Strategic Plan

Right at the start of this transformation, the global COVID-19 pandemic hit in the spring of 2020. Although priorities were shifted to create and support new hybrid learning and remote work environments for students and employees, the transformation took on new importance. The pandemic provided expediency and focus to the transformation, compressing the timeline for significant change and lopping years off the process of bringing all institutions onto the same technology platforms under the watchful eye of a newly unified team. With this metamorphosis, USNH was able to support its new business environment.

While ET&S was centralizing its capability, we were empowering our leadership team to best support our students, employees, and research teams. A key element of this success was ensuring the CIO was an active participant in institutional strategic planning.

The outcomes of this transformation included vast improvements in the following areas:

• Public Safety - ET&S collaborated with the UNH COVID Testing Lab to pull all campus testing results into a single, public-facing dashboard that benefitted all USNH campuses and New Hampshire as a community by providing a real-time lens into the spread of the virus.
• Innovation - Aligning expertise into individual service lines brought the best and brightest minds together to provide depth and capability, which brought innovation to the forefront and enabled ET&S to expedite solutions that support the emerging and changing needs of both the academic and research environments.
• Network Environment Improvements - ET&S completed a massive system-wide improvement to network infrastructure, significantly upgrading the USNH network to provide students, faculty, and staff with crucial high-speed bandwidth access to support hybrid learning and work environments.
• Cost Savings - The ET&S transformation allowed USNH to significantly reduce operational costs, which was crucial during a time of increased expense to support public safety.
• Improved Cybersecurity
  ET&S enabled integrated cybersecurity policies, training opportunities, strong configuration management, and constant maintenance of the environment to counter the emerging ransomware threats.
• Technology and Service Standardization 
  ET&S integrated software, services, and processes across USNH to provide the USNH with more efficiency and better 24/7 customer support, and to promote collaboration and communication across all institutions. 

Coming out of this transformation, although we feel pretty good about where we are at in this stage of the pandemic, we have no idea what tomorrow, next week, or next year will bring. We do know we are now prepared as an organization to pivot in whatever direction that we need to deliver support to our research and our academic spheres, no matter what operating environment they need. Everything we accomplished in the last two years gives us options to pivot. We have the expertise and capacity in place to further modernize our infrastructure, and that puts us in a powerful position moving forward.

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