A Message from Our CIO
The key themes that emerged for Queen’s last year are even more resonant now. Through both long-planned initiatives and the coming recommendations from Queen's Renew Project, I am excited to explore the ways in which technology and digital innovation can assist the University in finding efficiencies and alleviating some of our current pressures. With the efforts made in recent years to strengthen this department’s workforce and our relationships with the wider Queen’s IT community, I am confident that the work identified in this year’s Operating Plan, as well as the priorities I have established for the department, will make us key contributors to Queen’s future success in overcoming the challenges of today.
Marie-Claude Arguin
CIO & AVP (ITS)
About Our Operating Plan
The purpose of our Operating Plan, published annually, is twofold. It provides direction to all IT Services staff members on the departmental priorities for 2024-25; and it informs our external stakeholders of the key activities being undertaken by IT Services during the current fiscal year.
Target Audiences
We invite all members of the Queen’s community to review our Operating Plan, published by the CIO & AVP (ITS), to provide transparency and accountability on the activities to be undertaken and prioritised by IT Services during the current fiscal year. Through this Plan, our Directors are empowered to allocate resources to sustain existing services and to undertake new initiatives identified and prioritised by our stakeholders to serve the needs of the Queen’s community.
Scope
This plan focuses on what will occur during the current fiscal year. Although there is other work that will be accomplished by IT Services, including important work to support the Queen’s community through activities such as ticket and incident response, provisioning, general support, and other project/work packages, the Operating Plan reflects the priorities for the current fiscal year that we have committed to complete.
Queen's Strategy
In 2021, Queen’s released its new strategy which encompasses the mission, vision, and values of Queen’s through six identified strategic goals. IT Services’ own mission, vision, values, and drivers are well-postured to support and deliver on the university’s key priorities.
More detailed information on the strategic goals is available on the Principal’s website.
Principal's WebsiteThe table below demonstrates the alignment between Queen’s strategic goals and IT Services’ drivers.
| Queen's Strategic Goals | Mapped IT Services Drivers |
|---|---|
| 1 | Aiming to increase the university's research impact |
Research Intensification |
| 2 | Advancing the student learning experience |
Student Experience |
| 3 | Growing the interdependence between research and learning |
Research Intensification |
| 4 | Strengthening the university's global engagement |
Revenue Generation |
| 5 | Deepening the university's relationship with the local, regional, and national communities |
Research Intensification
Digital Agility and Resilience |
| 6 | Improving Queen's organisational culture |
Operational Excellence |
Our Drivers
Our drivers help us to stay aligned with the larger Queen’s strategy. Proposed initiatives and projects should align with our drivers to achieve both IT Services’ and Queen’s goals.
Queen’s students’ lives are enriched and deepened by their learning journey, by experiencing an extraordinary sense of community, and by a desire for a better humanity, while also growing the knowledge, professional skills and digital literacy for the workplace.
To be achieved through:
- Timely insight though integrated analytical data into their progression and pathways;
- Easy-to-use and seamless integration of learning tools and campus life resources;
- Student-centric service design and delivery across the institution with self-service, on-demand, and customised services and resources for different personas’ needs;
- Mobility and equity: anywhere, anytime, any resource, any device and any accessibility need met;
- connected, participative, and informed through meaningful personalised notifications, customizable feeds and integrated web presence, contributing to a happy, healthy, home experience whether on campus or online; and,
- outcome-driven adoption of teaching technologies with first-rate support for faculty.
Queen’s researchers are empowered to pursue opportunities and to conduct impactful research through digital support services closely connected with research success.
To be achieved through:
- Enhancing and integrating faculty, graduate and post-doctoral supports across the institution with a research-centric view;
- Facilitating access to world-class computing services that advance research outcomes, collaborations, and impacts;
- Facilitating interdisciplinary collaborations;
- Promoting research at Queen’s; and,
- Creating a dynamic environment for all researchers.
Queen’s fully capitalises on its opportunities.
To be achieved through:
- Reinforcing enrolment strategies through data-driven decisionmaking; through building quality, well-managed constituent relationships, and through presenting a modern web presence;
- Assisting advancement efforts with high quality data on all Queen’s constituents’ engagements across the institution and throughout their lifetimes;
- Enabling the expansion of on-campus, remote, online and hybrid delivery of exceptional teaching and learning experiences for credit and non-credit courses, including revenue administration automation and efficiency; and,
- Supporting reporting to funding organisations through automation of performance metrics.
Optimising and transformative measures continuously support a culture of high performance across all levels of the University.
To be achieved through:
- Fostering equity, diversity, inclusion, indigeneity and accessibility by design through the thoughtful implementation of digital resources;
- Active community engagement that recognises the University as a human institution that exists for a planetary good;
- Including digital literacy and profiency planning and activities throughout our digital journey;
- Facilitating informed decision-making through the development of business intelligence capabilities, including data governance, data literacy, data integration, data analytics and AI;
- Continuous improvement through the ongoing evaluation of betterment opportunities, through process re-engineering, and by seeking synergies across Queen’s;
- Modernising service delivery to respond to the journey toward a pervasive digital curriculum.
- Supporting reporting to funding organisations through automation of performance metrics.
Queen’s has achieved a dynamic state of continuous evolution within its digital environment, seamlessly adapting to change and encouraging its community members to pursue opportunities.
