a

“WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT ONCE

YOU DON’T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT BANDWIDTH

ANYMORE?”

 

STRATEGIC PLAN 2016

ROSS WILSON WISCNET BOARD OF DIRECTORS

   

 

January 2011

n behalf of the WiscNet Board of Directors, it is my great pleasure to introduce you to our strategic plan for the next five years. A good friend once told me there is nothing that will tire an audience faster than presenting a strategic

plan to them. But this new plan has me excited and energized. It may be the Board’s best-ever direction-setting effort. So let me grab just a couple of big ideas from the plan and challenge your imagination. The first big idea is “Growing.” We’ve used the phrase “Grow Smart” for several years, most importantly to describe our unlimited usage network participation pricing model and to signal our collective challenge to push the network harder to produce new and innovative results. Our Grow Smart concepts remain in this plan but now Grow Smart evolves yet again: All of the new plan’s goals push us to grow, grow, grow! We cannot be satisfied with what we have done and we must keep pushing and go further as our members will need more services, more advanced technology, and more tools. Grow, grow, grow smart! It is our mantra, our challenge and it really motivates us! The Board also gave us a new vision statement, “We connect the World to Wisconsin and Wisconsin to the World!,” which expresses the second big idea that I want to highlight: “Connecting.” The first half of the vision statement (“…connect the World to Wisconsin …”) challenges us to provide many ways to readily connect our members, regardless of location, to information from around the world. This is a big challenge but it’s also an important piece of what we have done for many years. It’s the second half of the vision statement (“…connect…Wisconsin to the World”} however, that is even more exciting, challenging and amazing. Through it, WiscNet asserts that Wisconsin is a valuable producer of 21st century innovations and that the World needs us to connect to our Wisconsin innovators and innovations. We connect communities in new and innovative ways. We connect major universities with technical colleges, libraries, and K12 schools, making us a 21st century education powerhouse. We are actively bridging the divide between the public-and private sectors. We connect hospitals to public safety experts in new, advanced ways. These are all wonderful assets and their value goes well beyond Wisconsin’s border. Our strategic plan sets out new goals for building more networks, connecting more people, and creating more services, with all these goals directed to supporting our members as you grow and provide new services, new ideas, new methods of teaching, and as we all serve the world. In short, our attitude towards our members and our common work is “Grow Smart!” I do hope that you find time in your busy schedules to read the entire plan, maybe over of a hot cup of tea or a cold beer, as I am sure you will find things that catch your interest. I do think you will find goals whose pursuit will make your jobs easier and more exciting. When you do find a goal that really strikes you, please feel free to share your excitement with your fellow WiscNet Board directors, the folks around you, or with me. We would love to hear from you. Growing smarter together,

David J. Lois Executive Director of Your WiscNet

O

STRATEGIC PLAN 2016 page 1

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Our mission is to fortify research, education, and public service with advanced communication technologies. It is done in partnership.

It is accomplished by strengthening the association, the members, and the communities to which we belong. It is championing the Wisconsin Idea by advancing high-performance networks and services that extend member

resources throughout the state and beyond.

We connect the World to Wisconsin and Wisconsin to the World!

WISCNET 2016 GOALS

The goals described in this plan represent an evolutionary path that maintains the critical components of our success, yet leads our association to grow and work together in new ways.

GROW THE PEOPLE NETWORK We will connect the people in and around our association and help grow collaborations that advance research, education and public service in Wisconsin and beyond.

GROW MORE NETWORKS FOR WISCONSIN We will continue to grow the advanced network infrastructure that our members share. We will help our members and community partners grow and connect their own advanced networks.

GROW SERVICES BEYOND THE NETWORK We will partner with our members to adapt and grow their innovative solutions into trusted services that other members will value. We will grow our service portfolio by rapidly seeding and winnowing new services.

1. 2.

3.

STRATEGIC PLAN 2016 page 2

GROW THE PEOPLE NETWORK WiscNet connects people. We create opportunities for our community to grow collaborations and share strategies. We work together to articulate needs and then we build connections, advance strategies and create services that solve the real-world problems of our members.

Grow the Value of Membership During our twenty plus years, we’ve seen at first hand how a high degree of personal connection can become the strength needed to drive innovation and change. It is the WiscNet community that will advance our mission and we will grow the value of this asset by creating more opportunities for our members to connect and work together. We will connect people and nurture personal connections through regular interactions that build trust and camaraderie. We will accelerate meaningful exchanges by helping the people in our WiscNet community find and work with trusted colleagues. Our members will connect through in-person and over the network meetings, shared learning opportunities and member-driven exchanges for ideas and resources.

A well-designed “people network” lets the people that our members serve and employ make simple and intuitive use of our most valuable resource: each other.

