University of Alberta

Office of the Vice-Provost & Associate Vice-President (Information Technology)

Welcome to the Office of the Vice-Provost & Associate Vice-President (Information Technology). This office was established in July, 2004 with the goal to lead the development, evolution and implementation of a long-range information and communications technology (ICT) plan for the University. We also participate in and represent the University, as appropriate, on all major ICT initiatives undertaken by the University. The office oversees two major support units on campus: Academic Information and Communication Technologies (AICT), and Administrative Information Systems (AIS).

NEWS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
Latest news:
  • April 9, 2013: THANK YOU Shelagh!

    I would like to express my sincere thanks to Shelagh Hohm, who is retiring from the University of Alberta. Shelagh is currently the Director of Administrative Information Systems (AIS), but she has had a distinguished career at the University of Alberta in several different key roles over the past 30 years.

    Shelagh began working at the University of Alberta in 1981 as a student developing Cobol programs. In 1986 she worked as a Multiple Virtual Storage (MVS) mainframe systems programmer and became the supervisor of systems programming in 1989, responsible for all hardware and software systems on the MVS platform. In 1993 Shelagh was named team leader of the Oracle Enabling project that first deployed Oracle as our database platform. In 1997 she established and managed the technology infrastructure of the UofA’s PeopleSoft implementation and in 2000 was selected as the Development Manager for PeopleSoft projects, as she played a key role in the outsourcing of PeopleSoft application and management services.

    In 2004, Shelagh became Director of AIS, where she is responsible for the major UofA administrative IT applications for Financial Services, Research Administration, Human Resources, Research Ethics and Student Administration. In 2010, Shelagh led the team that selected Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) as our application management vendor and IBM as our infrastructure management vendor. Shelagh has been the successful manager of this multi-vendor outsource arrangement for the past 3 years.

    She led the AIS team in winning University of Alberta and Project Management Institute (PMI) project of the year awards and a TCS award for the best-managed account among all TCS accounts.

    I want to recognize Shelagh’s dedication not only to AIS, but to the entire University community. We will miss her. I also want to express my personal thanks for her guidance and generosity during my 9 months as Vice-Provost and Associate Vice-President (IT).

    I wish Shelagh all the best in her retirement from the University of Alberta and in her new position at MacEwan. I look forward to collaborating with Shelagh as part of Campus Alberta.

    Duane Szafron
    Vice-Provost and Associate Vice President (IT)

  • February 12, 2013: The University of Alberta is selecting a new synchronous learning tool as eClass Live! to replace Elluminate. Stakeholders wanted! See the linked page for details.
  • February 7, 2013: The University of Alberta will be hosting the first bi-annual Campus Computing Symposium on Thursday May 9th, 2013.
  • December 3, 2012: Welcome Josh Ryder! Please join us in welcoming Josh Ryder to the Office of the Provost and Associate Vice-President (Information Technology). Josh began his term as Strategic Initiatives Officer (Information Technology) on December 1, 2012.

    Josh comes to us from the Augustana Faculty, where he served as Assistant Dean (Infrastructure and Technology). Josh previously worked in AICT and earned an MSc in Computing Science at the University of Alberta.

  • October 2, 2012: The lecture by Sebastian Thrun about Massive Open Online Courses and Udacity is now on-line (courtesy of the Faculty of Science).
  • July 1, 2012: Welcome, Duane Szafron!
  • May 28, 2012: Read the proposal and FAQ for the new ITAC and ITEC committees.
  • March 18, 2012: Read the 2012-2017 IT Plan. Feedback is welcome and should be sent to .
  • January 1, 2012: Any laptop containing university data must be encrypted. Get more information and find out how to encrypt your laptop's data here.
  • Check out the uAlberta iPhone app. Also available: a mobile Web app for uAlberta.

Important documents published by our office:

  • 2010 Learning Management System Evaluation Team Report [PDF]
  • 2009 Learning Management System Review [PDF]
  • Information Technology Plan: Interchange 2007-2010 [PDF]
  • E-Learning Report 2005: A Foundation for Transformation [HTML] [PDF] [MS-WORD]
[Archived News]

Our office consists of:

  • Rob Lake
    Information Technology Planning and Forecasting Officer
  • Scott Delinger
    Information Technology Strategic Initiatives Officer
  • Josh Ryder
    Information Technology Strategic Initiatives Officer

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