SUNY Oswego, The Digital Campus

The State University of New York (SUNY) at Oswego is a public comprehensive college located in central New York on the shores of Lake Ontario. Founded in 1861, SUNY Oswego offers its 8,000 undergraduate and graduate students preeminent academic programs in the arts and sciences, business, communications, and teacher education. The institution's success is built on providing students outstanding educational experiences with attention to a liberal arts and sciences foundation, practical applications, interdisciplinary approaches, independent scholarly and creative work, and skills for living in multicultural and global communities.

SUNY Oswego is a collegial and vibrant community that has a forward-looking strategic plan and is in the midst of an $800 million campus renewal program. It has recently opened or is currently building new living-learning communities, high-tech classrooms, a science complex, a teacher education center, a fine and performing arts center, and recreational facilities on its spacious campus. This focus on renewal has led to opportunities to significantly upgrade the physical and virtual environments of the campus.

Overview

In 2014, SUNY Oswego developed its latest campus strategic plan, Tomorrow: Greater Impact and Success with wide input from the college community. The plan lays out performance drivers, key indicators, and impacts that build on current success and drive the institution forward to serve and thrive into the future.

As President Deborah F. Stanley rolled out the strategic plan, she focused on embracing technology and creating a "digital campus" as important factors in success. Stanley viewed technology as instrumental in creating an environment for people to work efficiently, make data-driven decisions, focus on student achievement, and enable our community's success in the modern world.

To further this vision, the campus launched an IT strategic planning process in an attempt to define what a digital campus is and how we would create one at SUNY Oswego. What we came to realize was that our digital campus would actually be a technical ecosystem aimed at increasing the use of technology to support the campus plan and improve student success. For this ecosystem to flourish, we would need to ensure

• ample infrastructure,
• access to intuitive technical tools,
• clear processes for units to implement digital services, and
• a skilled workforce that was comfortable using technology.

We felt that if we could create this environment, students, faculty, administrators, and the broader college community would thrive.

The Importance of Planning

The planning process itself was viewed as an important step intended to promote inclusivity, communication, relationship building, and priority setting. The steering committee took a year to gather feedback in a variety of formats, including a listening tour, focus groups, and open forums. The group included representatives from all institutional roles and levels, which helped guide the work and the overall process.

Among our key process milestones was a kickoff event with more than seventy-five faculty, administrators, and staff. We invited a guest speaker to begin the meeting by discussing the state of technology in higher education and where it was headed. Next, breakout sessions envisioned what a digital campus might look like, as well as the strengths, weaknesses, and gaps that Oswego's enterprise IT had in relation to achieving that vision.

These breakout sessions were repeated multiple times during the semester with smaller groups, including Campus Technology Services (CTS) staff and IT governance and advisory groups. Turnout was excellent for these sessions, which built awareness of the initiative and facilitated discussion about the digital campus theme.

A goal of the steering committee was to closely tie the IT strategic plan with the campus Tomorrow plan. To accomplish this, we ensured an overlap in people who participated in creating both documents. Many of these people were already involved in technology committees, often chairing a group. This overlap helped bring synergy to the initiative.

It Takes a Village

During our discussions, it became apparent that many people were eager to implement technology to move their goals forward and increase efficiency and innovation. To truly become a digital campus, the plan had to be an institutional initiative. The steering committee clearly saw that it was going to take a village to create this digital campus—and that strong partnerships with business units, faculty groups, Residence Life, and students would be required. The strategic planning process was instrumental in forming these tight bonds early.

While creating a digital ecosystem was an institution-wide initiative, CTS had to be the key player in that environment. CTS staff members had to assume various roles—as leaders, collaborators, change agents, and stewards—if the ecosystem would be healthy and grow.

The Village Roadmap

Our plan, The Digital Campus: Technology for an Enhanced Tomorrow, had broad goals in four areas:

• Learning, teaching, and scholarly activities;
• Efficient business processes;
• Development of enterprise IT as a service provider;
• Governance and decision-making.

Once we completed the strategic plan, our roadmap became clear. The first milestone was to create a "Starbucks-like" experience, where people would arrive on campus and attach to the network and services as easily as they do at a coffee shop. The top priority was therefore to enhance the infrastructure to ensure comprehensive wireless coverage and ample bandwidth. Without this fully developed network layer, it would be difficult to succeed with other projects.

