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IT Service Status
IT Service Status

Facing Forward—Sharing Priorities for the Year Ahead

At the October 22 Extended Staff Meeting, senior leaders came together to participate in a panel discussion, led by Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer Sean Reynolds, to share updates about department priorities, significant projects, and critical focus areas for operations in the fiscal year, along with tips and encouragements for staff to stay engaged and find joy despite challenges.

The panelists included:

  • Dave Carr, Associate Vice President, Cyberinfrastructure
  • Victoria Getis, Senior Director of Teaching and Learning Technologies
  • Brandon Grill, Senior Director of Technology Planning and Security
  • Andrew Ludington, Senior Director of Enterprise Systems
  • Jackie Milhans, Director of Research Computing and Data
  • Joe Paris, Associate Vice President, IT Services and Support

The panel responded to questions posed by Reynolds, offering detailed insights into their respective areas and emphasizing the importance of integrating service and expertise, collaborating, and connecting across Northwestern IT teams. The leaders also echoed each other's intentional focus on combining cooperative planning with distributed technology teams and enterprise business, research, and academic partners across the University.

Below, we captured the themes and highlights of the conversation around priorities, but we encourage you to take a moment and watch the full panel discussion in the Extended Staff Meeting recording (available to Northwestern IT staff only).

Modernization, Innovation, and Efficiency

  • Fiscally focused telecommunications planning is underway to reduce telephone hardware in favor of expanded digital options for a voice platform.
  • Developing more agile approaches to project management for enterprise support strategy.
  • Efficiency, cost, and security-fueled efforts to reimagine the technology certificate renewal and management processes.
  • After addressing a technical debt on the research computing infrastructure, a rebalance of work will focus on user experience and engaging with the research community.
  • Enabling business efficiencies in research administration, procurement and payment services, and graduate student union appointments.

Security and Risk Management

  • Identity and Access Management (IAM)-led work to continue enhancing protections against cyberattacks through individual access breaches.
  • New operational work around risk management and security compliance, particularly to support ever-evolving research and government regulations.
  • Addressing security challenges in cloud-based cyberinfrastructure that are introduced via SaaS environments.
  • Strengthening security and expanding storage for research data—Quest enhancements.

AI Readiness and Enablement

  • Establishing a baseline of literacy in Generative AI for faculty, instructors, and staff, as well as opportunities for deeper learning and facility with AI in academic contexts.
  • Managing growing needs around data center cooling in response to demand from AI and other emerging technologies.
  • Building strategy around support for growing explorations into AI for researchers.

User Focused Service Design and Community Interaction

  • Deepening our understanding of how the University community experiences the ecosystem of services provided by Northwestern IT and learning how we can enhance them from a user perspective.
  • Thinking about how recent staffing updates will allow for more agile responses, efficiency, and improved productivity to address broad, rather than siloed, requests for tools such as AI chatbots and other items of shared interest and growing needs.
  • Renewing our focus on developing processes that map directly to identified needs from distributed IT partners and support checks and balances in security and compliance, as well as responsiveness that reflects an understanding of their individual priorities.
  • Elevating awareness of the various IT teams’ service and training offerings.

Accessibility, Collaboration, and Partnerships

  • Deepening and expanding work to grow digital accessibility efforts beyond the learning management system into other areas of impact across the University.
  • Conducting a comprehensive evaluation of Google for Education collaboration services and the potential for a pivot that would merge these services with other existing options.
  • Collaborating with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications to build a new co-located cluster.

Following the discussion around department priorities, the panelists discussed what we might be able to do with additional budgetary resources and how we can shift existing work to make room for new initiatives and challenges.

Finally, the panel closed the meeting by talking about the importance of identifying ways for Northwestern IT staff to stay engaged and find purpose and value in their work despite current challenges (e.g., ongoing commitments, no merit increases, benefits changes, etc.).

The consensus was that professional development opportunities remain an important tool for growth (and professional development dollars are available in the budget), and peer-led community engagement and recognition can create tangible value and serve as inspiration for individuals. Panelists also encouraged staff to lean into uncomfortable work for growth opportunities, acknowledge one another and accomplishments, make space for innovation, participate in communities of practice, and most importantly, make time for fun through creativity.

Once again, the full Extended Staff Meeting is available on demand for Northwestern IT staff.