On February 14 this year we announced that Ryerson was embarking on creating a digital strategy informed by a series of community consultations. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and Ryerson’s move to an essential services model on campus, we suspended the consultations on April 6. It is now time to restart the consultation process while taking into account how the pandemic has made us even more reliant on digital services.  

During the pandemic, a great deal of work at the university was able to continue via online services. Working online also made gaps in our online services more obvious. Many people adapted as best they could. In some cases, new applications were used such as Docusign to sign some documents online. In the current context, it is important that we identify the challenges and opportunities of working remotely as well as the challenges and opportunities experienced prior to the pandemic. As a result we will restart the consultation process by first asking the Ryerson community to tell us how things should work. 

Share your digital moments

We are interested in hearing very short stories – often called digital moments – that illustrate how you would like to work or how you imagine others being able to work at Ryerson. Each story should be told from one person’s perspective and should describe an improved user experience. It could be a student, researcher, director, teaching assistant, instructor, staff member or others. 

Your short story should be specific and clear about the context your story is occuring in, who is the actor in the story, why they need to do something and how it is best accomplished. Don’t be afraid to tell us how to improve something simple, like completing a form, signing a document, completing a process or looking for a specific piece of information. We’re interested in all sorts of short stories including stories related to:

• scholarly research and creative activities (SRC)
• student experience
• learning and teaching
• enterprise services
  (includes Ryerson’s HR, Finance, RAMSS as well as Ryerson’s network and other widely used services)
• cybersecurity

We hope the short stories you tell us will help guide our work in the coming months as well as in the next year or two. Each digital moment will be reviewed to understand how the events in the short story might trigger a series of actions and data exchanges between people, organizations and systems. In turn this will help us plan the evolution of systems and services at Ryerson.

Please give some thought to how things should work, and tell us a short story by completing this simple: 

Digital Moments Form 

Sincerely,
– Carol Shepstone, Chief Librarian
– Steven Liss, Vice-President, Research and Innovation
– Brian Lesser, Chief Information Officer