I am asked by a few staff members to explain what is the “vision” I have for my organization so that they can help me achieve it. My answer is “Unfortunately, I don’t have much more than what we have already talked about…” which happens to be an unsatisfactory answer to those who ask this vision question. And what we talk about are broad principles that should govern us as described in our strategic plan. In fact, what many want me to answer are specifics in their area rather than a broad organizational vision.

On the other hand, those staff members who are willing to look at what has made us successful and learn from them and help contribute to our success are doing tremendous things. And one of them is creative uses and reuses of technologies. I want to mention a few here.

We purchased a drone as a way to experiment with its use in teaching and learning. This has resulted in an exciting partnership between LTS and a faculty member in classical studies. An LTS staff member accompanies the faculty and his research team of Wellesley undergrads and other collaborators to Greece to use the drone to film the archaeological sites. But then, snapshots from the videos get into a computer modeling software and finally parts of it gets printed in 3-D printers. Next year, it will be in virtual reality (VR) software!!! Amazing stuff. But then, we decided to use the drone to map our golf course. We are in the process of getting it ready to post on the website, but I think it is a cool and creative thing to do. Then we can do VR on it and have people play remotely for a small fee, right? For an additional small fee, we will adjust your score.

We have been using a product called Nolij Transfer, which is an integration tool. We have used it to pull in data related the applicants from Common App and other sources to get them into Banner. one of our staff members who is the local expert at this has been always saying that we should look at this broadly, but we never found a real application for it. Then came Workday and we were searching for a solution to integrate data from Workday back to Banner during the transition period. He raised this again and has demonstrated that this will work beautifully and it really does. It saves so much in the way of time and effort and headache. Our implementation partners were literally shocked to see how easy this is because this is where other institutions spend a lot of their time and effort. This is the kind of creative reuse that serves us well!

We reuse portions of our homegrown web applications all the time. The speed with which we create new apps by adopting existing ones is simply amazing. As they say “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.

Finally, I want to mention something that as an organization we can all be proud of. I have mentioned several times our approach and success in having the community use our data through the system we call WANDA (Wellesley ANalytics Decision­ support Applications). It is built on Microsoft SQL Server and we use a data warehouse by iStrategy, now Blackboard Analytics. Our team has been superb in extending its use and learning advances in this area. Most recently, they have found Power BI from Microsoft as an excellent tool for data visualization, back ended by Microsoft SQL Server.

So, we now have an excellent way to slice and dice alumnae data which uses these technologies, done in record time. This is kind of an extension and reuse of technologies we have become familiar with.

I just used a few here, but there are a lot of things going on along the same lines.

So, whats the vision? “Excel in Creative (Re)use of Emerging Technologies for the benefit of those we serve”?