As part of the university redesign of 2008, the role of Chief Information Officer was created with the objective of looking at information technology as a strategic component of TWU's future, reflecting society's trend. Over the last 3 years, all technology-related functions at TWU have been brought under the Office of the CIO umbrella. The Office of the CIO provides vision, overall leadership and general administrative oversight of TWU’s information technology (IT) division including academic and administrative computing, network and core infrastructure, web and software development, project management, strategic systems, telecommunications, audio visual and customer support services.
Significant achievements have been accomplished since then. To name a few:
- Centralization of all IT resources, previously distributed within over 10 business units, to achieve business goals by fostering innovation, prioritizing IT initiatives, and coordinating the evaluation, deployment, and management of current and future IT systems across the organization. Over 3 years, this has reduced the total IT spend by nearly 40% (lowest IT operating budget expenditure in 10 years) and significantly increasing the total number of services provided.
- Promote and oversee strategic relationships between internal IT resources and external entities, including government, vendors, and partner organizations.
- Successfully obtained a $1.3 million Federal Knowledge Infrastructure Program grant that enabled us to update the whole university’s wired and wireless network, implement VoIP, and an Emergency Notification System. This large 2-year project, completed in August 2011, has readied the university's core infrastructure to support the large influx of personal computing devices such as personal laptops, data phones and tablets, which has tripled the data network demand in less than 3 years.
- Through appropriate consultation with stakeholders, we have establish IT departmental goals, objectives, and operating policies and procedures, such as the implementation of a technology governance model for project prioritization that involves the top senior executives of the university, social media policy, cloud policy, and privacy impact assessment process.
- Other key initiatives include the implementation of new finance modules to manage promissory notes and RRSPs in Aqueduct, MyCourses in China, and the implementation of Software as a Service(SaaS) cloud solutions like SalesForce (CRM), SilverPop (Marketing Automation System) and Convio CommonGround (Donor Management and Fund Raising System).
- Participated in the implementation of TWU Impact, a storytelling and fundraising site for projects supporting the Trinity Western University community.
- TWU Connect a student portal to centralize, organize, and increase student involvement opportunities on and off campus.
- Redesign of the Trinity Western University main corporate website, in collaboration with UComm, incorporating SEO and web analytics.
- Established the first Project Management Office (PMO) at TWU in November 2010.
- Implemented Radar an online project portfolio management system to manage over 400 projects through out the entire IT Division and UComm, and customized it implementing KPI reporting for all our initiatives and to provide visibility of IT projects to the university community.
Dr. Alma Barranco-Mendoza, Chief Information Officer
Joining IT in 2009, as one of the few CIOs under 40 and one of the fewer than 23% female CIOs in North America, Dr. Barranco-Mendoza has brought a fresh new perspective to technology as TWU's first CIO. With over 22 years of IT experience in a wide range of industries including higher ed., biomedical, software development, telecomm, legal, and biochemical, her main interest is in the leverage of technologies for strategic value-based business process optimization and simplification and the use of information in the development of metrics for decision making. In addition to her role in IT, she has served at TWU as assistant professor in the departments of Computing Systems and Informatics and Biotechnology since 2004. She was the recipient of the Provost's Innovative Teaching Award in 2009. Prior to her roles at TWU, she co-founded Infogenetica Bioinformatics, a medical bioinformatics research and consulting group, where she served as President and CTO, and prior to that, she was the Chief Knowledge Engineer and Manager of R&D at Knowledge Junction Systems, a software company focused on developing web-based business intelligence solutions for the Telecommunications industry.