Loyola Digital Experience

Delivering the Next Best Experience for Students, Faculty and Staff

The “Foundational” element requires us to modernize architecture, infrastructure, and information security needed to offer a more contemporary experience. These are the things that no one asks IT for, however, it’s expected and required that we’ve done this work to position our organizations for the future. It will include advances in Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Single Sign-On. Due to the many and varied relationships a university maintains, higher education requires a more complex IAM model than I’ve ever experienced in any corporation. We have embarked on the Foundational theme with a set of programs, “LDE Foundational Security and Collaboration Program”, which consists of nine unique projects that modernize our architecture for digital platforms and better user experiences. 

Data, Dashboards, Digitization, Innovation

The “Transformational” element will focus on Data, Dashboards, Digitization and Innovations that will help us advance technology, data services and decision support systems. We have a business intelligence practice that is partnering across the institution to build data models and visualizations that use our rich data sets in ways that were difficult to achieve previously. The early projects are generating great results! Additionally, we’ll be activating a number of efforts to incorporate appropriate use of Internet of Things devices and sensors to measure things and collect data, and then to contemplate how we plan for bandwidth and storage to accommodate those services. And we’re very interested to explore emerging services in artificial intelligence, machine learning and augmented/virtual reality to both augment our technology services but also to enhance the teaching and learning experience.

"Simple, Secure, Seamless"

The ”Consumable Experience” will be the most visible to our customers and friends. We want the digital experience at Loyola to be “simple, secure and seamless” so that no matter what your relationship with Loyola you can fulfill your relationship in a digital environment that is easy to navigate, safe, and engaging. We know that aging technology is frequently an inhibitor; most of us cannot handle the complexity of change management and magnitude of cost to do a massive swap-out of all technology components at once. As a result, we’ll be thoughtful and planful for how we combine old stuff with new stuff to enable a better experience. We’ll be counting on things like virtualization and cloud solutions applied in the right places, in the right ways at the right times to help accelerate our progress. We’re excited about what the future holds in this new strategy, and we’re comfortable knowing that we don’t have all the answers today. The market is full of disruption and we will be watching for those disruptions that will be timely to embrace.