Student Working at T&I

Strategy & Architecture

Our Vision For The Future

Our vision for Davidson is to serve as a model for higher education, with a digitally-savvy student body and a workforce that can thrive in an increasingly complex and digital world. Institutionally, we leverage automation and data to promote efficiency and effectiveness. Technologically, our open, interoperable, and inspired technology ecosystem connects people, information, ideas and toolsʳɫ¹ÙÍø”both inside and outside of the collegeʳɫ¹ÙÍø”to enable and drive personal and institutional agency, agility and adaptability.

How We Work Toward This Vision

Members of Technology & Innovationʳɫ¹ÙÍø™s (T&I) technical staff and leadership comprise the technical architecture group, which guides the technology strategy for T&I and for solutions purchased college-wide. Our technology architecture strategy, adopted in 2019, is based on the following principles:

  • When selecting enterprise-level solutions (for example, for disaster recovery and backups) and departmental applications, give preference to cloud-based (infrastructure-as-a-service and software-as-a-service) solutions.
  • Emphasize automation across our infrastructure and services, and use proven platforms for developing, integrating, maintaining and securing technology.
  • Authorize access to services using a secure, easy to use single sign on credential, combined with two-factor authentication.
  • Ensure service interoperability with our enterprise data warehouse, enabling the collegeʳɫ¹ÙÍø™s access to high quality data for reporting, via a data governance process.
  • Continually increase the resiliency of our campus network, Internet access and telecommunications services.
  • Deliver applications considering our usersʳɫ¹ÙÍø™ increasing (and sometimes sole) use of mobile devices.
  • Apply best in class information security principles in our daily operations and when selecting new technology services and products.