I am in Indianapolis attending the EDUCAUSE Annual conference. You can see my tweets from the conference. We had an early start at 8 AM to listen to the first keynote by Daniel Pink titled “The Cascade Effect: How Small Wins Can Transform Your Organization”. It was interesting and there were a few good take home lessons. The talk was mostly about motivating the staff in your organization. He referred to a collection of social science research in his talk the conclusions from which can be summarized as “If the work involves even rudimentary cognitive tasks, then better rewards by themselves don’t improve performance”.

Some of the recipes provided were useful, such as constant feedback, providing autonomy etc. One thing he mentioned was to give the staff an hour a week for them to explore new things. As you see in one of my tweets, I am very happy to say that we already have this in place in LTS at Wellesley where we encourage the staff to take 2 hours a week to explore new areas. He stressed the importance of weekly meetings where feedback is provided, but change every fourth such meeting to talk about something totally different, such as career ambitions etc.

I also attended a couple of other talks, one on digital scholarship and another abut “what’s next in higher education”, both were a bit disappointing. However, during a dinner last night I was talking to a few colleagues from other institutions and what caught my attention was how many times the “What if?” question came up.

Several of the “What ifs” came from the group that believes in the value of running data centers and technology in house vs moving to the cloud. So “What if Microsoft or Google goes out of business? Do you have an exit strategy?” Of course, we all worry about this. In case of Google, the emails and documents can be moved to other systems because they provide access to them in ways that this can be done. I would say that the same thing is true with Microsoft’s Office 365. Will this be easy or pretty? Absolutely not, but the point is that it can be done and we have thought about it. What the question implies is that somehow, by supporting these systems internally, we are safe from some of these vendor dependent questions, which is far from true. Evenif one is running email in house, they are running someone else’s software and they are probably running hardware that has risks associated with it too. In other words, we all take risks one way or the other and each of us have different tolerance. But, what is important is to realize this and not somehow assume that just because that things are more under our control (or so we think) because of proximity, we are in a better position.

“What ifs” also spanned the open source strategy and I reminded the colleague that we don’t jump on open source without careful examination and that some of the open source tools we currently use are far better supported than the highly paid support that we rarely use from vendors (because they rarely answer our specific questions) and that some open source solutions have outlived proprietary software.

“What if” the security is compromised in the cloud? Another one, where the question applies equally to cloud or not. Most of us have limited staff who are struggling to keep up with their day to day duty while trying very hard to be on top of the hackers and cybercriminals. Whereas the risks involved and liability is so great for the cloud providers that they allocate a lot more resources than we can possibly provide. Is this true with all cloud providers, of course not. This is why being extremely careful is important.

“What if I could go take a nap now?” Unfortunately not. I have to participate in a panel in 40 minutes and I am not good at short naps.