IT Roadmap (2025-2027)

The journey from IT as a reactive service provider to a strategic business partner follows a predictable value curve. Through continuous improvement and strategic initiatives, IT Central Services will evolve through three distinct phases, each delivering increasing business value to Vertex Education. It is normal when a team goes through the organizational change ITCS has expirenced to see a brief dip in service reliability and support, and I believe we are at the tail end of that dip. Now that we are on / or in the final stages of migrating to one Microsoft 365 tenant our support complexity has gone down dramatically. As we continue to stabilize and optimize our current environment, we will be able to focus more on strategic initiatives that drive business value.

This roadmap is designed to guide us through this transformation, with each initiative strategically sequenced to build the foundation necessary for the next phase of growth and maturity. Put simply the faster we get these items completed, the faster ITCS can stop being an expense and start providing measurable value to the company.

The IT Central Services team operates with a focused, disciplined philosophy that values results, ownership, and adaptability. These principles define how we approach our work, how we scale, and how we continue delivering value across Vertex Education as our systems grow in scope and complexity. These items do not change our focus from the core values or strategic anchors of Vertex but rather are specific principals that make us better IT people in general.

The following challenges reflect architectural, operational, and organizational realities that must be addressed to ensure Vertex IT can continue to scale securely and independently.

K12 Hardware Refresh Program

The K12 division currently operates on non-standard Windows 11 Home devices, which cannot join the Vertex Active Directory domain or comply with security baselines. The hardware refresh initiative will replace these devices with enterprise-grade hardware running Windows 11 Pro or Enterprise editions. Once deployed, all devices will be joined to Active Directory and managed through Intune for patching, encryption, and DLP enforcement. Completion of this initiative will unify security and management across all Vertex entities.

Tour of Duty Rotation Program

The cross-team Tour of Duty program between CSIT and VMSIT establishes a recurring two- to three-week rotation that allows staff from each division to embed temporarily in the other. This initiative fosters knowledge sharing, broadens technical familiarity, and ensures coverage in the event of major incidents. The rotations strengthen interdepartmental relationships and provide career development opportunities while improving operational resilience.

SME and Field Nation Expansion

Vertex IT Central Services will continue to grow its network of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) through Upwork and on-site field contractors through Field Nation. A dedicated budget line needs approval for SME consulting hours. This strategy supports scalability during peak demand periods or specialized projects, without the long-term cost of full-time staffing.

IT Executive Dashboard

IT Central Services is building a comprehensive executive dashboard that consolidates key performance metrics, operational data, and strategic insights into a single, accessible platform. This dashboard will provide leadership with real-time visibility into IT operations, enabling data-driven decision-making and proactive management.

The dashboard will integrate data from multiple sources including the ticketing system (SLA compliance, ticket volume, breach analytics), infrastructure monitoring (PRTG performance metrics, uptime statistics), asset management (lifecycle tracking, refresh cycles), and security posture (vulnerability assessments, compliance status). By centralizing this information, executives can quickly assess operational health, identify emerging trends, and make informed strategic decisions.

Key features will include customizable views for different stakeholder groups, automated reporting capabilities, trend analysis with historical comparisons, and drill-down functionality to investigate specific metrics or incidents. The goal is to transform raw operational data into actionable insights that support continuous improvement and demonstrate IT's strategic value to the organization.

Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs)

This is our opporunity to move from reactive suppor, to proactive support, and a plaform for departments to leverage IT as a strategic partner. At a glance it is IT meeting with department leaders to discuss how we are doing, what their goals are, and how we can help them meet those goals with technology.

ITIL Ticketing System with Integrated Asset Management

Our current ticketing process lacks full integration between service requests, incident tracking, and asset management, resulting in data silos and inefficient workflows. Implementing a new ITIL-aligned ticketing system will provide a unified platform to manage incidents, changes, and assets within a single system of record.
By linking assets directly to tickets, IT can gain visibility into device history, user impact, and lifecycle status—enabling faster resolution times, improved SLA compliance, and more accurate reporting. Additionally, this integration supports proactive maintenance, better forecasting for hardware refresh cycles, and stronger accountability across the IT lifecycle.

Resource and Growth Strategy

To meet increasing demand without unnecessary headcount expansion, Vertex IT Central Services will continue developing a hybrid staffing model that combines core full-time staff with a network of on-demand specialists. This approach allows the organization to maintain consistent service standards across all locations without overextending internal resources.

The Isha Report is a real-time SLA performance dashboard designed specifically for IT Central Services. Built on the same calculation methodology as the enterprise SLA report in Tableau, the Isha Report provides a narrowed, team-focused view that includes CSAT metrics, breach analytics, and trend data tailored to CSIT operations.