As we built out the infrastructure, we wanted to create a framework to help partners move forward on their priority projects. Our goal was to assist the coalition of the willing—that is, those partners who wanted to infuse technology into their area to meet institutional goals. We achieved this support in multiple ways.

First, we supported innovation in the academic areas. Our campus typically has two significant academic technology innovation projects each year: one is a top-down initiative sponsored by the provost; the second is a series of bottom-up faculty-sponsored projects. Examples of provost-sponsored projects include

• offering mobile technology (iPads and Apple TVs) and support to faculty to improve teaching in the classroom; and
• the introduction of inclusive access digital texts to lower the cost of education.

This year, the initiative is the Accessibility Faculty Fellowship program, which aims to help our campus create a process and a culture of accessible academic content.

Our faculty-sponsored projects are supported by annual Technology Innovation Program (TIP) grants, which are part of our CTS budget. Academic units submit project requests for funding, which has two goals:

• support academic initiatives related to instruction and/or improving student learning and outcomes through the use of technology; and
• further encourage implementation of SUNY Oswego's Tomorrow: Greater Impact and Success strategic plan.

Over the past five years, the college has sponsored 52 projects with total spending of about $350,000. This past year, we awarded fourteen grants, with twenty-three faculty recipients splitting $75,000 for projects including virtual reality, a one-button like studio, and makerspace support.

Second, we support administrative units implementing both niche and fundamental technologies by creating processes and guardrails that help them move to the cloud. Clearly defining processes and project partnerships has helped IT and business units move to the cloud together in a coordinated fashion. To further this initiative, the campus defined and documented our process in a report, Implementing Cloud Technologies at SUNY Oswego.

Finally, a key aspect of our digital campus plan was to develop CTS into an organization that could take on the various roles required for the plan to succeed. This process included IT Service Management training for all CTS staff to ensure that we matured into an organization that focuses on partner success, high-quality services, and continuous improvement.

Lessons Learned

Digital campus is a term we use constantly. We have achieved many successes, although not quite as quickly as hoped. Our biggest lesson has been in recognizing the value of constant two-way communication throughout the planning process and beyond. The time spent talking with different stakeholders and understanding their technical requirements, as well their vision for their units, has been invaluable. These conversations helped us build relationships and gauge readiness to move forward and also better understand what is required for initiatives to succeed.

Implementing the IT strategic plan has helped our institution reach many goals. It has also helped us reinforce the campus strategic plan as the guiding document to measure and score projects and ensure we prioritize in a way that reflects broader goals.

Following are a few of the other lessons we have learned in our digital campus effort:

• Focus on the institutional mission. Every meeting and project offers an opportunity to reinforce how actions, services, and projects are affecting the goals, objectives, and impacts we seek as an institution. Reinforcing that this is the priority helps guide decisions, thinking, and culture.
• Create and build on strong relationships. We sometimes overestimated how prepared business units were to implement technology into their operations. Vendors often say that only minimal enterprise IT is needed for projects to move forward, but in our experience, that was not always true. We learned that it is better to combine IT's strengths (business analysis, project management, risk analysis and mitigation, and appropriate data sharing) with each unit's subject matter expertise. Building on the strong relationships we developed in planning helped our IT unit better cooperate and collaborate with our partners.
• Long-term planning and budgeting are essential. Resource needs must be considered over time. Using one-time funding for infrastructure or services requires operational spending down the line. Realizing the implications of these decisions and adjusting budgets early helps institutional planning.
• Don't let laggards lead. There are always people who resist change, but they should not hold back those who are ready to move forward. We have found that it is better to let those who desire new tools and ways of thinking pull people forward than to let resistors hold us back.

Our plan is now reaching the end of its projected life span. SUNY Oswego governance committees have decided, however, to continue with our goals for a two-year period and focus on existing roadmap items. We'll then assess whether we should continue with the roadmap or start fresh. Either way, the discussions around our direction are invaluable and will continue as we move forward.

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Sean Moriarty is Chief Technology Officer at the State University of New York at Oswego and Chair of the SUNY Council of CIOs.