Announcing our new strategic partner

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I’m pleased to announce that after a thorough evaluation and careful consideration, the CI Web Refresh Core Team has selected Stamats as the strategic partner for our Web Refresh project. As a thought leader in digital marketing, research and strategy for higher education, Stamats brings considerable experience and expertise to the direction of our web site refresh effort. You can learn more about the company at: http://www.stamats.com/about/.

A word of thanks to all the vendors that participated in our evaluation process. Their time and feedback in responding to our RFP helped us shape our own perceptions of this project and refine our strategic approach. 

Stamats will be coming to visit campus during the first week of May to meet with key campus stakeholders. Details to follow shortly, stay tuned!

Top 3 Vendor Finalists & Vendor Presentations

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First, a big note of thanks to all of the vendors that participated in our evaluation and selection process. We appreciate the effort and detail that went into crafting the RFP responses.

I'm  happy to announce that the Web Refresh Core Team has completed the RFP evaluation and narrowed down the pool of vendors to three finalists (in no particular order):

  • Happy Cog
  • Stamats
  • White Whale
We believe each of the three finalists have the background, knowledge and expertise to help us achieve success in our project. Because the final vendor we select will be working with so many campus stakeholders, it's important to choose a vendor whose approach, strategy, values and vision compliment our own.

To that end, we are working with each finalist to schedule a campus visit and in-person presentation to our Web Refresh Core and Advisory teams. Each vendor will get meet members of each team and outline their proposed approach to our Web Refresh project. It will be an opportunity for us to experience working with each vendor in-person, and give each finalist a better feel for our campus and our community.

Invitations for the vendor presentations were sent to Advisory Team participants this afternoon. A limited number of additional spaces are available for other current CI students, faculty and staff that wish to attend any of the vendor presentations; please contact me via email at peter.mosinskis@csuci.edu to RSVP (presentation schedule is forthcoming). Spaces are limited and are available on a first-come first-served basis.

In the meanwhile, any questions or comments regarding the vendor finalists can be sent directly to me at peter.mosinskis@csuci.edu.

We look forward to meeting each vendor in the coming weeks, and finalizing our selection shortly thereafter.

RFP update

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Here's a quick update about our the status of our process:

The RFP closed in December as planned, and we received a number of detailed responses from the vendors we solicited. The Core Task Force has reviewed the RFPs and is following up with vendors for clarification of responses as necessary. Reference checks are also being scheduled.

Once complete, we will select a maximum of 4 vendor finalists to make a brief presentation to the Advisory Task Force, which consists of a larger set of key campus constituents. We anticipate announcing the finalists in the next few weeks, as well as the presentation dates and times.

RFP update; getting the word out and getting involved.

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Our RFP for our strategic partner for our web refresh is scheduled to close this Friday, December 16. We look forward to reviewing responses from the vendors selected to participate in that phase.

The refresh of the University web presence requires collaboration across the University, so it's important to get the word out about this project early. To meet this need, we're tackling project communication at a variety of levels:

Grass tops: the University cabinet has discussed the high-level timeline, scope, budget and requirements of the project. In addition, each Vice President has been asked to recommend employees to serve on the advisory team for this project, to help ensure that the core team receives representative feedback from key campus stakeholders.

Grass roots: we've contacted all users of our central web content management system, echoCI, to notify them that this project is set to begin in 2012. In addition, we're publishing a blurb in this week's "Wavelength" campus newsletter about the project. We're also contacting members of key campus committees to keep them in the loop.

Want to get involved in the project? We're looking for a variety of community members to participate in our refresh activities. Visit the project site, and sign up to participate on the "Get Involved" page.

If there are other ways you think would be useful to getting the word out, please post your comment here, or email me at peter.mosinskis@csuci.edu.

RFP for strategic partner

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On November 22, CI issued an RFP to select a strategic partner to assist in planning, strategy and execution of the University Web Refresh project.

We have invited the vendors with the top 8 highest scores in Phase 1 of our evaluation to participate in Phase 2, which includes the RFP submission process. We look forward to their responses. The deadline for their completed proposals is Friday, December 16.

