The Vision Ohio strategic planning process and the resulting academic plan stemmed from both the leadership of President McDavis, who announced a set of goals for Ohio University in his 2004 inaugural address, and a directive from the Board of Trustees to create a multi-year road map capable of aligning the ambitions and the resources of the University. The Vision Ohio process is now in its fifth year of development.
Management and oversight of Vision Ohio was delegated by the Board of Trustees to the Vision Ohio Steering Committee and the institutional leadership team that includes the President, the Executive Vice President and Provost, the Executive Staff, and the Deans.
Effective strategic planning is an iterative process through which each successive draft of the plan is discussed, assessed, and revised to ensure that goals and objectives are being met and that emerging exigencies in the university's internal and external environments are being addressed.
Vision Ohio has followed such an iterative process from the creation of the draft plan during the 2004-05 academic year through the subsequent work of the implementation teams and planning bodies in the 2005-06 academic year to the identification of first generation Vision Ohio priorities in Spring 2007. Presented with those priorities and a revised version of Vision Ohio, the Board of Trustees requested that the President develop an action plan by August 2007, complete with budget estimates, that would specify how Vision Ohio would be implemented over the next five years.
That plan known as the Five Year Vision Ohio Implementation Plan, developed through a campus-wide process, was endorsed by the Board of Trustees in February 2008. In creating the plan, care was taken to build in alignment with the emerging accountability measures of the University System of Ohio's Strategic Plan for Higher Education 2008-2017.
In fiscal year 2009 (labeled "Year One" of the Five Year Vision Ohio Implementation Plan), the university invested $5,413,658 in base funds on the Athens and Regional Campuses and $2,150,000 in one-time-only funds on the Athens Campus in Five Year Vision Ohio strategies. Strategies were selected for funding based on their contribution to academic excellence and revenue growth and the likely breadth and depth of their impact. Accountability measures and metrics were put in place to ensure that the investments made bring about the agreed upon results.
