A message from Lois Brooks, vice provost for information technology and chief information officer:
There’s never been a better time to work in information technology. Every day, we get to work on interesting and impactful initiatives, collaborate to solve complex problems, and explore how new technologies can serve the needs of UW–Madison’s students and employees and the state of Wisconsin.
As we look forward to the start of 2024, I hope you share my optimism about what’s in store for us in UW’s IT community. Here’s a preview of some of what we have to look forward to:
Continued focus on learner success
A core part of our mission is enabling student success through technology. In 2024, we plan to double down on our efforts to use data-empowered educational practices to provide insights that promote best practices for teaching and learning. Through our partnerships within our digital accessibility liaison network, we will make strides to increase the accessibility of the digital campus experience as we continue to implement UW’s Digital Accessibility Policy. We’re also poised and ready to help the university explore new online courses and degree options to give new flexibility to our students and perhaps even open up opportunities for people who don’t think of college as an option right now. Our partners in UW’s schools, colleges and the Division of Teaching and Learning continue to innovate, so we expect new initiatives to launch in the coming year. We stand ready to help implement the next evolution of higher education in Wisconsin.
Culture, Climate and Engagement
Ensuring a vibrant, inclusive and exceptional workforce of IT professionals has always been and will continue to be a top priority, and in the coming year we will focus on the people who make possible everything this university accomplishes. The Division of Information Technology will open a new chapter in that ongoing effort early next year as Dominic Ledesma joins the division as the inaugural Assistant Vice Provost For Culture, Climate & Engagement. I look forward to welcoming him to the division’s leadership team and helping him establish his new team in 2024.
Administrative Transformation Program & Workday
With the recently adjusted timeline, we anticipate a successful Workday deployment in 2025. To achieve that success, we plan to make substantial progress integrating ancillary systems on our campus and across the Universities of Wisconsin. With significant involvement from our HR and finance teams, we will ramp up our focus on our business processes to optimize this transition. Our work is vital to completing the Administrative Transformation Program — a top priority for UW–Madison and the Universities of Wisconsin — and I’m excited to see all the work our teams have put into this project begin to reach fruition.
AI everywhere
Artificial intelligence is still a hot topic in popular media. But beyond the hype, the real-world implications of what AI technologies could enable for us in the coming year are profound and truly exciting. In 2024, AI will be embedded further into our work and the tools we use daily, boosting our productivity and opening the door to new uses we may not have considered before. We are exploring options for enterprise AI services for the university community, which — with proper oversight — would provide safe, secure, supported and equitable access to this new technology. Our skills in AI will continue to grow as well as we experiment with chatbots, language models, machine learning, and generative tools and find more ways to augment human capabilities with machine intelligence. All of this will position us to serve as guides, helping others at the university navigate this new technological landscape.
Cybersecurity
We are forging ahead on cybersecurity initiatives to protect the university’s digital assets. I’ve written before about why cybersecurity is vital to the future of higher education, but I can’t stress it enough. In the coming year, we’ll continue to make progress on our Smart Access security initiatives. We will continue to leverage existing tools to enhance our security posture as we look forward to implementing new tools and automation to help us stay ahead of emerging threats. And we’ll continue to build on our productive partnerships to migrate the university’s distributed directory environments into the Campus Active Directory.
2024 promises more innovation, more impact, more collaboration and more achievements that we can all take pride in. I feel privileged and thankful to share in this work with all of you. I hope you all enjoy the end of 2023 and have a very happy new year!
— Lois