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Information TechnologyGuiding Principles

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  4. Cultivate governance

Cultivate governance

Prior to the formation of Vanderbilt IT as a single organization, IT functions had very little governance. The division, with support from institutional leaders, has made great strides in establishing, fostering and bringing transparency to IT functions. With the establishment of the various governance groups and procedures, VUIT is able to facilitate cross-functional visibility of priorities and align those projects with strategic institutional priorities.

Governance groups continue to meet during organizational changes to prioritize key projects 

Even with such large organizational changes as the university’s replacement of its financial, HR, and administrative systems with Oracle Cloud applications and the Medical Center’s migration of electronic health records to Epic, Vanderbilt IT continues to work on customer-driven projects. To make sure that key projects continue to be prioritized, VUIT conducts AppSync, the Vanderbilt Technical Resource Committee, and G2 meetings.

AppSync is a meeting that brings together leaders from a variety of Vanderbilt departments to articulate their business needs for VUIT resources. VUIT reports to the group on work completed, work in progress, work on the horizon, and resource utilization. This group continues to meet monthly and includes representatives from Communications, Athletics, Human Resources, Finance, Academic Affairs, and Development and Alumni Relations, among others.

In addition to the need to govern development initiatives, infrastructure projects also require governance to evaluate requests and resource allocations. The Vanderbilt Technical Resource Committee conducts technical reviews of project requests and manages the capacity of technical resources.

The results of these governance conversations are carried forward by Vice Chancellor John Lutz to G2. G2 is an executive oversight group that is composed of vice chancellors and the provost. Together, this group validates requests, offers guidance on priorities, breaks log jams and provides approval of work.

In an effort to address the need to consistently produce easily consumable data, VUIT has deployed an enterprise portfolio management tool called Planview. This deployment served as a major leap forward to having a single source of truth for capturing incoming requests, managing project statuses and managing the capacity of IT teams. Today, VUIT continues to strive toward greater awareness and transparency and leverages Planview to push data out to the community through reporting dashboards.