Continuous improvement of IT

This post contains an outline of goals for the continuous improvement of IT at UWG . Thinking about how to achieve these goals was a major influence on my thinking about IT reorganization.

I'm going to take these to the open meeting tomorrow to get feedback on what I've missed or goofed up. Let me know if you see anything, too.

Five overarching goals:

1. Improve service to users
   
2. Increase efficiency
3. Improve security
4. Improve accountability
5. Improve budgeting and planning processes
   

Some areas in which to effect these improvements, in no particular order, with the relevant goals in brackets:

• User-service orientation [1, 4]

• Decision-making [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
• Strategic
• Tactical
  

• Service desk (AKA help desk)
  
• Hours of operation [1]
• Problem resolution [1, 2, 4]
  
• Identification of shared and/or common problems [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
  
• Single point of contact for all user support requests [1, 2, 4]
• Online knowledge base [1, 4]

• Quality of service [1, 4]
  
• Levels of service
  
• Variation in levels of service
• Specialized services
• Administrative
• Academic
  

• Faculty/staff development
• User training [1, 2, 3]
• IT staff training [1, 2]
• IT career development
• Cross-training
  

• Duplication:
  
• "Back-room" services like server administration, directory services [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
• Computer lab and classroom management [1, 2, 4]
  
• Budgeting [5]
  

• Service management standards and procedures [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
  
• Issue response and tracking
  
• Service-level agreements (SLAs)
  
• Operational-level agreements (OLAs)
  
• Service catalog
• IT asset management
• Hardware
• Software
• Licenses
  
• Change management
• Configuration management
• Version control (AKA Revision control)

• Standardization (where appropriate) [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

• Project management [2, 3, 4]
• Process improvement
• Risk management
• Quality management (e.g., validation and verification, defect prevention, standards, best practices)
  

• Incident management [1, 2, 3, 4]
• Security incident management
  
• Bug tracking
• Disaster recovery
  

• Access control and authorization
  
• User access [1, 2, 3]
  
• IT staff access [2, 3, 4]

• Internal IT auditing [2, 3, 4]
  
• Network and software vulnerability assessments
• Intrusion detection and prevention
• Packet sniffing

• Coordination, communication, and IT governance
• IT/user communication [1, 2, 4]
• Intra-IT communication [1, 2, 3, 4]
• Clear definitions of IT roles and responsibilities [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
• IT budgeting process [2, 4, 5]
  
• Up-front budgeting (i.e., less reliance on end-of-cycle and ad hoc budgeting)
  
• Unified IT budget
• Business case, TCO, ROI analyses
  
• IT planning and prioritization process [2, 4, 5]
• Strategic
  
• Tactical