Governance

• Enduring goal: Regularly review and affirm UMSI shared values across all of UMSI’s important constituencies, including faculty, staff, students, alumni, and donors.
• Five-year objectives: 
  • Create governance structures that support faculty and staff to play impactful and meaningful roles in determining the direction of UMSI. 
  • Develop and offer a weekly “how things work” series (e.g., how procurement works, how hiring works, how hosting works, how GSI assignments work, how the field prelim works, and etc.).

Creating and maintaining a diverse, equitable, and inclusive organization

• Enduring goal: Make diversity, equity, and inclusion part of the fabric of everything we do, visible in our community life, instruction, research, and administration of programs and services.
• Five-year objectives:
  • Fulfill the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Strategic Plan.
  • Create a physical environment (in North Quad and later in the new North Campus location) that incorporates visual art, murals, and images that reflect the many different cultures/individuals that have impacted the field of information.

Recruit, develop, and retain outstanding organizational members. 

Overall

• Enduring goal: 
  • Lead by example in terms of fostering an inclusive organizational climate that embraces diversity and equity -- and align with campus efforts to achieve the same across UM and in the broader society.
  • Convey history and values of UMSI to new organizational members, both via onboarding and ongoing mentoring.
• Five-year objectives:
  • Hire faculty and staff to meet the needs of the MADS degree.
  • Develop social structures that foster and preserve high familiarity and recognition among faculty and staff, despite growth and dispersion across multiple locations.

Faculty

• Enduring goal: Recruit, develop, and retain faculty who are committed to the UMSI mission and values, who excel in research and instruction, contribute to making UMSI a more diverse, equitable and inclusive community, and are eager to learn from fellow faculty, staff, students, and alumni.
• Five-year objectives:
  • Hire to maintain intellectual diversity among the UMSI faculty.
  • Hire to build on existing excellence and expand core strengths in research and teaching

Staff

• Enduring goal: Recruit, develop, and retain staff who are committed to the UMSI mission and values, who excel in their areas of expertise, and who contribute to making UMSI a more diverse, equitable and inclusive community, and who are eager to learn from fellow staff, faculty, students, and alumni.
• Five-year objectives:
  • Launch revised hiring processes designed to increase the diversity of applicant and interview pools.
  • Develop and deploy mechanisms to improve cross-site communication and collaboration.

Students

• Enduring goal: 
  • Recruit, develop, and graduate students who are committed to the UMSI mission and values, who excel in their work, who contribute to making UMSI a more diverse, equitable and inclusive community, and who are eager to learn from fellow students, staff, faculty, and alumni.
  • Increase educational opportunities for first generation college/graduate students, for those from under-served/marginal communities, and those from the lower quartiles of the socio-economic distribution.
• Five-year objectives:
  • Ph.D. students -- Increase the size of the applicant pool and increase the yield percentage for domestic applicants.
  • Masters students-- increase domestic and international enrollment diversity in the MSI and MHI (e.g., distribute international enrollment across a broader range of countries, increase the socio-economic diversity of domestic students).
  • Undergraduate students -- Achieve class cohorts of 200 BSI students by expanding our pipeline through outreach to K-12, community colleges, and online learning communities.
  • Online students -- Launch the MADS degree (Fall 2019) with at least 150 students, with quality comparable to our MSI and MHI students.

Stewardship

Facilities

• Enduring goal: Provide facilities that allow UMSI to fully express our independent identity, and support our research, teaching, and public impact -- while doing so in an environmentally sustainable way.  
• Five-year objectives:
  • Complete construction of the new UMSI/CSE building on North Campus to meet or exceed the Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design (LEED) silver standard.
  • Develop closer synergies with UM partners to offer high-impact and innovative academic programs on North Campus.

Budget

• Enduring goal: secure and manage financial resources sufficient to support our educational and research missions.
• Five-year objectives:
  • Build a fund surplus that can be used to reduce the fundraising challenge for our building project.
  • Allocate resources to achieve successful launch of the MADS degree.
  • Maintain a portfolio of programs and priorities aligned with our resources such that the addition of new programs/priorities will be balanced by reducing/eliminating existing programs/priorities.
  • Increase the allocation of resources toward needs-based financial aid to UMSI students, particularly in the MSI and MHI programs.

Endowment and gifts

• Enduring goal: raise sufficient funds to support our educational and research missions.
• Five-year objectives:
  • Achieve an annual five-year moving average of $2.8 to 3.2 million in annual fundraising production.
  • Collaboratively raise funds with the College of Engineering to construct a new shared UMSI-CSE building with groundbreaking in 2021 (an estimated $30 million fundraising goal).

Business processes

Continuous improvement

• Enduring goal: Nurture an organization-wide commitment to reduce inefficiencies and waste, to promote innovation, and to measure operational effectiveness.
• Five-year objectives:
  • An additional three or more staff units will complete the Lean in Daily Work program.
  • Create a staff award to reward innovations for efficiency and administrative excellence.

Cross-unit collaboration

• Enduring goal: Maximize our financial and human resources and strengthen our outcomes through effective cross-functional collaboration.
• Five-year objectives:
  • Develop a new model for the Dean’s Cabinet meeting which includes assignment of outcome-focused projects to complete between meetings.

Shared services

• Enduring goal: Maximize use of UM shared services where feasible and practical.
• Five-year objectives:
  • Engage in pilot program opportunities related to Merchant Account management, M-Reports and guest and student reimbursements.
  • Achieve 100% utilization of the Shared Service Center travel and expense reporting service.