Humanities & Sciences IT Overview

Humanities and Sciences IT (H&S IT) is part of the Dean’s Office of the School of Humanities and Sciences (H&S). The H&S IT Team works with University IT (UIT), our peer IT organizations and external partners to support stakeholders across the school. 

In all our work, we aspire to meet the H&S Dean’s Office Guiding Principle of Outstanding Leadership and Support, and achieve that through these priorities and values:

H&S IT Priorities

  • Directly support research, teaching and creative expression through investments in technology; balance that investment by finding more efficient ways to provide administrative support to the Dean’s Office and to the school at large.
  • Provide tools and solutions that enable departments and programs to focus resources on their academic mission. Emphasize solutions that support multiple departments.
  • Mitigate risks associated with inconsistent management of information and technology resources.
  • Leverage university solutions where possible; implement local systems for H&S where our needs are unique or significant gaps exist.
  • Contribute solutions to the Stanford IT community where our initiatives have produced exceptional results that can be broadly leveraged.

H&S IT Values

  • Encourage innovation: Focus resources on innovative use of technology, both within the team and in the broader H&S community.
  • Collaborate: Create opportunities for collaboration across the IT team.
  • Cultivate relationships throughout H&S and Stanford that allow us to deliver solutions that delight the H&S community.
  • Be transparent: Work with H&S stakeholders to determine priorities and allocate resources.  Communicate with the H&S community about current work and future initiatives.

Team Structure

The H&S IT team has five major service categories across two teams. Sean Brandt's team manages Application and Data Services and the  Website Consulting, Operations. Academic Support functions are managed by Andy Miller.

 

  • Application Services: Services and software that allow for the efficient use and management of H&S resources. These include systems like the H&S Budget Planning System (BPS), the H&S CRM service, and HandSOn (faculty information system).
  • Data Services: Services and software that expand the ways our stakeholders make use of data from both university sources and H&S systems.  We create dashboards that provide operational information to support departments and strategic dashboards and reporting infrastructure  to support H&S planning efforts.
  • Web Consulting: A platform and project management team that creates innovative, best-practice website solutions for H&S departments and programs. We do this by leveraging a common platform for most H&S websites, and each website contributes new functionality to that platform to benefit future sites.
  • Operations: Processes and services that keep our school’s everyday IT secured and running smoothly. Work in this area includes: moving H&S IT to cloud services where practical, computer replacements for faculty, staff, and postdoctoral scholars, information security consulting, and outreach efforts on IT initiatives.
  • Academic Support: We provide the H&S community broad access to shared solutions for teaching, learning and research. Current focuses include high-performance computing and support for laboratory IT.