Like many divisions at Rice, OIT engaged in reflection and strategic planning during 2024. Our new vision, guiding principles, and operating model are aligned with the university’s Momentous plan and the OF&S strategic mission and vision. Our goal is to become “Your partners in research and educational excellence.”
Rice’s IT Vision
IT will provide excellent constituent service, acting as a strategic partner to advance Rice’s priorities and mission of “pathbreaking research, unsurpassed teaching, and contribution to the betterment of our
world”. IT will fuel innovation at speed across the university by building a culture of trust, using an effective operating model, driving seamless experiences, and providing core IT capabilities.
Guiding Principles
The IT Function at Rice with be a strategic partner that will....
1. Lead with collaboration to enable the mission and provide excellent constituent service
- As technology and its role in the University evolve, IT will focus on serving constituents in achieving desired outcomes. This means neither saying no in order to adhere to a process, nor saying yes reflexively. Rather, IT must understand the true needs behind an ask and help creatively identify a path to a better and more pragmatic “Yes.” This path must meet the strategic needs of the university, while staying within acceptable risk thresholds.
- Rice will continue to innovate and improve proactively, and will serve all its constituents in an inclusive, accessible, and customer-centric manner.
2. Drive innovation from Within
- OIT will provide constituent services that address differentiated needs. Innovation from within will harness untapped opportunities through closer collaboration with experts across campus.
- OIT will lend its tech expertise to serve the needs of domain experts across the institution, and help them understand how technology can drive outcomes in instruction, research, and administration.
- OIT will delegate technology decision-making where appropriate.
3. Build trust with all communities at Rice through structure, communication, and efficacy
- A culture of excellent constituent service will permeate all IT work. We will build trust between IT service providers and consumers by establishing more structured and reliable processes to serve all university constituents and partners.
- IT service requests will be routed to the right service providers; IT will enable customers to structure service requests so they are clear and actionable. IT will have a transparent and structured process to quickly evaluate and address technology requests.
4. Facilitate learning, scholarship, and speed to scientific innovation
- IT will be nimble to serve constituents more efficiently and support innovation; innovations should be driven from all corners of the university community. Leverage automation and AI as “digital workers” to ease administrative burdens of our scholars and innovators. Leverage automation and AI as accelerating “co-pilots” to the innovation process. Security will promote innovation while balancing differentiated constituent needs and regulatory requirements.
5. Invest wisely in the right tech for the right reasons
- Utilize commercial solutions (often cloud-native) and minimize tech debt to improve constituent experiences.
- Regularly rationalize the systems portfolio to enable IT to focus on adding value for constituents.
- Evolve from a culture of customization to one which judiciously adds customization when required.
- Account for Total Cost of Ownership and support model (not just implementation or license costs) when making technology product decisions - particularly around "freeware.”
Strategic Initiatives
The following initiatives were crafted by cross-functional stakeholder groups.
- Embed Accessibility, Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (A/DE&I) in Tech - Implement measures into technology and encourage organizational behaviors that promote accessibility, diversity, equity, and inclusion.
- Upgrade Systems and Services to Enhance the Constituent Experience - Modernize technology solutions and optimize processes to create seamless, personalized constituent experiences.
- Establish a Service-Oriented Operating Model - Enhance IT service delivery processes, success measures, and governance to more efficiently and effectively meet stakeholder technology needs.
- Scale and Enhance Research Technology - Accelerate research outcomes by implementing advanced tools, infrastructure, and computational capabilities and providing research computing as an end-to-end service.
- Establish Data Governance and Data Stewardship - Establish data policies, management practices, and analysis capabilities to promote informed decision making and responsible stewardship of constituent data.
- Implement IT Change-Enablement Strategy - Launch a campus-wide IT communications and enablement strategy to foster a well-informed community and facilitate collaboration in IT-related endeavors.
- Address Technical Debt - Replace or upgrade legacy applications and hardware to streamline systems architecture and mitigate operational risk.