Engage Beginners and Experts Every person brings both expertise and questions to our table. We will not only provide beginners with valuable opportunities to learn, but we will also connect experts with trusted colleagues with whom to share opinions, best practices and lessons learned. Since our people are the continuing source of our community’s successes, our simple design is to welcome all people to WiscNet.

1.

STRATEGIC PLAN 2016 page 3

Encourage Members to Innovate When our community created WiscNet twenty plus years ago, no one knew then what our members would come to do now with the Internet. Similarly, we have little idea now how we will use our advanced networks in the coming ten to twenty years.

But we will put the network to new uses. And we are ready now to encourage and support our members to continue “changing the game” to meet their needs by pursuing innovative strategies. We’re committed to a cycle of community engagement, innovation, and advancement that

uses our “people network” to create, test and deploy new services for our members.

Be Human We appreciate that our membership includes a wide range of personalities. We’ve learned to talk directly with people and offer the same practical, informal assistance that we would offer a neighbor who asks a question. We know that we don’t know everything and that no strategy is perfect, however well-intentioned, but we will offer genuine service with our members’ best interest in mind. Good service maintains trust and establishing our reliability starts with the basics. For example, we will continue to ask for feedback and act on that feedback. We’re also committed to regular, effective, and open communications among our staff, membership and board of directors.

STRATEGIC PLAN 2016 page 4

GROW MORE NETWORKS FOR WISCONSIN During our twenty plus years together, our members have grown an advanced network that moves tens of gigabits per second across Wisconsin and beyond. While we will continue to grow our shared network, we will also take a thoughtful and strategic step forward by working to grow other high-performance networks. We want to help our members and community partners –- public and private -- grow and connect many networks that will move hundreds of gigabits per second, enabling Wisconsin and our communities to advance in the 21st century and beyond.

Grow Community Area Networks In brief, Community Area Networks are local economic development opportunities through 21st century technologies. They create a platform for community-based services to make the public sector more efficient and the private sector grow locally. They connect the community in new and innovative ways. We anticipate (and encourage) a growing number of our members to connect to each other through advanced Community Area Networks. These Community Area Networks are locally controlled and will “scale up” cost-effectively to backbone speeds that will support diverse organizations, widespread facilities, and advanced applications.

The success of Community Area Networks will

depend on three factors: building a robust optical

fiber infrastructure for the community’s shared

region, growing a collaborative association of

community partners who will govern the network

and sharing resources in new and innovative ways

within the local public and private sectors. To assist with these factors and build on WiscNet’s membership strategy, we will support and offer services to any Community Area Network association, to which our members belong, that wants to share network-based services that benefit their institutional missions and their shared region.

2.

STRATEGIC PLAN 2016 page 5

Advance the WiscNet Network Our multi-state backbone network will remain the foundation for our WiscNet community and the services we share. We will continue our strategy to acquire and light optical fiber that allows us to operate a highly scalable and economical backbone network. To meet the advanced needs of our members, we will continue to augment our backbone network with new optical paths, examine new technologies and protocols, and upgrade our deployed infrastructure.

Accelerate Global Communications Our members want to push their research, education and public service activities beyond community and state borders. Our members also want to establish global collaborations that draw together national (and international) experts and data. The WiscNet backbone network allows for opportunities like these because it has a robust, scalable multi-state infrastructure with multiple international connections. Our continuing roles in efforts like BOREAS-Net the Northern Tier Network, the Great Plains Network, and CIC OmniPoP will serve to strengthen our high-speed regional, national and international connections that engage our members globally.

Make U.S. UCAN a Success for Wisconsin Funded in 2010 by the Federal Broadband Technology Opportunities Program, the United States Unified Community Anchor Network (U.S. UCAN) will become a nationwide advanced network infrastructure that, together with state and regional network partners (including WiscNet), will enable the connection of America's community anchor institutions to support advanced applications not possible with today's typical Internet service. U.S. UCAN fills a critical gap linking community anchor institutions together into a national, open network with next-generation capabilities, operated with end-to-end transparency and the highest levels of performance uniquely suited to the needs of their communities. As U.S. UCAN’s partner, and because it constitutes a national endorsement of WiscNet’s model for providing advanced network services to diverse anchor institutions, we will serve our members’ strategic interests through influencing the policies and leveraging the resources that U.S. UCAN will deploy in Wisconsin and in our multi-state service region.

Fulfill the National Broadband Plan For Wisconsin Twenty plus years ago, we brought the Internet to Wisconsin by educating, promoting, developing, and sharing everything we learned about this “new Internet thing” with our public and private sectors. The Internet changed the world and WiscNet changed Wisconsin.

