Institutional Excellence

PILLAR 5

INSTITUTIONAL EXCELLENCE

Ensuring UA Lives its Values and Innovative Culture to Enable an Efficient, High Performing Academic and Administrative Enterprise

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As a dynamic institution in education and scientific exploration, we always aspire to operate as a best-in-class place to learn, research and work, where innovations are encouraged and incorporated. To achieve this vision, we are deploying strategic initiatives that will better unlock the potential of our employees and enhance the student experience.

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Initiatives

Active

Each initiative has a project plan in place. Teams are working toward meeting milestones.

Initiative Owner: Nirav Merchant

This initiative focuses on the design, development, launch and user orientation to the UA Soteria system. UA Soteria provides a secure data analysis platform and additional data services for campus researchers working with protected and private data. UA Soteria allows researchers to perform data analyses and create visualizations ensuring no accidental data leakage or exposure.  The 5.3 Initiative also brings the creation and launch of the Data Science Fellowship program.  The Fellowship program aims to build a rich, data science community of postdoctoral practitioners and researchers applying data science methodologies and techniques to health-science related research. With more access to advanced analytics, Arizona Health Sciences is poised to pursue new leading-edge programs, generate inventive pilot programs and bolster future grant submissions. Learn more about Analytics Powerhouse.

Launch Date: 3/25/2020
End SIF Funding: 6/30/2024

Strategic Initiatives Fund FY24 Budget: $400,000

Up and Running

The goal/vision of each initiative has been operationalized.

Initiative Owner: Darcy Van Patten

Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) is an organizational strategy to increase and improve interaction, outreach, and engagement with the University’s students, alumni, industry partners, and other strategic constituents. An institutional CRM strategy, supported by a shared technology platform, increases information-sharing across campus, improves the efficiency and effectiveness of engagement activities, and amplifies existing positive relationships to enable the University to meet its bold strategic goals. The UA-branded CRM software program, Trellis, supports and strengthens the University’s relationships by providing a comprehensive view of constituents to deliver a modern, personalized digital experience. Trellis promises to strategically advance the University in multiple areas, including student success, advising and engagement, marketing and communications, alumni relations, community and government relations, and more. Visit trellis.arizona.edu to learn more about this initiative.

Launch Date: 05/17/2019
End SIF Funding: 6/30/2023 

Initiative Owner: Ravneet Chadha

UA will build a data warehouse that can be used to collect, curate, and make easily accessible a broad range of standard institutional data for use by all levels across campus. Through this initiative, a new way for delivering high level data to the decision makers will be established. New reporting tools that best fit the need and are intuitive to use will be implemented. Data and information will be collected systematically and prepared for use so that the data center can provide accurate, relevant, reliable, valid, timely and accessible information. The data warehouse will include process, outcome, and programmatic data which will help UA with result-based strategic decisions.

Launch Date: 08/30/2019
End SIF Funding: 6/30/2023

Initiative Owner: Laura Lukomski

The purpose of this pilot project is to increase efficiency, transparency and access to pertinent data through a shared contract management and storage system. A workgroup of representatives from across campus will develop and run a two-step pilot project for enhanced contract management: the first step is selection, training and implementation of a centralized contract storage system that all involved UA parties will be able to access. If this first step of the pilot is successful, it will pave the way for the larger next step – contract workflow redesign.

Initiative Owner: Jane Hunter

This initiative is designed to provide UA stakeholders processes and tools which encourage feedback and submission of strategic ideas to ensure constant renewal of the strategic plan and strengthen its long-term viability adapting and responding to new conditions, situations and environments. These processes and tools will help develop and deepen a sense of ownership of the strategic plan by the UA community, will encourage the creation of new ideas, and cultivate a culture of entrepreneurship and institutional responsiveness at UA.

Launch Date: 08/23/2019

Initiative Owner: Trevor Ledbetter

The University of Arizona will enter into an agreement to ensure 100% of the University’s purchased electricity needs are met by renewable resources by the end of 2020. This will be complimented by several on-campus solar demonstration sites, and together will eliminate 100% of the University’s scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions (emissions that result from the production of electricity purchased by the University from Tucson Electric Power). This represents a reduction in the University’s carbon footprint by nearly one third.

Initiative Owner: Garth J Perry

The Office of Budget and Planning is realigning resources to support a variety of campus planning challenges, which represents a shift from a traditional resource allocation and reporting role toward a strategic decision-support role. Adoption of a common budget and planning platform will empower units by simplifying their planning processes and by allowing flexibility to capitalize on strategic opportunities as they emerge, including linking budgets to the university’s overall Strategic Plan. The selected software platform will also facilitate the bi-directional nature of planning between central administration and Responsibility Center Units (RCUs) of the university and allow for timely and informative insight and decision-making support by all levels of university leadership.

Initiative Owner: Peter Dourlein

This cross-cutting initiative will provide a comprehensive physical framework plan (Campus Master Plan) to facilitate the strategic growth and success of all university/campus stakeholders and will enable the campus environment to support all other Strategic Plan pillars by providing for the physical context within which the University's learning, research, social and cultural initiatives can occur. The Campus Master Plan initiative is the initiation of a complex, year-long, multidisciplinary effort to develop a physical planning framework to support the activities of all University stakeholders, while most closely focusing on facilitating the priorities established in the UA Strategic Plan.

Launch Date: 07/22/2019
End SIF Funding: 6/30/2020


 

The initiatives below were launched as part of the original 2018 strategic plan. Due to a variety of factors, the initiatives were discontinued or significantly downsized. Contact strategicplan@arizona.edu for more information.

Our Best Work Environment | 5.1A

Living Our Core Values | 5.1B

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