Action Item 10.01
The campus community must be involved—as a full-fledged partner with both authority and responsibilities—in the development and implementation of IT strategies and service directions taken at LSU. Essentially, the Flagship IT Strategy planning process must evolve a long-term role for the task forces, to facilitate ongoing input from the community, as well as a venue to help communicate IT directions more broadly on campus.

The process that has resulted in this planning document showed the value of closer collaboration between the CIO and the campus IT-using community. While setting high-level directions for IT should be the responsibility of the University’s CIO, obtaining the valuable advice and counsel of the IT community—faculty, students, and staff – will only serve to increase the value of the CIO’s decisions. The community has, through this plan, given form to a vision for IT at LSU. It can and must serve a continuing role in helping guide the specific aspects of implementation of the many action items. The community not only should have the perspective of giving advice and consenting authority to IT directions, it also thus assumes a significant responsibility to ensure that various elements of the implementation are carried through. The CIO receives great value in terms of communicating IT directions, situations, and challenges through the mechanism of the task forces; and this, too, speaks to the value of continuing the involvement past the crafting of the plan. But more importantly, the CIO gains through this collaborative process not an oversight authority, but a working and dedicated partner to achieving the vision herein described.

Action Item 10.02
The Office of the CIO and ITS should play a critical role in sharing specialized IT knowledge across the campus. As the central component in a coordinated University-wide IT service environment, ITS must ensure that there is an IT-focused Web presence that provides for the University a pathway for communicating the broad set of IT infrastructure and services described in this Plan. Thus, ITS and the Office of the CIO should develop a central LSU-IT Web site that fulfills the broadest possible mechanism for discovering facets of IT at LSU.

Untapped and unknown resources are available across campus. People have specialized skills or expertise in specific technologies that may benefit the campus as a whole. Incentives should be put in place to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and the education of users and IT personnel alike, and ITS is uniquely positioned within the University to facilitate this sharing of knowledge.

There is an expressed need for an “IT@LSU” Web site that is easy to navigate, facilitates problem solving, and lets users know more about the resources available to them as members of the LSU community. Basic items commonly used, like technical support, getting an ID, and ordering a telephone, should be readily available, as should up-to-date information on all facets of the IT environment at LSU. While not specifically an ITS Web site, the site should certainly encompass all services offered by ITS, and provide links to the broader, distributed IT services and infrastructure available from all units across campus. To the user, this site should present a seamless and holistic image of IT at LSU.

The University community should be constantly aware of IT capabilities available to them. An inventory of available tools and resources with their locations will make optimal use of an abundant IT environment. Additionally, individuals should be aware of the types of technical support available to them and the means by which they can contact support agencies.

To ensure that the IT agenda for LSU stays in line with the desires and needs of the campus community, members of the campus community should be encouraged to provide feedback on IT initiatives and progress via simple-to-navigate Web-based means.

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Action Item 10.03
ITS should initiate a program of activity base costing for IT services it provides, so as to illustrate for the community the relative cost of its various services. This effort should be coupled with a user satisfaction survey, so that cost and quality of service (in terms of user value) can be illustrated.

To the campus, the costs of services and infrastructure provided by ITS for the benefit of the entire campus has been, to date, veiled and mysterious. Members of the Flagship IT Strategy task force found the process of engagement illuminating, in terms of their understanding of the broader roles and functions of ITS; but this process limited that exposure to only a handful of members of the campus community, and did not provide sufficient detail. A unit the size of ITS will certainly benefit from a more detailed analysis of its underlying cost structure (for services) and the sharing of that information broadly throughout its own organization and across the community of its users/customers. The community will benefit by having a better and richer understanding of both the cost and broadly-perceived value of ITS services, and this will help better guide the advice and direction the community provides to the central IT organization. Such a program should feature not only significant detail of costs and quality assessments, but open-access (via the Web) to that information by the community at large.

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