Teaching and Research Excellence

Enrich academic technologies and support services to supplement and enhance the University’s distinctive highly personal faculty and student interactions and to enhance critical components of the University’s research infrastructure and facilitate the growth of faculty and student research and scholarship.

As part of the IT Strategic Plan, we launched an academic technology support strategy to set into motion a system of seamless support for faculty and students. This initiative supports the Vision2020: Charting a Course for Academic Computing at Wake Forest that articulated that “Wake Forest remain an exemplar for a new kind of premier learning experience, valued not only for the close personal relationships between our students and their instructors, but also for the innovative learning environment afforded by our effective use of academic technology in our teaching, learning, scholarly, and creative pursuits.”

Highlights include:

• With nearly 450 learning spaces between the Reynolda campus and Wake Downtown, the recently formed Learning Spaces Committee is charged with balancing the need to bring on new classrooms, supporting building additions and renovations, and upfitting existing classrooms. During the past year, over 75 spaces saw technology replacements, upgrades, or were added to our systems. At Wake Downtown, the team successfully brought twenty new classrooms online while reducing the projected spend by nearly 45%. Twenty additional new campus spaces, including Angelou Hall and Reynolds Gym Phase 1, were outfitted with state-of-the-art technology.
• Following a national search, Ms. Hannah Inzko joined Information Systems as the Director of Academic Technology. Hannah will work in collaboration with the Teaching and Learning Collaborative, the Office of Online Education, the ZSR Library and the Instructional Technology Group to lead and develop the University’s academic technology goals.

Administrative Excellence and Student Success

Support academic excellence and student success with services that are efficient, mobile, data driven, and responsive to the needs of faculty, students and staff.

Wake Forest University CIO, Mur Muchane, collaborated with campus colleagues to conduct a thorough assessment of the University’s technology infrastructure. Based on that assessment, Workday was selected to replace Banner as the financial, human capital management, budget and planning system. Workday promotes operational excellence by unifying Finance, Human Resources, budget and planning into a seamless system that makes it more efficient to complete everyday processes.

With an easy, user-friendly interface, Workday is designed to meet the unique needs of higher education institutions. With a rollout date of July 2018, Workday@Wake offers:

• one convenient interface
• cloud-based, mobile-optimized technology
• embedded analytics
• lower, long-term costs
• fewer forms and paperwork
• adatability to any device or platform
• automoated and streamlined departmental processes
• comprehensive views of organizational data
• flexibility to update personal information in real time

This will be a key year for Wake, as we collectively work toward implementation of this solution that will significantly enhance the service level provided to the Wake Forest community and replace a range of expensive-to-maintain and difficult-to-use standalone systems.

President Nathan O. Hatch

Infrastructure and Support for Innovation

Support faculty, students and staff to innovate, discover and collaborate with secure, reliable and robust technology infrastructure.

The IT Strategic Plan identified the need to increase and improve our support services provided by the Service Desk and through self-service. Our solution was multifaceted but can be summarized in 1) an expansion of the types of questions and issues the Service Desk can resolve, 2) a redesign of the Service Desk, both in the physical layout as well as in the support staff structure, and 3) a new and improved IS website (is.wfu.edu).

A review of support services enabled Information Systems to move many of the issues that were escalated to other IS teams back to the Service Desk through empowerment and training of the Service Desk staff.

The new Service Desk area included an onsite tech shop that provides the ability to repair computers onsite, decreasing the amount of time customers have to wait. The redesign also allows for a more collaborative work environment, ensuring that staff are visible and readily available to serve walk-in customers. For customers preferring to call for assistance, the Service Desk currently has a 98%+ calls answered rate. And Live Chat provides immediate support for our entire campus community, wherever they may be.

The new IS website (is.wfu.edu), WordPress accessible and mobile-ready, has proven to meet the needs of our campus community in a friendly and easy-to-use format. With a responsive search bar, the comprehensive, self-help content allows users to get assistance quickly and easily.