About
Welcome
We encourage you to further explore our website to learn about the diverse IT services we provide and the talented people who provide them. Or perhaps you'd like to learn more about our organization with a mind to joining our talented team of professionals. Whatever has brought you here, we bid you welcome!
Engineering IT Shared Services is the primary IT services provider for the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Our mission is to ensure that all faculty, students and staff in Grainger College have easy and well supported access to IT services that are second to none in support of their teaching, research, and learning. We pride ourselves on our user-centric approach to IT, with emphasis on effectiveness, flexibility, and transparency.
Our Ideals
Beginning in the Fall of 2015, Engineering IT embarked on a deep analysis of what kind of organization we should be. Our goal was to create an organizing concept that would guide our development, decision-making, and work effort for the foreseeable future. The following are the Ideals that came from this work, what guides our organization.
Why is it important?
“Academics” - that is teaching, learning, and research - are the core mission of the University and of the College of Engineering. Engineering IT has come to realize that our success and greatness is directly and inextricably linked to our ability to impact that academic mission. We exist to enable and enrich the learning and discovery for which Engineering at Illinois is renowned. Of all the varied work we do, we must strive to excel most wherever we most closely impact academics.
What does it mean to us?
This might translate to restoring service to instructional home directories before restoring portal services in the event of an outage. It may also mean helping a grad student defending his thesis with an audio/visual problem before assisting an administrative assistant with an email problem. It doesn’t mean that we completely ignore “administrative” requests, only that giving time and attention to academic requests will take precedence over administrative requests.
Why is it important?
The College and the University are large, vibrant, and decentralized organizations with a blinding array of initiatives, activities, and priorities. In an environment such as ours, relationships are the true currency of the land. To succeed in serving the tremendously diverse needs of academics, we need to understand their perspective, and we can only achieve that through close relationships. To get any attention or resources on issues we consider important requires a substantial stock of trust from many different stakeholders. For all these reasons developing and maintaining relationships with our customers is essential.
What does it mean to us?
This likely translates to taking extra time to engage with customers to understand what they’re trying to accomplish, and suggesting options that they may have overlooked instead of focusing on addressing a larger volume of issues in a more transactional manner. In some settings the goal may be more to maintain, or not lose trust or credibility than to build it. Managers may need to adjust expectations of workload and request response.
Why is it important?
To be credible and achieve meaningful impact we must of course do more than simply partner closely with academics, we must also deliver. IT as a discipline is about creating solutions. We are creative problem solvers for both common and strikingly unique issues. Beyond that, we create new solutions (often, but not always through technology) that enable work that was not possible before. To keep pace with a College who does the impossible every day Engineering IT must operate with great agility and energy. Thus we have always been more focused on getting results than establishing and following strict processes.
What does it mean to us?
Doing “whatever it takes” to get the job done is the goal. It is more important to deliver a solution that a customer needs than to strictly follow our Service Level Definitions.
Why is it important?
Engineering IT does not exist in a vacuum, nor is it a free-standing organization with its own ends to pursue. Rather our organization is at its heart an enabler and a force multiplier for the academic mission. Our role is to constantly seek new ways to grow and enhance the College’s ability to discover and disseminate knowledge. Our goal is not a simplistic efficiency for ourselves, but rather to both steward our own resources and talent and to invest in ways that improve the College’s ability to rally its own resources toward academic impact.
What does it mean to us?
We should strive to run efficient operations so that we can focus as much of our own resources as possible on academic impact. We should strive to streamline bureaucracy and remove hurdles from the path of academic progress, even at times when it requires us to invest more of our own resources. We acknowledge that much of teaching, learning, and research are inherently inefficient, and our contributions are focused on enabling that, at times messy exploration.
Our History
Engineering IT was officially formed July 1, 2010, when the eight departmental IT groups within the College were merged into one organization. Following several years of work integrating people, processes, and technology, Engineering IT has realized its founding vision. Every faculty, student, and staff member in the College now has access to a robust professional IT organization whose breadth and depth of services and skills far exceeds that which any individual department could sustain independently. Our organization is now focused on leveraging its collective talents to become the most engaged and effective IT partner of any Engineering college in the nation.
Despite its expanded size and scope, Engineering IT remains fundamentally a local, departmental IT organization. Engineering IT strives to provide outstanding enterprise services where they are needed by the College and unavailable elsewhere, but the overall posture of the organization and the preponderance of our staff are focused on the needs of the departments and the faculty which we serve. Through our geographically distributed local IT support staff and our dedicated outreach and engagement staff, we strive to continually improve the connection and partnership between research and education and the information technology that enables them.
Engineering IT is organized as a Shared Services organization. Shared Services is a blend of centralization and decentralization that aims to provide the best of both worlds (e.g., economies of scale from centralization and customer focused from decentralization). Shared Services includes a number of defined components which Engineering IT embraces. Collectively these structures create an organization owned by and accountable to its customers.
Governance Guidance
Key to our Shared Services design is a governance structure composed of representatives from the users of the Engineering IT services. Governance is responsible for determining what services Engineering IT needs to provide and for holding Engineering IT accountable for its performance in delivering those services. Engineering IT is responsible for implementing business processes, technology, and an organizational structure and culture that provides the high quality set of services its users need. Engineering IT Shared Services as an organization relies on the input of governance and the College CIO to guide our continued development and prioritization on our path to becoming second to none.
“The best in all my years of working!!!”
-Anonymous, via 2021 Customer Satisfaction Survey
Administrative Staff, Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL)