Information Technology Governance
Information technology decision-making may be viewed as a three tier hierarchy consisting of strategies, policies, and operations. While the Chief Information Officer (CIO) plays a coordinating role at all three levels, IT decision-making at Reed is highly collaborative and involves many different individuals and groups.
Strategic Planning and Priority Setting
Strategic planning is conducted every five years with input from all constituencies. The outcome is a list of strategic technology goals that is adopted by the college. More information about the strategic planning process, and past strategic initiatives is available at the IT Strategic Planning site.
IT Policy-Making
Thanks to the honor principle, the small size of the Reed community, and the commitment of IT staff to devote sufficient attention to individual problems, many technology issues are resolved without the need of formal policies.
When the creation of a policy is required to ensure fair and responsible use of technology resources or to comply with statutory rules, the task generally falls to the Computing Planning and Policy Committee (CPPC). Topics that have come before the CPC in past years include illegal peer-to-peer file sharing, email as a form of official college communication, file backup and retention protocols, instructional technology support, data privacy and protection as dictated by regulatory requirements, five-year strategic planning goals, cybersecurity, theft/loss/damage of College-owned computer equipment, and periodic review of the Computer User Agreement.
Although the CPC is responsible for developing technology policies, when issues have curricular, budgetary, or strategic implications for the College the committee refers policy drafts to the President's Senior Staff before action is taken.
Operational Decision-Making
As is true of strategic goal setting and policy creation, operational decision-making for IT is also a high collaborative activity. In addition to soliciting input from individual students, faculty, and staff, Information Technology utilizes various external and internal groups in the decision-making process:
- Administrative Users Group (AUG) – The AUG includes the staff of Administrative Computing Services (ACS) and representatives from administrative offices. It meets on a regular basis to discuss user needs and to plan changes in Reed's administrative computing environment. In addition, ACS meets on a regular basis with representatives of major administrative offices.
- IT interdepartmental teams – As needed, IT creates teams that may include staff from several IT departments to deal with specific issues, such as the selection of a new software system, the delivery of a new cloud service, the revision of an operating procedure, etc. See the description of different types of IT teams.
- IT internal activities – IT staff collaborate extensively on operational decisions though daily group messaging, weekly technical meetings, and quarterly meetings of the entire IT staff.