Emory's University Technology Services (UTS) reorganizes for the Next Wave
Oct. 9, 2008 - In order to meet the mission of Emory University and the Office of Information Technology, UTS announces today a realignment of the Division into eight newly formed departments, each with a defined purpose directly addressing improvement areas requested by our stakeholders and customers.
Movement toward a thorough organizational review started last year with the appointment of Deputy CIO Brett Coryell. With ongoing feedback solicited and received from Emory faculty, staff, students and internal UTS staff, a formal reorganization process began in early September. Under Brett's leadership, a cross-functional working group focused on various aspects of UTS's existing products, service delivery, capacity, competencies, and productivity. Working in conjunction with outside consultants, the group also met with a cross section of key customers including the Emory Libraries, Emory Healthcare, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Public Health, the Provost's Office, and Human Resources.
Through a series of meetings, very clear key areas with themes of improvement emerged: Culture, Customer Relationship Management, Innovation, Operational Excellence, Customer Service, Service Delivery, and Employee Development.
Highlights of this reorganization that directly address these themes of improvement are:
Culture: Strengthened branding and signage will reflect a consistent use of UTS . We are now a consolidated Division of one. A new Executive Director position provides focus on improving the culture of the organization.
Customer Relationship Management: An increased commitment to improve customer intimacy through the creation of a Customer Relations team with a newly defined role and staff dedicated to Customer Relationship Management.
Innovation: The formation of a new Integration Competency Center positions UTS for innovation in the areas of service-oriented architecture and other advanced integration technologies including Java programming expertise, web development, and development of critical shared data environments.
Operational Excellence: Combining second tier services such as Desktop Support, Monitoring, and Field Services enhance the quality of support and better leverages resources. Similarly, the consolidation of enterprise applications such as Remedy and Blackboard into a single application development team creates a mature and standard set of implementation and development practices. The creation of a Disaster Recovery Planner and a dedicated Service Management Office all address important operational readiness needs.
Customer Service: The Help Desk, now the Service Desk, provides a single entry into the organization for support and work requests, eventually providing 24x7 support. The Service Desk also adds a dedicated Knowledge Management function to foster self-service and increase first call resolution for our customers.
Service Delivery: A Project Management Office ensures better quality and consistency for on time and on budget project delivery. A true QA and Release function ensures new services are fully tested and quality controlled prior to production release.
Employee Development: New opportunities to cross-train employees by creating larger departments with internal career growth such as: the Call Center operators and the Service Desk and Field Services with Desktop Support. The new Executive Director provides focus and attention to employee enrichment.
This new organization eliminates duplication of effort, takes down silos, redeploys resources to expand services, uses proven industry standards to improve productivity, builds capability to deliver innovation through integration, and builds new competencies to improve reliability and efficiency.
These changes enable UTS to meet Emory's future vision goals as stated in the Office of Information Technology's mission statement:
As a key enabling function at Emory, the mission of the OIT is to create and sustain a seamless, agile, innovative and efficient information technology environment that advances the educational, clinical and research activities and aspirations of Emory University and the Woodruff Health Sciences Center.
A detailed organizational chart is available here.
