A Message from Our CIO
With Queen's Renew Program firmly established, IT Services is focused this year on how technology and digital innovation can help address the most pressing challenges facing the University today. Seeking ways of becoming more effective and efficient in delivering Queen’s services is our prevailing theme, and the CIO Priorities described below are each key enablers to achieving these objectives. I look forward to pursuing these activities with the members of my skilled and dedicated team and the community partners with whom we continue to forge productive partnerships.
Marie-Claude Arguin
CIO & AVP (ITS)
About Our Operating Plan
The purpose of our Operating Plan, published annually, provides direction to all IT Services staff members on the departmental priorities for the fiscal year; and it informs our external partners of the key activities being undertaken by IT Services during the current fiscal year.
Target Audiences
We invite all members of the Queen’s community to review our Operating Plan, published by the CIO and AVP (ITS), to provide transparency and accountability on the activities to be undertaken and prioritized by IT Services during the current fiscal year. Through the plan, our directors are empowered to allocate resources to sustain existing services and to undertake new initiatives identified and prioritized by our stakeholders to serve the needs of the Queen’s community.
Scope
This plan focuses on what will occur during the current fiscal year. Although there is other work that will be accomplished by IT Services, including important work to support the Queen’s community through activities such as ticket and incident response, provisioning, general support, and other project/work packages, the Operating Plan reflects the priorities for the current fiscal year that we have committed to complete.
Queen's Strategy
In 2021, Queen’s released its new strategy which encompasses the mission, vision, and values of Queen’s through six identified strategic goals. IT Services’ own mission, vision, values, and drivers are well-postured to support and deliver on the university’s key priorities.
More detailed information on the strategic goals is available on the Principal’s website.
Principal's WebsiteThe table below demonstrates the alignment between Queen’s strategic goals and IT Services’ drivers.
| Queen's Strategic Goals | Mapped IT Services Drivers |
|---|---|
| 1 | Aiming to increase the university's research impact |
Research Intensification |
| 2 | Advancing the student learning experience |
Student Experience |
| 3 | Growing the interdependence between research and learning |
Research Intensification |
| 4 | Strengthening the university's global engagement |
Revenue Generation |
| 5 | Deepening the university's relationship with the local, regional, and national communities |
Research Intensification
Digital Agility and Resilience |
| 6 | Improving Queen's organisational culture |
Operational Excellence |
Our Drivers
Our drivers help us to stay aligned with the larger Queen’s strategy. Proposed initiatives and projects should align with our drivers to achieve both IT Services’ and Queen’s goals.
Queen’s students’ lives are enriched and deepened by their learning journey, by experiencing an extraordinary sense of community, and by a desire for a better humanity, while also growing the knowledge, professional skills and digital literacy for the workplace.
To be achieved through:
- Timely insight though integrated analytical data into their progression and pathways;
- Easy-to-use and seamless integration of learning tools and campus life resources;
- Student-centric service design and delivery across the institution with self-service, on-demand, and customised services and resources for different personas’ needs;
- Mobility and equity: anywhere, anytime, any resource, any device and any accessibility need met;
- connected, participative, and informed through meaningful personalised notifications, customizable feeds and integrated web presence, contributing to a happy, healthy, home experience whether on campus or online; and,
- outcome-driven adoption of teaching technologies with first-rate support for faculty.
Queen’s researchers are empowered to pursue opportunities and to conduct impactful research through digital support services closely connected with research success.
To be achieved through:
- Enhancing and integrating faculty, graduate and post-doctoral supports across the institution with a research-centric view;
- Facilitating access to world-class computing services that advance research outcomes, collaborations, and impacts;
- Facilitating interdisciplinary collaborations;
- Promoting research at Queen’s; and,
- Creating a dynamic environment for all researchers.
Queen’s fully capitalises on its opportunities.
To be achieved through:
- Reinforcing enrolment strategies through data-driven decisionmaking; through building quality, well-managed constituent relationships, and through presenting a modern web presence;
- Assisting advancement efforts with high quality data on all Queen’s constituents’ engagements across the institution and throughout their lifetimes;
- Enabling the expansion of on-campus, remote, online and hybrid delivery of exceptional teaching and learning experiences for credit and non-credit courses, including revenue administration automation and efficiency; and,
- Supporting reporting to funding organisations through automation of performance metrics.
Optimising and transformative measures continuously support a culture of high performance across all levels of the University.
To be achieved through:
- Fostering equity, diversity, inclusion, indigeneity and accessibility by design through the thoughtful implementation of digital resources;
- Active community engagement that recognises the University as a human institution that exists for a planetary good;
- Including digital literacy and profiency planning and activities throughout our digital journey;
- Facilitating informed decision-making through the development of business intelligence capabilities, including data governance, data literacy, data integration, data analytics and AI;
- Continuous improvement through the ongoing evaluation of betterment opportunities, through process re-engineering, and by seeking synergies across Queen’s;
- Modernising service delivery to respond to the journey toward a pervasive digital curriculum.
- Supporting reporting to funding organisations through automation of performance metrics.
Queen’s has achieved a dynamic state of continuous evolution within its digital environment, seamlessly adapting to change and encouraging its community members to pursue opportunities.
