to help dictate how they are delivered and supported in a holistic, enterprise way. In other words, find the services that have enterprise level consumption and treat them like actual enterprise, common good offerings from a central provider. Our campus customers should not need to know who offers a service, just that it is available. This work will need to lean on all of our campus partners, governance groups, and the needs of our audience as the guiding principle.

We closed with what felt like a very open conversation about many topics — talent, growth, work from alternative locations, the need for the team to understand how our budget works, and more. Coming out of the meeting I will be launching a Coffee with Cole series that aims to bring small numbers of staff together with me for more personal conversations. These skip level meetings have always been an important part of my understanding of the real challenges people are facing while trying to do their jobs. And with that said, I cannot wait to continue this journey with my new colleagues as we work to build upon the legacy of innovation in our work supporting this amazing university.

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.