Strategy

W&M IT staff work to support both internal and external strategic initiatives, projects and goals with specialized resources and expertise. Our strategic partnerships are reflected in communications, project management, consulting services, analytics, relationship management and technical assessments while helping to define the university’s technology and organizational excellence strategies. To aid in our approach, we have supplemented our organization with strategists who have skills and expertise in these areas. They help to align IT functions to the university's technology assets, innovation efforts, business operations and academic initiatives by engaging in broad university thinking and collaboration.

Spotlight Story

IT swoops in to help AidData with their Global Chinese Development Finance Dataset

Scott Stewart and Phil Fenstermacher were essential in helping to get a solution in place for the Global Chinese Development Finance Dataset search interface. AidData's previous solution for generating project pages failed due to the volume of project ages that needed to be generated (more than 13,000). When AidData was scrambling to find a solution, Stewart had the idea to use Jekyll, which he got up and running quickly so that they could start expanding on it. Fenstermacher was essential in getting the solution working in Docker/Kubernetes so they could easily update their staging and production sites, as well as set it up so that if there was high traffic, they could easily expand and support that traffic.

"I have no doubt that, without their help, it would have been very tough to get a solution working in time for the delivery," says AidData Software Lead Brooke Lautenslager. "I really appreciate the time and effort they put into this solution."

Project Management & Strategic Support

While many university team members contribute to the management of technology projects, our strategists have embarked on many efforts to implement critical needs through project management and strategic support. This year, their unique skill sets have made impactful contributions to the following activities:

Project Management

This year our strategists have managed the analysis, evaluation and implementation of these complex technology projects:

Banner 9 Self-Service
buyW&M
Cayuse
Decisions.com
Teams Calls

Strategic Support

With an understanding of our technology portfolio and current capacity, our strategists have made impactful contributions to these strategic efforts:

Banner Student Profile
COVID Management
Data Fluency
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Dashboard
DEI learning modules
Digital Learning Environment (DLE) evaluation
Esports extracurricular and academic activities
Graduway and career engagement
Faculty Data consultation
Health Logistics
Portfolio management
Provost's Data Initiative
Swem/IT/STLI Strategic Planning – Vision 2026
University data architecture modernization

Communications

Our strategists worked with internal and external partners to refine and re-think communication methods, content and delivery.
We implemented a new application and maintenance status tool and developed a working committee within IT to best respond to changing communication needs.
IT team members also serve on the larger university communications committee to evaluate current state and design improvements to communications that are more strategic, responsive, accessible and effective for the whole campus.
We introduced a SMS tool for expanding text-based communication at the university. In addition, we're facilitating an accelerated release of Ellucian’s Communication Manager that will help offices easily build and deploy targeted communications related to student services and accounts, finance, and human resources.