I can’t believe that it was a year ago that I interviewed for the CIO job at Wellesley. My first interview was on Sep 10 when I met with the search committee in two groups and then the second one was on Sep 17th, which was a day-long visit to the campus with some individual and some group interviews. This was followed by a student from South Africa giving me a tour of the College campus and then dinner with a few members of the search committee. During the interviews I heard about FirstClass a little bit, but the student talked a lot about it. Honestly, I had no clue about it until then. After I accepted the job in early October, FirstClass would occupy a significant portion of my life and it still continues, a year later.

I remember Sept 17th vividly – I was staying in a hotel in Needham and was trying to look up directions to the College and the website was down. I looked in Google Maps and left the hotel. I had totally underestimated the time it would take to get to the College. I parked in the garage and was desperately looking to see how to get to the President’s office for my first interview with President Bottomly and there were no clear signs. I asked a student who pointed me in the direction of Green Hall and I rushed, but no idea which entrance to use. Somehow, I made it with 5 minutes to spare. And praying that I will not get a crisis call from Pace University (where I was working)  during the day. And my prayers were answered.

All of us in academia talk about the contrast between summer and fall, which is real. I played so much golf during the summer. Since the beginning of semester and the fact that days are getting shorter, golfing has practically stopped. Now, I have an excuse I can use when my score is bad – the start of the semester.

I looked at the blog and didn’t realize that I have not written anything for two weeks. Time just flies I guess. Last week was a busy one. I attended the Chairs meeting along with the Registrar. Many faculty members thanked our team for helping them during the Google transition and I assured them that they will be there for the remainder of the departments. I also heard from those who did not have that great an experience with the transition. I am meeting with a few to learn what didn’t work, so we can correct the issues. I stressed the importance of seeking help because, whichever way we cut it, it ain’t easy even for those that are technologically advanced. They may understand GMail and FirstClass really well, but the interplay between the two are deeply technical.

For eg. since we have not moved everyone yet, a lot of emails still pass through FirstClass. FirstClass keeps a copy of all emails that it forwards, as a result of which users go over quota (since they no longer are in FC and cleaning up messages). Apparently, when this happens, the user account cannot send any emails, which means they cannot forward any longer either. The sender is not informed that the user is over quota! Our systems folks are monitoring this and adjusting the quota as needed. Transition pains, as they call it!

I also spoke at the Science Faculty Seminar about managing LTS, how it is a classic constrained optimization problem trying to maximize the customer satisfaction with far too many constraints. Except, we don’t know the functional form for the function we are trying to work with. So, I talked about some of the major constraints that we have to work with – vendors imposing non-negotiable changes, government regulations, varying technical expertise of users, varying levels of resistance to change, budgets etc.

I feel these touch points are extremely important. They allow me to communicate with the faculty and staff so they get a better appreciation of what we are trying to do. Not necessarily the case that everyone agrees with everything we do, but that is OK. Having a dialog is far more important. I have received questions and emails from several faculty members after these two presentations, so I feel like it was all worth it.

In the meantime, we are progressing really well in a lot of fronts – our institutional repository is beginning to take shape, we had a very nice LTS Expo, our portal will be enhanced with more applications (including easy access to library resources), we are rolling out the email aliases of untruncated usernames of first initial followed by last name, firstname.lastname and preferredname.lastname to a test group of users this week with the intent of doing this for everyone shortly thereafter.

All of these will be viewed as changes and those who have been asking for these will say “Thank you, but, tell me, what took you so long?” and others will say “Here you go again, introducing more changes…” It is all in the eyes of the beholder and it is our job to explain all of these to our users patiently and where applicable, like the repository or the email aliases, there is no need to use them if you don’t want to.

I wonder where things would be a year from now when the email transition would be in more of a steady-state. Time does not really warp yet, so we have to go through the transition pains.