Horizon McGill aims to improve efficiency, trim costs, and make McGill a better place to work and study. In this Q&A, McGill’s Chief Information Officer and AVP (IT Services), Paul Chamberland, discusses the role of IT Services in achieving these goals.
The Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution is inescapable front-page news. What does it mean for McGill?
AI isn’t just a technology; it changes everything. It’s a cultural shift that requires us to challenge how we do things and continually experiment. It will fundamentally transform how the University operates and delivers value to our community. Among other things, this will mean walking away from longstanding processes in favour of new ones that are still being defined. It’s an exciting time.
So, it goes beyond IT – it is a University-wide transformation that touches every part of how we work.
Does that mean IT’s role is changing?
It’s more fundamental than that. We’re changing how we see ourselves; IT’s very identity. We need to be a central enabler of the University’s “digital transformation” – the integration of digital technology into all areas of McGill. To ensure its success, IT must actively engage with the community to understand their needs and co-create solutions that support them.
This is different from traditional models where IT operates more independently. We need to be an active partner to students, faculty and staff, to support McGill’s academic mission, and prioritize the effective use of technology.
We’re getting better at this approach, but it isn’t entirely new.
IT’s account managers collaborate regularly with stakeholders to provide updates on the progress of IT initiatives, discuss their needs and priorities, and fulfill these by engaging the right IT team at the right time.
One recent example of our collaboration with stakeholders was when we worked with the Career Services team last year on myFuture to centralize McGill’s career management tool. In doing so, we helped make it easier for students to research and access internship opportunities.
You can check out our 2024 IT Annual Report for many other examples of how we have worked collaboratively with departments across McGill.
What does that mean for Horizon McGill, and for the University’s mission more broadly?
We’ve always supported the University’s mission, and we’ll keep doing that. What’s changing is that IT will help shape and drive key institutional goals more directly – in line with the Horizon McGill vision of more effective, more efficient, ever-improving ways of working. McGill needs a centrally planned IT solutions portfolio, with effective enterprise-wide direction, standards, and governance.
We simply can’t afford to keep doing things the way we’ve always done them. Our budgetary landscape is changing. Our technological landscape is changing. And the rest of the world – including other world-class universities – is changing too. We don’t just want to keep up. We aim to lead.
When you talk about IT going out to people, does that include Faculties and Units?
Absolutely. We’ll be more agile, more collaborative, and work better with academic and administrative units. We’re prioritizing two-way communication – understanding their needs, aligning with their goals, and delivering value in all we do.
We’re also adopting a hybrid operating model that combines the strengths of centralized IT functions with those performed closer to Faculties and Units. That balance is key – we need a cohesive, responsive, efficient IT ecosystem that supports both institutional and local goals. And again, in line with Horizon, this all needs to deliver value to faculty, staff and students. This goes back to what I was saying earlier: our roles and responsibilities are evolving, and we’ll be engaging with the whole McGill IT community to chart our way forward.
How does cybersecurity fit in?
Cybersecurity has long been a top priority at McGill, and that’s not going to change. It’s mission-critical that we manage the complete risk landscape with continuous monitoring and proactive governance. We will also continue our regular outreach efforts to raise awareness of cybersecurity throughout the community.
What will change, though, is that we’ll increasingly use automation and AI to streamline the risk and compliance processes, and to keep our community safer.
How else do you see the University benefiting from AI?
We aim to make McGill a leader in the transformative application of AI in higher education.
That means that, beyond using AI for efficiency gains, it’ll be at the forefront of that digital transformation that will advance the core of McGill’s academic mission: teaching, learning, and research. Our job is to provide the infrastructure, tools, and support to help units explore and use AI effectively and responsibly—and to help the University establish governance frameworks for the ethical use of AI.
This is a key milestone in our journey. We’ll be deploying AI-driven tools for data analysis, personalized learning, operational efficiency, decision support, and more. We introduced a secure version of Copilot AI last year and we’re working with leading tech partners to introduce more AI at McGill.
Such as?
Well, the AI at McGill Project is evaluating the potential of ChatGPT, among other generative AI solutions, to enhance academic, administrative, and operational functions while ensuring alignment with institutional values, data governance, and privacy standards.
There are a couple of other exciting projects in the early stages. We’re developing a generative AI platform run on McGill servers that we own and protect, so that we can ensure data privacy and confidentiality.
There’s also an AI-powered chatbot, based on open-source models, designed to answer questions about McGill by pulling information directly from the University’s website. The strategy and architecture behind this chatbot are designed to be reusable for other projects, so we can maximize the impact of what we build – and what we learn while we build it.
What are some current initiatives or opportunities to improve the digital experience for students, faculty, and staff at McGill?
We already have many tools, but they’re not always easy to use. We want to help McGillians get more value from the digital solutions we already have by creating a more seamless and user-friendly experience.
This includes simplifying interfaces, reducing login complexity, ensuring mobile responsiveness, and streamlining administrative and academic processes, so students, faculty, and staff can focus on their core activities with minimal technical friction.
For example, we’re currently implementing a new travel expense management solution in Workday to replace the long-standing manually-driven processes—a change that aligns with the goals of the Horizon initiative to drive efficiency and streamline operations.
There are also some clever grassroots solutions that have been developed using existing tools. I recently learned about how IT’s Web Development team and Communications and Institutional Relations integrated a range of tools—LDAP, ServiceNow, Jira, and GitLab—to automate communication as McGill websites migrate to the new version of Drupal. It’s an ingenious solution, and people are already thinking of other ways to put it to work.
Can you discuss IT’s role in this institution-wide transformation further?
As you can imagine, McGill holds a vast amount of data. We’re rethinking the way it’s managed, improving governance and data literacy, and empowering units to use that data to drive their daily operations.
The idea is to ensure consistent, timely, secure access to high-quality institutional data, so that our entire community can easily get the data they need.
What do you want McGill to become?
The ideal end-state is a seamlessly integrated, simplified, data-informed, and AI-powered digital ecosystem. That’s a fancy way of saying something simple: we’ll change the way we use and roll out new technologies to help McGillians innovate, work together, and continue doing great things. That’s our vision, and we’re excited to make it a reality.