Case Studies and Reports

Integrated Media Technologies: Customer Satisfaction Survey Results
March 2018

Approved by NIU's Marketing and Communications Clearinghouse and Human Resource Services, this customer satisfaction survey was conducted to help IMT better understand our customers' awareness, usage, and satisfaction with services. Our response rate was just over 25% (858 responses) with an 86% overall satisfaction rate. Receiving information about cost and quality of service, functional requirements, timely service, and accessibility, the answers to this survey have already begun to inform our future.

FY19 Budget: Executive Summary
March 2018

The completion of the Division of Information Technology’s (DoIT’s) FY19 budget submission fulfills its four-year effort to repair and redress any and all remaining structural issues with the central IT budget at NIU. This year also marks the end of an era for DoIT. Most central IT problems are solved. Value now must be created inside other budgets by enabling better business practices. Much depends, then, on the ability and the will of those offices to make change and that will be the hallmark of the next era of IT at NIU.

Project Management Best Practices
December 2017

A best practice is a technique, method, or process that is believed to be more efficient and effective in achieving a goal than other techniques, methods and processes when applied to a particular condition or circumstance. Best practices are based on experience and are used to describe the process of developing and following a standard way of doing things. DoIT's Project Management Office Intern has collected some project management myths and best practices.

AnywherePrints Project Summary
December 2017

Throughout 2014 and 2015 a systematic review of printing practices on NIU's campus revealed a number of costly and dissatisfying aspects of printing as a service. As a direct result of this review, the IT Steering Committee approved the AnywherePrints (AWP) project in 2015 as an effort to help divisions understand their own printing cost and opt into shared print devices as a way to reduce costs, increase quality, add features, realize environmental benefits, and pave the way for business practice modernization. The revised state of printing as of December 2017 is now generating over $1 million per year in recurring savings for the university as compared with the FY16 baseline. This update details the source of these savings and evaluates the performance of the project against its defined scope and objectives.

Action Plans for Program Prioritization
July 2016

As called for in the Program Prioritization 2015-2016 Administrative Task Force Report, the Division of Information Technology created Action Plans for each program. DoIT accepted the overwhelming majority of the recommendations and sought to add its own creative additions. Moreover, the document established a context for the work leading up to the PP narrative submissions, detailed key milestones achieved since the narratives were submitted, and laid out long term roadmaps for local and distributed IT teams that went beyond the PP recommendations in order to prepare NIU to compete effectively in the uncertain future.

Student Technology Use at NIU
May 2016

The EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research (ECAR) conducts an annual survey of undergraduate students and their experiences with and attitudes toward technology and their academic experiences. In 2016, NIU became one of the 183 higher education institutions that participate in this valuable study. The annual survey results are already being used across campus to challenge our assumptions about general access lab spaces, wireless coverage and capacity, and the use of technology in teaching and learning spaces.

Project Management =  Relief + Results
August 2015

The Division of Information Technology (DoIT) Financial Management Systems (FMS) team had a problem. An upgrade was necessary to provide a stable foundation for critical financial modules like Contracts, Grants, eProcurement and Project Costing. But in order to save money, we had to spend the time and we had to do it fast: the upgrade had to be finished in just months, by May 2015.

FY16 Budget: Executive Summary
July 2015

The Division has been trapped for years in a mismatch between income and expense: we have been encouraged and approved to submit unbalanced budgets where “budget” exceeds “expense” and “expense” exceeds “income.” For example, our approved FY15 budget included planned income of $23.2M and planned expenditures of $28.8M: an approved, but negative balance of $5.5M. For the first time, this budget addresses the structural imbalance between our income and expenses and begins to address the systematic underfunding of capital equipment.

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