This reporting framework requires team members to document breach justifications on a daily or weekly basis directly within the ticketing system. By shifting accountability from reactive management follow-up to proactive self-documentation, the Isha Report creates a more efficient workflow and establishes a culture of ownership around SLA performance.

Purpose

• Accountability: Require agents to document breach justifications, creating transparency and ownership of SLA performance.
• Data-Driven Insights: Aggregate breach reasons into Pareto charts to identify top contributors to SLA failures.
• Performance Visibility: Provide real-time dashboard access to SLA metrics, CSAT scores, and breach analytics for the team.
• Strategic Planning: Enable informed staffing decisions, process improvements, and targeted training based on breach patterns.
• Continuous Improvement: Shift from reactive breach management to proactive performance optimization.

Implementation Approach

The Isha Report will be built as a custom web application integrated with the ITSM ticketing system. Agents will be prompted to categorize and document breach reasons as part of their daily workflow. The dashboard will provide filtered views for individual agents, team leads, and executives, ensuring each stakeholder sees relevant, actionable data.

Over time, accumulated breach data will feed into predictive analytics and trend forecasting, helping IT Central Services proactively address emerging issues before they impact service delivery. This positions the department to move from firefighting breaches to preventing them entirely.

IT Central Services operates with intentional discipline around team structure, capacity measurement, and strategic hiring. This section outlines our current organization, how we leverage external talent, the metrics we use to determine when to scale, and the next strategic position we plan to add.

Organization Structure

IT Central Services is a 4-person team responsible for covering all enterprise IT service areas. Rather than attempting to be experts in every domain, the team focuses on core competencies while strategically leveraging specialized contractors for advanced technical areas. This approach ensures comprehensive coverage without the overhead of a large full-time staff.

Geographic Coverage Constraint

A critical constraint facing IT Central Services is that the 4-person team is based in Arizona while supporting offices coast to coast across multiple time zones. To address after-hours support needs—particularly for East Coast offices where critical issues shouldn't have to wait until Arizona business hours—the team has implemented an on-call rotation leveraging PagerDuty.

This on-call system ensures that urgent IT problems can be escalated and addressed outside of standard Arizona working hours, but it is not a long-term sustainable solution for comprehensive coast-to-coast coverage. As the organization continues to grow and service expectations increase, IT Central Services may need to explore one or more of the following strategies:

• Staggered working hours to provide extended coverage across time zones
• Entry-level or part-time regional support staff positioned in key geographic locations
• Enhanced self-service capabilities and automation to reduce dependency on live support
• Tiered escalation protocols to better triage what truly requires immediate attention versus what can wait

Without intervention, the geographic mismatch between the support team's location and the supported user base will become an increasingly significant service delivery challenge, particularly as Vertex continues to expand through M&A activity.

When to Engage SME Contractors

Independent contractors are engaged for projects requiring specialized technical depth beyond the core team's expertise. This includes advanced infrastructure work (server clustering, SAN configuration), specialized platforms (SharePoint architecture, VoIP engineering), security initiatives (penetration testing, compliance audits), and custom development (automation scripts, API integrations). This model ensures IT Central Services can deliver enterprise-grade solutions across all technical domains without permanently expanding headcount.

Capacity and Growth Model

As the IT Central Services team continues to expand its operational footprint and security responsibilities, a clear model for capacity management is required. The IT / MSP industry adopts a 100:1 user-to-FTE ratio as a benchmark for sustainable workload distribution.

Capacity planning will leverage metrics from the ITSM system including ticket volumes, SLA compliance rates, and infrastructure utilization. As leading indicators trend beyond 90% utilization for more than two consecutive quarters, new roles or external SME capacity will be engaged.

The current ratio doesn't suggest immediate headcount needs but underscores the importance of achieving near-peak efficiency through strategic technology investments and process automation. With the right systems and automation in place, the IT organization's optimal efficiency potential is estimated at 175:1. Using this calculation the CSIT team should be able to support 525 Vertex employees if running at peak performance.

As the environment scales through M&A activity and organic growth, the capacity model will guide staffing decisions—ensuring that IT Central Services can maintain high service levels without overextending resources.

Potential Strategic Hire: Application Portfolio Manager

As IT Central Services continues to mature, one potential solution to capacity and specialization challenges could be the addition of an Application Portfolio Manager (APM). This role would be a hybrid between helpdesk operations (like Seth), project management, and continuous improvement—essentially a utility player for the CSIT team. The APM's primary responsibility would be staying ahead of application changes: monitoring vendor roadmaps, knowing when applications are rolling out new updates or features, understanding how Windows updates will impact the business before they're released, and ensuring the CSIT team is aware and prepared before changes hit production.

