Thursday, day 11
Well, here is the end. Everyone feels like summer camp has ended. The group really gelled after just a few days. Many people thought the backnoise channel played a role in that. I have to agree. It was great having a whole second conversation going on. Imagine if during a presentation you could hear the thoughts of other people in the audience, the questions thay had, their comments, the additional resources they know of — that’s what backnoise provided. The faculty made a wordle of the backnoise text
Everyone is pretty exhausted — especially the ones that stayed up to midnight each night (I wasn’t one of those). But I’m still exhausted.
To sum up, here’s 3 types of things I want to take away
- things to do
- check on campus crisis plan
- plan a user support retreat
- include: Pink exercise, hedgehog concept, Terry Hartle view of higher ed
- check on the cognitive cost of voice recorders, flip video, other things
- IT advisory committee
- get “Good to Great for Social Sector”
- things to think about
- managers (doing things right) vs leaders (doing the right things)
- creative leadership model
- current disruptive currents in IT
- things to think differently about
- life-work balance
- looking at things as essential vs. strategic
- cognitive cost of services
- tracking projects in the department
Wednesday, day 10
Today things are winding down. We have group project presentations this afternoon and one speaker this morning. We start the day with Mitzi Montoya, Assistant Dean of Research at North Carolina State. She talked on “Marketing for Sustainability.” She too was a great speaker and really hit on some relevant marketing ideas for IT. For me, the key take-away was the cognitive cost of a service. That is best described as how hard it is to get to your service, or how many steps does it take. This is a lens that I want to use to look at what we provide. Two things come to mind — voice recorders and flip video cameras. We should pick models that are easy to use, reduce the cognitive cost. Other items included a reminder about “Good to Great for Social Sector.” I’ve read most of “Good to Great” but would like the tie back to nonprofits. The hedgehog concept came up which was a good reminder to think of us in terms of that concept.
The afternoon was filled with group presentations. My group presented on “Innovation.” We took the definition of “ideas applied successfully” and deconstructed that a bit for higher ed. Another group tackled “globalization” which made me ponder why we don’t leverage video conferencing, including desktop video conferencing, for remote support including Rochester. Another group presentation on “collaboration” and did this great exercise for getting to know each other. This exercise came from Jody as she uses it in her classes. I have a bunch of ideas for a user support retreat now. The group on “sustainability/green it” reminded me about the President’s Climate Commitment — I know Paul signed it but is the campus moving forward on it?
The day ended with a group picture, a graduation ceremony and 1 minute speech from each of us about the experience.
Tuesday, day 9
Today we delved into e-scholarship again this time with Christine Borgman from UCLA via video skype. It worked really quite well. She used her work with CENS as a case study. Not a lot of takeaways — I’m just not that interested in e-scholarship or see the pressing relevance right now for Augsburg. The major research institutions in the room were far more engaged in the topic.
The after consisted of a tour of Emory facilities including Cox Hall — I feel like I visited one of the holy sites for learning spaces. I of course snapped many of my own pictures. One tidbit, they spent 30% of their budget on lighting — something to not forget. We also visited the tiny room where they are digitizing books in partnership with Amazon. I snapped a few pictures of their machine. As we watched it looked like maybe an average of 5 seconds per 2-pages with a yellowback book. They noted for every 1 hour of digitizing they needed 2 hours of post-processing.
We then had a panel discussion with leadership from the library and IT at Emory. A few quotes include “manage complexity in an organization resistant to change,” “higher ed lacks guts but has a heart,” and “the part that is not in the classroom is a business.” The various discussions made me think
- we need to track what projects we have going on (something Leif has been interested in). There has been so much talk about projects driving things.
- how do we keep meeting the changing demands and stay nimble? — our beginning efforts to build a knowledgebase, make videos are all moving towards a campus culture where people can use some self-service. I want to have the personal contact to be meaningful and advance our goals and the mission. We have a talented, committed outstanding user support staff. We can’t keep expanding and changing what we support without streamlining some of the basics — some questions are essential but not strategic.
