Dear Campus Community,

Another year has quickly passed, and I’d like to take a moment to reflect through a technology lens at some highlights as well as share what’s ahead for the future.

What’s been going on? My first year at Fresno State was a deep and helpful experience, one in which I learned about the many ways technology could effect change through innovation and business process improvement. This past year proved to be a year of change in the areas of organizational structures, processes, resources, and culture. In order to better understand needs and foster helpful service, our technology teams began an intentional process of broadening and deepening relationships with the campus community.

So, what’s ahead? This coming year, we will move forward in many areas of our new Technology Strategic Plan in support of organizational renewal, innovative academic and administrative support, participatory governance and process improvements, proactive support for scholarly activities, and a strong culture of service. As each year passes, we see how technology continues to enhance how we approach teaching, learning, research, and administration. Let’s review some of the work we achieved together and then look forward to the coming year.

Highlights from this past year:

• Brought in Google for email, calendar, and collaboration and retired Zimbra
• Built out 4 smart classrooms for Fresno State Visalia campus; later enhanced two to be distance learning classrooms
• Launched new iPad loaner program supporting up to 1200 students within DISCOVERe
• Launched new printing system for students, faculty, and staff
• Launched new glass light-board to support online teaching and learning
• Launched internet-enabled devices around campus to support location-aware services
• Enhanced and replaced technology within a number of classrooms around campus
• Supported technology needs for Summer Arts
• Enhanced a number of paper and manual workflows
• Supported rollout of technology-enhanced advising, planning, and analytics
• Enhanced the campus security and privacy posture through awareness, training, and threat prevention and mitigation
• Enhanced a number of central workflows and processes

Beyond projects and initiatives, we worked a great amount on processes, people, and community:

• Launched a technology leadership development program to support professional development and to build a leadership pipeline
• Launched a formal project management office, information technology architecture group, and innovation team
• Continued work with the restructuring of technology shared governance, including the launch of the various subcommittees supporting technology prioritization for our campus.
• Launched a new staff recognition program
• Sponsored multiple student capstone projects
• Launched first Hackathon contest at Fresno State with sponsorship from technology firms from Silicon Valley and abroad

Future projects:

• Continued classroom technology modernization
• Major upgrade of the Human Resources and Student systems
• Learning Management System evaluation and potential change
• Enhancement of accessible technology tools and support
• Increased support for research, high-performance, and virtual computing
• Multi-factor authentication and other proactive security and privacy enhancements
• Continued work with new and enhanced online workflows
• Fresno State Mobile enhancements
• Continued optimization of shared governance and renewed efforts with data governance
• Data signage and data visualization exploration
• Next-generation cloud infrastructure exploration
• Artificial Intelligence ,Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality innovation exploration

I cherish the opportunities I have to serve our students and their success. Our technology team deserves all of the credit in supporting our campus with its hard work, dedication, and support. I’m very proud of our Technology Services Division and want to encourage you to share a small word of appreciation when you have the opportunity.

Thanks very much for your dedication in supporting our campus, the community, and the Central Valley. Together, we can bring our technology capability and capacity from a state of being good to one of being great, so that we can better support the mission of Fresno State – to boldly educate and empower students for success.

Sincerely,
Orlando Leon
Chief Information Officer
California State University, Fresno