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.

I am very excited by the Mobile App Development that has resulted in many useful apps for faculty, students and staff. I use the Directory lookup which allows me to click on the phone number and dial right away; and “Where’s the Bus”, it is awesome – check it out and you will know what I mean. The team is continuing further development of these apps.

A limited rollout of SSL-VPN which allows remote access to various technical services on campus was successful and we will be announcing a wider rollout in the weeks to come. This will provide access from home and other remote locations for the NTM file server, library databases (without additional passwords), keyserver access to run software etc.

We are also in the process of testing Summon, a discovery tool that is expected to vastly simplify searching for content across our catalog, journal articles etc. The project team is planning the testing and rollout. We expect this to be available to the College community in the Fall.

Of course, the Library and Technology Policy Committee will decide on what the next Email/Calendaring solution will be on Tuesday, which will result in a major project for us for the next few months. It is exciting that we will bring this to a closure soon. I am happy to report that Sakai conversion has gone extremely well and it is being used heavily. Go Sakai team!

We have made the decision that the current Web Content Management System (CMS) called Bluenog ICE is not for us! It is extremely resource intensive. As you may have noticed, it has been unstable during the last week or so with little help from the vendor to be able to solve the problem in a timely manner. We will be looking at open source alternatives. We have scheduled trips to Amherst College and Middlebury College who have been using Drupal as their CMS. We will also explore WordPress and Joomla.

We are also working on enhancing the Campus calendar in collaboration with the special events office and public affairs and we will be moving to a fully web based version of R25, called R25Live, which will simplify the space request process. In addition, we are talking about training the event requestors and tagging events in such a way that there will be a public calendar that will not have the usual internal meetings etc. It is exciting.

We currently load the library database with information about patrons once a year. We are looking to automate this so it happens more often than that to avoid a lot of manual work on the library staff side. In addition, we will be exploring ways to simplify the management of financial transactions on the acquisition side with Banner.

In line with the philosophy of Mobile App and the Calendar, which simply says, go to the source of data, but be bold and creative about delivering the data in the most useful ways, we are pretty close to releasing a beta version of course listing that will allow the students and faculty to explore the courses offered by the college in a much better way.

We are working on a virtual desktop environment that will enable a user to request and get a Windows machine with various licensed software installed on it. A Mac user can use RDC (Remote Desktop Connection) to this environment and run a windows machine. We will also be looking at this for some administrative offices where we will install a thin client connecting to this environment.

We are looking to reconfigure our network architecture and simplify it for management. This is a major project slated for the summer. Similarly, we will be looking at the way we manage account provisioning/deprovisioning with an eye on simplicity and functional enhancements.

We like the new Web Help Desk system. We are trying to see if other administrative offices can take advantage of it for their offices.

While I have highlighted some of the major projects, there are many more that are in the works. We are looking at documenting all of these project requests making them available to the community.