Completed in the Fall of 2023, this project set to revamp the annual Business IT Symposium. The project revamp turned the focus outward to the campus, to highlight new and ongoing efforts that units are undertaking to bring about Business Excellence. Units showcased their work for others in an Exhibitor’s Hall. There was also a fishbowl conversation with key Operational Excellence leaders.

Completed in February 2024, the Brand Guidelines Website project’s objective was to fully develop the brand guidelines for the Urbana campus and provide them in a format that all units could use in their day-to-day marketing and communications activities. The Strategic Communications and Marketing Office (StratCom) team worked with key campus communication and marketing stakeholders to codify brand standards and build a refreshed brand guidelines website, brand.illinois.edu, that provides the brand policy and resources for the university’s marketing and communications community.

As a part of the Operational Excellence recommendation to foster a community of data practitioners, the Data Explorers project set out to develop a program that increases data literacy and general awareness of data services and data related efforts. The program accomplished these goals by coordinating presentations that address a range of topics related to fundamental and advanced data concepts, data related programs and services available, and on-going projects that impact the data community. The Data Explorers Program was fully operationalized on 7/1/24. The program is now led by the Data Explorers Leadership Team with the support of the Data Explorers Coordinator Intern. The program has successfully hosted over 10 presentations and has built a consistent audience. It will continue to grow and develop increased engagement with the community.

The Data Resource Inventory project sought to gather information and produce an inventory of existing administrative data resources that are utilized in strategic decision making. This inventory will be leveraged for future projects that address OpEx recommendations and will ultimately improve the way the university community interacts with the available data resources. This project identified and documented over 90 data resources spanning across 16 administrative areas. The information collected has been captured in the Smartsheet tool that will be easy to expand upon and leverage as additional projects related to the creation of a data services catalog are executed.

The FABPlus expansion project commenced in February 2024 and was finalized in September 2024. The project’s primary focus was to expand access to FABPlus by providing a collaborative tool for budget and resource planning for inventory managers for items less than $2,500. The FABPlus expansion highlights tracking items such as PCs, laptops, phones, and other items with memory storage. The project expanded access to FABPlus to the University of Springfield, Chicago, and the Urbana campus. The FABPlus expansion also improved inventory management training tools and created an onboarding structure for new inventory managers.

The GenAI Solutions Hub project completed Phase 1 on 8/30/2024. The project established a working group of IT professionals who focused on developing campus-specific generative AI best practices for administrative/business purposes. Part of the project was the pilot of MS Co-Pilot with early adopter departments and units for general testing and to help establish those best practices. Phase 2 focuses on operationalizing generative AI tools and resources at Illinois. Visit the GenAI website for more information.

Completed in early 2024, the goal of this project was to set up an interim board to serve the Urbana campus by providing guidance on the release and use of student-focused data.

The Master Brand Launch project was completed in June 2024. This project aimed to introduce the refreshed brand platform to the campus communication and marketing community and provide tools and training to implement it. Included in these efforts were an official launch event (in person and online), providing a library of written training and templates, an online training program through Canvas, and in-person and online workshops. The StratCom team also provided Office Hours for units to speak to a team member about questions about their department situation or need.

Part of Operational Excellence, this project mapped procurement approval processes within the Purchasing & Contracts Management Office (PCMO) and with in colleges/units across campus. We completed the project on March 12, 2024. The project produced 9 maps for the PCMO and Unit/College processes. The project flagged 10 opportunities for improvement in areas like transparency/tracking, training, and collaboration. Next steps will be to determine which opportunities the Procurement Advisory Governance Committee want to move forward on and to begin discovery and/or project set up for those items.

The Project Management Community of Practice was successfully completed on May 15, 2024. This project set out to establish a campus-wide community of project managers and those who do project management as part of their jobs. Over the course of a year, we collated more than 50 templates, trainings, and other resources. The community has 92 members, 78 are considered active members. We hosted 4 roundtables, the first one had 13 attendees, the second had 21, the third had 42, and the fourth had 32. The Community will continue being facilitated by the SPMO.