Although I have been in transition for over a month, last Friday was my official first day as the CIO for CityU. In this blog, I would like to share with the greater CityU community - teachers, students, staffs, alumni and friends, some of my thoughts on our current ICT needs and priorities. By sharing, I hope we can all work together to create an even better CityU by leveraging ICT for teaching, learning, research, administration and outreach. I sincerely welcome any suggestions, comments or thoughts you might have on this or any other ICT-related issues.
At the top of my list of ICT priorities is clearly IT readiness for the 3+3+4 Academic Reform. We need to ensure all our central and departmental IT systems are well prepared and ready. These include systems for admissions, student records, academic advising, etc. Enhancements and modifications are needed to handle the more flexible major/minor curriculum structure as well as support for different types of admissions, such as college/department admissions, and advanced standings - exemptions versus the old credit transfer.
My next priority is to see how we can use IT to be better at what we do, and to further increase our efficiency and effectiveness. For example, for teaching, we will continue to explore new tools and platforms to streamline our delivery of knowledge and students’ learning/sharing. For research, we will explore tools that facilitate collaboration among academic staff and graduate students, both within research groups and cross departments. For administration, we will explore new technologies to further enhance the quality of data and knowledge presented in our executive systems.
For example, we need to find better ways to streamline how we distribute news and messages to the general CityU community. We will need to take advantage of newer Web 2.0 tools and platforms that encourages productivity, collaboration and knowledge sharing. We need better tools to allow us to quickly and easily search and locate data, information, knowledge, documents, and forms from our Intranet. We need to continue to improve the quality of the learning environment for our students by providing them with tools that they are most comfortable with.
Externally, we need to enhance our Web strategy and further strengthen our online presence. We will need to continue the momentum created by our new homepage to spread our branding concepts and ideas to colleges, departments and administrative units. Our identity and message can be made clearer through consistent branding and better information architecture.
Within CityU’s greater IT organization, I would like to encourage more collaboration and knowledge sharing of best practices among all IT staff from CSC, ESU, to those within colleges, departments, and administrative units. CityU has a lot of valuable resources; we need to leverage off each others’ strengths and expertise.
Finally, CityU has always pride itself for being ahead of the curve and taking a leading role in terms of the use of technology within Hong Kong’s higher education community. Along this line, we will continue to explore new technology developments and trends and take full advantage of them whenever possible. For example, technology trends such as virtualization, cloud computing, WAN optimization, and executive dashboards. Some of these are already deployed and in use at CityU.
