Year in Review

Message from the CIO

Message from the CIO

Over the past year, our team has continued to bring a high level of technological expertise to advance our campus community. Since joining the William & Mary community in June 2020, I have had the honor of watching our department flourish, despite significant challenges and confounding circumstances. The team and I are incredibly proud of the work we have accomplished this year and am grateful to share so many outstanding projects and achievements that the team has made. As we prepare for the coming year, we are happily reflecting on the progress that we have made in the past year and are excited for what lies ahead. 
 
In this annual report, we share our team’s points of pride, highlight some of the projects that have made an impact on our students, faculty, and staff, and introduce our goals for the future. 
 
This year we continued to work towards the goals outlined in the university’s Vision 2026 strategic plan by updating infrastructure throughout campus with the latest technology to help the campus community flourish. Our team began the process of evaluating our Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and will continue to evaluate our options over the coming year. We also welcomed a new Deputy Chief Information Officer, Andrew Crawford in the spring after bidding farewell to longtime Deputy CIO Berni Kenney after 21 years with W&M IT. 
 
In addition, many team members launched several projects to modernize the technology platforms at W&M Law School, including shifting their myLaw Learning Management System to the university LMS, Blackboard, implementing a new exam administration solution, and we are in the process of consolidating their file structure into modern cloud storage. Additionally, the team introduced Microsoft Teams Calls to maximize our investment in Microsoft Office 365 and to have a centralized hub for communication and collaboration at the university.  
 
A team from IT and STLI completed a thorough review of the university’s Digital Learning Environment (DLE), and we look forward to taking the recommendations that came out of that review to elevate the digital tools and resources we have for our students and faculty. Additionally, we carried out many initiatives to secure our network and strengthen our protection from cyber-attacks. 
 
Looking ahead, W&M IT is committed to bringing high quality technology to campus so that our faculty, staff, and students can be successful. We are excited to continue to develop ways for our community to use technology to enhance how we are connected on campus, and beyond. Our department looks back on this year fondly and is grateful to continue to support the university’s goal of providing an exceptional environment to learn, teach, and work.

University & Community Engagement

University & Community Engagement

Internships 

• In partnership with the W&M Career Center, W&M IT hosted its first winter externship experience with Jack Hayes '24. Jack spent an entire day in IT during winter break and got to get a behind-the-scenes campus tour with Reggie Williams, learned about our support center and server room, sat in on a technology leadership meeting, talked data with the CDO, learned about HPC, had a 1:1 with the CIO and CISO and much more. 
• W&M IT offered several internship experiences this year, including a communications intern, technology intern and data intern. Many thanks to Rachel Malla '25, Clayton Emge '25, Cameron Jones ‘25 and Namit Nallapaneni ‘26 for bringing a student perspective to the team and for helping IT achieve its mission!

Cybersecurity Awareness Month 

During October, W&M IT celebrated Cybersecurity Awareness Month by quizzing our community on their cybersecurity knowledge. Tabling events were held on campus and as faculty, staff and students walked by they could take a quick quiz to see how cyber smart they are. We're happy to report we have a savvy and well-informed community! Most passerbys received a perfect score. 

W&M IT Sustainability Efforts

• 12 laptops were donated to Literacy for Life for use in their Newport News classroom.
• 30 laptops were donated to HCDP Ghana, an organization that plans to set up a computer lab for a rural community in Ghana.
• Everything that IT is not able to donate, we sent to Recycle Virginia for placement in Virginia schools. In addition to laptops, we also recycle copper cables and phones by sending them to Recycle Virginia. 
• Campus computers managed by W&M IT (i.e. computer labs) are equipped with screensavers that turn the computer off when it has been idle for a certain period of time, saving power. 
• W&M IT is building automation to monitor temperatures in buildings and boilers.

Points of Pride

Sponsored Programs and Research Compliance System (SPARCS)

SPARCS is an easy to use, configurable, electronic research administration solution to manage all research activities that replaces the homegrown grants and compliance management tools. SPARCS has already begun to reduce administrative burden for researchers and research administrators. When fully implemented, this platform will enable researchers to manage all research activities in one place. This year we went live with the Animal Oversight module and are actively working to implement the Sponsored Projects and Proposals S2S modules to support the W&M and VIMS Offices of Sponsored Programs and the Human Ethics module as the second module in the Research Compliance suite. 

