Strategic Directions: Shaping Our Future Together

USD's Strategic Directions Initiative is a multi-year planning process launched by President Mary E. Lyons in October of 2003. She began this endeavor by assembling a team charged to solicit insights broadly from campus and community constituents and then use that information to examine USD's mission and core values, articulate a vision for the future, and craft a set of visionary strategic goals.

President Lyons stressed the importance of establishing broad, far-reaching goals to sustain a variety of planning initiatives over the next five years rather than defining a narrow set of goals that could lose their effectiveness as circumstances change. She also drew a distinction between strategic goals designed to position USD for the future and important operational objectives that need administrative attention but are not inherently strategic.

USD's dynamic, ongoing planning process will be supported by a number of different task forces during the next five years. Each task force will be responsible for developing multi-year plans that target specific strategic goals and defining performance indicators to monitor their progress. The objective is not to write a strategic plan, but to plan strategic initiatives.

This Web site is the official publication of the Strategic Directions Initiative, and records of the process will be posted here on a regular basis.