Introducing the Campus IT Plan

Thanks to the collaborative efforts of 20 IT organizations and over 300 individuals across campus, Stanford’s first-ever Campus IT Plan is now available on a new website.

The Campus IT Plan provides a collective view of the technology efforts underway across  Stanford’s seven schools, SLAC and all major academic and administrative support organizations.

The work began last summer when IT leaders gathered to discuss a vision for the future state of IT at Stanford. At the heart of their vision was greater alignment across distributed campus IT organizations, increased efficiency and productivity, improved resource utilization, and ultimately, better service to the Stanford community.

About the plan

As a central repository of planned IT efforts, the Campus IT Plan is an important step towards greater alignment. It gives visibility into what other teams are working on and unlocks opportunities for IT professionals to leverage each other's expertise, find shared solutions, create efficiencies, and much more.

“Stanford’s IT environment is remarkably diverse and distributed, and this is an unprecedented approach to communicating the breadth and depth of IT initiatives across the entire university,” said Tom Cramer, assistant university librarian and a member of the Campus IT Plan Steering Committee. “The University Libraries are pleased to be part of this process — both to find others working on similar projects as us, and also to surface some of our own efforts that may be of interest to other departments,” he said.

Sam Steinhardt, assistant vice president of Shared Services in University IT (UIT), chaired the Steering Committee that guided the plan’s development. He added,

“The Campus IT Plan is a testament to the collaborative spirit of the IT community to better align and improve the ways we work together to deliver technology services.”

Explore the plan and join the conversation

Not only is the Campus IT Plan an invaluable tool for the IT community, it also provides faculty, students, and staff with visibility into the work that IT organizations are doing to support their teaching, learning, research, and administrative work at the university.

You can view the plan in a number of ways:

• By Strategic Area: All IT efforts are mapped to one of ten strategic areas — such as Research, Infrastructure, or Data Analytics — to showcase commonalities between the efforts.

• By Keyword: Explore the plan by keywords such as “cloud” or “virtual reality” to find out about all the related IT efforts in those niche areas.

• By Unit: Check out what a specific organization is doing.

We also invite you to join the conversation in the new IT at Stanford Slack workspace. This new workspace includes a dedicated Campus IT Plan channel that provides a forum for everyone across campus to discuss planned IT efforts, share ideas, collaborate on projects, ask and answer questions, brainstorm, and more. To get started, view the Get Started on Slack page.

Looking ahead

In the coming year, the IT community hopes to build on the momentum from this inaugural year.

“Though details have not yet been finalized for year two, we’re excited to facilitate collaborative planning efforts across multiple campus units, and, as we did this year, collect and publish updated plans from the IT community,” said Tara Robenalt, Campus IT Plan program director and director of Business Relationship Management in UIT.

Learn more and share feedback

To learn more about the Campus IT Plan, visit the Introduction and About pages on the Campus IT Plan Website.

We’d also like to hear from you. If you have questions, comments, ideas, or would like to participate in next year’s research, please contact the project team.