From the President
Posted: Tuesday, November 5, 2019President’s Institutional Innovation Advisory Council
In my Opening Year Address, I noted that higher education is undergoing significant demographic and technological shifts, which will require us to change how our institution operates, how we collaborate across departments and divisions to solve institutional challenges (retention, enrollment, developing new revenue streams, etc.), and how we prepare our campus workforce to address the ever-changing challenges of the future. To examine these challenges and questions, I am creating the President’s Institutional Innovation Advisory Council (IIAC). The IIAC will include a representative from each division and faculty with expertise in the content areas being examined (organizational development, workforce planning, innovation, organizational psychology, etc.).
The IIAC will be charged with helping assess and analyze institutional data, policies, and processes and making recommendations to the president and the cabinet to help inform their decision-making for the following challenges:
- What are the campus's strengths, challenges, opportunities, and threats in terms of organizational culture, employee engagement and satisfaction, workforce development, organizational agility, and institutional innovation, and how do they affect institutional performance? What strategies and initiatives can further improve institutional performance by leveraging these factors?
- How do we assess and build institutional capacity (workforce development, organizational structure, process improvement, organizational agility, technology infrastructure, etc.) to support new campus initiatives, programs, and strategies identified in the strategic plan?
- How can Buffalo State College be more intentionally innovative and agile as an institution to quickly adapt to meet market needs and demands?
To begin examining these questions, the first project the IIAC will be charged with from fall 2019 to fall 2020 is administering a Campus Culture and Employee Engagement and Satisfaction Study using the “Great Colleges to Work for Survey.” I will announce the IIAC members in the coming weeks.
