September 2025 CIO Updates

A new “Well-Being” icon now appears in the Canvas global navigation, linking to health and wellness resources for students, faculty, and staff. The centralized access point supports over 55,000 students and thousands of employees, improving awareness and use of health and well-being services. Prompted by a student-led initiative, the update connects users to health and well-being services and a map of campus wellness sites, including food pantries, Counseling and Mental Health Centers, and outdoor wellness spaces. Learn more on Health and Well-Being.

Digital engagement continues to grow, with homepage and artificial intelligence pages leading performance across the website platform along with strong AskUS email performance. Website saw 12,911 unique visits and 47 seconds active time. AskUS emails averaged a 50% open rate across 10 campaigns. LinkedIn posts earned 3,263 impressions and 65 reactions. Top-performing website pages were the homepage and artificial intelligence. 74% of users accessed via desktop. UT Works sent 4 emails with no links; ET/CIO sent none in September.

 

Our team collaborated with end-users to redesign the ID Card Modernization Project interface, using their feedback to drive iterative improvements. By consolidating two legacy mainframe screens into a single responsive interface optimized for tablets and featuring intuitive layouts and modals, we developed a streamlined solution that significantly reduces training time and user errors, ultimately boosting staff productivity and enhancing the overall user experience. ID Center Staff noted that the new interface is much easier to learn, enabling new team members to quickly become comfortable after a single orientation session and contribute effectively from the start. The ID Card Modernization Project was launched to solve persistent issues with the university’s outdated mainframe-based system, which required staff to navigate multiple screens, causing inefficiency, high training costs, and frequent errors. To address these challenges, our team collaborated with end-users to understand their workflow needs. Through iterative design sessions, we created a unified, responsive interface that consolidates all essential functions into a single screen and supports tablet use, improving usability and positioning the university for future technology enhancements. View the ID Center UI

 

MyUT provides UT Austin students with a web-based portal and mobile app that consolidates campus resources, including Canvas integration, class schedules, campus maps, and student support services. On the first day of classes, MyUT supported 49.9K student logins which means 90% of enrolled students logged in. A popular service on day one that students use is the schedule of classes along with the campus maps feature in the MyUT mobile application to find where their classes are located. I am happy to report that service, and all others were up and available. Of the nearly 50K students that logged into MyUT on day 1 of the Fall 2025 semester, usage statistics were collected to understand the different ways students used and accessed MyUT. This data is valuable beyond MyUT as it would also be a guide as to how these same students would be accessing other University applications. Apple Mobile Devices: 86% of students using MyUT do so using an Apple mobile device. Mobile Applications: 83% of students using MyUT do so using native mobile applications vs. using the web portal. Bookmarks: Students bookmarked 64.6K services and links in MyUT for easy and convenient reference. Supporting day one usage was made possible due to the Emerging Technologies and Architecture Team upgrading MyUT cloud hosting to premium hosting. In past fall semester starts, the MyUT web portal and mobile application systems would fail and be unavailable when most needed on day one of the semester. The move to premium hosting enabled the web portal and mobile applications platforms to be up and stay up for student usage. Visit MyUT 

 

As part of D2I's effort to provide minimally transformed data for business use cases, the Academic Data Model v1.0 was released to production in September. This allows users across campus with the appropriate permissions to immediately connect to already dimensionally modeled data in the student space, enhancing our overall trusted information infrastructure. Understanding business definitions and relationships is a key barrier to answering questions for analysts across campus. This model allows campus analysts to access the data with baked in definitions and relationships, reducing overall time spent in producing analyses from the raw data. The Academic Data Models joins the Workforce Data Model and Financial Data Model as a full-scale production model available to campus to analysis needs. Future versions will address additional academic topics, creating a more robust resource. A semantic layer will also be released later this fall for further ease of use. 

 

As part of our semesterly commitment to provide accurate, verified data for executives for use after 12th and 20th class day, D2I completed its annual census and admissions processing. This work underlies important University reporting and announcements, including the linked press release showing all-time highs for enrollment and student performance. Over 18 team members worked across both technical and analytical teams to ensure timely refreshes and loads for data to feed important institutional milestones in September. Read the UT News Article, UT Sets All-Time Highs for Enrollment and Student Performance.

 

As part of our ongoing effort to transition all legacy dashboards to modern Data Hub infrastructure, the Retention, Attrition, and Graduation visualizations and the underlying analytical architecture completed modernization in September. This move ensures we are utilizing the clean, modular, and robust architecture of the Data Hub and retiring legacy sources in our dashboards over time. It joins over 35 other dashboards coming out of the Data Hub today. As part of this effort, we modernized four front-end visualizations and dashboards that are available to our stakeholders, redesigning them based on input from users to be more efficient and user-friendly, and align with our best practices and accessibility standards. 

 

Over the course of the fall Data Hub onboarding program, D2I introduced analysts to the UT Data Hub through a structured series of synchronous and asynchronous sessions. The program successfully exposed participants to key data hub concepts and tools, created space for technical troubleshooting, and highlighted the need for clearer structures, resources, and agreements to support analysts moving forward. Participants from multiple CSUs provided feedback on the structure and content of sessions, including important feedback for us to develop and grow this program further in the future. All participants found the program valuable overall. Efforts to support data access across campus continue to be needed and necessary. How best to support the diverse group of analysts is now better informed due to the completion of this second pilot cohort. Read more on the, Data Hub Onboarding Program Review.

 

The co-authored policy between the Digital Accessibility Center in Enterprise Technology and the office of Institutional Accessibility and Accommodation in University Risk and Compliance, demonstrates the University’s commitment to ensuring our digital environment is accessible to all faculty, staff, and students. The Digital Accessibility Policy is the first policy applied into the Handbook of Oppressions to govern accessibility for the expansive digital footprint of UT, aligning the University with federal regulations changing in April 2026 - Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The change to Title II applies to all official UT websites, online applications, platforms, documents, course material, multimedia, and social media. In 2024, Enterprise Technology established the Digital Accessibility Center, subsequently securing centralized funding for the unit to serve as a hub for all of campus, aiming to reach compliance through by providing digital accessibility resources, engagement, services, and cross-unit collaboration. Read more on Digital Accessibility.

 

As part of an exciting new partnership, the team successfully onboarded Austin Community College (ACC) as the first non-UT-affiliated customer in the data center. Since May 30th, the team has installed 70 devices, with a projected total of over 100 devices, marking a significant milestone in data center expansion and utilization. The onboarding of ACC reduces unused data center space and generates between $75,000 and $100,000 in new revenue, enabling the ET Operations team to reallocate general operating funds to other areas of the organization. Additionally, this partnership paves the way for further collaborations with Texas State University and the City of Georgetown, enhancing data center utilization and increasing revenue opportunities. The partnership with ACC is a critical step in reducing data center subsidy reliance and maximizing facility usage. This initiative not only boosts revenue but also fosters new relationships that expand the data center’s reach beyond UT, opening doors for future partnerships with other agencies.