About

Welcome

We encourage you to further explore our website to learn about the diverse IT services we provide and the talented people who provide them.  Or perhaps you'd like to learn more about our organization with a mind to joining our talented team of professionals. Whatever has brought you here, we bid you welcome! 

Engineering IT Shared Services is the primary IT services provider for the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Our mission is to ensure that all faculty, students and staff in Grainger College have easy and well supported access to IT services that are second to none in support of their teaching, research, and learning.  We pride ourselves on our user-centric approach to IT, with emphasis on effectiveness, flexibility, and transparency.

Our History

Engineering IT was officially formed July 1, 2010, when the eight departmental IT groups within the College were merged into one organization. Following several years of work integrating people, processes, and technology, Engineering IT has realized its founding vision.  Every faculty, student, and staff member in the College now has access to a robust professional IT organization whose breadth and depth of services and skills far exceeds that which any individual department could sustain independently.  Our organization is now focused on leveraging its collective talents to become the most engaged and effective IT partner of any Engineering college in the nation.

Despite its expanded size and scope, Engineering IT remains fundamentally a local, departmental IT organization.  Engineering IT strives to provide outstanding enterprise services where they are needed by the College and unavailable elsewhere, but the overall posture of the organization and the preponderance of our staff are focused on the needs of the departments and the faculty which we serve.  Through our geographically distributed local IT support staff and our dedicated outreach and engagement staff, we strive to continually improve the connection and partnership between research and education and the information technology that enables them.

Engineering IT is organized as a Shared Services organization. Shared Services is a blend of centralization and decentralization that aims to provide the best of both worlds (e.g., economies of scale from centralization and customer focused from decentralization). Shared Services includes a number of defined components which Engineering IT embraces.  Collectively these structures create an organization owned by and accountable to its customers.

Governance Guidance

Key to our Shared Services design is a governance structure composed of representatives from the users of the Engineering IT services. Governance is responsible for determining what services Engineering IT needs to provide and for holding Engineering IT accountable for its performance in delivering those services. Engineering IT is responsible for implementing business processes, technology, and an organizational structure and culture that provides the high quality set of services its users need.  Engineering IT Shared Services as an organization relies on the input of governance and the College CIO to guide our continued development and prioritization on our path to becoming second to none.

“The best in all my years of working!!!”

-Anonymous, via 2021 Customer Satisfaction Survey
Administrative Staff, Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL)