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Laurier Digital Strategy

About Laurier's Digital Strategy

A digital strategy provides clear and realistic expectations of technology, services and operational practices, and ensures that the solutions we implement are approached purposefully and meet the needs of the communities that we serve.

This will enable individual and institutional success, help us to understand the potential of digital technologies and associated services, prioritize our investments, and readily apply them to better serve our diverse community.

Learn more about how we developed our digital strategy below or download the PDF.

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Strategic Priorities

Through engagements with the community and work within the Digital Strategy Working Group, three key priorities were identified as being the most important to our diverse community and imperative to our strategic success. These themes are:

Accessible and Equitable Access to Services, Tools and Resources

  • Ensure that services, tools, and resources are accessible and available to all the communities we serve.
  • Provide equitable digital experiences to our students, faculty, and staff.
  • Adopt people-focused services, systems and applications that are easy to use.

Communication, Collaboration and Connections

  • Optimise technology and services that enable communication and collaboration within our institution and with our wider community.
  • Proactively engage and elicit feedback from our community regarding projects and initiatives that support our strategic efforts.
  • Integrate software, systems and infrastructure that ensure a balance between security, privacy, and usability.

Purposeful Transformation in Learning, Teaching, Working and Research

  • Invest in people, processes, and technology that will enable current and future strategic initiatives at our institution.
  • Connect virtual and physical environments to support diverse modalities for working, teaching, learning and research.
  • Empower our workforce, students, faculty, and researchers through training and upskilling.

Annual Reports

The Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) annual report sheds light on the collaborative efforts between the ICT team and university partners throughout the year. The initiatives featured include how we keep our community connected, secure our data, and implement enhancements.

Project Roadmap

Our five-year roadmap outlines projects that will change how students, faculty and staff work, learn, teach and research at Laurier. As funding, opportunities and priorities change, new projects may be added or removed from this timeline to help us achieve the goals set out in Laurier’s Digital Strategy. Projects listed below are organized based on their current status and are adjusted annually to reflect current projected timelines.

Projects with an * indicate additional projects added to our roadmap based on institutional priorities.

Key Performance Indicators

In 2023, we will start setting our baseline for each of the following key performance indicators (KPIs). These KPIs will serve as an initial starting point that we will use to track our progress. Additional KPIs may be added subsequent years.

KPIs and Data Sources

Metric

Description

Data Source(s)

 Progress

Digital Solutions

Number of planned solutions implemented, and projects completed on the roadmap to support students, faculties, and departments.
  • Alemba Ticketing System
  • Excel
  • JIRA

Started/In Progress: 8 

Completed: 1

Not Yet Started: 10

User Satisfaction

Satisfaction from students, faculty, and staff with digital solutions and self-service offerings.
  • Alemba Ticketing System Post-Service Survey
  • Lesson Learned Project Reviews
  • Office of Research survey results
  • Project-specific Implementation Surveys

Researchers: 1.7/5 (Needs Improvement)

Staff/Faculty: 4.8/5 (Very Satisfied)

Students: N/A*

Consultations

Increased participation in town halls, focus groups, and various committees regarding digital initiatives.
  • Number of attendees in Townhalls, focus groups, and working groups

Diversity on Governance Committees: 4.3/5

Inclusion Mechanisms: 4.5/5

Responsiveness to Feedback: 4.3/5 

Data Connections

Percentage of data sources connected to the central data warehouse.
  • Banner
  • TargetX

Amount of Data: 1.2TB

Number of Data Sources: 3

Number of Reports/Dashboard Views: 6,036

Training and Upskilling

Percentage of staff that complete cyber security training.
  • Percentage of staff that complete Cyber Security Training by June 2023 as a baseline

Percentage Completed Training: 92%

Why a Digital Strategy?

Our Digital Strategy has overarching and integrated themes across all strategic areas of the Laurier Strategy and will be essential to helping the university be successful in achieving its objectives.

Each of strategic priorities in Laurier’s Digital Strategy were selected for the significance of their impact on our university community and specific activities that will be necessary for Laurier to achieve its broader objectives of thriving community and future-readiness.

Achieving these objectives will require support from leaders and a collaborative effort within the Laurier community to implement projects and initiatives that work towards these goals. It will also require proper project prioritization and an understanding that we have limited resources and must work collectively to ensure an appropriate balance between enterprise-level solutions and services that serve business units and/or functional needs.

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Feedback or Questions?

Have questions about our Digital Strategy or want to find out ways that you can get involved? Feel free to contact Kyle Harris, associate director of Strategic Initiatives and Communication, or submit the online form.

Members of the Digital Strategy Working Group

The Digital Strategy Working group is made up of diverse leaders from across the university that represent various strategic priorities of the university. The group meets bi-weekly to discuss current priorities, work planning and actions required. Sponsors are provided a monthly report detailing the progress that have been made towards developing our digital strategy.

Values of the Digital Strategy Working Group

Our Digital Strategy will provide a shared vision to enhance teaching, learning, research, administration, and service through sustainable digital innovation for Laurier and for our community of partners. In developing our approach, the Digital Strategy Working Group has identified a series of values that will drive its development.

Through this strategy we will: