I have been in Chicago for the last three days attending the annual Workday conference, which they call Rising. It was exciting and today I will be flying back and looking forward to another exciting event – the Inauguration of Dr Paula Johnson, the College’s 14th president. Paula has already brought so much energy, optimism and enthusiasm to the College and I am really looking forward to the new beginning.
It has been a while since I have gone to a vendor sponsored conference like the Rising. There were something like 7000 attendees. There was the usual entertainment, receptions, too much food and keynotes. But I attended some really useful presentations that were well done. You can see my tweets here.
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A Disclaimer: Though I would like to think that I came up with these ideas first and I am the only one who came up with these ideas, the reality is that there are many others who would have come up with the same or much better ideas and worse, some of these already exist and I just don’t know about them!
Credit Cards/NFC (Near Field Communication) – Many banks now give you the option to get emails or texts when your credit card charges are over a certain limit. Now that many merchants are accepting payments via NFC through mobile phone, the same applies. Great feature. What I need additionally is the receipts for purchases also be communicated along with it, so I don’t have to print receipts. Similarly, if I want to return something, no need to hunt down the receipt, just use the same credit card/NFC and the merchant can pull up the receipt. I know that some privacy advocates wouldn’t want this, so make it optional.
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As everyone says “I don’t know where the summer went”. Right, it came and went before we knew it. In LTS, as always, summer was very productive. Our staff worked on several exciting projects, notably, a large contingent of both LTS staff and those from Human Resources and Finance were working extremely hard on Workday related activities as well as others working to make sure that the classroom technologies were in good shape for the start of the semester. Based on the feedback we have received so far, classroom problem calls are down to a handful, which is great news.
We also have had a few glitches that we will be attending to aggressively to sort out. Most notably, our course browser and waitlist system were way too slow for a period of time and we have already provisioned additional hardware with more memory and CPUs which hopefully will help address these issues.
We rolled out an initial version of dashboards for alumnae data using Microsoft SQL server, which I think will vastly simplify the way many offices access this data. The modern and easy to use PowerBI interface from Microsoft drives all of this and our technologists have done a terrific job of packaging the data and creating easy to use interfaces to slice and dice the data. (more…)