These initiatives have been enabled through the implementation of portfolio and project management best practices, including the development of a robust project management office, governance structure and process. In addition, implementation of ITIL-based IT service management processes and tools has supported the establishment of shared services.

Community Satisfaction

IS&T has been measuring community satisfaction with the quality of technology services at BU through the TechQual+ survey, a standard survey developed by higher education IT leaders for higher education. We administered the survey in the fall of 2009, 2011, and 2013.

2013 Survey results showed positive gains in several areas, accompanied by rising expectations. The largest changes in perceived service level by the campus community as a whole are reflected in the chart below:

At the same time, expectations rose in 2013 as shown below:

This resulted in the following differences between minimum and perceived service levels for the 1331 student, faculty and staff respondents overall. Red indicates service areas where perceived levels fall below minimums, while blue indicates areas where perceived levels exceed the minimum.

Satisfaction with technology services is highest among students and lowest among faculty. Areas of most common gaps between expectations and service provided are wireless coverage, classroom technology, assessment systems, research support, central information system security, Finance and HR information systems, and student information systems.

Service Health

IS&T monitors the health of the services in our service catalog, as well as the corresponding operational costs of those services. They reflect the following notable risks in the BU technology service environment:

• BU still has a set of core administrative systems that are end of life and require renewal or, at a minimum, support risk mitigation, including Student Information Systems, Ancillary Systems, and non-SAP Finance, HR and Budget systems.
• BU telephone services are also at end of life and need to be replaced/migrated to newer, unified communications technology.
• BU has a basic set of information security services, most of which are current, but is lacking in advanced functionality and maturity/breadth of deployment of current services.
• BU has some research computing facilities, such as the IBM Blue Gene, that are end of life. Visualization capabilities are also late in their life cycle.
• The BU network infrastructure is in need of a refresh program; Authentication, Directory and Storage Services are in need of renewal.

Benchmarks

BU Technology Service benchmarks are drawn from the Educause Core Data survey and TechQual+ Survey tools. In accordance with the terms and conditions of use for these resources, these documents are available to BU community members only upon request. Please contact vpist@bu.edu for access.

Key Trends

The BU community and governance committees have spent a significant amount of time considering current trends in higher education and technology over the course of this planning process. Trends of particular note to which these groups agreed we must respond include:

• The transformation of teaching and learning through technology-enabled pedagogies. Beyond MOOCs, BU exists in a rapidly changing context of what higher education is and will be in the future.
• Analytics and Big Data. BU will need to be able to collect, secure, analyze, manage, and retire massive volumes of research and, at least potentially, academic and administrative data.
• Global connectedness and collaboration. Today BU’s faculty and students can be found in 75 countries on 7 continents, and we collaborate not only across disciplines and colleges, but across institutions and industries. The power of social media and new collaboration technologies should be harnessed in the interest of BU goals.
• Usability, including mobility. Today’s students, faculty and staff need to be able to access services from anywhere, on any device, through an intuitive interface comparable to consumer services.
• Information security as a core competency. Information security threats and consequent regulatory requirements are increasingly pervasive and complex.
• Extreme pressure to control or reduce the cost of education. With higher education having been identified as having “cost disease,” BU must work to leverage technology to reduce administrative overhead costs and identify new, more efficient operating models.
• The abstraction of IT services from the physical campus, and transition of IT staff from builders of systems to architects and integrators of services. With pervasive, high bandwidth connectivity and the rise of cloud service providers at all levels of technology service, from infrastructure to platform to application, options for ways to provide IT services are diversifying rapidly and require careful selection and management.