Greetings and welcome to the 2019 University of Maine System State of IT report.  This year marks the first time our annual report is available as a digital newsletter.  We hope this format enhances overall usability, readability and accessibility.

2019 saw the entire University Services: Information Technology team pull together to continue to fulfill our shared vision to empower the UMS community with reliable and innovative technology solutions.  We are pleased to share highlights of these efforts of the past year in this annual report. Among the highlights presented in this report are several major ongoing initiatives representing capital investments to improve systems and infrastructure across the University, including:

• Mainestreet Campus Solutions 9.2 Upgrade
• Classrooms for the Future
• Wireless Infrastructure

As we look beyond the work completed in 2019, we are aligning resources to best support and enable emerging strategic priorities for the University, including the transition to unified accreditation.  This effort will require comprehensive review of existing data structures, systems and tools to better understand opportunities to improve processes, systems integration and data analysis to achieve targeted goals under a unified accreditation framework.

Ever-present is the need to facilitate and support enhancements of student success across the University.  Current efforts to improve the student experience with our core administrative system, Mainestreet, is underway [See Mainestreet Improvements: UX Project].  We were also active participants in the selection of a new system-wide learning management system, Brightspace by Desire2Learn, [See Learning Management System Transition] which will be available to all students in Fall 2020.  Finally, US:IT is leading the charge to deliver a comprehensive, unified campus card experience for students, faculty and staff in 2020 [See University OneCard Solution]. Under this model, students will be able to take advantage of their meal plans and campus-dollars programs on any University of Maine system campus along with a wealth of new self-service options.

2020 promises to continue the trend of delivering significant technological enhancements to members of the University of Maine community.  On behalf of the entire US:IT team, we remain thankful for the opportunity to partner with colleagues across the University and look forward to continuing to build collaboration in the new year.

Sincerely,
David M. Demers, Ph.D.
Chief Information Officer
david.demers@maine.edu