At a university as large and complex as UMass Amherst, technology touches nearly every moment of campus life. From safeguarding research data to supporting tools and platforms that students, faculty, and staff depend on, the teams behind those services keep the university running, often in the background, solving problems before most people know they exist.
Keeping this mosaic of teams and functions working in concert requires a coordinated approach. Last September, UMass Amherst launched the One IT Initiative to develop a more cohesive, consistent IT organization. The goal is stronger cybersecurity protection, better coordination of support across campus, better-defined career paths for IT staff, and a stronger foundation for the university’s future IT needs.
Getting there takes deep staff engagement and a commitment to listening across teams. Over the past year, UMass IT has conducted hundreds of individual conversations with IT staff and campus stakeholders to understand needs, strengths, and challenges across IT. Across the full Staff Engagement Initiative, UMass IT has now completed 323 individual IT staff discovery meetings representing more than 500 hours of engagement interviews.
Now, that discovery is moving into deeper cultural and operational territory, with a focus on developing service models that meet the university’s needs across three key areas: People, Finance, and Technical Discovery.
People: Listening before design
Terry Carroll, Assistant Vice Chancellor, Special Projects, has a central role in the people side of this work.
This past summer, the One IT Staff Engagement Initiative entered Phase 2, focused on Shared and Embedded Solutions. Carroll is leading a working group of IT representatives from across the university charged with exploring what service delivery could look like in a center-led, future-ready IT organization. The group will also examine mature models at other R1 institutions and ultimately make recommendations to leadership.
UMass Amherst’s IT landscape has grown over time into several distinct service cultures. Some teams have historically supported administrative and enterprise needs, while others focus on faculty and research environments or operate as decentralized staff embedded within specific units.
Each brings valuable knowledge and different ways of working. Rather than designing a new model from the top down, Carroll wants those experiences to inform the new model.
“We take bits and pieces from each, because they might be doing the same thing slightly differently,” she says. “We should be looking at what works best for the campus and then develop a new culture of how we’re going to move forward.”
Carroll says hearing each team’s perspective is critical because IT support for a large and complex university is never one-size-fits-all. Each area of specialization has its own needs and challenges, and a center-led model must account for these realities.
“Every single member of the working group is someone who has expertise in their area, and we want to bring in all perspectives.” Carroll says. “We want to engage IT teams from across campus to have ownership in this process.”
At the end of this phase, Carroll hopes the work will produce, in addition to recommendations for a service delivery model, a stronger shared understanding of terminology, service expectations, and the needs different IT teams are trying to meet.
Finance: Building a sustainable model
A future-ready IT organization also needs a sustainable way to fund the services it provides.
The finance discovery process is being led in part by Melissa Zawadzki, Director of Finance and Facilities for UMass IT. Zawadzki joined UMass IT in April 2025, shortly before the One IT initiative was announced. Her role gives her a wide view of the operational systems involved in IT, including how services are funded and how data about those services is tracked and understood.
In this phase, her job is to understand how IT is currently budgeted and paid for across campus. The answer is complicated, as over time, different departments have developed different ways to fund IT support. The challenge is to figure out a future model that reduces complexity where possible, with a blended funding system projected to be in place for the 2028 fiscal year.
“My goal is to have no more than five funding frameworks that can work for multiple departments,” says Zawadzki. “We’re working really hard to have better reporting and dashboards and analytics around IT spending across campus.”
Zawadzki understands that the work requires patience and sensitivity. Discussing budget setups takes trust. For her, success is less about getting every detail perfect from the start and more about being able to adapt over time.
“Success is where we can work well together and address problems as we find them,” says Zawadzki. Ultimately, the work comes down to providing reliable and future-ready IT support across campus.
“It’s really about the delivery of service,” Zawadzki says, “and the funding is just the mechanism.”
Technical: Finding risks and redundancies
The third pillar focuses on the technology itself. Alongside the ongoing people and finance engagements, UMass IT has partnered with Deloitte Higher Education to launch a 10-week technical discovery and assessment.
The engagement is looking at technical capacity and needs, including aging equipment, redundant systems and applications, and areas where risk or inefficiency may have accumulated over time. Deloitte is also benchmarking UMass Amherst against peer R1 institutions to understand how universities of a similar size organize and support their IT environments.
Deloitte’s work is expected to result in a high-level picture of the current technology landscape this fall. Carroll is particularly interested in what happens when that outside assessment compares to what teams are learning internally.
“If the external lens and the internal lens match, then we’re doing something right,” she says. “If they don’t, then we need to reevaluate our planning.”
From discovery to continuous improvement
The One IT discovery work is building the foundation of how UMass IT is evolving as an organization. But the culture of engagement won’t end with the initiative’s completion.
“We’ve done a tremendous amount of listening, learning, and groundwork over the past year,” says Monica Kane, Associate Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and Deputy CIO at UMass Amherst. “It signals our commitment to empowering the campus community to guide our transformation. I'm excited to see where that takes us.”