To be achieved through:
- Continuously evolving the digital environment to fulfill the University’s aspirations as they emerge:
- Modernised core capabilities and robust infrastructure set the foundation for Queen’s digitalization journey;
- People are skilled, connected across communities, united around a common understanding of Queen’s values, vision and goals; and
- Adaptive governance is in place to allow for rapid innovation while maximizing value for the institution.
- Mitigating cyber risks by cultivating risk-informed communities, maturing cybersecurity practices, ensuring regulatory security compliance, practicing responsible asset management, and enhancing continuity planning.
Our mission statement describes our purpose and overall intention. Our vision provides a vivid mental image of where we imagine ourselves to be in the future, while our values and principles are the beliefs and philosophies that drive the culture of our department.
To strengthen student success and research impact through enabling information and technology services.
A Queen's community that is empowered and enriched by evolving digital technologies, and experiences first-rate service.
- We are professional, curious, forward-looking, and open to new ways of working.
- We are responsive and transparent to the community, and demonstrate awareness of their business needs.
- We exercise leadership at all levels and build strong stakeholder relationships.
- We collaborate effectively with people of diverse perspectives and experiences, and create safe space in which to share ideas.
- We adopt an informed and risk-aware approach to timely decision-making.
- We continuously invest in ourselves to grow competences.
The following are IT Services' design principles:
- Student experience comes first.
- Institutional outcomes before technology.
- One identity.
- Enter data once.
- Intuitive, accessible, and secure.
- Self-service and automation.
- Fiscally responsible.
As CIO and AVP (ITS), it is my responsibility to ensure that all of the work undertaken by IT Services supports the strategic goals of the University and provides value to the community. This means that some of our core activities remain constant year over year while others fluctuate depending on the changing institutional context – making this annual Operating Plan quite important. Every work package listed in this document is valuable, but there are always a few initiatives to which I am particularly attentive; below are five major activities that fall into this category for the current fiscal year. While this year’s list does not specifically call out investments in the workforce, enriching our people remains a guiding departmental principle. I count on each and every one of us to never forget the importance of “Happiness” and “Human Connection”, our themes of the past two years. It is up to us all to ensure the concepts we’ve learned are now put into practice and become part of our daily lives, within and outside the workplace. Let’s lean on one another through tough times – together we are stronger … and hopefully (I dare say probably) happier.
Cybersecurity threats are increasingly sophisticated and constantly evolving. Under Queen’s cybersecurity program, multiple initiatives to enhance the University’s protections against cyber threats are spearheaded and ongoing. One of the key projects in this fiscal year is focused on protecting user endpoints – devices such as desktops, laptops, phones and tablets that our community members use to access Queen’s network, systems and data.
Building on the initial Endpoint Protection project executed in 2021-22, this project is focused on deploying a newer set of endpoint protection tools called Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, which allows for real-time detection and response to threats on users’ devices. The objective of this initiative is to ensure that all devices used to do Queen’s work (including personal devices) must be confirmed to be healthy and secure before they connect to Queen’s network, systems and data, which requires that some or all of Queen’s enterprise suite of endpoint protection tools is installed on them.
The first major release in Queen’s multi-year Enterprise Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) program occurred in Spring 2024 and delivered foundational capabilities for International Undergraduate Recruitment and Admissions as well as enterprise social media management through Sprout Social. The next phase of activity is targeted to develop the processes for Graduate International Recruitment and Admissions and Domestic Undergraduate Recruitment and Admissions, as well as scaling the capabilities delivered in the first release.
It is a priority of the Provost to establish an enterprise approach to guide the adoption of generative AI (GenAI) tools at Queen’s, and the CIO and central IT have a significant role to play in supporting these activities. Prioritised tasks include establishing guidelines on the use of GenAI in support of teaching and learning, research administration and operations; incorporating AI oversight into Queen’s governance bodies; and creating environments for the safe use of GenAI tools.
Evolving Queen’s digital governance will enable the University to make investments that are aligned with ever-changing and emergency technology trends in ways that are more fully transparent, inclusive, and consistent with Queen’s strategy and goals. The intent this year is to establish a foundational practice to advance enterprise-wide architecture standards and to build on existing governance bodies, like the Queen’s Digital Planning Committee (QDPC), to enhance representation and incorporate different expertise such as GenAI (and maybe more).
Launched in early 2024 by Principal Deane and under the direction of the Professional Services Working Group, Queen's Renew Project's goals are to help the University understand where we need to invest effort to meet current challenges and secure future opportunities, and to create a working environment where professional staff, who deliver administrative and support work (like us!) that bolsters Queen’s teaching and research mission, are well supported with effective tools, systems, and processes. A recommendations report from the Nous Group is expected in Summer 2024, and responding to those recommendations is a fiscal year priority.
Operating Plan
This section provides high-level direction for teams internal to IT Services to guide them in delivering the priority initiatives, projects, and activities, at the right time.
Just as importantly, it is meant to inform the Queen’s community of all the ongoing activities within IT Services. Such information-sharing has historically enhanced collaboration.
We are leveraging a web-based, dynamic tool to allow for updates to specific fields throughout the year. Also, newly approved activities will be added to the table quarterly.
Operating Plan2023 Year in Review
In IT Services, we believe in celebrating our successes. The start of a new year is a great time to pause and reflect on all that was accomplished over the past one, from the implementation of new technologies to the strengthening of collaborative relationships to the sheer volume of activities that were completed. We invite you to celebrate with us.
IT Services: Year in Review 2023