Reimagining IT Archive

"UC Berkeley's IT professionals work together to provide the tools, data, and infrastructure the campus community needs to continue to grow as the world's greatest public research university."

group photo from Reimagining IT kickoff retreat on Oct. 4-5

A Look at Our Past:

In-depth IT strategic planning began in Fall of 2016 with Reimagining IT (ReIT): a months-long process involving the entire One IT community. During this time, the Program Planning Group (PPG) formed to guide the process and to ensure priorities aligned with Berkeley's campus strategic plan. 

Since the successful creation of the initial ReIT Strategic Plan, a newly constituted PPG continues to oversee our annual IT priority setting process and to steward strategic technology projects and related campus initiatives. In Spring 2021 we evolved and to reflect the new operational phase of our work we renamed this the IT Strategic Plan. However, we wanted to preserve the comprehensive and foundational work that was created through the ReImagining IT process. 

Links to All Archival Pages:

What was Reimagining IT?

Reimagining IT was the name of the nine-month, bottom-up strategic planning process that engaged the greater One IT and campus community.

Goals  

The project ran from October 2016 - June 2017, and had three key goals:

  1. Create an IT strategic plan to support the Berkeley campus for the next five years.
  2. Build a shared mental model and increased capacity among campus IT leaders and staff to implement future change.
  3. Get “stuff” done during the planning process. Great and doable ideas will be implemented along the way. Some of these will be related to existing “in-flight” projects.    

Why we engage in strategic planning? 

  • We have an opportunity to comprehensively align Berkeley IT to our core campus mission of teaching, learning, and research, and to the critical needs of our faculty, students, and staff.
  • With a strategic plan for Berkeley IT we can change the dialogue from short-term, one-off decisions to more strategic discussions that include investments for the future, and support important in-­flight initiatives.
  • We have an opportunity to reshape the narrative about IT at Berkeley, and to provide strategic recommendations for our new campus-level executives when they are on board.

How was the project structured?  

Our nine-month project was designed to be iterative. It had four sprints where “working groups” dove into one of the IT Leadership and staff-identified project focus areas to develop recommendations and plans of action. The Work Groups were comprised of interested IT staff of all levels from across the campus. 

We used the OGST (Objective, Goals, Strategies, Tactics) strategic planning framework. We also utilized the Work Groups and the Advisory Group as well as staff input to refine our Goals, Strategies, and Tactics to develop our finalized plan intended to realize our highest level objective:

“Berkeley One IT is a trusted and strategic campus partner, directly supporting the teaching, learning, and research goals of faculty and students, financially sustainable, and providing and protecting core IT services for the common good.”