INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY STRATEGIC PLAN
FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA
University Committee on Information Technology
and Communication

Adopted June 7, 1993
Revised May 2, 1994

The Vision

Thomas Jefferson founded a new kind of university to suit the special needs of a democracy. He created an integrated educational environment which he termed an Academical Village to encourage intellectual exchange across disciplinary boundaries, to combine living and learning in order to bring scholars together in "new configurations", and to involve all members of an academic community in the cooperative pursuit of knowledge.

The University of Virginia remains committed to Jefferson's form of education -- an education that spans disciplines and opens new horizons, thus enabling "students" to become "scholars." His vision of intimacy and interaction has been challenged as the community of scholars has become both more diverse and more highly specialized. We have moved from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, yet the essence of Jefferson's vision is as relevant today as it was two hundred years ago. Today, information technology is an integral part of an academic community, analogous to the central role of the university library in Jefferson's time.

Mission Statement

A university education equips the student with the ability to acquire, evaluate, and apply knowledge -- a process called scholarship. Information technology is critical to the University's mission to provide the student access both to a broad range of knowledge and to the tools required to structure, manipulate, and evaluate it. This is the greatest promise of information technology in higher education -- it permits students to examine information that might have required a lifetime of study a generation ago, and thus it can allow students to become scholars. The organization of the objectives and strategies shown below reflects the variety of demands for information technology at the University of Virginia:

I. Instruction and Research
II. University Administration
III. Health Care
IV. Public Service

Because they are so flexible, many computing technologies can serve diverse needs; a high-performance computer network for instruction and research can also provide an essential backbone for administration or health care. Thus, many of the objectives and strategies are shared among the different computing constituencies. Indeed, instruction and research are inseparable when evaluating information technology objectives. At the University of Virginia, today's research becomes next week's lecture notes and next semester's exam question, so that the boundary between "instructional computing" and "research computing" is never fixed.

Information technologies at the Health Sciences Center pose a special set of problems and opportunities. Because these technologies form critical links in direct patient care, extraordinary levels of reliability and accountability are required. In addition, patients, physicians, and other care-givers expect that computing technology should simplify, rather than complicate, the treatment of an illness. However, effective health-care information systems provide a unique opportunity for health-care professionals to examine, at a level of detail that could only be imagined twenty years ago, their hypotheses about the nature of illness and the most effective strategies for its treatment.

We must also stress that technological advancement often favors quality over quantity. This is a very general observation that applies to almost every enterprise, including scientific research, medicine, literary scholarship, and undergraduate and graduate instruction. Thus, the development of more powerful experimental techniques allows scientists to ask "better" questions, but not necessarily "more" questions. Likewise, more powerful diagnostic procedures allow a physician to prescribe more appropriate therapies, rather than simply see more patients. Information technology is a tool that will continue to dramatically improve the quality of higher education -- with the aid of these technologies students and faculty will have access to a much broader range of resources and be able to pursue questions to greater depth. Information technology can also increase instructional "productivity" for courses that rely on repetitive exercises, but such courses are very rare at colleges and universities.

The essence of a university is knowledge, its creation, its storage, and its communication. The ability to process information, the "raw stuff" of knowledge, is thus critical to the university's mission. Information processing can be even more than a tool of accounting or science, but an essential part of education and scholarship in the sciences, arts, humanities, and professions. The University's Information Technology charter therefore is to advance the mission of the University by providing information technologies that support and enhance academic, health care, and administrative functions in pursuit of excellence.

Objectives and Strategies

I. Instruction and Research

Objective

Strengthen effective and innovative teaching and insightful learning by stressing interaction, collaboration, and individual exploration. Provide hardware and software tools and training and support to allow students and faculty to imagine new vistas, pose new questions, perfect new procedures, pursue new collaborations, and disseminate new knowledge.
Strategies
A. Develop a support program to provide the training, the documentation, and the consultation expertise necessary for students, faculty, and staff to utilize effectively the rapidly changing spectrum of computer hardware, software, and computer-based information resources. Such a program will require the collaboration of the Department of Information Technology and Communication (ITC) and other providers or information services with schools and departments. However, one organization -- ITC -- must be the leader of this cooperative endeavor.

Although computing resources will continue to become cheaper, more powerful, and more decentralized over the next five years, as computing applications become more diverse, the personnel costs to support effectively those resources will increase both relative to hardware and software costs and in absolute terms. The increased demands for computing support will certainly require cooperative mechanisms that distribute responsibilities between ITC and other schools and departments. Such mechanisms may require changes in school and departmental budgets to reflect changing personnel needs to support information technology appropriately.

As with distribution of responsibilities, one organization must be given the responsibility to ensure that support needs are being clearly identified and addressed. However, the decentralization of hardware and software resources and the rapid changes in computing technology require that ITC develop a flexible and responsive policy for hardware and software support.

B. Provide all faculty, staff and students with access to appropriate computers or workstations, related software, technical support and training required for their instructional and scholarship needs.

For example: Provide students with appropriate microcomputer and workstation laboratories and the associated software required to meet the basic needs of students without personally owned computers, and the advanced and special purpose requirements of all students. Provide help in specifying and selecting hardware. A core set of general purpose applications -- word processing, electronic mail, communications, reference management, spread sheets, illustration, statistics, database should be identified and supported; negotiate site licenses.

