Rice President Reginald DesRoches shared the following message to the Rice community in an email March 29:
Dear Rice colleagues,
Rice is committed to advancing as a top university for research, scholarship and innovation, student success, operational excellence, and diversity, equity and inclusion. This ambition requires us to continuously evolve, improve our current administrative practices and identify opportunities to work more efficiently and effectively. Most importantly, our budget model must support our goals.
Therefore, I am excited to announce the launch of Rice’s Budget Transformation Initiative, co-led by Provost Amy Dittmar and Vice President for Finance and Administration Kelly Fox. The purpose of the initiative is to build transparency and an understanding of the university’s budget as well as design, develop and implement a new campus budget model built for Rice by Rice leaders and stakeholders that will better reflect our mission, values and priorities.
The new campus budget model must provide enhanced incentives to support and reward growth in critical areas, ensure openness and accountability for using and allocating funding, and better align with our mission. The work of the Budget Transformation Initiative is vital and ambitious. To be successful, this work must also be transparent and inclusive. We are committed to an inclusive governance process, including campuswide stakeholder input and feedback.
After a thoughtful process, we have selected McKinsey & Company as our partner in this initiative. Their team has already started helping us develop the project structure, governance process, design parameters and data-gathering strategy.
We will begin implementing a new budget model by the start of fiscal year 2025 (July 1, 2024). Throughout the initiative, there will be many opportunities to provide feedback, engage with the project team and learn more about Rice’s financial structure. More information about how to engage in the Budget Transformation Initiative will be provided in the coming weeks.
For initial details about the initiative, visit https://fa.rice.edu/budget-transformation . In addition, we have set up an email address budgettransformation@rice.edu , for comments, feedback, suggestions or concerns about the process.
Thank you for your partnership in this important endeavor.
Sincerely,
President Reginald DesRoches