I should be writing more often than I have been and I need to fix it. That means I need to get my priorities right! Had a good time visiting Montgomery Bell State Park near Nashville, TN where my wife had a conference. We hiked a lot and I played golf at the Frank G. Clement Golf Course. It is a very well maintained public golf course that is also cheap. There were two major issues at the park – food and wireless. Wireless worked well for a day and then it was out for a whole day. My Verizon MiFi signal was poor, so I had to rely purely on AT&T phone. Given the news about the NSA data mining on Verizon calls, may be Verizon servers were too busy serving up the data that they were not servicing the MiFis!

One thing that I have been thinking about lately is how little I interact with one of the largest constituent base – our students. I am sure that this is a serious issue for most CIOs. We have very strong relationships with all administrative offices and therefore several senior administrators and administrative staff. Similarly, we have strong interactions with a significant number of faculty to support their technology (and in merged organizations, library) needs ranging from hardware to shrinking collections to electronic journals to increasingly digital scholarship projects. Our relationships with students is literally non-existent in comparison.

In my case, my direct interactions with the students have been very few. We have had one or two representatives to the Advisory Committee on Library and Technology Policies every year for the past two and a half years. The student newspaper writers have interviewed me for a few articles there. I have interacted with the senior leadership of the College Government and with the students in one class that I audited (ES 250 Reading group on Technology and a Sustainable Future). I also was interviewed by groups of students in the Albright Institute on technology matters. I enjoy every one of these meetings and am amazed at how bright and energetic they all are.

We have over a hundred student staff and I stop by and chat with a few of them at the service desk or at the helpdesk, but this is very rare. So, I want to make a serious attempt to get to know the students and how the existing technologies are being perceived by them and see what we can do to serve them better.

In many cases, they seem not to care that much about technologies, but that is really not true when you engage in one on one conversations. They do have opinions on this matter, just that they either don’t know how to escalate their concerns or they are simply resigned to the fact that any of their suggestions may just be ignored.

In my goals for the next year, I have stated that this will be an area where I want to devote more time. If you have pointers you want to share with me on how best to address this issue, I would be grateful!