C. Provide all faculty, staff and students with high-bandwidth access to the university electronic resources independent of their location: office, dormitories, or home, and during travel.

This network should be extended to the community, state and world. Important features are high bandwidth, speed, transparent access from off-grounds, adherence to standards, ease of use, and an appropriate security environment assuring validity of information on the network. For example: the university should provide a standard set of remote access network protocols -- IPX, AppleTalk, TCP/IP, as well as standard dial-up serial communication and offer advice on modem selection and alternative connection protocols.

D. Provide faculty and students with appropriate technology to support efficient and effective instruction and learning in classrooms, including high-bandwidth network access and high-quality presentation capabilities. This capacity for delivery of instruction should be supported with appropriate resources for development and production of educational materials.

E. Provide access to local and remote high-performance computing machinery. (We should identify some level of computing capability that must be available locally, and make a commitment to belong to appropriate consortia to provide access to ultra-high-performance machines).

F. Collaborate with university libraries and other local or remote information providers to provide general access to information for scholarly use. Training of faculty, staff, and students should be provided for ease of access to networked information and in uses of the network to support collaboration. Develop and provide tools for making electronic information easily available and make the University of Virginia a major electronic information resource on the network.

G. Explore and evaluate innovative approaches and applications for integrating computing into instruction and scholarship. Support "leading edge" hardware and software developments with the potential to revolutionize how faculty, staff, and students integrate, manipulate, and evaluate information.


H. Implement a planning/review cycle to re-evaluate critically the best uses of information technology in support of instruction and scholarship and introduce a method of funding departmental computing and its support that can sustain these facilities over the long term.

II. Administration

Objective

Support the administrative functions of the University by ensuring the availability of required data, using a reliable network of cost-effective and integrated information systems. Administrative functions exist to support the academic mission of the university, to perform its fiduciary responsibilities and to assist in managing University resources. These functions operate at several levels: central, school, departmental and in the work of individual faculty. A major effort should be made to tailor and focus information systems and tools to the needs of schools, departments, faculty and students.
Strategies
A. Manage institutional data as a university asset and provide appropriate user access to it. Provide faculty and staff with the appropriate tools to assist them in the electronic management of course-related student information, and in the electronic management of research grants and projects and other university administrative data.

B. Enhance applications development capabilities throughout the University by offering training in the principles and techniques of software development and making available to the user community more sophisticated, yet inexpensive and easy to use development tools. Promote innovation in IT applications in all programs. {ITC/Departmental position sharing, summer faculty fellowships, lecture program, foster partnership with selected ITC vendors.}

C. Develop and maintain a continuing plan for new administrative applications subject to administrative priorities and review processes.

D. Assist the university in reengineering its administrative and academic processes. Develop a plan for reducing redundant paper work, forms, and data submission, and data entry.

E. Develop clear, concise university-wide policies addressing ownership, access, control and abuse of information and the establishment of administrative mechanisms for policy enforcement.


F. Develop financial resources to support the growth and replacement of central and departmental information technology equipment and application software.

III. Health Care

Objective

Promote and support the objectives of health maintenance, disease prevention and patient care through enhanced access to and integration of information systems in the academic and clinical health sciences throughout the University and the surrounding region.
Strategies
A. Develop appropriate hardware and software systems to support the transformation of the patient record from its current mix of paper and electronic components to a fully automated and integrated computer-based patient record.

B. Implement a mechanism for evaluating and selecting information systems throughout the Health Sciences Center, from billing and scheduling systems to specialized data acquisition and imaging systems, that includes requirements for interfaces to other health sciences information systems for integration of data into the computer-based patient record.

C. Provide secure and timely access to the appropriate databases, including the computer-based patient record for clinical research and education, outcomes assessment, health services research, management systems and reports, and administrative and clinical decision making.


D. Develop a regional computer network to support a regional system of health care. The extended network will link hospitals, physicians, pharmacies, and other health-care providers with laboratories and insurance companies to integrate record keeping, documentation, billing, management, and evaluation and to coordinate costs across facilities.

IV. Public Service

Objective

Provide public schools, government officials, and the community at large with intimate access to the information, academic and intellectual resources of the University by progressively extending the boundaries of the Academical Village.
Strategies
A. Provide support and leadership for networking services, such as Virginia Education and Research Network (VERNet) and the parallel K-12 network (Virginia's PEN), which link public and private educational systems within the Commonwealth.

B. Support the extension of the university electronic resources to surrounding communities through libraries, and other state and local organizations.

C. Facilitate and encourage an infrastructure which will foster collaboration with other institutions and private industry.

D. Provide technological leadership to SCHEV, the Center for Innovative Technology, the state library system, the state legislature, and other state and national government agencies.

© 2008 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia.

The information contained on the University of Virginia’s Department of Information Technology and Communication (ITC) website is provided as a public service with the understanding that ITC makes no representations or warranties, either expressed or implied, concerning the accuracy, completeness, reliability or suitability of the information, including warrantees of title, non-infringement of copyright or patent rights of others. These pages are expected to represent the University of Virginia community and the State of Virginia in a professional manner in accordance with the University of Virginia’s Computing Policies.