Thank you to the more than 200 individuals who attended our Informatics and Information Technology Collaborative Town Hall on Feb. 28 in person or virtually. We greatly appreciate your time, talent, questions, and feedback.
A recording of this Town Hall for informatics and IT staff has been shared via email. Below are helpful timestamps to help navigate the recording. If you aren’t able to access the video, or would like to access a full transcript, please fill out the question form with your name and email to request access.
Presentation
A presentation by Jeff Korab, senior IT director, took place for the first 30 minutes of the Town Hall. The timestamps below correspond to the content covered in the presentation.
- Introduction
- Presentation Kick-Off: 2:25
- Project Summary Signpost: 3:57
- Current & future state examples: 4:11
- Bright Future: 5:33
- Goals of IITC: 6:03
- Benefits for Staff: 7:55
- Project Team: 8:46
- Our Approach: 10:10
- Operational Outline Signpost: 11:58
- What has happened so far? 12:00
- What is NOT changing on July 1, 2023: 13:21
- What IS changing on July 1, 2023: 14:08
- HRS Changes on July 1: 14:50
- July 2023 into 2024 & beyond – what changes next: 15:53
- Draft Service Lines: 17:24
- Other Future Changes: 20:45
- Next Steps: 22:15
- What you can do: 22:25
- Our Pledge to You: 23:32
Question & Answer portion
The second half of the Town Hall was dedicated to answering questions from in-person and virtual attendees. Use the below timestamps to skip to responses to specific questions.
Answers to questions asked during the Town Hall that we were not able to answer live are now posted on the FAQs page.
- Will centralized IT be responsible for budgeting our department IT staff for fiscal year 2024? 24:37
- It seems service level agreements will be critical to fulfilling all of the things that need to be accomplished with this change. What process is it going to take to create those SLAs? 25:28
- For purchasing IT supplies and hardware in the futurem, who will be doing the purchasing and what sort of limits or budgeting would there possibly be? 32:47
- What can staff do individually to set themselves up for success in the new structure? 34:07
- How do we get engaged functionally in this effort with the limited bandwidth we have today? 34:41
- Is there some anticipated phasing to the Service Lines? 36:58
- In this centralized structure, what is the plan to balance consolidating services with also being able to provide that white glove approach where it makes sense? 38:12
- So how does this apply to individuals with IT titles who only work for a particular PI? 39:50
- If job titles, job descriptions, compensation and work arrangements are not changing on July one, are they subject to change at a later date? 39:50
- What will service level agreements and MOUs look like between departments? 40:54
- Will current projects within departments be paused, who’s making the decisions on which projects may to be paused, and to what extent do those stakeholders have input? 42:02
- Will business relationship managers look similar to how HR is structured? 42:44
- What is the likelihood of compensation for somebody decreasing as things start to take place and people move into positions? 44:53
- What will the purpose of the local support units/teams be and how will they function that’s different than a centralized help desk? 44:53
- Could you speak to the structure for how the IT directors reporting will change in July? Will there be new positions or recruitment for those next-level leaders that the IT directors will report to? 47:04
- To what extent are you working in alignment with UW Health and other University IT groups to ensure alignment and familiarity amongst all these interfaces and efficiencies or reductions of redundancies? 47:48
- Have we considered using any sort of climate survey as a way of gauging success and identifying areas of concern as we move through this change? 49:38
- After the IT leads report centrally starting on July 1st, what is going to begin to drive individual IT priorities, the departments or the office of Informatics and IT? 50:20
- Is there a plan to like staff up for project management on this? 50:57
- How do you envision things looking when things are more standardized across the board through the whole SMPH? 52:13
- How will hiring or interviews be different? Will the departments have a say in who works with them? 53:41
- This initiative seems to silo people into service lines, but you said the vision is to break down silos. Can you clarify how the team will work together as a whole? 54:06
- How will this initiative handle the transition from highly cross-functional teams to people with a one-to-one relationship with their service areas, and for those that don’t want to specialize, are there opportunities across service lines? 54:59
- Right now a PI or researcher can get a single-stream answer from somebody about a rather complex project. When we have these service lines, how much does that create inefficiencies in those sorts of projects? How do we address that less generalization could possibly lead to brain drain? 56:47
- There seems to be a lack of emphasis on identity and access management, which concerns me because that drives how and where people get access to pretty much everything – can you speak to the plan there? 58:42