To be achieved through:
- Continuously evolving the digital environment to fulfill the University’s aspirations as they emerge:
- Modernised core capabilities and robust infrastructure set the foundation for Queen’s digitalization journey;
- People are skilled, connected across communities, united around a common understanding of Queen’s values, vision and goals; and
- Adaptive governance is in place to allow for rapid innovation while maximizing value for the institution.
- Mitigating cyber risks by cultivating risk-informed communities, maturing cybersecurity practices, ensuring regulatory security compliance, practicing responsible asset management, and enhancing continuity planning.
Our mission statement describes our purpose and overall intention. Our vision provides a vivid mental image of where we imagine ourselves to be in the future, while our values and principles are the beliefs and philosophies that drive the culture of our department.
To strengthen student success and research impact through enabling information and technology services.
A Queen's community that is empowered and enriched by evolving digital technologies, and experiences first-rate service.
- We are professional, curious, forward-looking, and open to new ways of working.
- We are responsive and transparent to the community, and demonstrate awareness of their business needs.
- We exercise leadership at all levels and build strong stakeholder relationships.
- We collaborate effectively with people of diverse perspectives and experiences, and create safe space in which to share ideas.
- We adopt an informed and risk-aware approach to timely decision-making.
- We continuously invest in ourselves to grow competences.
The following are IT Services' design principles:
- Student experience comes first.
- Institutional outcomes before technology.
- One identity.
- Enter data once.
- Intuitive, accessible, and secure.
- Self-service and automation.
- Fiscally responsible.
As CIO and AVP (ITS), it is my responsibility to ensure that all of the work undertaken by IT Services supports the strategic goals of the University and provides value to the community. This means that some of our core activities remain constant year over year while others fluctuate depending on the changing institutional context – making this annual Operating Plan quite important. Every work package listed in this document is valuable, but there are always a few initiatives to which I am particularly attentive; below are five major activities that fall into this category for the current fiscal year. While this year’s list does not specifically call out investments in the workforce, enriching our people remains a guiding departmental principle. I count on each and every one of us to never forget the importance of “Happiness” and “Human Connection”, our themes of the past two years. It is up to us all to ensure the concepts we’ve learned are now put into practice and become part of our daily lives, within and outside the workplace. Let’s lean on one another through tough times – together we are stronger … and hopefully (I dare say probably) happier.
Enterprise Architecture (EA) provides a structured framework through which a comprehensive view of Queen’s business capabilities, technologies, applications and data can be seen. Work is underway to gather the University-wide asset information required to store, structure and visualise Queen's EA repository in one location. This activity is a critical enabler for digital governance transformation and in support of Queen's Renew Program priorities.
This initiative to transform Queen's digital governance will encompass three objectives: to enable a more efficient IT demand management process with increased visibility into digital investments through appropriate checks and balances; to create a more holistic, standardised, inclusive and collaborative framework for decision-making; and to provide a framework through which to right-size the number of digital applications and associated technical processes being used across Queen's. This activity is a critical enabler in support of Queen's Renew Program priorities.
This year, Queen's Renew Program's roadmap is focused on the areas of Financial Services, Strategic Procurement Services, Human Resources and Facilities. Bolstered by the ongoing parallel work to transform Queen's Digital Governance and to establish an Enterprise Architecture practice for Queen's, IT Services will prioritise support to improve the endorsed business processes in these areas through the implementation of automations and digital platforms. The outcomes will promote effective, supportive, flexible and adaptable, and financially sustainable services.
Queen's multi-year Enterprise Constituent Relationship Management (eCRM) program will see gains for University Admissions and Recruitment (UAR), the Office of the University Registrar (OUR), and the School of Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs (SGSPA) during this fiscal year. Activities will be focused on unifying and centralising processes for communications; streamlining and enhancing admissions processes; improving processes for supporting students; and delivering comprehensive reporting and metrics. In addition to these gains and activities, a new cycle of work will commence within the fiscal year, emphasising improved internal communications to all faculty and staff members across the University. The eCRM team will collaborate with various units on campus to implement further CRM functionality, aiming to consolidate the numerous systems in use and to build efficiencies. This will include scaling previously implemented capabilities within eCRM, such as case management and graduate admissions systems for SGSPA and faculty-specific admissions processes.
Over the past two years, Queen's has made great strides in establishing enterprise data governance structures, identifying key data roles, building a data operating model, publishing a Data Access and Sharing Usage standard, and enhancing our ability to deliver data-driven dashboards. In the coming year, we will mature Queen's enterprise data management and analytics practices by assessing Queen's maturity in all data knowledge areas and developing an action plan to address the capabilities most in need of attention.
Over the past 5-7 years, Queen's has established strong foundational cybersecurity protections. However, the complex and ever-evolving threat landscape requires constant vigilance and multi-layered actions to keep those foundations strong. This year, Queen's cybersecurity program will focus on data protection, privileged access management, continued endpoint protection, and improved completion rates for cybersecurity education and awareness training – the single most important defense against the kinds of user behaviours that lead to costly data breaches.
Operating Plan
This section provides high-level direction for teams internal to IT Services to guide them in delivering the priority initiatives, projects, and activities, at the right time.
Just as importantly, it is meant to inform the Queen’s community of all the ongoing activities within IT Services. Such information-sharing has historically enhanced collaboration.
We are leveraging a web-based, dynamic tool to allow for updates to specific fields throughout the year. Also, newly approved activities will be added to the table quarterly.
Operating Plan