History and Mission

Progress Report on Strategic Plan (November 2006) - (doc)

Proposed Mission, Objectives and Goals

The College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) is a diverse and multifaceted academic entity composed of sixteen departments and nine support units that exhibit equally diverse and complex technology needs. A proposed mission of a CAS-IT group is to establish and offer a nexus of organized, distributed information technology services to all of these departments and units and their constituency.

A Technology Support unit for CAS was proposed in reference to the above mission. The objectives of this unit is to effectuate and promote proactive planning processes that establish and prioritize technology needs, develop and maintain ongoing technology projects for a wide definition of technology applications throughout the College, proactively and reactively enact efficient and helpful support mechanisms in response to complex outcomes resulting from the use of technology, evaluate instructional technology, train technology personnel and clients on the use of instructional technology, and facilitate ongoing technology projects and personnel maintenance at all levels throughout the College as consistent with the larger mission of Illinois State University, and particularly as addressed in the Educating Illinois II document.

As consistent with the Educating Illinois document and the final committee report on Organizing Distributed Technical Support (aka the Chizmar Report) the assumption here is that "technical support includes both reactive and proactive assistance to users as they utilize information technology to accomplish professional, organizational, and instructional tasks." A final assumption is that the above mentioned assistance facilitates or enables the constituency to, in turn, better support them.

In some complex organizations, goal statements stand as justification for existing actions and structures and can also serve as a basis for evaluation. Measurable goal statements for the proposed technology support unit within CAS will include:

provide a clearinghouse of ideas, practices and technologies for faculty, administrators, and staff throughout the College as well as provide a walk-in facility for computing support
impact the effective implementation of technology in teaching, learning, research, and training
establish a planning procedure whereby technology resources become distributed without redundancy and waste
create a curricular model for the technology development of students
provide users with a local support person as well as a college-level support team
develop, enhance, and maintain an integrated server farm and secure computing environment
improve administrative online functions
facilitate mobile computing needs
interact with the university networking, training, marketing, and other centralized computing groups
maintain a college level location for specialized but shared equipment
create policies to improve the college computing environment
centralize fiscal purchases and personnel at the college level

Evolution of Technology Support Within the College

As the use of technology for research, instruction and administration within the academy has evolved during the past two decades, a variety of technical support units have emerged within the College. This has resulted in a somewhat independent set of technical support units that assumes a wide variety of functions based on the needs of the individual disciplines. Given that individual departments, faculty, staff, and students have presented different needs and application, an array of units (formal or otherwise) exist within the College. A general list of the functions and services that these units provide, in the broadest sense, might include:

computer classroom and computer lab support, where a specific, pedagogical or academic need of one or more departments within the College is attended to and where software installation/upgrade and hardware installation/maintenance/repair is routine,
facilities planning to facilitate and coordinate renovations,
fiscal management to share in costs and avoid replication of effort,
communication to create a dialog with users and technology entities,
desktop support for faculty and college/department/unit staff, where software installation and upgrades is provided as needed, and where hardware maintenance and repair is a dominant activity,
distributed printing services for all faculty and department staff,
networked services for individual faculty/staff file sharing and storage and, in some cases, including electronic mail services,
faculty development in relation to teaching and research,
project development in relation to teaching, research, and administrative functions,
product testing/ evaluation in relation to teaching and research,
troubleshooting,
creation of policies as needed to maintain a secure and effective computing environment,
student development and evaluation in terms of professional practice, and
server support and administration for the College.

Reorganizing some of these functions and services (listed above) in specific offices at the College level was prudent. In doing so, the College provides a mechanism by which the College could bridge some of these services and functions with those that are common to many departments while also creating a means to have specialized functions at the local level . This is why CAS-IT was created.