Integrating our efforts to further advance Kentucky

Campus Community,

In recent years, every part of our campus has grown. It’s not growth for the sake of growth or points about which to brag. Growth — managed thoughtfully and planned carefully — is how we advance Kentucky.

• We are educating and graduating more students.
• We are treating and healing more patients.
• We are conducting more research — much of it focused squarely on this state’s challenges.
• And we are seeking more partners, in more communities, throughout Kentucky who we can work with to improve the health and the economy of all those we serve.

Strategically growing enables and empowers our efforts and our success. 

A critical issue is how do we continue our momentum in advancing Kentucky, even as there are more questions about what we do and more scrutiny through federal and state laws and directives about how we do our work? 

One important response — which will be a focus of mine and many others on campus over the next several months — is to further integrate many of our support services and functions.

Integration is more formally bringing together more people from across the campus who perform similar, important functions and services. Working together, we can do more and do it at an even higher level of quality and efficiency: more units, with comparable functions, rowing in the same direction, with the same goals and mission. 

• This initiative — what we are calling Integrate Blue — formally kicked off last week.
• A team from units across the University, led by UK HealthCare Chief Financial Officer and Beyond Blue CEO Craig Collins, is meeting with deans and other administrative leaders to discuss the integration effort, the process for it and the timeline for how and when we can bring functional areas together. (Beyond Blue is the holding company we created to help manage and operate strategic initiatives such as our community hospitals and UK Athletics.)
• We are starting by examining Information Technology Services, Student Success and Marketing/Communications.
• Specifically, we are evaluating how we bring together into one functional setting more of the people across our enterprise who provide technology services, support students through admissions, financial aid and other efforts and promote and communicate about UK internally and externally.
• Over time, we will look at several other functional units with the same strategic focus and process.

We will keep the campus informed and involved throughout the process. 

• You can email our team at integrateblue@uky.edu for more information about this initiative.
• Next week, we will launch a landing page — integrateblue.uky.edu — where we will provide the latest information.

Let me be clear about what Integrate Blue is and what it is not. 

This is not an initiative designed to reduce staff or reach some prescribed budget savings. 

Today, UK has more than 33,000 employees. I expect that number to continue growing as we seek to do and be more for Kentucky. In the last 15 years, our budget has roughly tripled — as we have educated, treated and served more people.

Growth is a goal because of the capacity it gives us to serve Kentucky. And as we grow, I’m convinced, so will Kentucky. 

It is, however, also critical that growth is managed in such a way that we are focused even more intently on our mission to advance this state. That doesn’t mean there aren’t multiple aspects to our mission and many creative and innovative ways we make it real and relevant for Kentucky.

But good organizations become great organizations when they are focused on one thing. 

For us, that one thing — as it has always been — is the future of our state.

It’s an exciting time, and yes, in many ways, a challenging one, to work in higher education. But there is no place I’d rather be than at UK, where our commitment to a common cause is so true to who we are as a community.

We serve Kentucky. I’m excited at the start of another year to focus on that mission together.

Eli Capilouto

President