Manage IT as an Institutional Asset
UCLA employs an institutional perspective for managing IT that transcends and magnifies central, regional, local, and individual IT capabilities, from the research group or department, to the campus as a whole, and the UC system or the broader higher education community.
YouTube: UCLA Vice Provost Jim Davis discusses this theme
To move its ambitious goals forward, UCLA will need to achieve greater focus in the application of its IT assets and investments. Independent units must pull together as one. Many IT resources and assets will, appropriately, continue to be distributed, especially for research and education and school, division, and department competitiveness. Local autonomy is recognized as highly valuable, especially to innovation and to sustaining research and educational competitiveness. It is embraced as part of a UCLA IT enterprise architecture that harmonizes local and institutional needs and finds an appropriate balance between autonomy and standardization and thereby allows a commoditized infrastructure to be shared and blended to satisfy end users’ needs.
To remain responsive, UCLA must manage campus processes, and the IT applications and services that support these, institutionally, so that services are provided with the highest standards of security, reliability, efficiency, functionality, and recoverability. This institutional approach will require transparency of IT investment across the campus and a comprehensive understanding of assets and services. It also requires development and adoption of shared standards to reduce complexity and interdependency among different technologies and applications.
In the future, non-differentiating services, especially infrastructure, will be delivered through a blended service model that preserves local support, customization, responsive-ness, and provisioning, while operations and other back-end IT services are provided regionally or centrally. Likewise, shared research IT infrastructure can provide leverage for grants and enhance faculty recruitment. Coordination and cooperation between IT service providers on campus will be vital to the success of these efforts.
Key to accomplishing these aspirations will be a robust, nimble, transparent, and broadly representative governance, prioritization and decision-making process that is integrated with campus budget and planning processes. This governance structure must address the needs of the broader institution while providing the greatest benefit possible to individual faculty, students, and staff.
While this strategic plan focuses of necessity on the model by which future services will be delivered, technology will not carry the day without our professional staff. In many ways these staff members are the most crucial asset: they understand the critical details of the research and education enterprises that they support. Generic IT skills may perhaps be readily available, the specialized knowledge of our staff is difficult to replicate. Thus, the emphasis will be on leveraging their skills and knowledge in support of the core missions of the institution, even though adjustments in assignments and/or job content will be unavoidable.
This vision element supports the institutional goals of draft academic plan Transforming UCLA for the Twenty-first Century by optimizing the application of IT resources and creating an inclusive and cooperative atmosphere in which services are delivered.