Monday, day 8 (if you count the weekend)
Day 8 opened with discussion on e-scholarship by Chuck Henry, president of CLIR and JQ Johnson at U of Oregon and Frye alum. This was not the most pressing topic for me since it was library-centric and publishing-centric. But I did get a lot of good references from Chuck on Humanities examples of e-scholarship like
- Parker Library @ Stanford – scanned and indexed manuscripts
- Roman de la Rose – digitizing 150 of 200 versions of the manuscript
- Nines – 19th century studies online scholarship
- TaPoR – environment for text study
Something in the discussion made me take note of Stacey’s blog post on library stats software. Something to follow-up on with the library. I think this is the package we have explored.
JQ focused on the Open Access model of e-scholarship. Again, not a topic close to my heart but a few things jumped out like
- arXiv.org – an open archive of e-scholarship in the sciences
- opendoar.org – directory of Open Access repositories, search them all
The afternoon brought James Hilton, University of Virginia VP and CIO. He was an energizing speaker and I was writing furiously during his session. He framed his talk around the fact tht the fabric of inquiry is changing — what questions we can ask and the ways we can answer them. For example when the Large Hadron Collider is running again it will generate 3 million DVDs of data per year. The four areas of computation, visualization, simulation, and technology-enabled represent the key areas affecting inquiry.
He then dove into how we navigate these disruptive changes. He highlighted looking at things as essential vs. strategic. I think this lens will be very relevant for me. For example, email is essential but it is not strategic. And if something is essential and commoditized it lends itself to be outsourced so that you can direct resources towards strategic endeavors. More on that in a bit.
James also touched on the “Does IT Matter?” book. He noted that because IT is mature enough now investment in IT alone does not give a strategic advantage. He framed it as, does oxygen matter? It doesn’t give us a strategic advantage but it sure is hard to live without it! He also warned that IT will become irrelevant if it is not aligned with the institutional mission.
He then moved into the need to embrace emergence. The world is emergent and not planned. We need to work in an emergence mode: we know where we are (starting point) and we then pick a direction to go. But we don’t define an endpoint — we don’t know where we’ll end up. We operate in a “fine tune as you go” mode and need to have a comfort with ambiguity. We need to develop a discipline of refining based on experience. Another mantra he uses is “tomorrow is better than today.”
We need to ride the current disruptive currents at play in higher ed IT.
- Unbundling
- taking that which was whole and breaking it up into parts
- mass media: 3 networks in the old days to 100s now
- content: iTunes unbundled the album into songs
- Demand Pull
- people can get what they want when they want it
- mass marketing vs. search
- lecture vs. exploration
- Commoditization
- people’s appetites have gone up but so has capacity
- the US steel industry failed because they ignored a Japanese process for making cheap steel (because it was cheap), then the Japanese process continued to improve and stayed cheap and it then killed the US steel industry
- fashion: cheaper, lasts not as long
- U of Phoenix: drives down labor cost and scales up
- Consumerization
- networks: airport brought wireless to the masses
- software: if google apps can be class and role aware, it can do 90% of what a CMS does
- user support: outsourcing helpdesks to PerceptIS or Presidium (people had mixed results with them)
- storage: amazon backup $0.02 a week for 1GB backup, why are we providing storage
- passing the enterprise altogether and going straight to consumers
- computers: this was the big discussion point. he’s set the path to reduce the number of public labs over the next 3 years
The computer lab issue raised a lot of discussion. They found that 99% of the new students had computers and students were using the labs for web browsing and word processing — activities done easily on their own computers. They started transforming some of the lab spaces into student spaces — a nice way to repurpose the spaces. They’re also planning to use virtual labs to deliver applications to students. There will still be a need for specialized labs for software that isn’t common (unbundling). It makes me think we need to look at our labstats and see how our spaces are being used. Student learning spaces are more strategic than the commodity computing need in my opinion.
He wrapped up with the advice of identifying your values and steering by them. He emphasized power (influence) over force. He likes to think of leading as “enrolling them with a vision.” However, you can’t enroll everyone so you need to get a critical mass of support for changes.
Weekend activities
The weekend has come and gone. I went with a group to the Saturday night Atlanta vs. Milwaukee baseball game. Atlanta lost. The high-tech stadium was interesting — the giant display screen was better quality than my TV! I haven’t been to a baseball game in like 20 years. It was interesting to see all the norms and traditions that happen. On Sunday I joined a group that went to the aquarium downtown. I got a lot of nice pictures of animals. We had lunch in the CNN food court — a few people went on the CNN tour (I didn’t). We took a cab downtown and took the MARTA back.