Policies & Procedures

W&M IT's Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) team worked diligently this year to establish a mature set of IT policies and procedures. In order to improve compliance, the policies and procedures will be adhered to and reviewed regularly. In the coming years, the GRC will meet monthly to edit the policies and procedures to broaden their awareness and responsibility of increasing outreach with the information security working group program.

Infrastructure Projects

Student Health Insurance

At W&M, students are required to have health insurance as a condition of enrollment. This year, IT's Systems Integration & Automation team automated a process to determine student eligibility and created data integration between Banner and United Health to keep the student insurance status in sync between the two systems, greatly improving accuracy and reducing manual effort required. In addition, the team:

• Consolidated reunion class reporting so all reports and web feeds pull from one source of calculated data (total donors, total dollars raised) instead of each report recreating the calculations independently improving accuracy & simplifying maintenance.
• Replaced a decade old manual business process for the Reunion/Alumni Engagement Staff with an automated process that ensures consistent and accurate data tracking for all class years throughout their overlapping five-year reunion cycles.

Salesforce CRM Graduate & Undergraduate Non-Degree Seeking Admission Support

The total number of applications submitted in 2023 increased from 3,592 (2022) to 4,715, (31% increase). A contributing factor to this growth is the number of programs being offered as well as adding online programs over the past few years. The Systems Integration & Automation team assists with launching all new programs - collaborating with schools to create the application for new programs which provides the ability to receive applications, letters of recommendation, waivers and online payments. The application review process and decision letters are also created for each new program.

New programs launched

W&M IT assisted with the launch of six new programs

• Mason School Veteran Entrepreneur Scholars Program
• SOE Educational Policy, Planning & Leadership – Curriculum & Educational Leadership
• SOE Online MAEd – Literacy Leadership
• SOE Post Professional Certificate – Special Education
• Reves Center Whole of Government Center of Excellence
• Graduate Arts & Science Non-Degree Seeking 

Timesheet Email Approval Process

This year IT implemented a Timesheet Email Approval process to provide supervisors an effortless way to approve timesheets.  The process allows supervisors to approve timesheets from an email on their mobile device, laptop or desktop computer instead of having to log into Banner Self-Service. This process emails supervisors minutes after the timesheet submission deadline has passed, informing supervisors they have timesheets awaiting their approval.  The email includes the supervisor’s timesheet responsibilities, the timesheet(s) awaiting approval, the deadline for approval & options for approving from the email. Each timesheet awaiting approval is listed with total hours taken and details on the time taken – date, leave type and hours taken.

Now about 50% or more of the timesheets awaiting approval after the submission deadline has passed are approved using the Timesheet Email Approval process.

Institutional Research & Analytics

The Institutional Research and Analytics teams completed over 300 projects this year. 

• The Institutional Research (IR) team delivered W&M quality data via the self-service Qlik Factbooks, provided data analysis and supported decision-making to many university offices such as the Provost, COO/Finance/Budget, Admissions, Strategy & Innovation, Institutional Accreditation & Effectiveness, University Registrar, University Advancement, Charles Center, and Diversity & Inclusion.
• IR partnered on a dozen research projects that focused on enrollment, degree projection models, and more. Besides Federal and State Compliance reporting on the university data, IR also provided data to the major guidebooks and ranking surveys like Princeton Review, U.S. News & World Report, etc. They also partnered with University Marketing and University Communications on investigating, vetting and communicating W&M Rankings.
• The Data Analytics Team delivered newly created Qlik apps and enhancements to majority of the 98 published Qlik apps and 500 published Qlik sheets. The Discoverer replacement project has successfully replaced all but a few remaining reports out of the 23,000 initial reports. Project completion is planned for fall 2023.
• Both teams worked closely together to improve business data fluency by holding Data Office Hours to provide a forum to answer data questions and identify new features and training opportunities. The office of CDO provided data leadership to the Huron Research Study as well as the W&M Economic Study.

DocuSign

IT partnered with departments from across campus to continue the effort to increase efficiency and security for form submission, routing and storage. Over 485 forms were moved this past year from paper to Docusign electronic format, eliminating the need for paper forms to be mailed or dropped off at one office and then routed through mail or hand delivered to approvers working in various other offices and buildings. Forms with required retention periods are programmatically routed to the Banner Document Management imaging system where they are securely stored and are accessible from Banner Admin.