Client Situation
Our client is the largest University in the UAE region. The University had approximately 19,000 students, faculty members and staff. The client was seeking a detailed internal assessment of the IT resources. With the advent of digitalization in the Education space, the client was targeting to benchmark itself against a set of leading international Universities.
Cedar’s Approach
Cedar was mandated to help the client conclude on a set of recommendations & the direction to rapidly transform the IT organization in the University to a world-class unit. The following steps were thus taken:
- An internal assessment was conducted, which encapsulated a detailed study of the organization’s IT structure, hardware, systems & applications & processes
- A user survey was conducted to understand the end-user response in terms of met/unmet needs, usage and availability of IT facilities and overall perceptions
- Two US universities were competitively benchmarked in order to understand their IT processes & enterprise-wide systems
- It was analyzed that system implementation practices are significantly more robust at the US universities, with large team sizes, comprising users and IT personnel combining their efforts
- The benchmarking helped to further understand the processes & IT implementation strategy by these universities, which furthered Cedar’s assistance in helping the client
Outcome
The following recommendations were made by Cedar to enhance the digitalization of crucial resources & operations University-wide:
- The client should realign the IT organization under the Vice Chancellor’s office in order to give the IT function a central, enterprise-wide role. A Chief Information Officer (CIO) position should be created to lead the set up
- Roles and responsibilities should be realigned within functions with clear JDs and department levels as recommended
- The IT workforce strength across the University should be increased by a total of 60 over the next 12-24 months based on benchmarks
- A Performance Measurement System should be implemented within the function, with measures for various levels as recommended
- The client should implement robust application development methodologies based on software engineering principles in the application development processes
- The client should rapidly implement the Banner SIS system and then explore opportunities to move all other critical approaches to one single Banner/People Soft platform
- Network management should be implemented actively with better information tracking and active utilization of network management tools
- IT MIS should be defined, and critical parameters tracked as recommended