Top Projects
At any given time, hundreds of projects and initiatives are happening within OTDI to maintain, enhance, or implement technology services that will benefit teaching, learning, research, and outreach at the university. Each year, a handful of projects are identified with the most significant impact or criticality.
Below is our current list of top projects and strategic priorities. This list is a living document, as technology can change quickly.
Enable Learning
Buckeye TEC Program
As a university, we are committed to reducing student cost to degree by reducing the cost of technology and reducing costs through technology. The components of Buckeye TEC that OTDI will continue to support in FY24 are: Adobe Creative Cloud, Virtual Desktop, and Student Technology Loan Program.
Classroom and Conference Rooms AV Management
This project includes the review and evaluation of classroom and conference room AV management to identify opportunities for improvement and implement changes.
Manager and Leadership Training
This project consists of manager development, building on existing new employee onboarding program, and C3 leadership to support the growth and development of our OTDI team members.
Support Growth of Online Learning Mission
Collaborate with the Vice President for Online Programs to identify, align and enhance technologies to support and scale online delivery.
Enhance Foundational Technology
Digital Accessibility Program
This set of initiatives is the next phase in maturing the Digital Accessibility Services program. The goal of the program is to equip Digital Accessibility Coordinators throughout the university to ensure that their unit implements accessible digital products and services. Not only are we tasked to manage the program university-wide, but OTDI must also ensure we follow the program we have set for the university.
Eduroam Implementation Project
This project will expand network capabilities, including the transition of users from using passwords for connecting to osuwireless to enrolling their device to connect to eduroam.
Establish OTDI Architecture Board and Reference Architecture
This project will establish a collaborative/cross-functional/cross domain group of architects, IT leaders, and solution engineers within OTDI. The focus of this group will be on continuous improvement, improving quality, establishing baseline and maintaining target and reference architectures, publishing documentation standards, guardrails, workflow processes and the delivery of outcomes for shared business concerns and alignment.
Microsoft Contract Changes
Microsoft is substantially changing their contract terms and conditions that will result in a significant increase in cost to the University. These changes include a reduction in storage allocation and Unified A5 license feature changes (removes EMS and Power Bi Pro for students).
Oracle / PeopleSoft to AWS Project
This Student Information System infrastructure automation project will build a highly modernized infrastructure-as-code ERP environment which will drive agility to accelerate time-to-value for this high-profile system used by students, faculty, and staff.
Secure an Open Academic Environment
Cloud Security Implementation Project
FY24 Cloud strategy efforts are a continuation of work started in FY23 where the focus was to identify and prioritize security risks primarily of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). FY24 focus is identifying solutions and planning how to best reduce the identified risks.
Workforce Identity and Access Management (IAM) Strategy
The development of a comprehensive workforce identity and access (IAM) management strategy will outline the objectives and implementation roadmap required to manage Ohio State digital identities and facilitate secure access to a larger scope of institutional data and university resources.
Zero Trust Cybersecurity
Zero Trust is first a cybersecurity design philosophy and secondly, a set of cybersecurity design principles that eliminates implicit trust by requiring verification, dynamic access, automated risk assessment and response, and transparency.
Simplify the Use of Technology
AI Strategy
Artificial intelligence was made publicly available in December of 2022. Two coordinated efforts will be undertaken. A multi-functional committee composed of faculty, staff and university leaders will be gathered to define the responsible, ethical, and equitable use for AI within The Ohio State. The second effort will seek to gather IT and other IT professionals to help to define a university sanctioned environment that can be used to allow for the expansion of learning about this technology and prepare our students for skills needed while protecting our institutional data and intellectual property.
Faculty Activity Reporting Project
This project will implement a new solution to capture faculty contributions. This system will provide valuable data for the promotion and tenure process, annual evaluation, accreditation, and highlighting faculty accomplishments and impact.
OTDI Service Owner Leadership Community
The OTDI Service Owner Leadership Community is a comprehensive program focused on the engagement, support, and development of the OTDI Service Owner role. The program contains three key components: Engage (establish a highly supportive and involved Service Owner community), Learn & Share (discover new or better ways to be an engaged Service Owner and team member), and Grow (formal learning opportunities to continually evolve skills and knowledge.
Shared Directory and Endpoint Services (SDES) Program
We are designing and building a new Shared Directory and Endpoint Services (SDES) offering and governance model, leveraging Azure Active Directory Services to be used by all university colleges and departments, excluding the Wexner Medical Center. Currently, each IT unit (Managed IT Services (MITS) and other distributed IT units) has their own Active Directory (or Active Directories) and Endpoint Services. The goal of this project is to work together to get all units to a single Shared Directory.
Student Stabilization Program
This project will touch on enhancements to access management, the Ohio State Mobile application, PeopleSoft, Salesforce (Buckeye 360), custom and ancillary applications. Where gaps in functionality exist, the best of “breed” technology will be implemented.
Teams Voice Project
The Teams voice project will upgrade our current telephone system (Skype for Business) to Teams Calling services.
Transform the Learning Toolset
Using the governance and advisory process, this project will distinguish between tools that should be supported centrally at the enterprise or with a community of a few schools and colleges or specialized within a school or college.
Web Transformation
Consolidating our OTDI web support into our standard Drupal distribution will have several important effects: address digital accessibility, branding and security needs, standardize web support within OTDI, and being able to address the significant web needs of the university by providing a simple web service that meets the needs of the university community.
Workday Improvements
Now that the functional business offices and the EBS teams understand the Workday system, it is time to make the processes easier and more focused on a frictionless user journey. Also, the university and medical center are changing vendors for better economical and services for employees, supplies, research, and services.
Support Data-Informed Decision Making
COTC Strategic Planning
COTC currently uses the Ellucian ERP technology stack on premise. Ellucian is changing its strategy to be cloud only. This will be more expensive than the current solution. An evaluation of the whole ERP ecosystem will have to be done and compared to the cloud offering or other alternatives along with negotiation of the costs.
Data Catalog Implementation
The data catalog implementation project supports the Data Consumption pillar of the overall data strategy by enabling those in our community to locate the data necessary for analysis and for informing decisions.
Governance
Within the university and OTDI, we recognize that governance and advisory is a current gap. Over the next 12 months, we will work to identify gaps, devise a new model, and implement changes (as needed).
MITS to MITS2
This project will transition existing MITS partners to the MITS2 chargeback model. The MITS2 model provides consistent Core IT costs with metered pay-as-you-go Consumable IT services and the flexibility for one-off Unique IT solutions.
Software Management Improvement
This project will evaluate opportunities for enhancing the value of software applications, improve the process for acquiring, and enhance management of these resources – make recommendations for improvement.
Student Data in the Reporting and Analytics Environment (RAE)
The Student Data in the RAE project will democratize and extend access to data in a single central source of validated core raw data and appropriately curated data sets built from the raw data for use in business data domain related projects across the university.