Why do we need a strategic partner, can't we just do it ourselves? The fact is we have a very skillful and capable Web Services team of designers and developers that can (and will) do much of the implementation work for this project, including developing and implementing the final design within echoCI, our web content management system. Unfortunately, this talented team team is very small, and given their current workload of other projects and existing web operations, the team would be stretched too thin to complete the project of this scope within the expected time frame.

In addition, it's a great opportunity to leverage the insight and perspective that a partner with significant higher education experience can provide with respect to our web presence. We can use this perspective and experience to identify strengths and weaknesses and develop strategies and tactics to improve in our information architecture, web marketing, content development, social media, and mobile development efforts.

What do you think? What are the pros and cons of selecting a strategic partner? And what attributes of a strategic partner are important to ensure the right fit with the University for this project?

Post your thoughts and concerns as a comment here, or contact me directly at peter.mosinskis@csuci.edu. We look forward to your feedback.

A new refresh project...really?

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Some of our readers may know that the University home page underwent its last major refresh in 2005. 


What you may not know is that the University home has undergone at least 8 significant (and incremental) refresh cycles since the August 2005 launch. Don't believe me? You can use the Wayback Machine on archive.org to take a look at a visual and architectual history of our web site. 

Overall, continuous and incremental improvement strategies have worked well to keep the University web site running smoothly while balancing demand for our limited human and financial resources. So why is this a good time to do another major overhaul? Here are a few thoughts:
  1. Web as a strategic communication tool: we know from our 2009 web research that over 80% of current and prospective students we polled stated that the University web site is their primary means of finding out information about the University. If nothing else, we expect those expectations to increase over the next 3-5 years, so we must take action to manage this anticipated demand.
  2. Social media. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube: we are all using it, and the University as an institution is using it as well. However, our web site and communication strategies generally aren't taking advantage of the power of social media to generate open discourse.
  3. Mobile: mobile web usage is exploding, and will only continue to expand. If our University's web presence isn't mobile-friendly, we risk alienating large groups of audiences.
  4. Infrastructure: over the last 2 years the University completed 2 major Web infrastructure projects: migration to our new web content management system (EchoCI) and deployment of new web server infrastructure to support it. We now have a solid hardware platform on which to build the next iteration of the University's web site. Along with these tools, we can leverage our years of expertise in web standards-based development to ensure our new site is both highly usable and accessible.
  5. Convergence: the time is right to tackle these issues. Our University's leadership recognizes the importance of these issues and is willing to commit the necessary resources to address them. This gives the University an opportunity to not only make our Web presence look and work better, but also to develop strategies that will improve our ability to communicate more effectively over the next 3-5 years. 
To respond to these factors, the Division of Technology & Communication has begun planning work for an overhaul of the University web site, including the home page, top-level pages, and sub-sites; campus-wide planning activities for that project are expected to begin in early 2012.

In our next post, I'll begin to outline the steps we plan to take to accomplish our objectives, the resources we'll need, and how we will engage the University community throughout the project. 

In the meanwhile, we're certain that there are other good reasons to complete a University web site refresh right now. Do you think the University web site should be refreshed now? Why or why not? Post your comments here, we look forward to hearing from you!

End of a busy summer

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Summer is almost over, students are getting ready to move in and start classes again, and many changes to the web site are being unveiled.

At the top of the list, CSUCI is unveiling a new logo, which will be making its appearance on the CSUCI web site shortly.

A sneak preview is available. Learn more about the unveiling of the new brand.

In addition, the web team has made some subtle changes to the wayfinding navigation featured on web pages that use the CSUCI brand. During the next academic year, you will continue to see progressive enhancement in the wayfinding features offered on the CSUCI web site.

Perhaps even bigger news is last week's launch of myCI, the new single point of access for key services. Students can now use a single user name and password to access CI Learn, Dolphin Email, CI Records and other services. While not directly related to the web refresh, myCI represents a big leap ahead in systems integration and ease-of-use of the web at CSUCI. In light of the difficult economic circumstances faced by the University, the launch of myCI is an incredible accomplishment and a testament to the committment and talents of Information Technology employees, and we're proud to be a part of that effort.

Get ready, it's going to be an exciting semester!