Student Life IT Strategic Plan & IT SharePoint Site Launch 

The launch of the Student Life IT Strategic Plan in 2025 marked a turning point for how technology supports students and staff across Student Life. After many months of listening and learning from the Student Life community in 2024, the plan emerged with a clear mission: to deliver secure, innovative and cost-effective services rooted in a humanistic mindset.  

Its vision — to be a trusted partner in transforming the student journey — reflects the belief that technology is not just about systems, but about enabling access, well-being and opportunity.  

With three goals at its core — Business Value Maximization, Achieve IT Excellence and Drive IT Innovation — the plan charts a path toward a more seamless, reliable and forward-looking student experience. For example, a student logging into a portal to connect with mental health resources or to book appointments can now do so with fewer barriers, gaining timely access to the support they need to thrive. 

Built through partnerships with departments across Student Life, the process itself strengthened relationships and created a sense of shared ownership in shaping the future.  

The new IT SharePoint site now brings this vision to life, offering staff a central hub for resources, updates and collaboration. By weaving together innovation and partnership, Student Life IT ensures that every digital tool is more than technology — it is a bridge to connection, equity and holistic student support.  

Just as students feel supported in their journeys, staff too benefit from a culture of collaboration, making the Strategic Plan a shared foundation for growth across the division. 

Student Life IT Mission: We strategically partner with Student Life departments to deliver collaborative, innovative, efficient, cost-effective and secure technology services in support of University excellence, demonstrating a humanistic mindset for our staff and students. 

Student Life IT Vision: To be a trusted advisor and partner in transforming the student journey, business innovation and growth through an engaged IT workforce. 

All initiatives within the Student Life IT portfolio are categorized under the three strategic goals identified during planning: Business Value Maximization, Achieve IT Excellence, and Drive IT Innovation.  

Under Business Value Maximization, the launch of the Student Life Staff Hiring Portal streamlined staff onboarding through secure online forms and workflows. The portal not only protects the submission of sensitive information but also reduces administrative burden across units. Future phases will expand its potential by integrating IT network and application access requests, and by tailoring workflows for units with more complex requirements. This work illustrates how digital transformation can deliver efficiency, reduce risk and free up time for staff to focus on higher-value activities that benefit the community. 

In 2025, Student Life IT also advanced several initiatives under Achieve IT Excellence, ensuring that systems, platforms and tools are reliable, secure and built for long-term success.  

A key milestone was the migration of the Student Life WordPress website to Pantheon, a hosting platform that enables staging and testing before deployment. This transition freed up significant resources previously tied to on-premises hosting and set the stage for migrating additional WordPress sites through 2025–2026.  

At the same time, Student Life IT partnered with U of T’s Information Security and Enterprise Architecture office to participate in a national pilot of the CIRA Extended Detection and Response (XDR) security solution, joining several other Canadian institutions in evaluating its ability to provide a unified, organization-wide view of potential threats. Together, these projects underscore a proactive approach to operational excellence, scalability and security. 

Excellence was also advanced in the physical and data environments that support our staff and services. New workstations and networks were set up in EL Commons for Career Exploration and Education (CxED) and in the expanded space for Accessibility Services, ensuring staff and students benefit from well-equipped, reliable environments.  

On the data side, Student Life IT began building Power BI dashboards to track progress on IT strategic goals, and also supported TCard Services in migrating Tableau dashboards to Power BI. The new TCard Power BI dashboards automatically update daily with card production data, replacing manual processes and vastly improving efficiency and accuracy. Further enhancements to the dashboards are being developed by SL IT in collaboration with TCard Services.

The Launch of Support Revitalization project bridged Achieve IT Excellence and Drive IT Innovation by reimagining how staff access IT support.  

In Phase 1, the Help Desk ticket system was redesigned with a more intuitive set of categories, following consultation with staff across many departments. The next phase will introduce AI-driven support through Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) models, enabling faster, smarter and more responsive assistance.  

This initiative illustrates how SL IT is not only improving current operations but also investing in innovation that redefines how services are delivered. Taken together, these initiatives strengthen Student Life’s foundation for innovation and service delivery, ensuring that IT infrastructure is responsive, resilient and built to meet the evolving needs of the community.