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UW-IT 2013 Annual Report

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Welcome At UW Information Technology, success comes through collaboration. Whether it's moving forward with a major initiative to modernize UW human resources and payroll operations, bringing faculty together to share how they're using technology to enrich student learning, or helping researchers identify the best technology resources to support their work, everything we do involves collaborating with our partners to advance teaching, learning, innovation and discovery. Through collaboration, we continue to deliver innovative tools that deepen and expand interactions between faculty and students. Last summer 36 faculty members shared knowledge and best practices on using technology to enhance learning as part of a Technology Teaching Fellows program developed in partnership with the Center for Teaching and Learning, UW Libraries and the Office of the Provost. They showed how they use tools, including the Canvas learning management system and Tegrity lecture capture, to hold virtual office hours, provide real-time feedback to students, and put lectures and quizzes online, freeing up classroom time for more interactive work. The launch of the MyPlan online academic planning tool earlier this year was made possible through collaboration with student advisers, Undergraduate Admissions and the UW Registrar, and funding support from the Student Technology Fee. Response was enthusiastic, with 24 percent of undergraduates using it by spring quarter. A recently secured $1 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation allows us to extend MyPlan to Washington state Community and Technical Colleges in two years, making it easier for those students to plan for a four-year degree and transfer to the UW. In the research area, our continuing partnership with the UW eScience Institute is helping to provide new tools to handle big data, a major challenge for researchers. An important step is the launch of a new 100G High Speed Research Network, which will help researchers better compete for big data science projects. We doubled the capacity of Hyak, the UW's highperformance shared computing cluster, and lowered rates and minimums for lolo, the centrally managed data storage service. Strategic partnerships with Microsoft and Amazon enable UW researchers to access Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services cloud platforms more easily, and at discounted prices. administrative infrastructure to meet the demands of a global research institution. The UW is moving forward with a revised six-year roadmap that will deliver new functionality and increased efficiencies faster and at less cost. To ensure we are delivering the highest value services, three information technology governance boards provide us with guidance on strategic directions and on project and service priorities. This spring we will conduct a customer satisfaction survey to gather broader UW community input. We are partnering with the Foster School of Business to implement a new service management toolset to increase efficiency and improve customer service, and plan to offer it to other local IT departments, with the goal of creating a unified, automated help system. Information technology is a game-changer for today's research universities. It is transforming the way we teach, learn, work, communicate and even how we think. It is changing what problems we solve and what we believe is possible. By collaborating together we can continue to harness information technology to help advance our most important work—developing tomorrow's leaders, solving global challenges and transforming lives. Kelli Trosvig VICE PRESIDENT FOR UW INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER Another major collaboration is the UW's initiative to modernize critical HR/Payroll operations. Led by UW Senior Vice President V'Ella Warren, this project will strengthen regulatory compliance and produce substantial productivity gains throughout UW units. This is the first step in a larger effort to modernize the UW's aging 2013 ANNUAL REPORT 1

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