Leadership Team Discusses Developing a Technology Road Map, Project Advancements, and More

The Leadership Team met on May 27 to discuss the following projects and updates:

Advancement Technology Updates

Michael Felberbaum and Hadar Call provided updates on two recent Advancement Technology projects, including Cross Campus and Time, Talent, Treasure (T3).

Cross Campus

Michael shared that President Salovey and Alumni Affairs and Development (AAD) were seeking ways to support the 170k living alumni who greatly outnumber the AAD staff trying to support all of the thousands of active volunteers. AAD needed a contemporary, self-service platform that both engaged the alumni community and enabled Yale to track and measure their engagement.

In response to these needs, Cross Campus—hosted on the People Grove platform, was developed to offer alumni a private, “LinkedIn-like platform” offering mentorship opportunities, professional development, volunteer engagement, and relationship development. The platform also offers maps to locate people of interest, engagement data for alumni association staff, and more. AAD leadership have driven adoption of the platform, which has earned 7k followers in just the last few months, by linking to the website in their email signature (“I Cross Campus, do you?”), among other methods.

Time, Talent, Treasure (T3)

Hadar spoke on T3, which launched on May 14 and offers AAD staff with a toolkit to support Yale’s multi-billion dollar capital campaign efforts. T3 offers AAD Staff new functionality such as “Insights,” that capture information about constituents from volunteers and others, “Listbuilder,” to customize the way data is displayed in Hopper, and “Open Pledges Lists,” to see all open or past due pledges and customize views to the user’s needs. The next phase of this project is underway, and will focus on engaging non-fundraising volunteers. AAD Staff expressed their excitement about these features in a recent video.

Technology Road Maps (TRMs)

Many teams are contributing to this year’s creation of an IT Long Range Plan covering five years (FY22-FY26). Technology Road Maps are a component of this effort to ensure that the University’s organizational goals, supporting IT service goals, and project goals are appropriately considered as they relate to each other, IT pillars, and financial planning efforts. Over 30 Technology Road Maps will be developed by August of this year.

Several IT colleagues, including Hadar Call and Vidhya Narayanan, have already engaged in the TRM process and have seen it as an opportunity to:

• Rethink plans
• Communicate what they are doing
• Align technology and business strategy

Vidhya Narayanan recently used the TRM process as she supported AAD with the anticipated expansion of two of their key platforms, Hopper and iModules. In the process of developing her roadmap, she compared her strategy to the business case outlined last year and mapped her applications based on maturity, growth, and more. She also partnered with Enterprise Architecture (EA) to review her goals, guiding principles, expectations, and benefits throughout the process. EA provided constructive feedback and examples of capability maps from different organizations to guide her process.

Louis King noted that Technology Road Maps are stories that, “start with an understanding of University priorities and end with a clear plan to get there.” He pointed out that TRM resources have been developed and are available on the Technology Road Map channel of the IT LRP team. Louis expects TRMs to be used at multiple levels in the organization from senior leaders to service teams because they, “clearly communicate service value-propositions and multi-year strategies to manage the technologies that underpin them.” He expects most TRMs to take 10-20 hours to complete.

The next leadership team meeting will be held on June 24.