Director’s Note

ITSC Strategies and Initiatives

Samuel Kwan, Director of ITSC

The modern society is crossing an inflection point, entering a completely new era in which digitalization and data-driven intelligence become the major sources of organizational competitiveness. This presents bountiful opportunities, and challenges, to higher education. As the major central IT unit of the University, we must ensure we are leveraging technologies in a wise and strategic way that helps all University members achieve the missions and goals of the University.
 

The University’s strategic planning exercise earlier this year provided a timely opportunity for us to review and plan our IT strategies together with the user community as well as senior management of the University.  A handful of strategic focuses in the coming three years, each with a number of associated initiatives or projects, have been mapped out. In a nutshell, we shall:

  • Strengthen our capacity of research IT in terms of human talents as well as infrastructure including computation, network and storage
  • Re-align IT infrastructure and support for teaching and learning to meet pedagogical needs of active learning
  • Consolidate basic IT infrastructure in line with best practices in cloud computing 
  • Support sustainable smart campus by extending the campus network into a platform connecting Internet-of-Things devices
  • Continue to strengthen cybersecurity to cope with escalating threats and increased reliance on IT for core activities
  • Promote wise use of IT by different constituents of the University community, through professional user support, consultation and training

These high-level strategies are used to drive corresponding initiatives and projects. In many cases, they are collaborative efforts with other University units that are the major stakeholders or contributors.   I am pleased to report that quite a few of them have already been under way, as you can see in other articles of this issue of Channel.  The 3-year strategies and initiatives are published on our web site for reference:

https://itsc.ust.hk/strategies
 

Your valuable comments or suggestions would be most appreciated, as always.