We now must leverage those lessons learned to join with other statewide and community organizations to successfully deploy universally available and affordable advanced broadband to all Wisconsin communities. Our guide here will be the Federal

STRATEGIC PLAN 2016 page 6

Communications Commission’s National Broadband Plan.

The National Broadband Plan asserts that Americans do not have access to universally available and affordable advanced broadband services, and hence, we will continue to lose our local, regional and global competitiveness until and unless we provide such services.

We believe that the WiscNet community must contribute our knowledge and resources to press for the implementation of the National Broadband Plan in Wisconsin.

Achieve Broadband Success Through Public/Private Partnerships

A common strategic theme articulated in the National Broadband Plan and the Federal Broadband Technology Opportunities Program is that “comprehensive community broadband infrastructures” should use public/private partnerships to meet our advanced broadband needs. To fully succeed in achieving our WiscNet community’s growth strategies, we will develop relationships with private partners who want to cooperate on building a shared advanced broadband infrastructure. Serving the needs of our community anchor institutions requires access to

optical fiber infrastructure. Whether it's built or bought, we are eager to work with our private partners to make innovation happen. Key to fostering this innovation is embracing the principles of network openness. The best way to accomplish our mutual goals is to support networks owned by communities and build partnerships open to public and private providers on the same open infrastructure. As our community roads bear multiple public and private purposes so too should our networks.

Build Community Capacity With Our Members As Community Area Networks grow in Wisconsin, we will work with our members to build community capacity through broadband. We will rely on and support our members in our common efforts toward sustainable and widespread community broadband adoption. We’re committed to working closely with our charter member University of Wisconsin-Extension to use their statewide expertise in economic development, leadership capacity-building, and community education to move broadband adoption forward. During 2011 and 2012, UW-Extension and WiscNet staff will work with our members in five Wisconsin regions to develop and demonstrate models for sustainable community broadband adoption. We will continue to grow our relationship with UW-Extension and want to grow similar strategic partnerships with other WiscNet members. We look forward to helping our research and education members form community partnerships with our hospital and local government members to extend and sustain advanced broadband capacity to Wisconsin communities.

STRATEGIC PLAN 2016 page 7

GROW SERVICES BEYOND THE NETWORK Our members trust our association to deliver and sustain a robust, cost-effective network. By relying upon and prudently developing this trust among our members, we want to grow new services that will make full use of an advanced ubiquitous network infrastructure. While the network will remain a top priority, we will take a fresh analysis of our core competencies in order to develop new services for and beyond the network.

Extend Foundational Partnerships

WiscNet members are tremendous engines of productivity, and our association is in the position to partner with our members to extend their services beyond their organization. Similar to the model developed for network services, we will enable and encourage our members to leverage WiscNet to provide valuable services to other WiscNet members. Take as an example data centers. Many of our members have robust, well-developed data centers that their business officers see only as cost centers. Many of our other members, however, need data center services like co-location and virtual services. As a trusted intermediary, we could

provide front and back office services to connect both people and strategies, satisfying the need for offsite data center services while providing a revenue stream to members with data centers.

Evolve Member Services Recognizing that both failure and success are opportunities for growth, we will learn from our failures and embrace our successes in order to develop WiscNet’s portfolio of services. After a careful evaluation of our members’ needs, we will adopt a “fail fast” approach to the creation of new services. This means we will try many new services (and some will fail), learn, try more and do

3.

STRATEGIC PLAN 2016 page 8

it fast. We will adopt the “fail fast” approach to develop four to five new services per year.

Establish Permission to Exit Our services are expressly designed to provide the capacity, reliability, robustness, technical support and exclusive advanced network access that our member organizations require. Over the years, we have added and subtracted services. It is in the best interest of our members that the services currently in production undergo continuous evaluation. To do this, we must give ourselves the permission to exit a service gracefully. Each production service should have a value portfolio and exit strategy updated annually. The value portfolio will list the service goals and the benefits of the service to our members, balanced against the costs of the service. This is the set of qualitative and quantitative metrics by which the service’s success is measured. We carry out the exit strategy when the metrics do not satisfy the goals.

Explore Services for People Traditionally, we have offered services to member organizations. We recognize that one of our core strengths is connecting people; therefore, WiscNet will explore services intended specifically for the people that our members serve and employ.

There are many people in our member organizations with whom we do not have relationships that they value. If we look deeper into each organization there are a number of researchers, teachers, staff and individuals that are capable of using WiscNet services. WiscNet members may wish to consider using our front and back office to provide services deeper into their organization.

740 Regent Street Madison, WI 53715

Phone: 608.265.6761 Fax: 608.262.9085

E-Mail: info@wiscnet.net Web: www.wiscnet.net