Page 17 - WesternU View Summer 2019

“We will also be partnering with each unit, especially

Clive Houston-Brown, EdD
on the academic side, to ensure we are getting to know

what they are teaching, how to teach it, and how

technology can partner with them to improve that.”

“Everyone knows their pieces of their technology, but no one has
the big picture of what we have on campus,” Houston-Brown
said. “We identified hundreds of applications that instruction is
using – from major enterprise systems like Blackboard down to a
little time and attendance app. There is a lot duplication, and this
comes out in end-user frustration and student frustration in the
number of applications they have to deal with.”
IT will look at ways to integrate and automate systems to improve
customer service. This will require the use of Lean Six Sigma
Jonathan Daitch, MEd
(LSS), a systematic and strategic approach to continuous process
Associate Provost for Online Education
improvement that has been embraced by WesternU as part of its
strategic planning. LSS is based on the principle of streamlining
organizational processes to ensure they are effective and efficient.
LSS helps redirect scarce resources and engages employees in even
higher-level mission performance.
“We will peel layers back to examine the core pieces we have to
have and where we can consolidate duplicate functionality within
the IT ecosystem that allows us to take precious resources, both
fiscal and personnel, and redirect them at strategic initiatives,”
Houston-Brown said.
The current IT organizational structure is vertically siloed, which
can result in internal communication issues with overlapping
services, Houston-Brown said, and people don’t always know who
to call when they need IT services. IT will be restructured
horizontally by subject matter and expert teams based on
functional support, where people have day-to-day duties in a
particular type of technology, whether it’s databases or desktops.
They can also serve as project support.

IT will respond to the needs of the academic and administrative
units on campus, rather than dictating what is used. Stakeholders
will also get a strong voice in IT with a steering committee made
up of senior leadership on campus, with four subcommittees
under the committee.

The department will move from being IT-centric to being business
centric, be it academic business or administrative business,
Houston-Brown said.
“We will look at how we put into place channels of
communication that ensure stakeholders are aware of what we are
doing so they are minimally impacted by updates, patches and
things like that,” he said. “We will take into account their needs
when doing those changes. We will also be partnering with each
unit, especially on the academic side, to ensure we are getting to

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