With the prevalence of information on the web and all the communication overload, it is very rare that you have to wait for an annual meeting to find out about new things. I remember attending meetings in the late ’80s and early ’90s (mostly related to my interest in Chemistry) after which you came back energized with all sorts of great ideas. Now, I am disappointed about the presentations in most meetings because it is very rarely that you hear of something new.
However, the networking is invaluable. Almost always, it allows you to gauge how your organization is doing in comparison to the others – and we are doing great, than you, and also you pick up little things here and there regarding directions others are thinking about moving in, feedback regarding products that we may be thinking of purchasing (that they are unlikely to put it in writing) etc.
I attended the Executive Summit organized by SunGard, the Banner vendor, in New Orleans from Friday to Sunday. It precedes the Summit, which is essentially a massive Banner User Group meeting. This year, there are over 6100 attendees!
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I am sure that all of us have been watching the tragedy that is unfolding in Japan. This reminded me of the Tsunami that devastated many countries after an earthquake in the Indian Ocean on Dec 26, 2004. Though none of our friends and family were directly affected by it, many that we know were involved in helping those who were affected. Seeing how quickly many of these countries recovered, one can only hope that the same will happen in Japan. Technologists are doing what they can to help the countries, including the person finder and other resources that you can find here.
Whether it is the tragedy in Japan or the recent happenings in the Middle East, we have seen how some of the technologies have played an important role. They are typically freely available social media tools that have revolutionized the way we communicate with each other and have helped bridge the gap between diverse world communities. They all share some of the important aspects of the topic that I want to talk about. Whether it is twitter or youtube or facebook, they are free to use and offer a platform for easy dissemination of information. Of course, there are many problems with these models, including the fact that it is easy to be anonymous and very easy to put out unsubstantiated information, but, with few exceptions, self-correction mechanisms come in and solve the misinformation.
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I actually wanted to write a post on a regional CIO gathering organized by Gartner Associates on “Key Performance Indicators” (KPI) which was very interesting, but not much there to report. There are some really interesting ideas on how different CIOs measure the collective performances of their own organizations. Steve Laster, the CIO at Harvard Business School, gave some examples, some of the usual uptime stats for standard services such as email. However, a few other examples he provided were intriguing – time tracking by staff and “number of angry calls to the CIO per week”.
In the end, the question that was posed to the attendees by Laura Craft, who moderated the discussion, was “Can you think of IT metrics at the institutional level?” In other words, what are the KPIs for the institution itself and amongst them, which are IT related. This did not result in anything that I found useful, but there were some wild ideas. I told the attendees my experience at Pace, where KPIs were big. There the institutional KPIs were simply “# of admitted students by school, Yield, Financial Aid offered, Net Revenue”. Whereas IT plays an indirect support role in all these areas, none of these are affected by IT performance directly.
We in Library and Technology Services (LTS, the new IS) are continuing to work hard on many different projects and I would like to talk about some of these.
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