2021 Annual Report University of Richmond Information Services

Message from the Vice President and CIO

Dear colleagues,

Welcome to our 2021 Annual Report! 2021 was another year filled with challenges and opportunities across higher education and at the University of Richmond. The resiliency demonstrated by you and others is noteworthy. This was evident when our institution returned to campus in the summer. Through it all, the women and men of Information Services have been there providing steadfast service and support for our students, faculty, and staff. Our report highlights the work we did to enable or enhance academics and administrative processes. We are pleased you’re taking time to review these accomplishments.

You will find information about how we are maturing Information Technology Governance so it is providing strategic direction of information technology and ensures IT services are aligned with the university’s aspirations. We have been and will continue to collaborate with colleagues across the institution guided by our University Technology and Information Plan. There are several examples within the report providing a summary of how we have supported teaching, learning, and research. One of the primary examples highlighted in our report was ensuring over 189 classrooms were returned to our pre-COVID configurations for the Fall 2021 semester.

Ultimately, we do what we do for and with people. Most, if not, all that we do is providing technology capability that supports the entire university. While much of these efforts go unseen and perhaps a matter of routine or expected for many, we take pride in our attention to detail in completing many initiatives supporting the entire community. The core of working with others is developing your cross-cultural competency. We are proud of our diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts planned by our inaugural DEI committee this past year which included several workshops, guest speakers from other institutions, and completion of online DEI courses by everyone in our division. Through it all we also welcomed new members to our team and bid a fond farewell to others who graduated, retired or found new opportunities to pursue. We are grateful for their many contributions during their tenure.

We have learned, adapted, and adjusted throughout 2021. We, like you, have developed our resiliency. The future, as we well all know, is unknown. What we do know is this: We look forward to working with you to ensure the University of Richmond has what it needs to continue to reach and achieve our aspirations.

Keith W. McIntosh, Vice President for Information Services and Chief Information Officer

University Technology and Information Plan: Update

As the University moves into the final year of the 2018-2023 technology plan, progress has been made in several directions. Completed initiatives include:

• 1.1 Create Common Virtual or Physical Space - The combination of the creation of the Faculty Hub and the move and expansion of the Technology Learning Center (TLC) have created online and real-world resource areas for faculty and students to access academic and technology resources.
• 1.5 Expanding Research Support - IS staff now participate on the faculty-led Data Analytics committee; a shared high-performance computing cluster has been deployed by the Provost's Office; a list of available research computing software has been released by IS; IS has sponsored institution membership in organizations that provide computing resources to faculty and students; IS regularly promotes training opportunities in workshops and online resources like LinkedIn Learning; and a project to create a restricted network that supports aging computers to continue to run on a short-term until they are upgraded or replaced.
• 2.4 Shared Case Management System - It was determined that the existing shared case management system, Maxient, is sufficient for managing student cases.
• 3.1 UR Better - This strategic initiative was intended to shore up UR Better during its first 2.5 years of growth, which concluded on 10/1/20.
• 4.2 IT Service Management - We have launched SpiderTechNet and the campus community appears to have embraced it as a means of requesting services, and reporting and tracking problems. We continue to work on the implementation of asset management.
• 4.3 IS Wide Project Management Office - Information Services has implemented a standardized approach to project management and is using the Project Management tools in SpiderTechNet to manage our projects. An updated list of active projects may be found on the IT Governance website.
• 4.4 Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery - Information Services has defined and tested a plan to recover systems to our off-site facility in case of a disaster. We have defined, confirmed and improved recovery time objective and recovery point objective for three tiers of servers. We have released an RFP for improving data protection and disaster preparedness, and received four proposals which will be reviewed with the intention of selecting one with a scheduled go-live date of February 2023.
• 4.5 Cybersecurity Awareness - The Cybersecurity Awareness goal met its initial outcomes during the previous year. The team re-launched the LastPass® password management tool across the campus community and saw an increase in the number of users. Also, the Information Security staff was increased by one security analyst. A project team of members from across IS was created to evaluate, test, and deploy a replacement endpoint protection product that offers the campus better detection and protection against today’s malware threats. Lastly, the team launched a campaign to increase awareness through various outreach tactics across campus, which includes cybersecurity awareness fairs, phishing exercises, monthly security tips, and providing training sessions.

Active initiatives include:

• 1.2 Expand the Technology Learning Center
• 1.4 Create Collaborative Work Spaces
• 2.1 Advisor Dashboards
• 2.3 Provide Better Search & Communications for Students
• 2.5 Leverage Mobile Technologies
• 3.2 Integrated Student Onboarding Capability
• 3.4 Banner to the Cloud