OFFICE OF THE UNIVERSITY CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER

Major ICT Achievements 2021–2022

The OUCIO team continued to successfully lead initiatives while providing ICT services to the Vice-Chancellery in the RHQ, there were several achievements as we transitioned to the post-pandemic era. The OUCIO, working closely with Campus CIOs and their teams, completed a number of cross-campus strategic initiatives which were mainly under the Agility and Access pillars of the UWI Strategic Plan. The team continued to exercise greater resilience, flexibility and be more prepared in the re-shaping, re-defining, and re-imagining of our initiatives to achieve the overall missions of the OUCIO and the wider university.

During the period, the OUCIO completed the coordination of campus website redesign working with campus Technical Web teams. The redesigned campus websites were completed, becoming modern, responsive, and more user-focused while appealing to students, researchers and alumni. The OUCIO web team completed the technical redesign of the uwi.edu website and subpages. The excellent work which was done in collaboration with Marketing and Communications led to the UWI being named the gold winner of the global AVA Digital Award.

Another major achievement was coordinating the successful roll out of the Zoom web conferencing platform for teaching and learning across the University, which was done in collaboration with the cross-campus ELearning, CETL and Office of Online Learning teams.

Under the Digital Transformation programme and activities relating to preparation for the Caribbean Development Bank loan, the UCIO presented shared initiatives components to Campus Management teams as part of the engagement exercise lead by the Project Coordinator. The UCIO also participated and presented at a digital transformation workshop.

The leadership of several UWI strategic initiatives turned to the ICT team for solutions such as the Cross-Campus Moodle (CCM) to support the multi-Campus teaching initiative from the Board of Undergraduate Studies. In collaboration with the Cross-Campus Elearning team, we prepared the proposal for the expansion and formal structures required for the CCM solution to support that initiative.

The deep experience of the CIOs in ICT Shared Services Operating Model became a treasure trove of detailed material for the UWI Shared Services initiative led by PVC Board of Undergraduate Studies. Although there has been little progress with the ICT Shared Services initiative as we await the required Human Resource and Finance Framework, the depth of experience that we gained designing this Target Operating Model has served us well in providing sound guidance to leadership.

We achieved a significant set of milestones. Highlights of major achievements by strategic perspective are presented in the Table 1 titled ‘Snapshot of Achievements Office of the University CIO 2021 – 2022’