What is the WashU IT Operating Model?
The WashU IT operating model is a structured framework that helps ensure IT functions are efficient, aligned with business goals, adaptable, secure, and cost-effective.
Why is an operating model important?
WashU looks to us with confidence to enable excellence and innovation in administrative services, teaching, learning, research, and patient care.
We have made significant progress in IT. The Operating Model provides two essential elements that guide how we work together: a common language and a framework.
- The common language helps us understand and think about how to best support each other to deliver IT to our fullest potential on behalf of WashU.
- The framework offers clear guidance for how we operate — informing the decisions we make and the actions we take.
This alignment and clarity enhance IT’s ability to deliver the support and impact that the organization needs and to drive value, enabling organizational success.
What is in it…
…for you?
- Less time spent on inefficiencies
- Collaboration flows seamlessly
- Capacity and demand management makes the workload more manageable
- Processes are streamlined
- You have the guidance, tools, resources, and support when you need them
…for WashU IT?
- Optimized customer experience
- Services meet/exceed expectations
- Decisions drive real results in alignment with strategic priorities
- We are set up for success with ability to adapt
- Tracking of organizational development
Read the full Operating Model
A close look at where we are headed
Operating Model Initiatives in Progress
WashU IT identified four initiatives with the greatest impact and broadest organizational benefit — Knowledge Management, Demand & Capacity Management, Service Portfolio, and Service Level Management.
These efforts are underway and are being coordinated as part of a cohesive and unified program to ensure alignment and maximize organizational benefit.
Knowledge Management
Developing a strategy and implementing systems and processes to capture, distribute, and effectively use organizational knowledge.
Demand & Capacity Management
Improving the ability to plan for and manage resources—people, systems, and infrastructure—to meet current and future demands effectively.
Service Portfolio
Developing a standardized classification of IT services that organizes and defines offerings to improve service management, communication, and user understanding.
Service Level Management
Establishing formal agreements that define the level of service expected from IT providers—ensuring clear expectations, measurable standards, and accountability.
All of our daily operations—and how we operate—ultimately help WashU in the pursuit of its mission.
Our Top 4 Initiatives ensure that crucial IT functions are efficient, adaptable, secure, and cost-effective. They guide how we share knowledge, what services we provide and how we offer them, and how we ensure we have the capacity to support the university’s demand.
The Operating Model, which extends beyond the Top 4 Initiatives, brings our teams together to work efficiently and in alignment across all areas of WashU IT. It extends, for example, to the tools and platforms that will be employed to support or amplify the delivery of work and successful execution of IT across the enterprise; how we monitor, optimize, and report outcomes; and how operational decisions related to the leverage of IT assets and capabilities are made, and who makes the decisions. Together, these elements enhance our ability to deliver the support and impact WashU needs from us.
Our Operating Model is tightly aligned with ImpacT, our IT Strategic Plan. When we operate like a well-oiled machine, we bring the “We Will Succeed” statements of the strategic plan to life. We deliver integrated technology ecosystems and innovative, adaptable solutions. We provide reliable services, enable excellence in research, education, and patient care, and demonstrate value to university leaders by aligning our investments with WashU’s strategic priorities.
More importantly, we engage people and make everyone feel valued, one because we work with a purpose, and two because we make a difference, and provide the solutions our community needs.
When our IT Strategic Plan moves in the right direction—toward our goals—we get closer to fulfilling our WashU IT mission of being the university’s strategic technology partner.
And in doing so, we contribute to WashU’s mission of forming leaders, advancing the discovery of knowledge, and improving patient care.