Administrative Excellence teams make progress in 2012

As 2012 ends, UW–Madison teams working on the Administrative Excellence initiative have made significant strides to realize institutionwide savings and efficiencies.

Their efforts include work toward consolidating email and calendar systems, strategic purchasing, aggregating data centers and improving instructional space utilization.  

Migration to a single email and calendaring system is on schedule to begin in summer 2013, with every unit on campus transitioned by no later than August 2014.  Work has begun to install Microsoft Office 365, and a new transition website www.365transition.wisc.edu has been launched to provide continuous updates to campus.

Re-manufactured ink and toner cartridges and select office supplies have been identified as the first UW–Madison preferred products. Products are designated as preffered for purchasing if they offer good quality  at a reduced costs. Preferred products are now available for purchase through the campus Materials Distribution Services website. Computer bundles for purchase will be selected in the near future.

The Data Center Aggregation team plans to complete a survey of campus data center service requirements by February in its effort to establish service tiers for a campus shared data center service. 

In its study of instructional space on campus, one team is finalizing a list of classroom attributes and completing an instructional space inventory. Another team is studying utilization data and developing criteria for assessing underutilized instructional space. 

In the queue for 2013 are projects that are key to future institutional goals and strategies, such as tying resource allocation more closely to current and anticipated funding needs and creating templates to assist staff in developing administrative policies and procedures.

Based on the August 2012 final report of the Current State team, the Enterprise IT Decision-Making – Future State team is making good progress to develop potential IT decision-making models based on desired UW characteristics as well as perspectives gained from benchmarking other universities.

Keep up with the progress of the teams here.