First Public Draft of Strategic Plan Released for Review
May 3, 2010
Members of the Georgia Tech community:
I am pleased to inform you that the first public draft of the Georgia Tech Strategic Plan – Designing the Future – a document that describes our collective vision and goals for the next 25 years, is now posted and available on the Strategic Vision website at: http://www.gatech.edu/vision/.
This draft represents the hard work and insight of thousands of individuals from the Georgia Tech community — students, faculty, staff, administrators, alumni, advisory groups, and friends — collected over the past nine months. We have worked very hard to ensure that the process was both comprehensive and inclusive so that together we could create a shared vision of what Georgia Tech might look like in the future. We appreciate all of you who participated in the town hall meetings, focus groups, “Days of Engagement,” and other opportunities for feedback, either with the subcommittees or via the Strategic Vision website.
We especially appreciate the tireless hours of dozens of you who served on the Steering Committee, subcommittees, and writing team. To ensure that all members of our community have ample opportunities to provide feedback after reviewing the latest draft, we encourage you to respond to a survey at http://GTood.draftstrategicplan.sgizmo.com by June 15. We will review all input to ensure that the final version of the plan is responsive to your contributions, thoughts, and comments. Supplemental materials including the subcommittee reports are also available on the Strategic Vision website.
The plan includes a draft vision and a description of five strategic goals with accompanying strategies that we will all use to plan and resource our work in the months and years to come, but at this point I need to stress the word “draft.” We are committed to providing an opportunity for everyone in the Tech community to review and comment on the draft before we produce a final version later this summer. However, to maintain momentum during the final stages of the planning process, we have developed a short list of big ideas. I anticipate that over the course of the next several months, teams of faculty and staff will work together in order to more fully develop some of these ideas.
In addition, while we believe that the current plan draft captures important strategies, others may be arise and be incorporated in the final version. Once finalized, I anticipate that we will use the plan with the finalized goals and strategies as a “Request for Proposals,” or RFP, to solicit ideas from the various academic and administrative units about how they propose working within their individual units, to help achieve the goals outlined in the plan.
We have all benefitted from working together to develop this initial public draft, and I greatly appreciate all of the valuable input we have received. Please rest assured that we will be purposeful in continuing to create opportunities for input and interaction.
If there is one consistent message I have heard from our community in my first year here, it is that Tech’s aspiration is to pursue excellence in everything we do, but especially in the way in which we educate our students, the research in which we are involved and the service and outreach aspects of our mission. Paraphrasing the vision statement, “we seek to build on our unique strengths to define the technological research university of the 21st century.” I know that nothing less will be acceptable to our community.
Thank you for taking the time to help bring the initial planning process to closure. Your effort and continued involvement will help to make a truly great Institute even better.
G. P. "Bud" Peterson
President, Georgia Tech
