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IT Launches First Phase of Strategic Workforce Plan

April 8, 2015

Information Technology recently announced the launch of an IT Strategic Workforce Plan and new leaders in key roles who will help spearhead the initiative.

The goal in creating a workforce plan is to build an IT organization that functions in a less reactive and transactional operational mode and move toward a transformational and service-centered operation that can enable, adopt and sustain innovation at UC Merced.

In a message to campus, Chief Information Officer and Associate Vice Chancellor Ann Kovalchick described the initiative as a multi-year effort that will require incremental and sweeping change, but the effort to make the shift will be persistent and purposeful.

Phase 1 Launch

Phase 1 of the IT Workforce Plan includes the recruitment and open search for a director of Academic and Emerging Technologies and manager of User Support. Recruitment also begins shortly for a deputy CIO of operations who will lead the following service centers: Campus Application, IT Architecture, IT Infrastructure and Research Computing.

As part of the Phase 1 launch, Kovalchick announced the recent appointment of Mariette Araya to the new position of Deputy CIO for Services and Support. Araya, who began her new role March 1, previously served as IT’s director of project management. She has an established record of success in service delivery and team leadership demonstrated by the robust and reliable delivery of the mission-critical Student Information System.

Service centers that will be under Araya's purview include Emerging and Academic Technology, IT support, and project management and customer relations. Additional staffing needs have been identified within the IT Workforce Plan and will be filled as the full implementation of Phase 2 of the Workforce Plan begins upon completion of Phase 1.

Araya has already begun examining incident-management and service-request fulfillment and has designed a number of operational service improvement initiatives that will be launched in May. Those efforts will build on some of the current work to be completed on Version 1 of the IT Service Catalogue and Knowledge Base. Future versions will focus on delivering self-service options and a service portal in which end users will be able to check on the status of service requests.