This person would serve as the organization's early warning system for application changes—translating vendor release notes into business impact assessments, coordinating testing windows, communicating proactively with affected departments, and ensuring the team isn't caught off-guard by updates that could disrupt operations. Beyond change management, they would also serve as an organizational connector—conducting Quarterly Business Reviews, coordinating scheduling between departments and M&A entities, running mini-projects with their PM skillset, managing vendor relationships, and acting as a liaison between IT operations and business units. The role requires someone who can shift between strategic planning, tactical execution, and hands-on problem-solving depending on what the team needs most at any given time.

If and when this role becomes necessary, key responsibilities would include maintaining visibility into all major application ecosystems (Microsoft 365, Workday, VOIP, security platforms), managing dependencies, evaluating new technology requests, ensuring post-project documentation is captured, and filling capacity gaps across the team as priorities shift.

What We Look For

• Business first, IT 2nd
• Proactive awareness and resolution of issues
• Proactive solution recommendations to the business
• High sense of urgency
• Sundown rule - No more than 3 responses to an email thread
• Meet commitments
• Deep, resourceful knowledge of our technical areas and industry movement

IT Central Services is committed to understanding and responding to the needs of the organization through three complementary feedback mechanisms: continuous pulse surveys, ticket-level satisfaction tracking, and structured quarterly reviews. Together, these initiatives create a comprehensive voice of the customer program that ensures IT remains aligned with business priorities and user expectations.

Quantum Pulse Survey

The Quantum Pulse Survey provides lightweight, continuous feedback from users across the organization. These brief, targeted surveys are deployed periodically to gauge sentiment on specific topics—such as recent technology rollouts, service desk responsiveness, or infrastructure performance. Unlike annual satisfaction surveys that provide a snapshot in time, pulse surveys create an ongoing feedback loop that allows IT to detect trends, identify issues early, and measure the impact of improvements in near real-time.

Pulse surveys are designed to be low-friction: typically 3-5 questions, mobile-friendly, and taking less than two minutes to complete. Results are aggregated and reviewed monthly, with action items tracked and communicated back to stakeholders. This demonstrates IT's commitment to listening and responding, not just collecting data.

CSAT Reporting Enhancement

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores at the ticket level provide granular insight into individual service interactions. By integrating CSAT surveys directly into the ticketing workflow, IT Central Services captures immediate feedback on resolution quality, communication effectiveness, and overall user experience. This data is critical for identifying patterns—such as specific technicians who consistently deliver exceptional service, categories of issues that frustrate users, or processes that introduce unnecessary friction.

Enhanced CSAT reporting will include dashboards showing satisfaction trends by category, technician, department, and time period. Low-scoring tickets will trigger follow-up reviews to understand root causes and implement corrective actions. High-performing interactions will be analyzed to identify best practices that can be scaled across the team. This closed-loop approach ensures that customer feedback drives continuous improvement rather than sitting unused in a database.

Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs)

Quarterly Business Reviews are a cornerstone of IT Central Services' continuous improvement and governance strategy. They serve as structured, data-driven checkpoints that align technology operations with business priorities, ensuring transparency, accountability, and measurable value delivery across all departments.

Each QBR brings together IT leadership and department heads to review key metrics including ticket volume trends, SLA compliance, asset lifecycle performance, cybersecurity posture, and major project outcomes. These sessions provide a platform to evaluate what is working, what needs adjustment, and where technology can better support organizational goals.

This is our chance to meet proactively and regularly with departments to ask questions like:

"If you could wave a magic wand and solve 1 problem or challenge completely that you have in your business, what would it be?"
"What part about your Technology drives either you or your team crazy?"
"Tell me about your department Goals & Objectives for the next XX months / years?"

Purpose

• Alignment: Ensure IT initiatives directly support business objectives and department needs.
• Accountability: Review SLA adherence, incident response performance, and project progress.
• Visibility: Present data on infrastructure health, asset management, and user satisfaction.
• Planning: Identify upcoming technology needs, renewal cycles, and training priorities.
• Feedback: Gather input from stakeholders to refine processes and improve service delivery.

Execution Approach

Beginning in 2026, QBRs will be scheduled for the last month of each quarter. Reports will draw directly from the ITSM system, ticket analytics, PRTG performance dashboards, and asset management tools. A standardized presentation format will ensure consistency across reviews, enabling year-over-year performance comparison and trend analysis.

Over time, QBRs will serve as the operational heartbeat of IT Central Services — ensuring that as the environment scales and complexity reduces, performance and stakeholder satisfaction remain consistently high.